What's up with all the sellers claiming "shipped" but tracking says "awaiting item"?

[t-man-x]

This is one of the things that royally irritates me about eBay. Sellers are printing up a label and sending emails out claiming items are shipped but the tracking clearly shows that's as far as they went: they printed a label. 

I've had sellers tell me something was shipped and send a tracking number and it never arrived. It wasn't shipped, period. It would've been scanned as accepted if it was. I've emailed sellers before after checking back daily for 5 days and noticing they never actually shipped the item, they reply back that it was shipped on such and such, and the tracking magically updates to "accepted at post office" 3 hours after I send the email. 

I'm at the point I'm getting burned on this with at least one item I buy per week. I'm usually ordering stuff that is labeled "Fast and Free Shipping!" and the sellers don't even bother sending the item to the post office until the next week. 

[t-man-x]

Pretty easy to rule that out by looking at the complete tracking history. If it were a case of items showing up and no tracking information showed up until the package arrived, okay then maybe that was the case. However I can't remember the last time that happened to me if ever. 

If it says "12:49 package acceptance" "2:32 regional origin facility" "5:52 regional destination facility" and so forth yet the seller claims they shipped it several business days beforehand they're generally mistaken or being dishonest. 

In fact if the package was picked up by a Postal worker and they failed to scan it that would only account for a small delay since within 24 hours it will be at the next facility where it will be scanned again. For it to never show up in the system prior to delivery the Post Office would have to completely fail to scan the item at several different locations. Not only would human workers have to fail to scan the item but automated scanning would have to fail also at multiple locations. The odds of that happening are astronomically small. Living in the Midwest, if I order something from NY or CA it's generally scanned 8 or 9 times. 

[t-man-x]

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@myangelandmyprincess wrote:

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@t-man-x wrote:

Well my original point is that there are a ton of sellers who do stuff like: Wait several days, then print a label. Mark as shipped. Wait several days, then finally ship it. If they don't manage to lose it in that time. 

I've had several sellers mark something as shipped and the tracking says the Post Office is waiting on the item, then when I ask if it's going to ship soon they say they claim they shipped it several days ago and then a few hours later it magically says "accepted at Post Office". 

I've had several other times where the item indefinitely shows "Post Office awaiting item" and then the seller claims it was lost in the mail but they'll "send me a new one free of charge". 

Yet there are also a ton of sellers that when you buy from them 19 times out of 20 the tracking says "accepted at Post Office" within 24 hours. 

Here's the truth from my over 20 years dealing with the Postal Service for eBay and Amazon: if somebody claims to ship within 24 hours and several days later the item doesn't say "accepted at Post Office", 99 times out of 100 the seller simply didn't ship it in the manner they indicated they would. 

A recent item I ordered was on December 28th. Says "Fast'N'Free" shipping. Here it is 1/3/2018 and it hasn't been accepted at the Post Office yet. Got the "shipped" notification yesterday. So going on the 7th day and nobody's even bothered to stick it in a mail box. 

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It's going on the third business day   And where is it shipping from?  There has been lots of winter weather preventing travel 

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It's actually the next state over, same exact weather as here, no snow anywhere in between, highs in the 30s. That was just the most recent shipment that's occurred in that manner. I mean in the time since typed the original rant it's happened many times.

That's literally the 3rd time in less than a month it's happened. Dozens of times a year I get the wait several days then print label and say it's shipped followed by several business days before it gets to the Post Office treatment. Although I prefer to buy on eBay a lot of times I'll pay a little more for something on Amazon because with Prime I have more assurance it will be there by a certain time. 

[lintbrush*]

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@t-man-x wrote:

Pretty easy to rule that out by looking at the complete tracking history. If it were a case of items showing up and no tracking information showed up until the package arrived, okay then maybe that was the case. However I can't remember the last time that happened to me if ever. 

If it says "12:49 package acceptance" "2:32 regional origin facility" "5:52 regional destination facility" and so forth yet the seller claims they shipped it several business days beforehand they're generally mistaken or being dishonest. 

In fact if the package was picked up by a Postal worker and they failed to scan it that would only account for a small delay since within 24 hours it will be at the next facility where it will be scanned again. For it to never show up in the system prior to delivery the Post Office would have to completely fail to scan the item at several different locations. Not only would human workers have to fail to scan the item but automated scanning would have to fail also at multiple locations. The odds of that happening are astronomically small. Living in the Midwest, if I order something from NY or CA it's generally scanned 8 or 9 times. 

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If I drop off a package at the post office and it doesn't get a scan (which does sometimes happen), when it gets the scan at the USPS sort facility, it time backstamps the acceptance exactly 1 hour 15 minutes to the Origin facility.

I assure you I do not bring my packages to the post office at 11:50 pm and then they travel 140 miles in that timeframe.  

