Yes, getting a physical receipt from the post office counter clerk is the only way to guarantee a timely "acceptance" event on the tracking history. As an experiment, yesterday I did just that to compare with my service last week. I went to the PO, stood in line and got a receipt for my Ground Advantage package. Last Monday, my 4 outbound packages took 2 days to get to the "regional distribution" location after pickup. The package I dropped off myself was immediately logged as "accepted" (as expected). It also showed arriving at the region center within 2 hours of my drop off.
But in perfect post office style, when I arrived there was one person in line ahead of me and no clerk. We waited 3 minutes until someone came to the front counter to help us. The other customer wanted to look at pretty stamps. Alot of stamps. I waited 5 minutes for this one person to decide what flower stamps she wanted to buy. Seriously? 8 minutes in line and I finally get my package scanned. I don't have time to do this for every package. This experience was not an anomaly. That is consistent with what I experience on every visit to the post office. Hence the reason I don't go there unless absolutely required.
Ultimately, USPS delivers my packages with the same overall success rate as FedEx and UPS. Which is to say, less than 100% but more than 98%. I am confident that I can ignore concerns from buyers who ask me for tracking updates hours after they purchase an item. But ebay service levels demand that sellers be responsive to these kind of questions. USPS failures to provide timely tracking updates pushes the burden of communicating with buyers back to the seller even though there is nothing a seller can do other than say "Your package was shipped!" We pay ebay and USPS for timely, automated communication updates which they fail to provide. As a customer of both ebay and USPS, I am dissatisfied. Ebay should be leveraging their influence with USPS to improve service.
