eBay posted an announcement on Wednesday to inform sellers that it was aware of recent shipping delays. The hosts of the eBay for Business podcast had raised the issue back on April 2nd, as we reported last week. Yesterday, eBay posted the following announcement on the Seller Announcement board:
USPS slow-downs and recent weather delays
We are aware that many USPS domestic shipments are taking longer to be delivered than typical service standards at this time.
We are monitoring the network and will adjust estimated delivery dates as needed to ensure your buyers see the most accurate delivery times possible. If there are developments that impact your transactions on eBay, we will also update seller protections as needed.
As always, thank you for selling on eBay.
The eBay Shipping Team
If you’ve been negatively impacted by the delays, let us know how eBay and other platforms are handling customer claims of items not received. And in the meantime, here’s a video of an interesting experiment conducted in Atlanta, where there have been reports of major issues with postal delays for over a month. A television station shipped 5 packages with Bluetooth trackers inside to test delivery performance – here’s its report posted to YouTube on April 5th:
She sent the packages by priority, bet the results would be alot longer if sent GA. I had to track down 4 packages early last month, none in the last couple weeks. I have the best mail lady, she scan’s all my packages and make sure the sub’s do too instead of the just the 1st five(yes it’s still a rule). She knows our St. Louis hub doesn’t scan all the packages, one I had to open a mail inquiry then a missing mail request until it finally was scanned 5 days at the buyer’s PO, 14 days after picked up.
Its a fight to get ebay to honor POSTED seller protections, last winter had a package delayed because of a blizzard in ND, ebay post seller protections but when I got a negative, none of the phone reps would remove it. I had to finally go ebay facebook and open a request there. They took care of it before I even click back to ebay’s page.
We shipped a package from Michigan Business to our Customer in Savannah, Georgia on March 28, 2024. The package never even stopped in Georgia (our Post Master stated it was most likely not accepted and sent to the next closest USPS Distribution Facility). It ended up in Jacksonville, Florida on March 29th at the Network Distribution Regional Facility…and sat for days. We finally Filed a Service Request with USPS on April 6th, which resulted in a Postmaster in Floriday simply reiterating what we already knew via the USPS Tracking System. No help at all! We finally filed a Missing Package Claim on April 8th and the next day the Tracking Data showed that the package was moving again. A good thing? Well…it may be moving; but, in the wrong direction! Our customer’s package has now been in Puerto Rico Since April 9th. As of today, April 15th, the package has not moved from Carolina, Puerto Rico. Not sure what our next step is. Most likely we will need to ship-out a 2nd pacakge (not through USPS) so that our patient and understanding customer may receive his products. This puts us at risk of not only losing our profit on the first package but taking a loss on both. * * * SIGH * * *
Complete BS. We got bad feedback from a seller whose item got lost by the post office. We reached out to ebay CS and got the usual “sorry we can’t remove that feedback” reply. Ebay does not care about its sellers at all.