"Standard Shipping" Now means "Ground Advantage"?

[sin-n-dex]

So on lots of items, I put "Standard shipping" as the service. I learnt in the summer from the veterans of eBay that if you assign a generic service like Economy or Standard, you don't have to update the service every time the post office makes changes to their services.

Well so far that's gone on fine, but as of tonight, when I went to put ESE on a postcard, it told me the buyer "selected" Ground Advantage. I thought ESE being the key word is "standard" was "standard shipping". Now eBay's trying to suggest to me the buyer paid for Ground Advantage when I charged 1.75 to mail a postcard.

I checked some other listings of like type items and they're "Economy shipping" which doesn't seem to be matched to a class. So looks like I'll have to make all my postcards "Economy shipping" to stay in compliance with the rules that you can't drop lower in the service you use for shipping.

Even in my listing when I review the shipping on the item, it's saying "Standard Shipping" is "First class mail", but it kind of is... it's a letter with a stamp, which is First Class. So why are they telling me the buyer has requested Ground Advantage?

C.

[1786davycrockett]

@sin-n-dex 

"Even in my listing when I review the shipping on the item, it's saying "Standard Shipping" is "First class mail", but it kind of is... it's a letter with a stamp, which is First Class."

The eBay Standard Envelope is NOT considered to be USPS First Class Mail:  it is USPS business "metered" mail, which is an entirely different mailing category, according to USPS.  And the ESE is NOT "a letter with a stamp, which is First Class" -- it's a letter with a contracted metered payment imprint.

As for how a buyer can change the method of shipment without the seller's permission:  is the postcard which was purchased actually listed under the item description "postcards," or was it possibly listed under a different category?  For example:  I never bothered to update some of the category designations on some of my older listings; so when they are purchased, the shipping charge is often out of whack with the shipping charge I had originally listed for the item, kicking it into a higher priced shipping category.  

So, if the postcard which you had sold had not actually been listed under the general "postcard" item description, it is possible that the bots kicked it up to USPS Ground Advantage.

You might have to bite the bullet on that one.

[stephenmorgan]

Recently when purchasing a shipping label, I often must change what eBay selected to what the buyer selected. The buyer will have selected Ground Advantage, but eBay will have preselected Priority Mail. I had to cancel a few labels and repurchase them because I did not catch the setting.

Last night I clicked on the button to purchase a shipping label and immediately the label was processed. I was not ready to purchase the label. I was expecting as normal to be sent to the shipping page to check package size, weight and purchase Insurance. I canceled the label and then had to purchase it somewhere else. I hope this is not going to be a normal thing. It is much more work to manually enter address information.

[nobody*s_perfect]

Some of your postcards, including one sold yesterday, are listed under "Collectibles," where ESE isn't available.

[sin-n-dex]

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@1786davycrockett wrote:

@sin-n-dex 

"Even in my listing when I review the shipping on the item, it's saying "Standard Shipping" is "First class mail", but it kind of is... it's a letter with a stamp, which is First Class."

The eBay Standard Envelope is NOT considered to be USPS First Class Mail:  it is USPS business "metered" mail, which is an entirely different mailing category, according to USPS.  And the ESE is NOT "a letter with a stamp, which is First Class" -- it's a letter with a contracted metered payment imprint.

As for how a buyer can change the method of shipment without the seller's permission:  is the postcard which was purchased actually listed under the item description "postcards," or was it possibly listed under a different category?  For example:  I never bothered to update some of the category designations on some of my older listings; so when they are purchased, the shipping charge is often out of whack with the shipping charge I had originally listed for the item, kicking it into a higher priced shipping category.  

So, if the postcard which you had sold had not actually been listed under the general "postcard" item description, it is possible that the bots kicked it up to USPS Ground Advantage.

You might have to bite the bullet on that one.

---

OK, on the definition of First Class/Metered Mail. I'm not always familiar with USPS stuff.

The postcards are all in the postcard category (I'm using SixBit which runs off a template). Seems some templates have "Standard shipping" and others have "Economy shipping". I might have never noticed this before because one with "Standard shipping" didn't sell... sometimes I do something, make a few listings, then change the templates when I learn something better. I'm going to check my postcards for shipping preferences (which is easy, just do it based on Lot assignment #, they will all be from the same template), and update anything that's "Standard" with "Economy".

I did sell another postcard today and it showed up Economy shipping, I think I get to choose my shipping method in that case, it won't default to ESE or Ground Advantage in this case. Sometimes it preselects something, but it won't tell me "buyer requested" beside any options when it's Economy shipping.

I had formerly thought if I had it set to standard I could choose my method, but when the postcard sold last night, it told me "buyer requested" on the GA option, when normally I would have shipped ESE. (Some listings actually have ESE as the method of shipping, but I changed stuff to Economy because I didn't want to update all my listings next time USPS makes a service change, like what happened in July).

When I go to the listing of the postcard that sold, where it says Standard Shipping, it put in brackets "First Class Mail" (which is not even the name of the service anymore), and I don't remember ever seeing that before... it used to just say "Standard shipping" which I thought was my choice of any ordinary shipping method offered.

C.

[sin-n-dex]

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@stephenmorgan wrote:

Recently when purchasing a shipping label, I often must change what eBay selected to what the buyer selected. The buyer will have selected Ground Advantage, but eBay will have preselected Priority Mail. I had to cancel a few labels and repurchase them because I did not catch the setting.

