Ep 268 || Holiday Shipping Update with Stuart Reichenbach

[podcast_team]

eBay Sr Director of Shipping Stuart Reichenbach updates us on all things holiday shipping and carrier status. Griff and Brian share best practice suggestions for reducing the likelihood of buyer returns.

Episode Links:
Feedback Enhancements Now Visible
Combined Shipping for eBay International Shipping Update
Recurring Links:
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eBay Seller Spotlight Podcast
eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey
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Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff, and this is the eBay For Business Podcast. Your weekly source for the information and the inspiration that we hope can help you start, manage and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. This is episode 268 as we do every week. Brian is in San Jose. Hi Brian.

Brian: Hello Griff. How are you?

Griff: I'm very well, thank you. And you?

Brian: I'm great. It's good to see you again virtually. And do we have a guest this week?

Griff: We do have a guest. Our guest this week is returning after awhile he hasn't been on the show. It is Senior Director of Shipping here at eBay, Stuart Reichenbach. Stuart is joining us to share updates and carrier status for the holiday shipping season. And then we're gonna do something different this week. Normally we have our, You Got Questions, We Got Answers shtick. Well we're not going to do it this week. It's going to be on a short vacation. Instead we're going to be sharing some best practices for a strategy for reducing the incidence of returns. A sore point for many sellers.

Brian: It is. And I think the, You Got Question segment, I think it's vacationing in Bali, isn't that correct?

Griff: It hasn't sent me a postcard yet, so I don't know where it went, but it has a week to get back.

Brian: . Okay.

Griff: Any news this week?

Brian: Well, we do have one news item about feedback.

Griff: What's the news? We haven't done anything to feedback in years.

Brian: You may recall Griff that in the most recent seller update we announced upcoming changes to the way feedback will be displayed to buyers.

Griff: Wait a minute. Yes, I do recall that. I completely forgotten. What's the news?

Brian: Well, last week the team working on these changes posted an update about these imminent changes to feedback on the seller forum on our community platform. And the post says, and I quote, "over the past few months, we've been working to improve the feedback experience for buyers on eBay. We are making these changes in order to give potential buyers better insight into your products. The first change is that we recently updated the default sort to highlight the most relevant feedback for your potential buyers. In addition, we have also started rolling out images on feedback to select sellers who have listings with multiple quantities. Starting this month, sellers will be able to preview feedback images on their own sold items. At this time, other eBay buyers and sellers will not be able to view images in your feedback. Existing policies related to feedback and feedback removal will also apply to images. Once this rollout is complete, we'll be expanding image feedback, visibility to buyers. With these updates, your potential buyers will see your most engaged buyer's feedback and be more confident about their purchasing decisions. These updates will serve to add credibility to reviews and increase buyer confidence while also elevating your feedback scores and helping to drive conversion." So what do you think about those changes?

Griff: It sounds like what a lot of sites already do.

Brian: It does. And I'll encourage our listeners if they have any questions, pop out to the forum and take a look, see what other sellers are saying on the forum. If you've got questions, we've got our teammates out there answering. And they also are tightly tapped into the feedback team that's made these changes. And so if anything comes up they're unaware of, they can reach out to that team.

Griff: I'll post a link to the seller forum where this was posted and it was posted there so that you can ask questions as well. The team is looking for input and comments and questions. You can send 'em to us too. I don't know if we'll know the answer by the time of the next, you got question segment, but if you want a quick answer and you want to engage with somebody from the team in real time, you can go to that page. In fact, I think if you go to the eBay community page and then look for the seller page, it shows up on the top.

Brian: Yes.

Griff: So before we do our little spot on our suggestions for reducing the incidents of returns, let's take a moment and go visit with Stuart Reichenbach and we'll talk about the 2023 holiday shipping season and any updates he has.

Griff: It's been a while since we've checked in with the Shipping team here at eBay and with the holiday shipping season, well upon us gonna be Thanksgiving in a week or two. What better time to bring back our favorite Shipping team expert, the Senior Director of Shipping here at eBay. Stuart Reichenbach.

Stuart: Hi Griff, how are you?

Griff: Well, just great now that you're here, we love getting these updates on shipping. Maybe you, before we start, you might explain again just what your role at eBay entails.

