Cut off times bank holiday weekend and ebays over optimistic estimated arrival times

[headshopuk]

So I've been selling a number of years and having noticed a pattern over these years that RM is basically going to deliver everything late next week because its a bank holiday weekend.  Anyway... to make life easier for myself, on Wednedsay I set my "Thursday cut off" time to 8am so that anything that comes in after that time on Thursday and on Friday could be sent after the bank holiday is over, i.e Tuesday. 

So I've just gone into the orders that came in on Thursday, to find that ebay is telling the customer that their estimated time of arrival will be Tuesday!  I send everything 2nd class post...

Ebay at least on my account has not taken account for the cut off time or the bank holiday weekend  so I'm definitely going to get lots of grief from my customers of which I tried in advance to circumvent.  

Ebay text chat (I suspect they are all AI bots at this point and not real people) told me I will not get any late delivery defects or any issues with service metrics but having been lied to before by the text chat thingy, im not so confident that that is the case.  

Does anybody else have an issue with the cut off times or estimated arrival times from there orders or is it just me? 

[headshopuk]

BTW I'd like to add to this that I stopped dispatching on Saturdays because even after I set a cut off time of 11am, anything that came in after that on a saturday, ebay would give a really unrealistic arrival time on that.  I think theres a saturday dispatch glitch and it hasn't been fixed... is there a moderator that could look into whether my shop is stuck in a saturday dispatch glitch? Thanks

[bravergrace]

The current system for "estimating" delivery times really ignores everything except how fast you sent stuff in the last few weeks.  It ignores things like days off, non-dispatch days, and even the estimated delivery times of Royal Mail or your courier.  

So if you:

- stop dispatching on Saturdays,

- or need next Wednesday off for a funeral,

- or are going to Bermuda for a fortnight,

- or if you stop upgrading orders over a certain value to express delivery,

- or break your leg and are stuck in hospital for a week...

eBay will ignore your settings and promise your customers that you will get everything delivered tomorrow anyway.  They say this is more realistic for buyers.  What it actually does, is punish sellers who do anything above the bare minimum, by forcing them to continue doing it indefinitely.

If you set a cut-off time of 11 am (but actually post orders that come in at 11.30), or mark Tuesdays as non-dispatch days (but occasionally chuck a few orders in the postbox on your way out to the golf course), or do anything else to give yourself some leeway, eBay will ignore it and then punish you for doing exactly what you promised to do.  They insist that "you did it last week, you should do it this week too".

[headshopuk]

Sounds pretty accurate from my experience.  At least it's not just me then. 

[louisianna]

Me too. I did contact Ebay and they said they would escalate it to the correct team, but it's obviously too late now. Seems to happen every bank holiday unfortunately.

[padanpcparts]

Exactly this. I have stopped trying to exceed customers expectations because of this absolute madness. It is a real shame as the majority of my customers are small to large businesses that are always available and just want the item as quick as possible to enable them to repair laptops for their end users. It has been like this for years and E-bay refuse to listen to seller feedback on it. 

Don't get me started on the 1 day international delivery estimates they give my customers......