Seller Rating System is a Joke

[knewdoors]

Seriously E-bay what a RIGGED set up re: Seller Ratings..How on earth are sellers supposed to be responsible for late items..when we put our customers purchased items in the post ASAP and yet Australia Post is slow or is delayed because Phil or Phillipa the postperson decides to take a break or is on the go-slow or like most Aussie cities the roads are clogged with too many vehicles.....or on International deliveries the mail on a plane is delayed due to circumstances way out of our control..so the seller takes the hit in the delay... SERIOUSLY E-Bay???...this whole show is RIGGED...what a joke...

[davewil1964]

You obviously are approaching the limit for late delivery defects.

You presumably don't send with trackable postage.

You are therefore assuming eBay will take your word for when you posted rather than the buyers' answers to the question of 'did it arrive by x'.

if you are posting untracked you are always at the mercy of buyer perception.

Either push your handling time out or use tracked postage.

Simple.

A lot simpler than posting a missive to eBay on the boards, as you well know. eBay neither read nor respond to board posts.

[lowanacrafts]

I have my handling days at 5. Customers are pleased when the parcel arrives early. Not sure what you have.
One reason for this , I live in the country and can't post every day.

[countessalmirena]

@knewdoors, it's an unfortunate truth that sellers are punished for the vagaries of the delivery time, rather than for the postage time.

Of course, the postage time rating should be very clear - when buyers are asked to give feedback - that it's NOT how long the parcel took to get to the buyer... However, as has been said in this thread, there are a couple of things that you can do to avoid defects associated with postage time.

1. Extend your handling time. I've checked a few of your items, and at the moment, the buyer would see ❝Will usually send within same business day if paid before 14:00 AEST (excludes weekends and holidays).---❞ and an Estimated Delivery Time based on that. Add a few days to that  handling time, so that the EDT has some padding for the inevitable delays and blowouts of Australia-wide delivery, and buyers will be pleasantly surprised when they receive their items sooner. (Buyers see the word "fast" in the FAST 'N FREE logo, and they expect it to be fast. Not meeting that expectation is going to annoy some buyers on the basis of their expectation.)
2. Fix up your postage options. At the moment, you have some listings where an international buyer would see FREE POSTAGE in the postage options, even though you try to cover yourself by stating in the listing description that free postage is for Australian customers. Having that sort of caveat in the DESCRIPTION does not protect you. (If you are not sure about how to set up postage correctly, post here and someone will advise.)
3. For items from a certain value and higher, you should not risk untracked postage. It's all very well to say that postage is free, and to think that buyers will therefore not expect the more costly (tracked) postage, but you are the one at risk if there's no tracking... Not only are you at risk for late postage dings, but also for claims of the item not arriving.

[wide-world-of-stamps]

Our situation exactly.

5 day handling and a note in our description that we don't post every day.

We used to have 3 days, and had a few problems.

Now we get things like "super fast delivery".

[jellybirddesigns]

Even if you post within 1 business day, push out your handling time to 5 or more days as the others have suggested.

I did this years ago and it has probably saved me countless hassles.

If you look at my feedback, I get a lot of positive comments about "quick" postage.

[homeopathmichele57]

I used tracked postage. i live in a regional area of Qld.  Iwas getting feedback from e.g. Perth about late postage (a very anxious buyer who was depending onthe AP app which I find quite unreliable - or it was a few months ago.

I contacted ebay to explain & they put things right very quickly to my surprise.

[waddingtonfirstaid]

Agree 100% with knewdoors and what you have to say here starting this threat. What a lot of sellers don't realize until it affects them directly is that time is of the essence now and delivery is the biggest part of it all. If you allow more than one day to process an order then you're seriously uncompetative because others in the game, let's say Amazon for starters, as well as your fellow eBay sellers striving to maintain a good rating, utterly depend on a delivery system which is also FAST! People want their food fast before it gets cold and you'all heard of Ubereats surely. Well, the same thing appies to all deliveries now. People expect it fast. You can no longer think orders can be bunched together and sent once or twice a week because those days are gone. If you want to have a good rating with eBay and all the bells and whistles involved in its algorithms, to set conditions so your product will come up in a search result, closer to the tope as possible even, then you MUST maintain a fast turn around and FAST delivery service which is 100% reliable.

My youngest son is completing a Business Finance and Marketing degree, I could go on and on about this, especially the inner workings of Facebook, let alone eBay.

The eBay seller rating system can affect sellers very badly due to no fault of their own and it should be dealt with by eBay because it currently stands as another dysfunction which drives sellers into closing.

[countessalmirena]

---

@waddingtonfirstaid wrote:

If you want to have a good rating with eBay and all the bells and whistles involved in its algorithms, to set conditions so your product will come up in a search result, closer to the tope as possible even, then you MUST maintain a fast turn around and FAST delivery service which is 100% reliable.

---

As a buyer only, I don't expect a fast turnaround. What I do expect is a reasonable turnaround... which isn't the same thing.

If eBay did not penalise sellers for delivery times, I'd be endorsing what you say. There's certainly been an increase in businesslike despatch from many sellers since the earlier days of eBay! However, eBay did and do and almost certainly will continue to do so... that is, penalise sellers for delivery times. That means that sellers have got to protect their standing as sellers because late defects have a serious impact on eBay.

That also means that it's better for some sellers - particularly sellers who are in areas where deliveries may be prone to bottlenecks and delays, or sellers who sell more frequently than some others to buyers who are in slow delivery areas, or sellers who are, for whatever reason, unable to post every day - to pad out the EDD to something more realistic than eBay's "Once upon a time" version.

The OP appears to be a seller who is in that situation.

Better by far to avoid the postage defects than try to race to the top in a FAST 'N FREE battle.

[collect247]

It should be the same for sellers as it is for buyers lol.

A buyer gets up to 8 days before they're punished for not paying so why can't a seller get those same 8 days minimum across the board to post an item?

Buyers take their sweet time to pay but sellers must deliver or else.

100% agree with the OP.