Stuart: Sure. Would love to.

Griff: Let's be clear here. This is the busiest time of year for you, right?

Stuart: It is. Well, you know, every year I say I always think our sellers because shipping's difficult, it's difficult throughout the entire year, right? And shipping is a big component of their business and we're busy year round just like our sellers are trying to make the overall experience for their buyers as easy as possible. And shipping is a big component of that. I think historically over the years, particularly the last five or six years, peak season has brought some real fear to people, right? Oh there was a couple of years there, there just wasn't enough capacity with the carrier networks and it's created this real sense of excitement, busy and fear. And that's what we'll talk a little bit about today. But yeah, it's busy for sure.

Griff: What's it like being Senior Director of this huge department?

Stuart: Well first I'm one guy. I get to be the face of an amazing team that's working day in and day out on behalf of the community. We get to have a lot of fun. This whole area of supply chain and shipping and pickup and delivery and what are the carriers doing and what's happening is a really complex one. And so we get to work in a variety of different areas making sure that we have great relationships with the primary carriers and that we're bringing great service capabilities and pricing to our sellers through our labels platform, which so many of our sellers use. It's a great place to access labels at really low cost. So we spend a lot of time on working on that kind of externally with carriers to make sure we're bringing great solutions to the marketplace. And then how do those solutions show up to our buyers? What are the estimated delivery dates that we're putting out to buyers? We think about sellers and their handle time and then the carrier needs to do what they need to do and ultimately that leads to what the buyer's gonna see and does the buyer get their package on time? And of course we spend lots and lots of time on that 'cause it is quite complex and it's incredibly important. And then new solutions, eBay International Shipping was rolled out a year and a half ago. eBay Standard Envelope, which we're gonna share some exciting news about today. These are new solutions that eBay's developed specifically for our marketplace and for our sellers to make shipping easier and to make again that experience for the buyers a better one. So there's a whole lot of areas Griff that the team's working on. Those are just a few.

Griff: Are you getting a feel for the current carrier situation? Are they prepared in your view for the onslaught of mail volume that's about to happen?

Stuart: We work closely with them. And to answer that question like what's gonna happen over the next six or eight weeks, let's talk about what's happened over the last year. The last few peak seasons have been mild and I think handled from an operational perspective better by all the carriers they've gotten used to it. They've done a better job at planning their resources and the people they need in their buildings and the number of trucks and planes and delivery vehicles. And they've also done a pretty good job of talking with customers about what's possible and what's not. We've seen a lot of good things with the carriers over the years and of course this year coming out of Covid, we're out of Covid now and everyone knows that the global economy, there's lots of questions about it. And so as we sit here today, I think all that work that's been done over the last handful of years combined with not as many packages in the network frankly right? The economy is challenged in a variety of areas. And so we see this year that if the carriers stay focused on what they need to do and with the amount of volume that isn't believed to be out there, there'll be enough capacity to meet the demand this year. And you know, our team is incredibly busy doing a whole lot of things alongside what the carriers are doing and sellers need to do a whole lot of things as well. I know you're gonna ask me a few questions about that I suppose.

Griff: Of course I am, you know, I'm going to because, well it's nice to hear what the carriers are doing, but sellers wanna know what eBay's doing. Is there a checklist of what you do on your team every year to prepare for the holiday shipping rush?

Stuart: We call it our playbook. What is the eBay Shipping Team's Holiday Playbook as we get ready for peak season. We talk about this every year, we build on that playbook every year and we look at the end of the peak season, January, we sit down, we go, okay, what really works, what didn't and what can we make better? A lot of common themes, but we have an incredibly detailed process around estimated delivery dates. That's really the most important thing during peak, right? We want to make sure that we're not surprising buyers on the bad side. We want whatever we tell them when they buy something from one of our sellers, we want the package to arrive at that time. During peak season, we have daily conversations with the carriers. We're looking at information they're providing us on where they may or may not be having delays in their networks. We get down into really zip code pairs to understand exactly what's happening with actual delivery times as opposed to what they're telling us is gonna happen. We use really complex algorithm, AI machine learning base that pulls in a lot of information, says this is what's gonna happen. We're constantly updating that and so we pull all that together and we're constantly looking to say, okay, how do we make sure that we enable the the most on time holiday season for both our sellers and our buyers? This playbook of ours is refreshed every year and we bring new tools into it and we've had some really great success in the last handful of years. I think the other thing, Griff, that we do that we're really not proud of but we think is really important is continuing to talk with the community. We're listening to the community. What are you seeing? What are you seeing from the post office? What are you seeing from UPS or FedEx? We bring that in and then as we see things we're communicating with the selling community constantly throughout peak and where we need to, we update seller protections. We've done that every year. Could be weather. Weather is an automatic. Other things in the network. We just need to update sellers where things are happening out of their control. We do a whole lot of that and we'll continue to do so this year also.

