Simple delivery is awful

I list a few things on ebay occasionally, but this new simple delivery is just rubbish for sellers. It assumes that ebay actually know the size and weight of items And that everyone can easily get to Evri or other courier services easily. Why did they have to stop the seller from deciding how to post items? Put me right off bothering to use Ebay.

 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Thanks for your response. I'll try Facebook marketplace.

 

Anything to get away from the eternal nightmare of eBay!

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Thanks for your helpful reply.

 

I had no active or draft listings when SD was brought in, so at least I didn't have the headache of eBay changing the postage. What a nightmare!

 

Yes, there seems to be a difference between taking the package to the PO with the label already attached and getting the code scanned at the counter.

 

I'm very curious about the idea of taking the package to the delivery office instead - can they print the label from your QR code? I don't have a printer. And I assume from your post that they don't measure and weigh the package - is that correct? Or is it simply that RM are more au fait with SD than some POs, and know that they can accept an item with underpaid postage if it has a 'Marketplace seller' label? Sorry for all the questions, but I'm very interested as this might be another option, even though my PO appears to be more or less up to speed.

 

I posted elsewhere today about a conversation I had earlier with my PO manager, so won't repeat it all here, but basically she said that they were aware that they should accept a package with an underpaid label provided it didn't exceed the maximum size and weight limits for RM (Medium parcel not exceeding 61 cm x 46 cm x 46cm, weight 20kg or less). So it looks like I'd be okay in that respect now that they're getting used to what is, to them, a big deviation from their normal (non-SD) way of doing things.

 

I owe thanks to SD for a couple of things.

 

Since the start of the rollout and the many discussions about SD, I'm sure that my brain capacity has increased! I'm having to absorb and remember lots of facts and changes, as well as having to apply logic and reason - I'm certainly being kept on my toes! I'd much rather be directing that mental energy elsewhere, though.

 

And, secondly, it's made me come out of my shell and post here more often, even if the TL;DR contingent don't see that in the same positive light that I do! It's been enlightening and enjoyable having the odd discussion with other members. 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful


@irt303 wrote:

I'm very curious about the idea of taking the package to the delivery office instead - can they print the label from your QR code? I don't have a printer. And I assume from your post that they don't measure and weigh the package - is that correct?


Unfortunately you would need to have the labels printed but in my experience they don't check weights or sizes at all at the delivery office. And it should be the same if you have a CollectPlus store near you that accepts Royal Mail parcels - as long as it's not massive they're not going to check if it's a large letter, etc. So those are both good options if you are able to print labels and you think your parcel may be bigger than the label should allow.

 

But if your Post Office are aware that they should be accepting all Simple Delivery parcels below the size limit then you should be fine. The potential issue with the QR code at the Post Office is that the QR itself doesn't say anything about email or simple delivery and the label that gets printed is just like any other postage label that you might buy in the post office - so it will say Tracked 48 and for example Small Parcel 2kg, but it won't say ebay Simple Delivery or Marketplace seller. So you can clearly see why some Post Offices may be checking and rejecting parcels with those QR printed labels. 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Got to be one of the worst changes ebay have made. changed all my private already listed items - some over 120cm and set for large parcels to evri small parcel and charged the customer £3.40 absolute joke, no option to cancel the label either unless you try and contact customer services - also a joke, its been 45mins so far trying to sort it out with a correct label.

 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

For the unused SD labels here's what you need to do:

 

  • If you selected 'Buyer pays’ when you created the listing, your buyer will automatically be refunded for any Simple Delivery label that isn’t used after 30 days
 
  • If you selected ‘Seller pays’ and offered free postage on your listing, you'll need to fill out the Request a refund for Simple Delivery form for the label that wasn’t used. Make sure to send your request within 14 days of your item selling.  Also ensure you add the replacement tracking number of the service used, and it shows delivery.

It hasn't been a smooth transition to Simple Delivery that's for sure, and still many issues to correct!

 

There is currently an issue that Simple Delivery not offering Custom Postage to oversize items,  lightweight items and those under £10,  these are all exempt from Simple Delivery.

 

There is a workaround.

 

From the link below Go To Solution and follow  the advice in Rick's answer to list your item.

 

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Seller-Central/how-do-you-list-anything-bigger-than-61cm/m-p/7882638...

 

@sound-central 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Thanks for another very helpful reply!

 

I assume where you typed "the QR itself doesn't say anything about email or simple delivery" this was an autocorrection of "eBay". 

 

I'd need the label already if taking to the delivery office - noted.

 

Thankfully, my main PO seems to be on board with SD for the most part. It's a bus ride into town for me. I do have a PO inside a Spar just a few minutes' walk away, but I'm not so confident that they'll know the score.

 

Yes, this does seem to be the reason some POs are still struggling to get their heads around it all. And the discrepancy between the appearance of self-printed labels and labels printed at the PO counter from the QR code is confusing us sellers.