Last night I clicked on the button to purchase a shipping label and immediately the label was processed. I was not ready to purchase the label. I was expecting as normal to be sent to the shipping page to check package size, weight and purchase Insurance. I canceled the label and then had to purchase it somewhere else. I hope this is not going to be a normal thing. It is much more work to manually enter address information.

---

I often have it preselected with Priority Mail (when I've put Standard shipping for my items), but it will show "buyer selected" at ground advantage, but I think in most cases it doesn't tell me what the buyer selected and lets me pick, that was the point of using a generic shipping term in the listing. Others have posted they do this to avoid making changes with USPS makes changes if they have thousands of listings.

C.

[sin-n-dex]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

Some of your postcards, including one sold yesterday, are listed under "Collectibles," where ESE isn't available.

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Postcards is a subcategory of collectibles, and the ESE option did appear when I bought the label, it just wasn't what the "buyer selected" on that sale which I didn't think it was allowed to do when I pick something generic like "standard shipping". Seems like if I change them to economy shipping there's no buyer selected choice, I can actually buy any service offered.

Every postcard I have ever shipped has had ESE offered, unless of course there are several cards and it's going over 3 oz, then in those cases they ship Ground Advantage.

C.

[wastingtime101 · Accepted solution]

The postcard you sold yesterday @sin-n-dex was not listed with generic no service specified Standard Shipping.

The postcard you sold yesterday was listed with First Class Mail, an untracked service. Since eBay does not sell labels for untracked services, the label page defaulted to Ground Advantage.

Because your postcard was listed in an eligible category, you still had the option of purchasing an ESE label, but it was not the default or "buyer selected" since it was not offered on your listing.

Hope that helps.

[sin-n-dex]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

The postcard you sold yesterday @sin-n-dex was not listed with generic no service specified Standard Shipping.

The postcard you sold yesterday was listed with First Class Mail, an untracked service. Since eBay does not sell labels for untracked services, the label page defaulted to Ground Advantage.

Because your postcard was listed in an eligible category, you still had the option of purchasing an ESE label, but it was not the default or "buyer selected" since it was not offered on your listing.

Hope that helps.

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Great find! What probably happened was when I updated them all (which I think most should have been changed to Economy shipping), this one might have had an offer and didn't update... I remember when we had the big drama with the USPS changes I updated my listings to have standard or economy shipping, but some didn't update because there was an offer (or some reason I couldn't modify it).

So basically the customer may have caught the only one left listed like that...

When I looked at shipping, it does actually say "Standard", but it also does say "First Class Mail", so your explanation makes sense for why I see this now, and never saw it before.

This might mean I don't have to go updating all the postcards... however in an unrelated problem, when I switched computers two years ago, my SixBit Database lost postcard photos for about four different lots of postcards, and when I revised my listings en masse (to change some TOS verbage), it updated the listing to remove the photos that SixBit lost (even though they were there on eBay and everything was fine till I did that).

The postcard photos is a major crisis because there's 500 listings this happened to, but not an urgent crisis which means once I find them all and take them down, I can leave it until I have time to photograph them again. (Photos of anything before I changed computers are gone, so I can't find the folder and just upload them again). I do back up my directories of photos, but due to external hard drive space, I am only able to go back about 2 years, I deleted anything older since most items except stamps and postcards have sold since then.

C.

[wastingtime101]

You have a lot of listings to update that offer First Class @sin-n-dex . Looks like all of your postcards with $1.35 ship are First Class while the ones with $1.40 ship are generic economy.

I'm attempting to run a scan. If successful I will PM a list of item numbers.

[sin-n-dex]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

You have a lot of listings to update that offer First Class @sin-n-dex . Looks like all of your postcards with $1.35 ship are First Class while the ones with $1.40 ship are generic economy.

I'm attempting to run a scan. If successful I will PM a list of item numbers.

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Hi,

Due to updating TOS in listings, it might have revered a bunch back to being 1.35. The 1.40 price was intentional for me to see what had been updated and what needed updating. The problem is I update some stuff on the site because it's easier to find stuff and do it fast, and it might not properly update on the offline program that manages inventory. (I've been advised by others who use the software not to do this, but I had done the shipping update on the site in July). I will check other things, I deliberately updated all prices when I updated the service to make identification easy.

C.

[sin-n-dex]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

You have a lot of listings to update that offer First Class @sin-n-dex . Looks like all of your postcards with $1.35 ship are First Class while the ones with $1.40 ship are generic economy.

I'm attempting to run a scan. If successful I will PM a list of item numbers.

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Don't worry about PM'ing, I just checked my Active Listings, exactly what happened is the older shipping price and services reverted back when I revised my listings (for the description box). Because I updated the shipping on the site my software didn't pick it up.

I will be able to fix this when I'm done updating the rest of the listings. Anything that was listed since July won't be affected.

I'm just adding this to the list of crisis that is plaguing my store this weekend.

C.

[wastingtime101]

Scan froze at 2900 listings (you have 3100 postcard listings) so I couldn't complete it and generate a report. But the vast majority of your postcard listings showed First Class and need to be updated.

[sin-n-dex]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

Scan froze at 2900 listings (you have 3100 postcard listings) so I couldn't complete it and generate a report. But the vast majority of your postcard listings showed First Class and need to be updated.

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When I'm done updating the descriptions probably all postcards will be back at First Class (since the offline software did not recognize the shipping update I did on eBay's site in July).

The software is smart, I should be able to filter all the problems with shipping and make the necessary changes. It's just going to take some time to upload the changes, so I'll have to work on something besides making listings for a few days.

C.