Griff: I pretty much can speak for sellers that I've talked to and they're pretty happy with the way that we keep that seller protection for shipping problems updated on the announcement board. I think it's become part of the eBay DNA now and sellers just automatically check it out and they know, hey, if something beyond my control, like weather. Our seller community now has gotten pretty comfortable with us saying, Hey, don't worry about it, you'll be fine. But that being said, it's still that time of year where you're a lot of sellers hoping to sell a lot and we at the podcast are constantly remind them, you know, at least have enough supplies on hand. But there's a whole another list of what sellers should be doing to prepare for the holiday rush, yes?

Stuart: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Right. So first off, we just published our 2023 Holiday Shipping Guide and Holiday Shipping Page and Seller Center ton of information in there, Griff. Great information, all of our sellers out there. Please take a little bit of time and go through the Holiday Shipping Guide and then follow your best practices in your business as you do every year. One thing that we tell everyone is don't adjust your handle time or change what you're doing with your business thinking it's gonna make things better for your individual buyer. That's our job. You commit to your handle time, do what you say you're gonna do, use the carrier you say you're going to use, we'll do the rest of it. If we have individual sellers that are trying to change because they see lateness or they see whatever it is that's gonna cause bigger problems. And we don't want you to have to do that during any time of the year, let alone at peak. More importantly, at peak. You run your business, don't adjust anything, we'll take all that information as I talked about before, what's going on in the networks, pull it all into our algo and then we'll adjust the handle time. Continue to communicate with your buyers. Buyers love to hear from sellers. If you see something on an individual shipment, talk to the buyer, be responsive to your buyer, included in our Holiday Shipping Guide. And we'll continue to up these as just to carrier cut off dates, understand what those look like as we get closer. I think they're pretty much fixed already and they should be in the guide, but we'll communicate again what those are. And then we talk a lot about domestic, there's international buyers out there as well. And so a lot of international buyers and a lot more, since we've launched eBay international shipping and so many of our sellers are using eBay, international shipping, bringing more buyers to their business, those lead times are longer than domestic. So let's just keep an eye on what's happening in international space as well.

Griff: There's been a history of the carriers during this time of year of adding surcharges to their shipping and label costs. What does that look like this year?

Stuart: I think the carriers typically try to do the right thing, right and if they've gotta add more aircraft capacity, they've gotta add more trucks. It does change their cost structure for a short period of time, but when it's not needed, it's not needed. And this year, happy to let you know that there won't be any peak season surcharges across any of our carriers on the eBay platform. I think in some cases some of the carriers have announced peak season surcharges in some areas, in some portions of their business, in their general business. But if you're buying a label on eBay, there won't be any peak season surcharges this year.

Griff: It's one less cost that's gonna show up on the buyer side if they're paying for shipping. So that's always good news for sellers.

Stuart: Absolutely.

Griff: And sellers who are paying for shipping as well.

Stuart: You got it. Yeah.

Griff: Now I've heard, well we saw the announcement about international combined shipping for eBay International Shipping and I think it's off the ground now we're in November. Can you give us an update about how that's working?

Stuart: I can. So this is a functionality that we just rolled out as an extension of our eBay International Shipping Program. Combined shipping was something that was asked for and the rollout, I think it launched, I think November 2nd was the actual date. We'll roll it out in a really smart way, making sure that it's working exactly the way we need. But I would suspect over the next month or so it'll be rolled out fully. We get questions on how it works. It's, it's really simple. It's just like a combined shipping on a domestic order. If you receive a single order from a buyer with multiple items, you're gonna know that it's qualified for combined shipping. And then what you need to do as a seller is all those items in that single order get packaged together for shipping. And so those orders all get combined and you ship those items our hub, just like you do if it wasn't a combined shipping item. And then we ship onward from there. So we're thrilled about this one. We knew it was something that we needed to get out there and, and we're glad we've been able to do so.

