Sellers marking items as dispatched when not

[doorengineer]

My gripe is, frequently when ordering online with eBay I seem to get an automatic “Dispatched” and often a tracking number as if the seller is on autopilot, yet it seems days before the parcel is in the care of the delivery firm/couriers, is this due to the courier not collecting in a timely manner? or the seller not dropping the parcel off at the courier's collection point for days? or really the fault of the delivery firm? should courier protect their reputation if the delay is due to the seller by stating on the tracking information the reason for the delay??? my thought is that sellers raises a dispatch invoice, postage, and tracking number automatically and use it as a picking sheet next time they go to their storage units which may be many days after the item has been marked as dispatched.

[doorengineer]

You may post the same or the next day like many other sellers but unfortunately, there are some who are too lazy to get off their butt until they have a stack of orders, all I am asking eBay is to change the rules so dispatched means the goods are posted or with the couriers.

Unfortunately Royal Mail Tracking often only tells when the tracking number for the label was raised and too often it must be days before the seller bothers to drop it off at the post office, we already get conformation the seller has received the order so why do we want a dispatched notice minutes later just because the seller has printed the label yet may be days before they post it???

[kit-kaboodle]

I use packlinc to post my items,as soon as I create a label, my item is marked as dispatched by eBay, even though it is not yet dispatched. Not My Fault.

[leoshopp]

Its not the sellers. Its the automated Ebay system. When the seller purchases the postage from them that it when the Ebay system automatically updates it as 'dispatched'.

[insidethe93]

eBay, please provide every one of its sellers with a Royal Mail letterbox right outside the seller's house or businesss premises, along with enough properly paid RM staff to collect from it. But even then, it'd still take time for "despatched" to become correct, wouldn't it. Too difficult, eBay? - well instead how about you change your term "despatched" to the accurate term "processinng"!!

[tech-and-tools]

You cant seriously be putting this forward as something anyone is
actually requesting. Although eBay's system of marking items as
dispatched is part of the problem it has absolutely nothing to do with
sellers stating 1 working day dispatch which almost like clockwork for
most medium and above sellers leave it sitting around 3-4 days before it
even sees a post office.

If you want to take 3-4 days great crack on but don't list as 1 working
day then act surprised when people start getting annoyed at you. When I
sell if I list 1 working day its one working day unless we have some
kind of natural disaster etc but the buyer has chosen to spend money
with you its not a radical idea to expect honesty as a bare minimum and
good customer service/experience should be the ideal. If I made
decisions like that when I worked in management I would have been fired
on the spot.


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[polytsr2]

A professional seller should operate under professional ethics and codes, if he/she is too busy with other things, or lives out in the middle of nowhere, then maybe they should consider not being a professional ebay seller! 
     The implications of pretending they have dispatched an item, when its actually still sat on their shelf is not really a nice way to do business!
    I have had many a late delivery, well past their last claimed last delivery date, yet the items were posted from within the UK to my address whcih is also in the UK, and even when when my ebay orders list said it was  'dispatched' an hour after i purchased and paid for it, i am still waiting for it.  No doubt they rely on that small buffer zone, and sometimes even lie about delivery dates to get the business from an ebay competitor offering a later delivery date, hey, maybe they cant even be bothered posting that day, or are too busy with other things in their life to get around to posting. No professional seller should be operating on ebay with those selling ethics! 

[polytsr2]

''Posting a few hours or a day later doesn't seem at all unreasonable.''    I disagree!  If it arrives when they said it would that fine, but many sellers abuse the automatic 'dispatched' system. They often claim in their advertised products, they are a few days quicker with their delivery dates than their competitors,  when in all honesty they never are!   The fact they rely on the automatic ebay 'dispatched' notification to then post whenever they feel like or get around to, ofter 2-3 days after!... and never actually bother to dispatch on that day ebay states its been dispatched, is not fair on the buyer who was duped into thinking they would receive an item quicker than the next ebay seller selling the same item.  I have lost count of my ebay orders being delivered later than the date claimed it would be here.  Some bad ebay sellers milking the system.

[geosacha007]

You can blame ebay for a lot of this.  They ignore the seller's stated timescales and invent their own estimated delivery dates which they tell the buyer.

For example, in order to get any reasonable delivery timescale from ebay I have had to put 5 day dispatch and 5 day courier.  This results in ebay telling the buyer delivery will be sometime from 3 days before I am supposed to post to one day after.    Obviously ludicrous, and could cause my buyers to get very angry when they think it is late.  It also allows the buyer to open a case for non delivery 4 days before the latest delivery date calculated from what I actually tell ebay.

[ozmonaut]

Well I think you just have to look at the seller's feedback. I've bought a few things now where nothing has happened for at least a week after I've received the 'seller has printed a shipping label' notification. I then checked the seller feedback to find surprise surprise they have bad feedback for constant late shipping. I now avoid sellers with this type of feedback.

[smooji]

So apparently, sellers get more orders from Ebay if they 'despatch' quickly, i.e. generate a label. If they are not actually ensuring that the product is with the courier within 1-2 days, let's not beat around the bush - they are lying to try and get orders. I have ordered 3 things (2 days ago) from Ebay, all on 1-2 day despatch times. Two items have had labels generated within hours, but haven't gone close to a courier (tracking is helpful), and the third hasn't even bothered to generate a label. If they don't arrive in the next 3 days, I am going to leave negative feedback for them all. If I am making purchasing decisions based on deceitful information, then they will have to live with the consequences. If everyone did the same, we would see a huge improvement in customer service standards. 

[tech-and-tools]

I'm sure this is built into the algo somewhere but the worst offender of
this practice are going to be those who sell hundreds if not thousands
of different products with multiples of those figures in weekly/monthly
sales. I'm sure eBay either doesn't mind so much continuing to promote
sellers bringing in large income & also probably has some median
calculation. I would be wholly surprised to hear about sellers seeing
massive negatives considering so many of the big sellers now seem to
care little about getting parcels moving.

I will say although I have not been ordering quite so much on eBay since
making these posts its been a tad better but that could merely be who I
am ordering from. What is most annoying for me is I remember the days
when not only did you feel a need to meet your customers expectations to
succeed but that doing so gave you an advantage. Now it would appear as
long as you don't push it too far its merely a cost of doing business.
In cost I of course mean a cost of "maybe" a few lost sales due to algo
but more important the cost to customers time.

The problem is its near impossible to really identify exactly what
happens behind the scenes for slow sellers but also how extreme if any
the consequences are. Feedback has long felt watered down and pretty
trivial which likely only increases this kind of behavior which just
makes it all the more frustrating knowing some simple changes only
considering an item as dispatched once the system sees "accepted at post
office" "dropped off at parcel shop" etc. Changing the current
dispatched status to advised of dispatch or postage label purchased but
not dispatched which I would argue is the honest route.


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[pillarboxred]

As a seller I am baffled by this annoying automated process eBay has. Some big businesses probably fire a product down a conveyor belt to the delivery van the second it is paid for but I don't. I have to manually mark supposedly dispatched  items as "not dispatched" until I get to the Post Office, after which I can mark them as "dispatched" once more. Work Creation, I call it.