How can one give negative feedback regarding Australia Post without it reflecting on the seller?

[tsmurf8_8]

Sellers make promises that Australia Post can't (won't) keep.  It's a shame really, gives the seller a low rating meanwhile Oz Post just sit back and please themselves!

[imastawka]

even though they knew at least one year in advance of when the birthday date was!

         

[*tippy*toes*]

Given that most of your purchases have been from China, from sellers with pretty bad feedback, I'd suggest to stop buying cheap carp from China. Then you won't have the issue of things taking longer than you think they should. I have bought a lot of things from China over the years and every single seller has the option of free postage, or paid postage. Paid postage sees it arrive much quicker. No-one chooses that though because they don't want to pay for postage and then they complain when it hasn't arrived in air mail or express times.

As mentioned, October can be shocking for deliveries from China. So can other times of year when they have national celebrations, like Chinese new year. Everything stops and nothing gets sent. I don't buy anything from China in Sept or Oct because it always takes at least twice as long to arrive. One time it was 3 months. I knew it would get here eventually as I'd bought from that seller plenty of times before.

The other thing you need to consider, if I sent you a message in Madarin, Japanese, Nepalese, would you be able to read it? Just because a Chinese seller advertises on English speaking sites, doesn't mean they can speak the language. Often they get someone else to do their listings or they use a translator (sometimes with disasterous results). Often when translating English into "Chinese", it makes no sense. I discovered that several years ago when I needed to contact a seller. I composed my message and sent it and the reply was ?????. I then got a friend to speaks the language to compose a message for me and they answered promptly and also apologised for not understanding what I'd written.

As a new buyer, you should know to ALWAYS check a sellers feedback. ALWAYS. Especially if buying from China. Buying cheap from China is often more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes it's worth spending the bit extra and buying domestically. It's a new buyer trap. They see cheap and jump on it. You'll soon learn that it's not worth it.

Generally if a Chinese listing offers free postage, it's coming via sea. That can take upwards of 2 months. Ignore the estimate for any overseas purchase, especially from China. Throw some public holidays and weekends in there, like Easter and you're screwed. In eBay land, every day is a business day, including Sunday, Good Friday and Christmas day. They are counted in the estimate. If you buy before Christmas, the estimates don't take into consideration the week that the postal service have off the week between Christmas and new year. At Christmas, I blow my handling time out to 30 days to make up for the almost 2 weeks where nothing happens in postage land.

I hope you never become a seller. Although maybe it might be a good thing if you do. Then you might see how unreasonable you are in regards to postage.

[englishrosegardens]

Did you check their feedback thoroughly before you bought from them?  Where you see the number of negatives in the summary part at the top, click on the number (it's a link) and it'll bring up all the negs left for them.  A lot of the really big sellers, especially the Chinese ones, will have heaps of negs for items not arriving.  A lot of the big sellers (not just the Chinese) consider it a poor use of their time to answer questions and would prefer to just refund as and when necessary.  If they do answer your questions, a lot of the Chinese sellers will just make false promises and try and string things out past the time for making a claim, so getting answers from sellers isn't necessarily going to help.

Apart from all the comments already made about mail coming from China, it's a huge country compared to ours and I wouldn't be at all surprised if mail times varied considerably.  The further the mail is coming, the more delivery times are likely to vary.  Take no notice of ebay's delivery estimates - how would they know how long a parcel from China is likely to take?  It's only a guess at best.

If mail can't be tracked it's pretty much a waste of time asking AP or any other carrier where your item is, so all you can really do is ask a seller to confirm that they sent it.  There's probably no such thing as a 'normal' response on ebay as every seller is different - there are good and bad sellers just as there are good and bad buyers.  There are good Chinese sellers but a lot seem to play by different rules to the rest of us.  As a rule of thumb, the bigger the seller (the higher their turnover), the less personal service you can expect.  I can understand this as many work on very low mark-ups and time spent chasing things they can do nothing about is time they could be spending on more profitable work.  I'm not saying I necessarily agree with it, just that I understand it.  For some products it's necessary to have a different business model if you want to compete successfully.

[k1ooo-slr-sales]

stawka, if you like that one, then what about the mother that bought a lunchbox for her child who was starting kinder and complained on the boards that the late arrival wrecked her child's first day at school!  It was only her impression that the delivery was late, reality was she ordered it too late for it to arrive in time for first day of school.

From memory, to make matters worse, she came to the boards asking about how to get compensation from the seller because she had to buy a cheapie from WW so that her child had a lunchbox on her first day.

Spoiler

well, that's my recollection . . . . . and it makes for a good story

[digital*ghost]

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@k1ooo-slr-sales wrote:

stawka, if you like that one, then what about the mother that bought a lunchbox for her child who was starting kinder and complained on the boards that the late arrival wrecked her child's first day at school!  It was only her impression that the delivery was late, reality was she ordered it too late for it to arrive in time for first day of school.

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The thread in question (memories of it still makes me shudder  ).

The lunchbox actually arrived on time, but the buyer still wasn't happy...

Can I leave negative if an item I have orded doesn't arrive when I want it even though it arrived within the expected delivery time? (Link)

[englishrosegardens]

And to tie it in with the birthday comment made earlier, the mother would have known well ahead of time when her child would be starting school and would need a lunchbox.

[springyzone]

In defence of the OP, how were they to know that the delivery estimates are put there by eBay and not the seller?  

Sure, people reading these boards are well aware that the estimates are often unrealistic and are out of control of the seller, but a casual buyer would have no idea of knowing that.  All they see is the description, postage, price, handling time and estimated delivery date - all presumably entered by the seller at the time of creating the listing.  The fact that one of the pieces of information is actually entered by eBay would not even occur to them.

The gripe of this buyer appears to be that he thinks the seller is intentionally misleading prospective buyers by putting a too short estimated delivery date.  We know that is not the case but I would guess many casual buyers may have the same impression.

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I would agree with ambercat.

I would go further. I think this person is not trying to blame the seller at all, they are asking how they can reflect their unhappiness about an aspect of the transaction.

My suggestion would be to write directly to Aust post & outline any problems. Keep a note of dates and how long things took to arrive. I made a complaint once via email to their head office, to complain about slow delivery to our area, and they did look into it, so it is worth doing.

Giving a neg in ebay isn't going to impact on Austpost one iota, they won't know and won't care. If you want your feedback to have any effect, it has to go directly to the horse, so to speak.

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The other thing that strikes me is we can wax on forever about what feedback should be for and what it should look like etc but all a lot of ebay buyers want to do is give feedback on how they found the transaction & the reality is they will want to comment on if an item was greatly delayed, slow or pretty poor quality etc

Wrong? Maybe, but that's the way it is & it ain't going to change.

A lot of the time it isn't fair I know, probably best to campaign for changes to the whole feedback system rather than try to educate buyers.

[k1ooo-slr-sales]

digi, you have a great memory . . . . .OR, you keep a file on memorable threads!  I'd forgotten about my "marsha, marsha, marsha" post.

I still have a recollection of a lunchbox/kinder thread out there somewhere.

[digital*ghost]

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@k1ooo-slr-sales wrote:

digi, you have a great memory . . . . .OR, you keep a file on memorable threads!  

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A little from column A, and a little from column B. 😄

That thread is definitely in my top 10 of memorable posts, but it's also the last thread I ever posted on in the answer centre, so there's basically a permanent link to it on my profile. 

[lyndal1838]

That thread was a classic.....think what could have happened to it if it had not been in the Answer Centre.   I believe it would have blown out to several pages.

BTW the poster has not been back to the boards since that thread and there is no sign of the ID on ebay at all.   I wonder if it was voluntary?