Griff: A seller has the ability to decide whether or not to combine, correct. If I make a domestic sale, I can choose to combine those orders if I want into one shipment or I can keep them separate.

Stuart: That's right. The use case on why you'd wanna do that, if it's going to the same buyer in the same order, I think you'd almost always want to combine in the international space, the cost of shipping. You're gonna drive more velocity when you do that. It'd be lower cost of your buyer.

Griff: Well the reason I ask that is I know that there's sometimes a concern on the seller side about the weight and dimensions of the different items that are gonna be shipped. Does eBay do anything to make that easier for a seller who's presented with a combined shipping order for something that's international?

Stuart: Yeah, We're doing that. What ultimately happens is, is we're looking what the two or three items might be. We're representing that from a shipping cost perspective and then ultimately remember here's the key right on whether it's domestic or international, it's not what the item is, it's the size of the box you put it in. And so that's really important. We of course are looking with our algos and trying to say, okay, we think a seller's gonna do this. We don't want a cell phone going into a box that'll, you know, that'll take a dining room chair right? An exaggeration of course. But you get the point. So we're looking at all those things and saying, hey, this is ultimately what the size both from an actual weight and then a dimensional weight perspective is and combined shipping, putting those items in one garden that will will hold them both is gonna be a great advantage from a cost perspective to the buyer.

Griff: This is a great program and we want to remind you too that if you've never used eBay International Shipping, if there's one thing that sellers love about it, it's that if you ship an item through eBay International Shipping to a buyer, you don't have to take the return.

Stuart: We handle everything about the return on behalf of our sellers. Once you make that sale and get it to us at our hub, you are done. It's a wonderful thing.

Griff: Yeah, I no arguing with that at all.

Stuart: Absolutely.

Griff: Lastly, before we let you go, I wanted to revisit another eBay unique shipping feature and that's the eBay Standard Envelope. We talked a little bit about it on the last episode because it was on the announcement board that finally after a couple years or or more, we've just enhanced the program. Would you talk a little bit about that?

Stuart: So eBay Standard Envelope now, I think it's a couple of years now, maybe even three, the end of 2020 maybe. But talk about use, our sellers, use eBay Standard Envelope all the time. Millions and millions of shipments taking place with eBay Standard Envelope because it brought a much lower cost of tracking to lightweight low value items. We were thrilled to be able to roll out five new categories or areas. eBay Standard Envelope has been expanded here just recently to patches, stickers, decals, greeting cards and seats. And that's moved on from trading cards, coins, stamps and postcards out on our shipping seller center. There's lots of information on eBay Standard. Look at it, it's wonderful. It's much lower cost tracking ounce based 1, 2, 3 ounces, about 80 cents up to a dollar and you get full protections when you use this program. And so we're thrilled to expand it. We're gonna continue to look at areas and locations to expand it, but it's been an incredible success story for our sellers for a couple years now. We're gonna continue to push on it.

Griff: Well Stuart, I want to thank you. This has been a great update. We're gonna have to revisit again after the holiday season's over just to see how well it went.

Stuart: Let's do that. Let's put something on for early February. Let's have a little recap of peak and what we saw and what happened and and the things then we're working on for 2024. Griff, we're there already.

Griff: Absolutely. You are on, I will ink you in for February.

Stuart: Hey, thanks again Griffin. Thank you to all of our sellers out there. Wonderful to be with you.

Griff: Thanks Stuart. Stuart Reichenbach is the Senior Director of Shipping here at eBay. E commands a big team and remember as I said, you can always stay up to date with all things shipping on eBay by visiting the Shipping page in Seller Center. It's really easy to find ebay.com/sellercenter. Then just click the shipping tab.

Griff: Now this is the time in the show where you expect to hear Brian say...

