Problems with a Royal Mail collection

[jacklecrac]

I sold an item and arranged for Royal Mail to collect today, they collected at 11:00am this morning

and brought their own postage label with the buyers address.

I received an email from them at 7:00pm saying that " they are sorry they didn't collect today and to arrange

a new collection or request a refund?"  Ebay now shows the item delivered at 11:04am!

What is going on here, is the parcel lost?

Art

[sml192]

Looks like the person collecting it entered the wrong code when scanning it.  It should still get delivered as normal.

What does the actual Royal Mail tracking show?

[c_of_e84]

I had a collection booked for yesterday though not through ebay, direct from the RM site, I got the email confirming the collection, just by chance I was the postie and asked if he wa collecting, he checked his PDA and the answer was no but offered to take it as an extra, he scanned it and said he would also scan it back at the office which he did so no problem, last night I got the email saying they were unable to collect, please arrange another collection or request a refund, there have been many problems since the AWS data centres got bombed in the middle east.

As to collecting an item and scanning it as delivered straight away, yes this can happen, its happened to me a few times, it still travels through the system but if a buyer contacts you it will still show as delivered on ebay so you are protected and you can tell them to do one they aint getting a refund for INR.

[jacklecrac]

Royal Mail tracking now informs me the item is at their Rochester sorting office this morning?
So I’ll monitor its progress. The whole system seems very flaky, very much like the post which is extremely irregular. Thank you for your help.
Regards
Art

Sent from my iPhone

[marco@ebay · Accepted solution]

Hi jacklecrac, thanks for your post.

This would be more from the Royal Mail side of things, so about that especifically we couldn't do much, as the wrong code was scanned/entered. However, keep me posted, and if the buyer claims the item was not received or it was lost, let me know, so we can take a further look to help you in that scenario.

Thank you,

Marco

[jacklecrac]

Thanks, will do.
Art

Sent from my iPhone

[c_of_e84]

As with all these systems, on paper and in beta test it works fine, now throw in things like poor mobile signal coverage, hacking, bombing the human interaction element and lack of training for the edn user and it falls over, the problem being, royal mail is an ebay partner but if anything goes wrong when a seller uses royal mail its the sellers fault, an international corporation like ebay cant sort it out but expect one solitary seller to be able to do it.