eBay

bigdeals.etc · ‎07-05-2019

I've seen it happen a few times with my packages. The most recent one is a package got returned to me because the addressee section became unreadable. At that time tracking showed that it got delivered to me. The package said to re-write the addressee label and just send it back out. So I did.

Tracking within USPS website still has the last update that it arrived to me on 7/3. But the linked tracking within ebay shows it did arrive to me on 7/3, but also shows that it went back out on 7/3 and currently is in the buyer's city PO as of 7/4?

How come sometimes ebay has better USPS tracking than the USPS?

tunicaslot · ‎07-05-2019

Ebay tracking is updated through USPS website and is usually a couple of hours behind as it isn't real time when things are updated on the USPS website. Your situation is highly unusual.

parkersparrow · ‎07-05-2019

I've had that happen on packages that were returned to senders. Idk why either?

luckythewinner · ‎07-05-2019

@bigdeals.etc wrote:
How come sometimes ebay has better USPS tracking than the USPS?

Probably for the same reason eBay sometimes has worse tracking than the USPS - because the link between eBay and the USPS is not a "real time" connection.

How could eBay have information the USPS is not showing?

Because virtually every high volume website utilizes multiple layers of caching, especially for data that is not time-sensitive.

If eBay happened to fetch the tracking data through an API that was not cached, it might get near-realtime data, whereas the USPS site search might still be fetching data from a cache that is minutes, hours, or days old.

And it not always "data" that is being cached; web servers often cache the responses from web page hits as well. So if you make the same API call that someone else made a few seconds ago, you may get a cached copy of the previous call. But a user who makes an API call that is not cached might get a more up-to-date response.