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: You got questions. That segment is taking a one week fall vacation and we don't know where. Could be Fresno, it could be Bali, who knows? And it'll be back next week. They'll send us a postcard or they'll let us know, but I know they'll be back next week. But this week instead of questions Brian and I want to address an issue that vexes every eBay seller at some point. And it's also the source of a lot of emails and posts and that's subject is returns.

Brian: Ah, returns. All sellers get 'em at some point, don't they Griff?

Griff: Yeah, they do.

Brian: No one wants to get a return but unfortunately returns are an inevitable and unavoidable part of selling products on and offline. I mean even brick and mortar stores get these, but there are steps in practices all sellers can take and adopt to help reduce the likelihood of these pesky returns.

Griff: I think the most important thing to talk about is your product photos. Obviously they should be clear and focused and well lit. This is absolutely crucial in preventing potential buyer confusion about different aspects and parts of the item that you're selling. It could be something like color. A color is sometimes for clothing. A big reason why buyers return it because the color you showed in the photograph wasn't quite the color they were expecting of the item to be and maybe little condition issues and maybe features that they expected to weren't there. So it's really important to take. And what is it now? It's 24 photos.

Brian: 24.

Griff: Yeah. So you now you can add 24 photos.

Brian: The other thing that I would add is on used items, ensuring that you highlight any of the blemishes.

Griff: That's really important and now you have more photos to do that.

Brian: We give you plenty of photos. But you should provide as many photos as necessary to show every side, every angle you can imagine, like if you're looking in a box, or certain things you want to look at the underside, the top, the sides outside handbag. You want to show the inside depending on the product. Take as many photos as you need to to really help describe that item to the person who can't pick it up and look at it.

Griff: Yeah, you know another important thing and this actually played a part in a tricky return that happened a number of years ago for me. If your item has identifying information on it like a manufacturer's part number or a serial number, you need to always include a photo showing those. But anything that's unique to that item, so say it's an electronic, who knows it was a GPS device or something else and you know there are lots of them. Make sure you show the serial number for that device.

Brian: That's actually a really, really good point Griff. It also bears repeating, make sure your item photos are focused, well lit and cropped to show only the item and as little of the background as possible. Even if you have 24 photos of an item, if they're not clear and focused, they won't help a buyer who's considered buying the item.

Griff: Well you know that cropping is really important, that's an issue I see a lot on eBay and other marketplaces where I purchase or source, are sellers who stand way back, take the picture and they never crop. It's so that it's filling up the photo box on eBay. And even if you don't know how to do this yourself, eBay on the List Your Item Page, that photo feature where you can upload your photos. There's an editor feature that lets you crop. You want the focus to be the image and not tons and tons of the background of your light box or your table because then the item is always harder to see.

Brian: Right. I think you talked about this years ago about when you're taking the photo fill up the lens so you don't have to do as much cropping then and you know that the photo that you're taking is clear and in focus.

Griff: Good point. And the next best practice we want to talk about is your item titles. In my view, titles are the second most important place for information after your photos. And your title should always contain all of the most important relevant keywords, fear item. And that might also include things like size, color, volume, age, version, et cetera. You should make sure that where it's appropriate and where it fits those who are in your title.

Brian: But aren't those really also in Item Specifics Griff?

Griff: Yeah, they usually are. But in the interest of removing buyer confusion to the greatest extent possible, it really does help and it doesn't hurt. It actually helps to repeat item details in as many places as possible.

Brian: Like the title and the item specifics.

Griff: Yeah those, but actually we'll talk about this in a minute. The description and even the condition. But if you remember that first impressions are usually the ones most remembered by somebody who's reading, text or viewing a listing, then the words in your title can help eliminate any initial confusion the buyer could have about your item.

Brian: Maybe we should give it an example on this.

Griff: Making the assumption for example, on a piece of clothing about size or about when it was made, that can be confusing. When I'm selling fragrances, some of these are old collective fragrances and I like to put the batch code in and the year. Now you wouldn't think those are gonna be important as search keywords, but it kind of is an impression first that the buyer is looking at this and they say, oh wait a minute, this is that Christian Dior version of Fahrenheit from 1990 and that's what I'm looking for. 'cause that's pre reformulation and here's the batch code, he's given it to us. I could look it up if I wanted to. And then there's the year and then they, they go into this knowing it's an older batch and they're not gonna ask a question or they're not gonna assume and then say, Hey, this wasn't what I thought it was. It's putting all that important information right up front where you can, you can't always fit everything in, but if you can, it's putting it up front so that the buyer knows what they're looking at and they're not gonna be confused about it or make wrong assumptions and then end up with something they didn't want.

