I wasn't going to post another update so soon, but I just wanted to share a couple of things I've adjusted since making this change.

I noticed some people were still making separate orders, and others were being charged a higher amount than they should have been (my parcel price, which I've also set as a cap through promotional postage rules so that items with different postage services will still automatically combine to a flat rate). 

This was confusing me quite a bit, but I dismissed it as people just selecting "promotional postage" in the cart because they were confused and thought it was cheaper than the flat letter rate I have due to how eBay display the discount.

Until I got a message from a buyer yesterday, anyway, who said they couldn't figure out what postage service was going to be used (and explained why). Turns out what I had done when bulk editing the postage was keep some of them (around 20-25%) at "untracked letter" while the rest were set correctly at "tracked letter". If you know how the cart works, then you already know the problems this can cause with auto-postage discounts. 

I wasn't using business policies, so this was a nightmare to fix at first 😭 I've given them another go now, though, and fingers crossed they don't mess things up like last time, because I switched a little way through and things were just so much easier (rather than open every listing, I just had to tick some boxes and migrate the ones with the untracked service over to the policy with tracked service).

Anyway, all this is to say I suspect this may have had something to do with why my multi-item orders were a lot lower than I expected, because some buyers would have basically been seeing large satchel prices in the cart, and also I had a flurry of sales come through this morning. 

While I was at it, I figured since everything is going tracked and eBay is (theoretically 😆 ) covering INRs if there's at least a lodged scan, I may as well return my handling time to normal - only 1 day difference, set it back to 2 business days instead of 3 business days.... and in typical ebay logic, 1 extra day was added to all of my ETAs. 🤣

Sales-wise, BTW, things are still slower overall and while total sales figures are ok, they include postage and that's a bigger percentage of revenue than it used to be - at this stage it's roughly 60% lower than my average for last year, but last year was both huge and an anomaly, so while dramatic in comparison, it's not too bad compared to previous years.