My 'Time Away" Was Not Honored nor Calculated Correctly into My Shipments.

[stephannhill]

Hello:

I have an eBay Store, H&H Treasures. I recently was out of town and thus, programmed a “Time Away” notification from February 18th – March 3rd.  During my "Time Away",  I had a total of five items that were sold. I mailed them out on March 3rd, the same day I flew back home. However, THREE of those five items were incorrectly labeled as “Shipment Overdue”. It resulted in being demoted from Top Seller to Above Standard. Thus, due to the "Time Away" not being honored, I lost my Top Seller Rating.  Those THREE items were indeed sold during the time I was away from home and thus, my merchandise.  Has this happened to other sellers? I have sent two emails to eBay and they have yet to answer my emails nor fix the inaccurate "shipment overdue" label of those three items.  I have been very diligent in keeping my Top Rated Seller status as I have worked very hard on my eBay Business to maintain that status and I should not lose it due to a bug in the system.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my issue! If you have any suggestions for me, please feel free to reach out to me via by messaging me through my eBay account as this is very frustrating for me. 

Sincerely,

Frustrated eBay Seller

[stephannhill]

Thank you so much for the reply. That is exactly what Velvet at eBay said. I will now know in the future what to do and what not to do while I am away from my store. Thanks again. 

[stephannhill]

Thank you so much for replying to my message. I have learned what to do in the future. Thank you!

[powell-memorabilia]

Unfortunate that you took my question as rude.  Personally, I find it helpful to assume that I did something wrong - rather than hope that there is an entire system working against me.  And, at the end of the day, yep, it was user error - not an eBay glitch.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

velvet@ebay  

I just want to clarify, if I use Time Away & do NOT change the handling time, but I send out offers on my vacation, those buyers will have my normal handling time?   Is that right?  Why?  

Secondly, if that's true, if I change my handling time in addition to doing the Time Away, then would I be covered for offers I send while I'm on vacation?  

Thanks

[velvet@ebay]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

velvet@ebay  

I just want to clarify, if I use Time Away & do NOT change the handling time, but I send out offers on my vacation, those buyers will have my normal handling time?   Is that right?  Why?  

Secondly, if that's true, if I change my handling time in addition to doing the Time Away, then would I be covered for offers I send while I'm on vacation?  

Thanks

---

I don't have a 'why' for you on the offers question @simply-the-best-for-you, they don't usually give us the 'why' behind things.

As for whether you should change handling times when dealing with offers while away, that is what is advised here. 

[d-k_treasures]

I can understand the offers(except the auto-accepted ones), as the seller has to actually respond to accept an offer(if not auto-accepted), or the seller initiated ones, but GSP or Local Pickup? Those do not make sense.

[wastingtime101]

Local pickup is neither here nor there because you're not strictly held to a handling time.

Seller-initiated offers I can understand being excluded because the seller is proactively sending them out. Although, anybody that uses the auto-send SIO feature should turn it off if they're going on time away. That's a "gotcha" for sure.

I agree that it doesn't make any sense for offers auto-accepted based on price threshold and for GSP sales to not see the benefit of a time away setting extending the shipping window.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

None of them make any sense.   I usually like to send offers even when I'm away & I use GSP too.  

From a programming standpoint, none of it makes sense, there shouldn't be all these crazy exceptions, just use the newly calculated handling time, like you do for anything else.   But nevertheless, it's easy to work around it.   Thank you velvet@ebay  for clarifying/confirming.  

I have to find the other thread with another 'pink' where this was discussed extensively, b/c I don't recall a word about all these exceptions & we were left with the impression we no longer had to manually adjust our handling time.  Honestly, it just seems like a best practice to continue doing it, period.  

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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velvet@ebay wrote:

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

velvet@ebay  

I just want to clarify, if I use Time Away & do NOT change the handling time, but I send out offers on my vacation, those buyers will have my normal handling time?   Is that right?  Why?  

Secondly, if that's true, if I change my handling time in addition to doing the Time Away, then would I be covered for offers I send while I'm on vacation?  

Thanks

---

I don't have a 'why' for you on the offers question @simply-the-best-for-you, they don't usually give us the 'why' behind things.

As for whether you should change handling times when dealing with offers while away, that is what is advised here. 

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velvet@ebay 

Sorry to bring this up again, but Velvet I did what you suggested & the results were VERY surprising to me, so I wanted to ask you about them & also give people a heads up.   I put my store on an approx 10 day Time Away & then, in order to handle the exceptions for offers & GSP, I ALSO changed my handling time to 10 business days.  

I did this yesterday (I've since turned it off), expecting that that would give me a ship by date of around the 11th, since it's 10 business days only.   INSTEAD, when something sold, I noticed the SHIP BY date was not until the 22nd!!!  Which is a ANOTHER WHOLE 10 BUSINESS DAYS!   So Ebay is, it's changing my handling time for Time Away by 10 days & then ADDING another 10 days on top of that, for my explicit changing of the handling time to 10 days.   Is that normal?  That's not what I expected to happen.   

