Estimated Delivery Dates and Very Poor Sept/Oct Sales

[datemike1]

Hey all, I don't post often here but I'm literally on hold with customer service as I type this.

CHECK YOUR ESTIMATED DELIVERY DATES ON YOUR LISTINGS!!!!!!!!

My "estimated delivery dates" are WAY off and after going thru a bunch of posts about poor sales a lot of sellers are having recently, as am I, I began to try to figure out what's going on and I noticed when I look at each of my listings, it's showing the following for estimated delivery dates:

To ship to MY zip code, USPS First Class mail will take 10 DAYS

To ship to MY zip code, USPS Priority Mail (1-3 days) will take 9 DAYS

What????  And these estimates are to ship to MY OWN zip code.  If I were a buyer and saw it was going to take 2 weeks to get my item.......  today is 11/5 and the estimates for USPS First class mail say 11/15 and Priority Mail is 11/14.   If that's what my potential buyers are seeing, of course that would account for the very poor sales over the last two months.

And yes, I double checked every listing to make sure my handling time still says 1 day.  

Is anyone else noticing this?  CS said they need to put in a "ticket" to correct this, so I'll probably need to call again every single day until this gets fixed.  If any of you have seen this and corrected it, is there an easy fix that i'm missing?  

[trustedbasset]

I haven’t had it happen. It sounds like yet another glitch. I can see a buyer passing that listing by for one with faster shipping. You did all you can do, keep on them!

[yuzuha]

I checked your listings and they're showing an estimated delivery date of on or before the 12th to me here in DC, which is about right when you consider that the 11th is a holiday.  If you shipped today (the 6th), the earliest something could arrive here would be the 8th.

I can screencap it for you if you'd like to see.

[dhbookds]

in Pa, not too far from you.............  Between Fri/Tues as above.........

But when I put in a Cal zip........I'm getting 9/15 or before for first class, or 9/14 for priority.........  that's not 2 wks, but most of our stuff gets there in 3 days, priority,  with one day handling...don't know what handling you have. 

For what it's worth, the shipping prices are the same, so you must be using flat rate. 

[mcdougle4248]

For my listings, all First Class Pkg and 1 day handling, the problem seems to be with estimates when I use my own zip code.   Item going to my zip code showing Nov 14th estimated delivery.  The nearest town, about 5 miles away  is showing Nov 9th.

[datemike1]

I appreciate you looking for that, no need to screencap, I trust you.  The 11th would make sense as an estimate from Harrisburg, PA to DC, and that gives me some relief that maybe it's not as widespread an issue than I'm thinking it is, maybe it's just a glitch that it's showing a ridiculously long estimate to my own zip code, but it creates a lot of doubt about what my potential buyers are seeing and if it's not consistent that erodes my already fragile trust that my customers are getting a consistent experience from the eBay website.  I actually pulled my listings up on my iPhone and noticed half of my mobile listings aren't even showing the Priority Mail option I just added a few days ago.  This inconsistency is difficult to accept given that we're going into the holiday shopping season.

[datemike1]

Appreciate you looking at the listing, yeah I have 1 day handling and typically during the holidays I make 2 runs to the post office so orders don't stack up, though the holiday "rush" really hasn't started yet for me, though I guess it's still early and I'm just beginning some external advertising. 

I've noticed when I ship from PA to CA it's almost always there in about 4 or 5 days, so even then an estimate of 10 days still makes me really uneasy and i'm 100% sure this is a change from how my listings have historically shown shipping estimates.  I did notice on eBay's new shipping label screen it now tells you the delivery estimate as well for each order so I plan to keep an eye on those going forward now as well.

[datemike1]

I didn't think to input different zips to see how it changes the est dates, i'm going to do that, thanks for the suggestion!

[happydaysantiques]

Goodness!  My delivery dates are way off, too. 

10 days (Nov. 16) to my own zip.

14 days (Nov. 20) from East Coast (me) to West Coast.

[happydaysantiques]

This has to be a significant turn-off to potential buyers, especially this close to the Holidays.

I wonder if there is an eBay rep here who might be able to help.

trinton@ebay

brian.t@ebay

tyler@ebay

I don't know how to reach out to these folks.  Maybe someone else knows.

[datemike1]

Just an update after some of the suggestions here, I logged out of ebay, cleared my history just in case, and input different zip codes, they're all coming out the same still, no matter what zip code I put in there?!?!?!??!  

Estimated on or before Fri. Nov. 15  

AND, half of my listings aren't even showing the Priority Mail option I added to every listing for the holiday season?  WTH???

This is so incredibly frustrating.  And I called CS and was told i'd get an email regarding the ticket they had to put in, but it seems nothing has been updated as of yet.  

I also recently changed the category a lot of my listings fell under because when I did generic searches for what I believe my customers may be searching for, I noticed the eBay search automatically picks a category to conduct the search in and you have to manually tell it to search all categories, a move i'm sure 99.9% of casual browsers would never make.  

Example, I sell mostly what's considered "entertainment memorabilia" and a bunch of the items are posters.  So for the last 4 years or so these poster listings had been under "entertainment memorabilia - other memorabilia - TV memorabilia."  Well when I did a generic keyword search I noticed that eBay's search automatically defaults to "ART PRINTS" when searching "The Office Poster."  None of my listings showed in general search when I searched that, even though my listings all have those exact keywords, but when I changed the category these fell under to "ART PRINTS," my views have increased 10-fold.  Great.  Except, it's not resulting in any additional watchers or sales, i'm assuming because people see it's going to take 10 days to get their item, so screw it they'll look elsewhere, probably Amazon.

I want to bash my head against the wall right now i'm so frustrated.

[datemike1]

call customer service asap... and then like me you'll probably need to call every day until it's fixed. Until then I've put a warning on my listings saying the estimated delivery dates are bulldung.