Although this example doesn't directly relate to anything I've bought on eBay, I thought I'd offer up this one as an example of just how bad Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Royal Mail Tracked 48 can be at times.
A few days ago, after getting back from work, I found that a parcel with a Royal Mail Tracked 24 sticker on the front had been posted through my letterbox. Nothing strange about that, you may think, but the delivery address was for somebody living in a street a quarter of a mile away from me! The only thing the postman had got right was the house number. Given that it was so close to Christmas I decided to take it round to the address that it should have been delivered to, especially given the possibility that the item inside the package may well have been a Christmas present for somebody. Had I not bothered to deliver the item myself there would have been no time for the rightful recipient to re-order a replacement item and receive it before Christmas.
If the parcel I delivered to the person at the correct address had been an eBay purchase and the buyer had opened up an Item Not Received case then given that eBay don't always tend to look at cases as closely as they ought to do the seller may have won the case merely on the strength of the tracking showing that the item had been delivered. If, on the other hand, the tracking showed that the item had been delivered to an address other than the one that the buyer provided at Checkout and somebody at eBay spotted it, then perhaps the case would have been decided in the buyer's favour. Either way, this would no doubt have resulted in a very unhappy customer, and a seller arguing that he/she had done nothing wrong in the first place, all because of an error on the part of Royal Mail. If Royal Mail can't be trusted to deliver the item on time, and to the correct address, then perhaps sellers ought to consider switching to an alternative courier when listing items for sale in the future.
