eBay

salebolt · ‎08-17-2021

Media Mail is quoted for 2-10 days delivery by USPS.

eBay is quoting 3-4 days, which is the First Class time.

Further, USPS mail is delayed about 20% of the time in the current environment.

The delivery estimates should reflect these issues.

myhomeschooldelights · ‎08-17-2021

Are you the seller or are you asking as a buyer? If you are judging by what you, as the seller, are seeing on one of your own listings, you are seeing the time it would take to reach your own zip code, or the zip code where the product is located before shipping, not what the buyer sees. If you click on the shipping/payment tab next to the description tab near the top left side of your listing, you can change the destination zip code and experiment with projected delivery times for other places. That's what the buyer is going to see when they are logged in to their account. I ship media just about exclusively, and I've noticed that it's normally a pretty accurate estimate to the buyer. For example the items I shipped today 8/17 mostly say expected delivery by 8/27. That's about right for media.

fab_finds4u · ‎08-17-2021

Shipping to my zip code is by Aug 26.

salebolt · ‎08-17-2021

I wasn't asking anything I was posting an issue. I don't really need you to try and debunk my report.

It's shipped 8/12, and was due 8/16. USPS has it expected on 8/16, but now marked as late delivery. The customer was told 4 days and it's late -- again. This happens on almost every Media Mail shipment now. This one is IL to KS. Short hops are not short anymore. Media Mail just two states over is seeing delays. I've seen the same to TX, AL, and LA. So because of the lower estimate, it's more likely to cause issues. The ones going cross country have more room for error because the quotes are higher. And some go thru without issue. But having eBay refund 20% of the shipments because they cant pad delivery times to match reality is not a risk I want to take.

The point is there are news reports that 20% of USPS shipments are late, and Media Mail is being routinely delayed by days at both the ship side and the receiver side. They should not be quoting average delivery times from the zone charts for any USPS shipment. It sets up unreasonable expectations for the buyers.

You may not be seeing this issue in your area, but we are. Since we have no way to control the delivery estimates, we can only report the issue, or add a large handling time to try and compensate. This is not the first time I've reported it. This has been going on for months and hasn't gotten so bad that we had to shift to First Class for most DVDs.

I fully expect that delivery times are going to be normalized to add several days and Media Mail might be eliminated entirely with the upcoming postal system proposed changes. The rates and times are already narrowing.

salebolt · ‎08-17-2021

@fab_finds4u wrote:
Shipping to my zip code is by Aug 26.

That doesn't mean much without a location. But I'll assume you're a fair distance from IL.

Given the problems I've seen are generally Midwest and middle South, I'd have to say that the problems is more noticeable in the nearer shipments where the estimated times are lower.

The simple solution is for eBay to add 3-4 days and present the user with a range like 4-8 days. For local shipments they are showing this format "Shipping: Free 4 day shipping " instead of "Estimated between Sat. Aug. 21 and Wed. Aug. 25". OK, that seems to be only for very local shipments.

My buyer claims to have been told on the eBay site delivery by Monday 8/16 (paid 8/10, shipped 8/11).

It's possible the buyer is getting this from the order status page which from my side says "Estimated delivery by Mon, Aug 16, 2021" (for this shipment not yet delivered) . That should never happen. It should be revised if later than expected, not presented this way. USPS also tags it as arriving late and still in transit on their tracking page.

As USPS says:

"The expected delivery date does not come with a money-back guarantee."
"The timeliness of service to or from destinations outside the contiguous U.S. may be affected by the limited availability of transportation."
"As a result of the ongoing COVID-19 emergency, certain packages may take longer than usual to arrive"

In any case, with shipments being regularly delayed, I don't want to see any hard promises. They have no problem extending this courtesy to Chinese shippers.

salebolt · ‎08-18-2021

The estimated delivery date is coming from USPS. For an order shipped 8/12 it was originally estimated at 8/16. This information shows on the USPS tracking page. eBay is picking up that info and showing it on the

Seller Hub Order Details page and the Order Details page linked thru the item page.

https://www.ebay.com/vod/FetchOrderDetails

On the item listing page items shipping to the same zip are quoted at 3-7 days, which would be what this item was estimated at. Using the current (outdated) projection for the USPS tracking page gives a late indication to the buyer, when in fact it is not late relative to the original estimate.

I expect this occur with First Class delivery as well, but since Media Mail is slower and subject to add'l delays based on priority, it becomes more noticeable on those shipments.