Brian: And then the nice thing there is that they've got the image and that text is matching and what the image is, it just helps reinforce what they're already seeing.

Griff: Exactly.

Brian: Well Griff next on the list of best practices for reducing the likelihood of returns is your descriptions.

Griff: So true. And I see a lot of descriptions and I tend to do this myself sometimes, so I'm guilty but a lot of us leave out some important item details from our descriptions.

Brian: Well you know that here on the podcast we preach quite a bit about descriptions should be short and sweet and cover all the facts as needed. But in addition your description should repeat and elaborate on as necessary any and all of the keywords in your title or more important, those item details that were not included in your item title due to character space constraints, for example, dimensions. That is an important one.

Griff: That's so important. I was looking, so I wasn't on eBay, I was on another site and I was looking at some of these antique Japanese tansus that I love to buy if they're affordable and none of them had dimensions, none of them.

Brian: That seems odd. That almost seems like standard. Sometimes the other thing that's important is to include the weight.

Griff: Oh that's very true. 'cause then it helps a buyer understand why the shipping may be a little higher than normal. And as important as descriptions, we don't want to leave them out because we talk about 'em all the time. Or listing item specifics because item specifics provide a seller with yet one more location on that listing page to indicate and not only the listing page on mobile app. Because that information shows up pretty close to the top for the item specifics. And it's another place to indicate important information about the item that you don't want the buyer to miss. Even if some of that information is repeated in the title or the description. The goal here is to make it less likely that a buyer's gonna overlook any important details about the item. And that way you avoid buyer surprise when they receive the item and hopefully you avoid a return.

Brian: This one is one where it's easy for a seller to say, I want to bury that info because I don't want to dissuade someone from buying, especially if it's something that maybe is unfavorable. It's super important to be clear and make that stuff transparent to the buyer. I think that's a really good point. The next important part of the listing is the Item Condition field. If your item is not brand new and you selected any of the available options for condition, a text box will appear where you can type important condition details. Never leave this box blank. Never. I often use the box to repeat important item details that a buyer might have missed in the title or the description.

Griff: And that item condition shows up towards the top on the desktop and I think also on mobile. So it's again, another place to reiterate something about the item that's important that's gonna make the buyer know and understand that item better before they make the purchase.

Brian: And to your point on the earlier point around making sure information's kind of accurate, make sure you're accurate with your item condition.

Griff: The last best practice is the type of return policy you provide. Now let me explain because you know there's not very many options but you can either accept returns or you can say no returns, which we never recommend. And then you can say who pays for return shipping and you can set a window for returns. My suggestion, and I adopt this and I use it, is that you say, I accept returns for any reason and I always pay for return shipping. My return window I think is still 30 days. There's two reasons for this. And the first reason is if a buyer sees that your return policy is that buyer focused, they're gonna be a lot more at ease and they're gonna be less likely to think, I may have to return this, I may have to return this, I may have to turn this. So this is a great way of putting the buyer at ease upfront that hey, if something goes wrong, this seller's gonna have my back. I don't have to worry about it.

Brian: And how often do you get returns?

Griff: This has been a busy year, I think maybe I've had four or five since the beginning of this year.

Brian: Most sellers find that when they adopt that free returns, free shipping, they don't see a spike in their returns.

Griff: Yeah. That's just some, some see less returns. The other reason is if you're not Top Rated Seller and you offer free return shipping, you have the option that if a buyer returns an item in a condition that's not the condition you sent it out, you can deduct up to 50% of the return from your refund. That's quite a substantial amount of allowance for this and I've used it once in the last year. I really, really stress that you have a generous return policy. Yes, you can say no returns accepted. Let me tell you what's gonna happen. You're gonna end up taking a return.

Brian: Yes you are.

Griff: It is going to actually be more difficult. Don't fight returns during the process. Say you'll take the returns. And if you're worried about cost, that's the next thing we're gonna talk about.

