Hi. I am a small private seller. I started selling around the late half of last year, and since then I've experienced what seems like 4 different complete overhauls of the payment system in barely over half a year. The latest one, before this change now, actually worked great for me though - the payouts and lack of fees were nice.
The new changes seem, not only greedy with the even larger arbitrary-looking fees disguised as "buyer protection", but also horribly miscalculated and made with no knowledge of how shipping in this country works.
Most of my items are small, cheap things I resell, and adding tracked delivery prices to them is impractical. I ship with just standard Royal Mail 2nd class most of the time, as well as quite often International Standard to a lot of countries you could describe as "third world."
As far as I'm aware, while it is possible for a postie to scan an item as delivered for 2nd class labels, with Royal Mail having its own questionable policies and practices, cutting employee numbers and increasing workload, this is unrealistic to expect to happen on a large scale as they are not obliged to scan untracked items even with the "Please scan upon delivery" stickers I have started attaching to orders. Same thing when I'm shipping to countries like Bangladesh or Nigeria, where Tracked shipping is 3 times more expensive than standard, and is more than the item itself.
This is a problem: with the new eBay policies saying that you get paid only after the item is marked as delivered; I couldn't find any information there on if you get paid even if it isn't, and if there is, I assume it's quite a long period and may require buyer reviews.
The problem is shipping label numbers generated on eBay get automatically added to the system as tracked services, even if they are not, so it seems the 14-day payment for untracked items rule does not apply.
I have about 10 of these orders in the mail just now, does this mean I'm just going to have to reach out to every buyer and pray in my hopes and dreams that they decide to write a positive review for me to get paid? Or am I going to have to wait ≥ a month, or contact eBay support with proof of postage?
I sell items for which eBay is really the only platform, especially for international customers, so I have no choice but to use it. If this tracked rule nonsense works as impractically as it seems to I might have to switch to generating labels off-site on Royal Mail Click&Drop which is incredibly inconvenient, or go buy a sheet of 2nd class stamps at the post office and ship old-school like that. I would really like to actually get paid for my travelling items though, and within a reasonable time.