[wastingtime101]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

 I put my store on an approx 10 day Time Away & then, in order to handle the exceptions for offers & GSP, I ALSO changed my handling time to 10 business days.  

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The problem with that, as you discovered, is it will affect all your sales - not just GSP and auto-accepted offers.

You can use Time Away and account for the other factors by temporarily turning off GSP and turning off offers.

You can not use Time Away and extend your handling time instead.

You can use Time Away and hide your listings to prevent all sales.

The exceptions list really screws things up for sellers that use those features, so all you can do is figure out which option is best for you working around the system.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

 I put my store on an approx 10 day Time Away & then, in order to handle the exceptions for offers & GSP, I ALSO changed my handling time to 10 business days.  

---

The problem with that, as you discovered, is it will affect all your sales - not just GSP and auto-accepted offers.

You can use Time Away and account for the other factors by temporarily turning off GSP and turning off offers.

You can not use Time Away and extend your handling time instead.

You can use Time Away and hide your listings to prevent all sales.

The exceptions list really screws things up for sellers that use those features, so all you can do is figure out which option is best for you working around the system.

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Thanks for your input.  Yes, it may be best to turn off GSP instead.   Tho' I guess the extending time didn't affect me that much, since I'd already had a sale, plus I have quite a few repeat customers.  I don't do BO, so that's not an issue, I only send out offers & I can control that.  But yeah, my adding the 10 day handling to fix the problem with the exceptions IS problematic.   

I'll have to think about this.  This is NOT what I expected.  I thought the extended handling time would just help in the case of the exceptions, not be ADDED to the Time Away.   What a nightmare.  Ebay needs to close up the exceptions.  

ETA:  I guess also, alternatively I could do what OP did & ONLY do Time Away & take a hit on my metrics for any GSP sales.  That actually might make more sense for me.  Ughhh.  NONE of these solutions are ideal. 

[velvet@ebay]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

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velvet@ebay wrote:

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

velvet@ebay  

I just want to clarify, if I use Time Away & do NOT change the handling time, but I send out offers on my vacation, those buyers will have my normal handling time?   Is that right?  Why?  

Secondly, if that's true, if I change my handling time in addition to doing the Time Away, then would I be covered for offers I send while I'm on vacation?  

Thanks

---

I don't have a 'why' for you on the offers question @simply-the-best-for-you, they don't usually give us the 'why' behind things.

As for whether you should change handling times when dealing with offers while away, that is what is advised here. 

---

velvet@ebay 

Sorry to bring this up again, but Velvet I did what you suggested & the results were VERY surprising to me, so I wanted to ask you about them & also give people a heads up.   I put my store on an approx 10 day Time Away & then, in order to handle the exceptions for offers & GSP, I ALSO changed my handling time to 10 business days.  

I did this yesterday (I've since turned it off), expecting that that would give me a ship by date of around the 11th, since it's 10 business days only.   INSTEAD, when something sold, I noticed the SHIP BY date was not until the 22nd!!!  Which is a ANOTHER WHOLE 10 BUSINESS DAYS!   So Ebay is, it's changing my handling time for Time Away by 10 days & then ADDING another 10 days on top of that, for my explicit changing of the handling time to 10 days.   Is that normal?  That's not what I expected to happen.   

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Hey @simply-the-best-for-you! There's not a way to pick and choose which listings get what and if you add 10 handling days, then that's going to push the time frame out for everything as you noticed.

We're basically taking the 10 Time Away days you set, and then adding the handling timeframe on to that when figuring the ship dates. This is why under normal circumstances, you don't need to adjust the handling time anymore. 

@wastingtime101's post gives you some great options and I hope this one helps to explain what happened with the Time Away ship by dates in the scenario you described above. 

[simply-the-best-for-you]

Thank you for clarifying velvet@ebay  , I sure hope Ebay can work on closing up some of those exceptions, as they affect MANY sellers.   I have 2 of them just from GSP & sending offers & none of the alternatives are ideal.  But it is what it is, so I guess I'll just pick one LOL.  

[wastingtime101]

The good news @simply-the-best-for-you is that enabling and disabling GSP is one check box in your account settings. In your shoes I would disable GSP when setting up Time Away.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

The good news @simply-the-best-for-you is that enabling and disabling GSP is one check box in your account settings. In your shoes I would disable GSP when setting up Time Away.

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Good point.  I did that during the worst of the pandemic when stuff was sitting at the GSP center for 4 weeks.   Still, it shouldn't be this complicated.  I'm going to have to print out your post for the next time cuz I'm not going to remember all these options a year from now LOL.