One package I put in the bin at 3:20 p.m. on a Friday.  It didn't show anything until the next afternoon at the sort facility - with the made up acceptance at 2ish Saturday in my hometown.

I've had package not show any scan for 2-3 days until it arrived at the buyer's sort facility. 

[1avid_collector]

You seem to be incapable of accepting the fact that USPS tracking is often more like USPS non-tracking. As both a buyer and a seller on eBay, I have seen USPS screw up about 25% of the time with regard mostly to tracking, but often also with regard to the routing of shipments. At this point, I have concluded that about 25% of USPS staff are complete idiots who don't care one whit about the quality of the service they're supposed to provide.

As perfect examples that contradict your assertion concerning "USPS awaiting item" cases, the 2 shipments I made with USPS in the last 2 days were scanned in at our local post office, and for which I got the acceptance receipts, neither has yet to be shown in the tracking as Accepted. In fact, one of them does not even show that the label was created -- showing a big red "Status Not Available" instead, nearly 10 hours (!!!) after I bought that label. In other words, USPS has not even acknowledged the validity of the label I purchased and printed on their own bleepin' website.

When tracking is part of a service for which we pay, and tracking is not provided or is blatantly defective, it becomes a breach of contract IMHO, and there should be easy legal recourse for the consumer -- like a 50% refund of the shipping charge paid by USPS to the shippers who were denied the full service for which they paid. Period.

[1avid_collector]

To sum it all up:
If you are:
1) a complete moron who cannot get a job in the private enterprise sector, and
2) when writing your own name, you get it 75% correct, but
3) you do have a measurable pulse
the government will most definitely hire you and, thanks to unions, will overpay you.

[berserkerplanet]

And yet I've had less minor hiccups with USPS tracking in many thousands of shipments over decades than I can count on one hand.

You must be doing it wrong.

[1avid_collector]

No -- I did it right like I always do. You must have read my post wrong. I have had numerous issues with USPS tracking, with far fewer shipments than you, after doing everything right. It is USPS that is doing it wrong. And there are countless examples of this all over this forum and all over the internet. Just open your eyes and look. At websites that solicit reviews of commercial enterprises from viewers, USPS typically has a 1-star rating -- that's a fact.

I can't believe you got a "helpful" for your "goody-two-shoes" reply.

[1avid_collector]

Typical USPS incompetence when it comes to tracking -- and tracking is by far the easiest part of their task. Scan the bar code, upload the data to the tracking server. Done! What could be so bleepin' difficult about this??? Are they using escaped zoo monkeys to run the tracking system???

[the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth]

I've bought over 10K items on Ebay and don't think I've run into any of the problems you describe. The only sellers who ship days later are the ones who have handling times that I have agreed to when I purchase. Maybe it's your category or something? Maybe you should shop locally?

[castlemagicmemories]

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@bonjourami wrote:

Any seller who is not shipping within his stated handling time is going to receive a defect...a few of those and he will be gone.

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That is true~but I have had sellers who did not know they had a handling time, let alone that they chose it!

[castlemagicmemories]

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@t-man-x wrote:

Glitches happen, but "most" of the time just isn't realistic. Fact is, 95% of the time that you get an "Your item has shipped!" email and 3+ days later the tracking says, "awaiting item", they simply haven't mailed the item or have only within the past 12 hours mailed the item. 

Folks are simply printing the label and not getting around to actually taking your product to the mailbox or post office for 5 days or more. There's just no reason for this. The majority of sellers who do this aren't selling in enough volume to justify batching their shipments for a week, and the ones who actually are ought to be able to figure out a better system. 

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If the seller has a 5 day handling time, then they have not sent the item late.

They may print the postage at the time of the sale, and that generates the Ebay email that says your item has shipped.

[yuzuha]

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@the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth wrote:

I've bought over 10K items on Ebay and don't think I've run into any of the problems you describe. The only sellers who ship days later are the ones who have handling times that I have agreed to when I purchase. Maybe it's your category or something? Maybe you should shop locally?

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I've never run into it myself but it definitely does happen.  One of my friends recently purchased something and two weeks later the seller hadn't even shipped it, so she ended up having to file a case.  eBay very nearly lost her as a buyer over it.

[oaklandmaryland]

I recently had an item that was delivered within 4 days and the scan finally shows up that said I just delivered to the post office at that time 2 weeks after it as delivered. How do you explain that this is the seller's fault?

[berserkerplanet]

I know what you are, and I'm not playing.

The fact that most of us can make it work just fine does mean that those of you that can't are doing it wrong.

And I'm pretty sure the helpful was for b-slapping you.

[t-man-x]

That would be the rarest of the rare outlier. I've been eBaying and ordering stuff online for 18 years now and don't recall that happening. What I do get on a weekly basis though is sellers who claim they ship within 24 hours and don't take the package to the post office for 5 days or more. Happened twice out of the last 6 items I've ordered.