Bogus Shipping Dates

OK Don....call the USPS and complain.
Lets see where that gets you.

The shipment was not philatelic in nature. But to show you how USPS works. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin a fairly large metropolitan area. I mailed 2 identical Medium Flat Rate boxes on 2/1. Tracking shows them accepted at the post office on the west side of town at 7:50AM and getting to the Airport facility at 10:07PM the FOLLOWING day. One made it to Salt Lake City at 8:37PM the day after that and was delivered to the customer on the 4th. The other box left Milwaukee and vanished on tracking! It finally was located somewhere on the 6th and delivered to the customer with no apologies to anyone. And I breathed a sigh of relief at not having to jump thru hoops to get a refund from USPS.

Until recently printing the ebay shipping label stopped the clock for 1 day shipping purposes. If I was paid on Thursday and printed the label on Friday I was in compliance and then I could take the items to the PO at my leisure. I'm sure some folks gamed the system and printed the labels and packed and shipped whenever they were ready.

Now that has changed. Effective this month ebay uses the date and time the PO scans the items into their system as the shipped date and tracks this metric, the customer can also tag an item as arriving late. For Top Rated Seller's you have to maintain a 97% compliance with shipping by the handling date.

This is particularly difficult for 2 reasons;

1. ebay is going back to September for the shipping by handling date, which is before the new rules started.

2. ebay's computer programs are doing the calculations wrong. If someone pays at 1:00 PM on Thursday and the Post Office scans the package at 2:00 PM on Friday the ebay system counts it as late. They programmed it to give you 24 hours not to the end of the next day.

After several hours on the phone I got a representative who admitted the problem and assured me it will be fixed before the next rating on February 20. Time will tell.

Any TRS out there should check their Dashboard.

KRelyea -

One more hassle. All of the ebay calculations are based on Pacific time. An item paid for at 2:00 AM Eastern time will register as 11 PM the day before according to ebay. Instead of focusing on slow loading search pages and missing pictures that deter potential buyers, ebay is attempting to blame sellers for their lack of business.

Clark

I guess I don't understand your point. I have developed several vender rating systems in my career, including ones that were reviewed and certified by ISO, and I can tell you that venders are held responsible for the shipping company and their performance. The shipping company is simply a sub-contractor for the vender.

Say you take your car in for body repair. The body shop subs out the painting of your car to someone else. The sub-contractor ends up taking 4 weeks to paint your car. You have an issue with the original body shop, not the painter. You don't have any influence with the painter. The responsibility follows the money, you are paying the body shop, the body shop is the one paying the painter, they have the influence.

If your opinion is that this is wrong, then you are disagreeing with the way things are done in the US business world and your beef is with this, not me. I was just trying to outline how this kind of thing normally works vs. how ebay has implemented it.
Don

Edit; If you would like to learn more, see this link
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com...-Rating.html

Don -

Do you really believe an alternative to the USPS exists for mailing lower priced ebay lots? When was the last time you received a FedEx or UPS package containing a seven dollar auction lot? It is bad enough that ebay requires tracked shipping (minimum cost $2.54 cash or stamps) to maintain Top Rated Seller status. For sellers, this means forgoing selling less expensive stamps or "bundling" into "sets" or groups inevitably containing some stamps the buyer doesn't want and won't willingly pay for.

Besides that, many buyers of philatelic items want to receive mailings franked with stamps.

The problem is that ebay requirements are based on some fantasy that the US Postal service is a fully functioning responsible organization. While things are getting better on the tracking front, there is no way to expect tracking to work the way ebay believes it does or should, at least not now.

I notice that even if labels are scanned at the counter in the post office, they don't always appear in tracking, either at the time or later. Sometimes tracking may not occur until the item reaches the destination distribution location, if then. I sometimes wonder if the bar code readers at the counter in the local post office are even connected to the USPS computer network.

Clark

Actually, the buyer chooses the shipping. Normally, they want the cheapest option, which is almost always USPS First Class mail. I offer multiple shipping options on some auctions, and I have never had anyone pick one of the more expensive options.

Clark,
Of course not, which is why I made it clear that un-tracked shipment are not included in any performance rating system. US business replies on 'promise date' for just in time deliveries; it is consider paramount in most companies. Heck, even my dialysis center relies upon JIT promise dates for dialysis supplies, and people's lives depend upon it.

adaplan,
No, the seller may offer alternate shipping methodologies for the buyer but the seller controls the choices, pays the shipping company.

