Letters returned to sender - how long does it usually take?

[egyptian-shop]

Hi,

I had an item I sent as a large letter returned today.  I can't find a record of the buyer or the item sold and have searched my invoices back to April.  Nothing in my sold items for the last 60 days.

Just wondering how long it usually takes the post office to return letters to sender, its a legitimate address not too far from where I live.

Thanks,

[zeroninetyone091]

hi there,

I find that it takes approx 5 weeks to be returned to sender.

It does depend though how long the destination Post office keeps it.

This in turn can vary from 10 days to 30 days. Waiting for the receiver to contact them?

[davewil1964]

---

@kopenhagen5 wrote:

Every seller should keep a sales record in a book. Especially as eBay details drop away after a period.

Very easy to have basic details in a ruled up record.

Not only to solve problems as this but also to help customers with past purchases or future marketing tools.

Occasionally items may be sent to the black stump n back, not found to be returned to seller after a few months, but rare.

---

A book? Seriously?

I keep mine in a spreadsheet.

[clarry100]

The overhead of manually keeping some form of book either on paper on in a spreadsheet would be enormous. At the end of each calendar month after all payments are cleared for the month I download a paid and posted report in CSV format and store that away on my local hard drive. This report contains all the sales record data you will ever need to search for a buyer. EBay don't allow you to see this info past 90 days so you need to keep it yourself. This also works for tax records

[*tippy*toes*]

Do you keep a backup on a different hard drive or on a cloud? I only ask because my husbands computer carped itself the other day and after trying pretty much everything,  I had to do a factory reset. Thankfully all his recent holiday snaps were backed up on Dropbox, but if they weren't he would have lost the lot.

[clarry100]

I do both to cloud and we also have a network storage device configured as RAID.

Just means that it has two large drives in it configured to back each other up so if either one fails all the data is still on the other.

We see only one drive, the RAID box doaes all the work in the background.

You're unlikely to lose both drives at once. But if that did happen then cloud to the rescue I guess.

We don't store any data files on our laptops at all, its all on the RAID drive which is accessible by any device on our home network.

So pretty good backups I guess, just in case.

If a laptop fails then we would have to go thru all the setup stuff again but all our ebay photos and data such as this stuff is pretty safe.

We also store a whole bunch of kids movies on it too and can then stream those directly to our TV. Much simpler than DVDs.

[dazzledayz]

Assuming the payment was via PayPal you can find the details you are after.

Go to the Paypal download centre and get a complete transaction history (download as CSV and open in excel or similar).

I don't know how far back their records go but it's longer than eBays.

You can then use the "Find" function to search the address column for the buyers street address.

Their eBay ID is also there in another column as is all other relevant data on one row concerning the sale.

I download this file every month and append it to an existing list in a permanent spreadsheet.

It gives me a complete list of sales going back to day 1.

[trrautoparts]

---

@clarry100 wrote:
The overhead of manually keeping some form of book either on paper on in a spreadsheet would be enormous. At the end of each calendar month after all payments are cleared for the month I download a paid and posted report in CSV format and store that away on my local hard drive. This report contains all the sales record data you will ever need to search for a buyer. EBay don't allow you to see this info past 90 days so you need to keep it yourself. This also works for tax records

---

Could you tell me where you get this report from please?  I have always kept my printed paper copy of each sale, but this would be a much easier way to do it all.

Thanks!