Brian: I have to concur with you on this one. Like I think maybe there's some edge case products within our marketplace that it doesn't make sense to have that generous returns policy. But for the vast majority of items sold on on eBay, having a simple returns policy means you're just not gonna end up with kind of conflicts that just chew up your time and increase your blood pressure. So I think it's important for sellers to kind of think about the bigger picture with returns and not necessarily every single return or what's happening in that specific instance of a return.

Griff: Now keep in mind that there are no guarantees. So we're giving you all this advice and tips and different strategies, but there's no guarantee when it comes to the likelihood of returns. You could adopt all of our best practices and you will still possibly receive return requests.

Brian: Exactly. And the goal here with the suggested best practices is not to eliminate all return requests. I mean that's not really realistic and it's beyond the control of even the most fastidious seller. The goal here is to reduce the likelihood of a return by providing your buyers with the information they need for making an informed purchase.

Griff: Yeah. And in doing so, in such a way that makes it almost impossible for a buyer to miss it. And finally, there's one more thing I want you to keep in mind and that's how to recoup any costs associated with your returns. Now if you've known me for a number of years, you know that I used to talk a lot about this, it was called self-insuring a lot of businesses use it. There's no reason that you can't use it no matter how big or small you are, the volume of business you're doing on eBay, it's a pretty easy strategy. We'll go into it in greater detail in a future episode, but I just want to give you an overview. Basically it's this, it's an accounting thing that you can do that puts your mind at ease. You figure out your return rate for the last year and your volume for the last year, compare that to what you've been doing or what you plan to do for the current year and follow your return rate.

Brian: And eBay makes that easy. And your performance metrics, you can see what your return rate is and using those numbers you could determine based on your cost of those returns. So say your cost of your returns last year was a hundred dollars just to make it easy and that we're talking return shipping and fees or whatever. And that's assuming you got items back and you can resell them. I mean if you got an item back and you can't resell it, that's gonna add to that cost. Then you take the number of transactions for this year that you're on track to actually making, and you divide the amount of that cost that you assume could be similar for this year by the number of transactions for the year. And that'll give you an incremental amount that in your bookkeeping you can create a column and say it's, you know, self-insurance and you add that incremental amount to the amount for all your prices for listed items.

Griff: And in the past, based on my volume and my return rate, it's something like maybe 10 cents, give or take a penny. Literally that small but it adds up. You do hundreds of transactions and then that 10 cents adds up to a certain amount of money And yeah, I don't know if the actual money, if you're putting in at a separate account, but what you have done is you've got bookkeeping that shows that that is my fund, it's my rainy day return fund that covers anything in the way of costs for returns. That's one way to putting your mind at ease. Another way is you just keep track of all those expenses. They are an expense return expense.

Brian: That's a really good point.

Griff: Yeah, you just take 'em off your schedule C at the end of the year for your business.

Brian: So I mean at least you're not losing a hundred percent, you're getting at least some tax break or not really a tax break, it's just, it's a loss.

Griff: Yeah, you're just taking it as a loss so it's accountable in your business. So let's go over this. We've talked about how to reduce the insta instances of a return. Hopefully we get them down pretty low if they're currently bigger for you or higher. And we've talked about the how to implement a return policy that can actually help lower the rate of returns. And we've shared my strategy overview for recouping losses due to returns. And I, I think that about covers it.

Brian: Um, did we forget something? What what about that other thing?

Griff: What other thing? What other thing is that?

Brian: You know what it is.

Griff: No Brian, I don't. I don't know what it is.

Brian: Griff, if you go out to the returns forum on the community, what would you read a lot about? Fraudulent return. How should a seller deal with that scenario? Because we hear this often.

Griff: You would bring those up, wouldn't you?

Brian: Have you ever had a fraudulent return?

Griff: Okay. As strictly defined. And that's a buyer deliberately trying to defraud me as a seller. Yes, I've had two in the last 15 years to be precise.

Brian: That's not too many.

Griff: No it's not. But you know, I never say, well I only had two or and then say, well you only had that one because if it happens to you as a seller, I'm gonna tell you it feels like terrible.

Brian: You feel like you've just been ripped off.