A seller is making the commitment to safely have the material delivered to the doorstep of the buyer. I am unsure how anyone can argue that, it is clearly stated in ebay's policy. If a customer does not receive an item in a timely fashion, are they going to be upset with the UPS/FedEx or the seller? If a shipment is lost, do you expect the buyer to run to down when they never hired or paid the shipper?

And by the way, the same holds true for shipments damaged in transit. There were many cases where we had a full shift of people standing around because a shipment on the dock was sitting there damaged by a shipper. The vendor was the one who packed it and paid the shipper to hit the promise date. American supply chain is totally and completely based upon promise dates.

I encourage anyone who wants to learn more to Google 'promise date' and vendor rating systems.
Don

The seller is responsible for an item until it reaches the buyer safely. That I agree with. If the USPS loses a package or it gets damaged en route, the seller pays. That I agree with. I've been on both ends of that equation. I hate issuing refunds as a seller, but as a buyer, I'll be darned if I'm going to pay for an item that I didn't receive. It may not be the seller's fault, assuming they shipped the item in good faith, but it sure as heck isn't my fault, and I'll ask for a refund every single time if I didn't get something, even if tracking clearly shows it was shipped but lost (or stolen) while en route.

However, as a buyer, I'm not going to ding a seller's rating for choosing to ship via USPS when that's what I would want them to do. Yes, I'll expect the seller to pay up, but assuming he does, I'm not going to consider them a bad or shady seller when they shipped something in good faith. They'll still get positive feedback and 5 stars, assuming they handle any issues professionally.

Artful,
Agreed, if a buyer is upset with something I think his first level of recourse is to communicate with the seller and try to iron things out. For me, I wouldn't ding a seller in virtually any situation. Frankly, I try to avoid the entire ebay rating system because it is such a mess.

I hope folks aren't shooting the messenger here, I was only trying to provide some context on a good vendor rating system. Here is a good article on these, note section on 'Delivery By Supplier Promise'

https://www.instituteforsupplymanag...Number=10826

What I find particularly annoying are buyers who pay for economy shipping, and then complain they didn't get the item in 3 days. They had the option of paying for priority mail, but choose not to. I had one buyer complain that an international shipment didn't get to him in 5 days, when he paid for first class mail. I told him typical shipping times are 10-14 days, and even showed him the tracking showing the item was sitting in customs for a few days. If the buyer needs an item quickly, they need to be willing to pay for what that costs, not expect to get it for free.

Adaplan,
No doubt. At the risk of a sweeping generalization, I think that younger people are more prone to a 'short duration time frame'. I find 'Time' history interesting. It was not that long ago when a rural town only had one clock located in the train station. At that time, a person might tell another, 'I'll stop by after lunch'. 'After lunch' might be 12:30 or 4:30. But with the advent of pocket watches, everyone shortened their time frames. Now 'after lunch' usually meant 12;30 to around 2:00.

In this internet age, I often think that folks time frame has shortened to a few minutes. If I tell someone I will be there at 12:30, by 12:35 they are getting frustrated. We don't often consider technology in the context of time frames, but it certainly has been evolving.
Don

My daughter (age 19) the other day was complaining about something taking forever. In this case forever was equal to about 1 minute. And it was something that would have taken closer to 10 minutes just a decade or two ago.

Ebays delivery estimates are a joke for much of the time and very seldom agree with the carrier's delivery time estimates.

If you ship internationally there is also customs to worry about and is not calculated in ebay's estimates.

Ship from Canada where tracking starts at around $15.00 and goes up. A lot is sent without tracking due to this Canada Post ridiculous cost.

We are at the mercy of what the buyer states as to was your item delivered on time. They get to answer as they please without any regard to the seller and sellers have no way to determine if it was delivered late or not.

ebay does not care and just puts in whatever metrics they want and sellers have to live with it. Wait till you send out 15 items in on envelope with no tracking and the buyer says it arrived late.

That counts as 15 orders and you get 15 strikes. You won't be on ebay long under those ridiculous rules, but it seems to be a way to get cheaper items off the site by getting rid of those sellers.