Just When You Thought Ebay Couldn't Get Worse .

I recently wrote about ebay uk's introduction of a buyer's premium under the laughable guise of "buyer's protection". Its next assault of buyers and sellers comes next month, with mandatory use of "Simple Delivery", under which all items will have to be sent via ebay's mechanism. No more using up decimal postage. And, instead of paying 85p for an item sent by 2nd class letter, buyers will now shell out £2.70. Marvellous.

"We're continuing our mission to provide you with a great selling experience on eBay, which is why we made it free to sell. Now, we're improving delivery so it's faster, easier, and more secure for you to send your items.

Starting from 15 April, Simple Delivery will be the only delivery method available for private sellers when listing most items. There'll be a few exceptions, such as low-priced, bulky items, and local pick-up, which aren't eligible for Simple Delivery.

What is Simple Delivery?
Simple Delivery is our all-in-one delivery solution, designed to cut out all of the effort and save you money. It's also the fastest way to get paid on eBay. Plus, buyers will benefit from savings and enjoy the peace of mind that tracking offers. Here's how it works:

1. When listing, we'll recommend the size and weight of your item. Just confirm and we'll do the rest.

2. Once your item sells, you'll receive both a printer-less QR code and a prepaid printable label, so you can choose what's easiest.

3. Drop off your item at the nearest carrier location, or schedule a home collection and you're done!

You'll still be able to choose the carriers by going to Postage Preferences in your account settings. We recommend enabling all carriers for the most competitive postage rates.

Benefits of Simple Delivery
Simple Delivery offers a faster and easier experience:

• Fastest way to get payments: Get your funds 2 days after delivery confirmation when using our prepaid labels.

• Save 20% off postage costs*: Get competitive rates to offer standard and express delivery with Royal Mail and Evri.

• Full protection: Enjoy peace of mind with eBay's full coverage for items lost or damaged in transit, where we handle claims with buyers so you don't have to.

• Free postage option: Choose if you want your buyer to pay for the label, or offer free postage and cover the cost.

• Prepaid and tracked labels: Labels come with automatic tracking so buyers always know where their items are.

• Flexible labels: Use a QR code for quick printing at drop-off locations, or easily print your own label at home.

• Positive feedback: From late April, you'll automatically receive positive feedback for tracked transactions delivered on time, where no feedback has been left within 7 days and no issues are reported, so you get the recognition you deserve. Learn more about this change.

Simple Delivery will apply to new eligible listings by private sellers in the UK, and from 7 April to any existing listings that are eligible. If you selected buyer-paid postage, this will stay the same when your listings are updated. If you're covering the costs, they'll be deducted from your sales. Click the button below to see what's eligible."

I think eBay is totally losing touch with what customers want or need and their Customer Service is out of touch with reality.

I have been in a struggle with them for 4 months on identity verification. I have been a member for 23 years with a 100% positive rating and everything went downhill once I sold my house and submitted a change of address in November 2024. All my payments were put on hold until I submitted government ID. I submitted my BC Driver's Licence and blocked out the Personal Health Number and associated barcode on the back of my BC combo card where the front is the Driver's Licence and the back is the BC Services Card. The BC Services card has access to all of my medical records and is not to be given out to anyone other than medical related institutions. I certainly am not going to give this access to an organization such as eBay.

This has been going on for 4 months through numerous chats, e-mails, etc. and the responses keep getting more bizarre. Responses have been that it needs to be JPEG instead of PDF (even though they list either as being acceptable), have to change my address back to the original address of the house that I sold, have to provide proof of UK citizenship or my UK birth certificate (I'm Canadian and have nothing to do with the UK nor was I born there), and finally last week that if I do not provide my Personal Health Number and barcode they will not verify my identity. This is ludicrous and I have now contacted the BC Ministry of Health who have indicated that I now need to escalate this to the BC Ministry of Health fraud department. I have notified eBay of this yet they won't budge and continue to tell me how valued and loyal a customer I have been. Surely there has to be someone at eBay that can cut through this red tape.

So the title of this thread is so appropriate, it just keeps getting worse.

so no more media mail?

The UK equivalent of "media mail" doesn't exist anymore. Some International Standard (i.e. surface) rates still have printed matter elements.

So all those bar coded 2nds everyone got for turning in their Machins are now going to be unusable for eBay purposes, and shipping costs will go from 85p to £2.70. Awesome.

My stock of the bar-coded swaps was used up long ago. I wonder what the effect will be on auction sales of modern GB, given that a decent percentage is used for postage. For me, one of the main irritations - aside from the loss of the ability to cross-subsidise purchases of reinforced envelopes etc via reduced-cost stamps - will be the need to queue at a packed post office to drop off items, rather than simply putting them in a post-box.

This is the latest in a series of ebay uk measures. First it ended selling fees on clothing, presumably to stem losses of sellers to Vinted. Then all sellers' fees went. Then it introduced a buyer's premium. And now this, which, like the buyer's premium, is also a Vinted requirement. So ebay arrangements now mirror Vinted's, to the detriment of buyers.

If you're now having to print out your Royal Mail postage, a couple of minutes work with an image editor will reduce your ink usage. Import the downloaded pdf at a high resolution. Select the Royal Mail banner, use levels to increase the contrast and then invert. Wipe out the boast about energy usage at the bottom. Convert to greyscale and then to two-colour index.

I had problems getting the labels scanned when first printing them out- turned out I was importing at 100dpi, which was making the qr code fuzzy.

" the need to queue at a packed post office to drop off items, rather than simply putting them in a post-box."

Which will be longer if there are other eBay sellers in your area.