Locked
Discussions in this board are limited to the original poster and Community Mentors
Your grace period ends soon...
Summary: webvinylandmore shared frustration about potentially losing their Top Rated Seller status on eBay due to shipping delays requested by buyers, which they've now been penalized for. They had followed guidance from eBay's support, only to learn mistakes had been made after the grace period expired. lady_madonna advised that in the future, sellers should offer to cancel and relist orders if buyers request shipping delays, as a way to comply with eBay's shipping rules.
This is probably more of a rant than a question but...
This morning I received an email from eBay with the heading "Your grace period ends soon". The email stated that I "didn’t meet one or more of the sales, volume or tracking upload goals set for all Top Rated Sellers in the US region". When I went to my eBay sellers page I found that I had two items that had supposedly not been shipped in the required amount of time. Knowing this not to be true as I ship pretty much instantly since I have a post office two blocks from my home, I investigated further. Turns out these were both items that the buyer had specifically asked me to hold off on shipping because they were out of town or some such. In both cases I had purchased the shipping and then waited till the requested date to actually hand them off to the PO. Now they are being counted as strikes against me and I may lose my Top Rated Seller rating as a result. I contacted eBay and they directed me to a page where I could request a defect removal but the 90 day period to do this had already expired as I had no idea there was a problem. They basically said that there was nothing to be done and I just had to work on building up my stats going forward. Aside from this being irksome because all I was doing was exactly what the buyers requested, the thing that really galls me is that I specifically phoned eBay in advance to find out what to do in these situations and this was exactly what they instructed me to do!
So now that I've vented, my actual question is - is there anything that I can do about this? There no longer seems to be any way to contact anyone at eBay who has the power to do anything, you either get a chatbot or someone who is just reading off of a script. Is there some way to escalate things to a person who actually can evaluate the situation? I have the messages that the buyers sent and, in theory, they could probably even look up that I had in fact called before proceeding to handle the requests in this fashion.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
comics-scifi-collectibles
Mentor2 weeks ago@webvinylandmore I just wanted to add that you need to have no more than 3% of your shipments shipped on time with tracking.
You also need to have 100 sales in a year and at least $1k in sales. This can be another reason that you lost TRS.
lady_madonna
Mentor2 weeks agoThere is nothing you can do to remove the defect.
In the future, when a buyer asks you to hold off shipping, politely answer that as per Ebay rules you are required to ship within X amount of days and offer to cancel the transaction and you can relist and they can repurchase when they are back home to receive packages.