If the actual acceptance scan doesn't show up (eventually, sometimes especially recently this has been delayed w/ USPS) within the stated time frame, the seller IS punished. Even uploading a tracking number proving you've done everything early can get you dinged if you neglect to attach that # fast enough to the order, but the amount it affects your account is less severe. As others have said, the seller sets their handling time and it's visible on every listing; the day 1 count starts the next full day 12:01 am (in their time zone-which can make a huge difference) and ends each day at 11:59 pm, excluding whatever days they have unchecked as a "working day" in their settings. It's also not supposed to count weekends and postal holidays by default, but I and others on these forums have noticed that not working consistently/at all. The only exception to all of this is if they offer same day shipping on the listing you bought.
Judging from my own experience and those of many posters on these forums, most of these sellers are not smugly pulling a slick trick, they're stressing about their metrics going down because of things out of their control. The only sellers I've encountered who seem to do this for kicks are super high volume so the number of sales dilutes the strikes and they aren't worried about losing a single case and ending up having to pay someone for the privilege of owning their item, which the buyer has no obligation to return whenever it arrives even if the refund has already been forced by eBay. Also, just as they count the label being printed as "shipping beginning", they use that date as the basis for all the timelines for complaint cases and for their new, now penalty laden revised estimated delivery date, which means there is an added disadvantage that it gives the seller and benefits the buyer. If tracking is not generating revised delivery estimates, pushing them out to ebay, and ebay reflecting them in the tracker, a seller can lose an INR case even though the carrier updated the likely delivery to be far in the future for whatever reason.
What ebay could do to fix this for everyone is make the delivery estimates more realistic (or at least adhere to their own stated method of calculating it, which is misleading at best and demonstrably false at worst). They surely have the data for approximate averages from place to place via various shipping methods, and they already wrote the rules, they just need to implement that in their code so that buyers and sellers aren't being misled and paranoid everyone is lying and scamming everyone, customers aren't dissapointed their item didn't come in time for Christmas or whatever, and sellers aren't worrying about paying people to own their inventory.
