The lack of flexibility - with just that one aspect - is truly dire.
If a seller de-selects a courier on a listing, that choice should (IMO) apply to that listing only, instead of it being applied globally to all existing and future listings. I can only imagine the havoc this causes for some sellers.
I have Evri de-selected, yet there are some items I would be prepared to send with them. But I have to leave them de-selected because I don't want them as an option on my other listings - the very problem you face.
eBay seems quite keen on pushing Evri, but this 'all or nothing' aspect of courier de-selection means that Evri won't get ANY business from me, whereas they would get at least some business from me if I could choose couriers on a per-listing basis.
Either Evri or RM for ALL your listings, OR both of them for ALL your listings. A binary choice, a 0 or a 1. It's 'simple' alright, but certainly not in a good way. More like 'needlessly restrictive'. I struggle to understand why eBay is being so heavy-handed on this point. It's as though the programmers are too inept or lazy to code things so that a courier de-selection (or a seller allowing both couriers) only applies to to the listing on which this was done - or, more likely I suppose, they have been instructed not to do so. For reasons of its own, eBay does not want us to be able to choose on a per-listing basis. I suspect that Evri has a lot to do with this.
I highly doubt that sellers would complain about the extra few seconds it would take to (if desired) de-select a courier on each listing. Better still, have BOTH couriers de-selected by default - it would still only take mere seconds to select one or both, but would ensure that sellers pay attention to this part of the process. But far more important than how the selection/de-selection is handled is the seller's need for their choice to only be applied to that listing.
Simple Delivery is old news now (for most of us, not for new/returning sellers, obviously), yet I'm still astonished when I think of just how much choice and agency it has taken away from us private sellers (don't even get me started on combined shipping). More than that, though, it has taken away a lot of the pleasure of selling. Before SD, I would not have considered the freedom to make choices about postage as something pleasurable - but now that this freedom has, for the most part, been taken away, boy, do I miss it. I took that freedom for granted, and, to put it bluntly, I firmly believe that we should all still be taking it for granted today. The ability to arrange postage for oneself, and to be flexible in response to buyers' wishes, was crucial to the selling experience.
My patience and enthusiasm are exhausted. I've mostly stopped tormenting my brain trying to work out eBay's reasons for what it does, because I'm not even sure that eBay itself knows. By that, I mean that I get the impression that the platform lacks a clear vision of where it sees itself in one, five, ten years' time. So many things smack of short-term thinking, the 'if it exists, monetize it' philosophy, the endless technical issues and their temporary fixes (if we're lucky), the abysmal CS, the bending of their own rules when they consider it expedient, the multiple stage workarounds that may work if the stars are in alignment...
Actually, that all makes me think of something even worse than short-termism. It makes me think of shabbiness, cheapness . It makes me think that just enough money is re-invested in the platform to enable it to reach the next quarter and the next round of changes causing upheaval for sellers. It's a multi-billion dollar corporation that looks (and acts) cheap and nasty.
Worse than anything, however, is eBay's treatment of sellers - private and business (for different reasons), old and new. We all know - or certainly SHOULD know - that the sole reason for its existence is to make money, but it is practically turning the alienation of its user base into a business model, on the cynical, but not altogether guaranteed, assumption that there will always be another mug to replace the one for whom it all gets too much.
I recently mustered enough enthusiasm to list some stuff. I had an initial small flurry of sales ('flurry' is probably the wrong word, I'm talking about a few sales out of maybe a dozen listings), then it went very quiet. It may be for purely innocuous reasons (nobody who has viewed the remaining items has been sufficiently interested in them to buy them), or it may be a worrying phenomenon that some sellers believe occurs, especially with unpromoted items. I don't know. I do know that I recently reduced all my prices to no real effect (it may have resulted in more views and/or watchers, but I've more or less given up monitoring them).
I know that the last few paragraphs have nothing to do with SD - sorry. I just wanted to illustrate how SD has combined with other factors to make it so that my enthusiasm for eBay selling is at an all-time low.
I'll end this diatribe with another pathetic and ineffectual plea for eBay to at least make SD optional (accepting that pleas to abandon it entirely would be even more foolish), along with the equally futile request to do away with BPF and go back to seller fees.
