We have been trading on eBay for over 8 years and our seller level has always fluctuated between top rated or above standard in the UK. Frankly I have never paid a lot of attention to the "Seller Level", as it always seemed to be at the whim of eBay what they would change and reality if you have 99.5% positive feedback, should you not have top rated anyway?
If ever I spoke to someone at eBay it would normally end up with me getting a bit hot under the collar, so best to ignore.
Anyway I have been a bit miffed as we do a lot of International orders and in "Global" we are rated as "below standard" and hence get a 2% extra fee, so about time to look at it.
One big problem is late delivery, we do actually dispatch 99% of orders the same day. On international it is difficult because you are in the hands of customs in far away places and poor international post services, Italy for instance (not our fault), but eBay make no allowance. So I looked at the orders deemed as "late delivery" and to get more detail downloaded the spreadsheet. Well an eye opener!!
We do track a lot of international deliveries and upload tracking numbers so I was surprised to see a lot of those down as "late delivery", as according to eBay:
"If you dispatch on time and upload a validated tracking number, or your buyers tell us their items were posted on time when they leave Feedback, you've got nothing to worry about."
Well you do have to worry! From the spreadsheet it shows when you got the order (paid), when marked as dispatched, when you uploaded tracking and when the item was first scanned. The problem is eBay take an item as late dispatched, from the time the order was paid to the time it was first scanned. If this is not within 1 day it is considered as late dispatched, regardless of how quickly, you packed it and passed to your courier / postie.
Having looked further I see this also applies to UK deliveries, so if you pack is delivered 1 day late, but it was not scanned by the courier with 24 hours of you receiving the order, it will count against you seller level.