Griff: You do, you feel violated? There are some steps you can take in this case. So it's hard to recommend this because if you've ever dealt with eBay's Trust and Safety Team, in return cases, they're going to default a lot of times to a buyer. So you want to have some proof. And everything that we've talked about up to date can actually prove to be valuable documentation in a case where a buyer has sent back something that you did not send when you sold the item. And you can provide photos of what you received and should you want to dispute the return, this is gonna be supporting documentation that can back up your case. It's not always black and white, it's not always assured. But you can do this. And if you've got a, a good history with eBay customer supporter, the trust team does rule in favor of the of sellers. And if that's not the case, and I always have to make this decision because I'm, I'm thinking what's the risk here? The first time it happened, it was so outrageous. It was an electronic device and I had actually taken pictures of the serial number. The serial number I got back didn't match. And when I disputed, and this was before there was a managed return process, eBay didn't know the people in the team had no idea I was actually an employee. But they did rule in my favor. But I didn't stop there because I was so outraged. I filed a police report and made sure that was on file. So you can always do that if the monetary damage is high enough.

Brian: And you do that in the location of the buyer city, right?

Griff: This was in San Jose and I, it was recommended and San Jose took it as a police report. You can report it in the city in which you live. But like I said before, that if you're following the right policy, you have the right policy in place, at the very least you can always at least get 50% of your money back. It isn't going to be a panacea, you're not gonna feel that much better. You can report the buyer to eBay. So make sure that you have a complete factual, non-emotional report of what happened. This does impact that buyer's status. We're not allowed to provide much detail about what happens. Everything is case by case. But we do know that buyers at the very least who are faced with this sort of situation are sometimes told by eBay, your return privileges are suspended and if it's egregious enough they say you are suspended. So it does result in actions against buyers. But you know, for privacy's sake, we never release the actual case scenarios themselves.

Brian: Right. But sellers should feel confident that like, especially in these kinds of scenarios, report the buyer.

Griff: And another thing, if you follow all of the steps that we've just told you, somebody who's come to eBay with the intention of committing something fraudulent is gonna be less likely to pick you because you've built in all these proofs of what the item is into your description, into your item description, into your photos, into the title, into your everything. They're going to be less likely to choose your item on which to practice. Something less than honest, less than upfront.

Brian: The other thing that you mentioned, kind of like one of the best practices, it also applies to this scenario which is you're kind of self-insuring even if it's a little bit different 'cause you're not just self-insuring, let's say for paying for the return of the item, but you're self-insuring for the item cost plus the return of it. Even in this scenario that applies. So if you go down that route, you can at least know that you've kind of covered yourself from a financial standpoint. It doesn't make it feel any better.

Griff: Oh it doesn't. Anyway so there you are. Those are our best practices for reducing the likelihood of returns. We hope they're helpful. We hope you'll consider adopting them. And if you do so, let us know if they have any impact on your return rate. If it lowers it, we'd like to know.

Brian: And let us know if you've got any other best practices about returns that you think other listeners would like to hear. And if you have questions about our return best practices or a question on any aspect of the eBay selling, why not call us on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: You can call that number any day of the week, anytime of the day and leave your question, comment, or suggestion. And we just might put it on the air.

Brian: And if you're not a call on the phone person, you can email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: And now your three point podcast checklist as every week.

Brian: Check the Announcement Board or in this case or this week, check the Seller Board at ebay.com/announcements for up-to-Date seller news every day.

Griff: Consider adopting our best practices to reduce returns.

Brian: That's it.

Griff: That's it. Short and sweet.

Brian: No thermal printer?

Griff: And buy a thermal printer.

Brian: That's more like it. Yay. I thought you might be slipping there Griff. And lastly, do you need to review anything in this episode? It's easy. Check the transcript for this in all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to find the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: And on our next episode, episode 269, we'll welcome eBay's Julie Klein from the eBay Ads Team. She's gonna bring insights on the different spending and shopping habits of Gen Z and Millennials this holiday season. And this is based on what Gen Zs and Millennials have told that team in real detailed survey data. I think some of it might be surprising. So tune in for that.

Brian: I think sellers are gonna wanna listen to that one. And You Got Questions we'll be back from its short hiatus wherever it's vacationing. We'd like to again, thank our guests this week. Senior Director of Shipping Stuart Reichenbach.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.