Ebay Late Shipment 5 or less vs 3% Classification

[Anonymous]

Hi, so I have been selling and monitoring my seller status. I have been learning about the late shipment status. Since I didn't have hundreds of sales, I was classified to be in compliance if I had 5 or less late shipments. I had 4 late shipments in the last year. So I appealed a couple of late shipments that were misclassified by ebay. Customer Service told me just to give it 24 hrs. So now i only have 2 late shipments, it should be 2 out of 5 or less allowed. However, for some reason they reclassified me under the percentage model, 2.13% (based on 2 late shipments out of 94 transactions. I have had the same number of transactions last few days. 

My concern is that I can easily drop status level even with 1 more late shipment and even before I appealed these 2 late shipments, I was in good standing with 4 late shipments out of 5 or less allowed. So technically, I had a buffer, was allowed another late shipment for total of 5 but now even 1 more late shipment would push me over the 3% rate. 

Why did this happen? The total number of transactions are the same over the last few days at 94, so its not like I got reclassified because I suddently had a huge number of transactions. I did call and chat with customer service, they said I would get a call from the correct department but were not very helpful, they agents I spoke to did not know why

[wastingtime101]

Have you reviewed the chart on this page? It explains how late shipments can affect your account and what the thresholds are. "5 or less" as you stated it is not mentioned anywhere.

You cannot have more than 2% of transactions affected or more than 4 unique buyers affected before your account will be subject to defect rates. According to your post, you're already above 2% so you need to bring that number down. Boosting your sales would lower that percent.

I think the bigger question here is why do you have late shipments and what can be done to prevent this situation. Are you meeting your handling time or do you need to extend it? Are you having issues with your local PO scanning packages and is there a SSK (self service kiosk) where you can scan your own packages to meet eBay's on-time shipping metrics?

When your sales volume is low, it's important to meet those metrics because the margin for error is very slim.