Following on my thoughts of last night 🙂
I would go as far as saying Ebay's prime aim in enforcing the use of SD for all private sellers from the 15th April is their way to ensure all private seller will have to send their parcels track and trace and that tracking is directly linked to Ebay systems . For Ebay they need that for all their other wonderful changes to work properly.
Everything they have done does seem to fit into that argument. Letters of certain value have to be exempt as they would normally be sent with a simple stamp and posted in a letter box.
If this is the case then why I strongly object to SD as a private seller ,as I was already doing what Ebay wanted and in a far better way than SD would allow me to . You can't blame those private sellers who choose to use traditional was of posting as that is the accepted norm .
If I am right then there are other ways Ebay could have done this with or without the likes Free to Sell, BPF etc . The system I was using meant I had lost a single package since covid and their is real benefit of printing you own labels and Ebay could have done more to promote this approach and the more you convince other seller to use the same approach it is genuine win /win .
However you cannot avoid the fact that SD has been a total joke in its implementation and if they wanted to avoid this mess then they should have done far more make SD a favoured option for sellers.
As I keep saying SD only becomes the money spinner Ebay want when nearly all items sold on Ebay use Ebays own delivery service . Fitting SD into business sellers is going to very difficult . An issue that is becoming more apparent is the void between Private and business sellers and SD makes that worse . To me that gap / void is a business opportunity that Ebay have failed to exploit .