 

With my currently-listed item, it's a moot point now, as I've erred on the side of caution, ignoring eBay's recommendation and selecting a size and weight band that my item is completely within. So, in theory, I should be okay now even if I took it to the Spar PO.

 

This is quite a learning curve!

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

You're as bright & breezy (and helpful) as ever! I've always liked the critical-yet-bemused attitude you have towards eBay's changes; you never seem to get angry, even though I gather from previous posts that these changes have affected (stopped) your own selling activity. And I'm sure many of us admire the calmness and patience you display when responding to posters who repeatedly fail to grasp a point, or who appear ungrateful for your attempts to help them.

 

If only SD was consistent, good and bad points alike. You say that "There is currently an issue that Simple Delivery not offering Custom Postage to oversize items, lightweight items and those under £10, these are all exempt from Simple Delivery."

 

Unless something has changed yet again, the above is not true for everybody. I've very recently listed and sold a DVD - Large Letter, over 100g, price £6.99 including BPF - and custom postage was available. I didn't need to employ any tricks or workarounds whatsoever, I just listed from scratch, and there was the option.

 

Maybe eBay have been tinkering about again since I created that listing, and custom postage is (yet again) unavailable where it should be?

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@irt303 wrote:

Maybe eBay have been tinkering about again since I created that listing, and custom postage is (yet again) unavailable where it should be?


They are doing exceptions by category which are more messy than I can keep track of.

 

Ebay should be about selling stuff not having problems with forced delivery. It's the tail wagging the dog.

 

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

I totally agree, it's all a massive diversion from the, er, dare I say, 'business' of listing and selling stuff.

 

I often wonder about the extent to which eBay knows its rear end from its elbow. It may have been changed since I checked recently, but on the SD exemption list, the Films & TV category includes 'Fridge magnets'.

 

'Nuff said!

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@irt303 wrote:

I often wonder about the extent to which eBay knows its rear end from its elbow.


I'm middle aged and have started to realise there are people much younger than me running some things now. Those kids are now of working age and so the next generation are messing things up like my parents generation thought we had. The revenge will be when their kids get old enough to screw up something they care about. Maybe they need to bring back some ebay managers from retirement to fix this broken platform? Then shadow them and don't let people back into positions of authority until they actually know what they are doing.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

"Maybe they need to bring back some ebay managers from retirement to fix this broken platform?"

 

Or - and I'm half-serious here - they could offer contracts to highly experienced sellers to fix it, a bit like the way some security and anti-virus companies employ former hackers.

 

I doubt many highly experienced sellers are also highly experienced coders, but that's kind of by-the-by - they would not need to be great coders, they would just need to tell the coders what end results the coders needed to achieve (just as, presumably, eBay management tells then what to do now).

 

It'll never happen. As with all corporate entities, especially the larger ones, a certain arrogant and intransigent mindset is baked in. They would never seek assistance from its platform users. They know best - after all, if they didn't, how could they have achieved the positions they have?

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@irt303 wrote:

They know best - after all, if they didn't, how could they have achieved the positions they have?


I can only think there were either no better candidates for the ebay management roles or there were serious deficiencies in the recruitment process. Someone needs to run a proper drains up on what's gone wrong with ebay uk in the past year (or two, that period of truly free selling was also nuts) to learn the right lessons.

 

The investor Terry Smith famously said he likes to own companies whose business models are so simple they can be run by idiots because, eventually, they all are.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

It will happen: inevitably sellers will sell less because the pain caused
by SD, this will be a major headache for a bunch of people at Ebay, they
probably have an agreement with RM and Evri which likely doesn’t give them
much flexibility, but they’ll adjust things to rectify one way or another.
It will take time though because of corporate red tape to implement
changes, contractual inflexibility and competiting priorities. I would
guess (hope) they have a plan to address most of those issues already, but
the corporate machine is a slow one. Pity their communication around this
is so poor though. So, Until then, keep making noise how awful it is so
this remains high on their priority list.
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"I can only think there were either no better candidates for the ebay management roles or there were serious deficiencies in the recruitment process."

 

Maybe (I'm sure you realized my last sentence was very tongue-in-cheek).

 

Trouble is, the higher you climb the greasy pole, the less it becomes about genuine competence, and the more it becomes about delegation, connections, talking the talk, and putting a spin on things to suit your own personal career ambitions rather than what might be best for the company/organisation and its customers/users.

 

For all we know there could be many eBay employees further down the food chain crying out for change (if only to make their own jobs easier, let alone making things better for us), and who are being ignored by the higher-ups just as we are.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Hi I've tried so far , Market Place , shopify ,and vinted far more straight forward

Sent from Outlook for Android<>
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@irt303 wrote:

For all we know there could be many eBay employees further down the food chain crying out for change (if only to make their own jobs easier, let alone making things better for us), and who are being ignored by the higher-ups just as we are.


Yeah it's likely frustrating to those who might care about what's going wrong yet still need to show deference to those they know are responsible for the mess. Still that's capitalism at work and maybe it might motivate some of them to rise up the ranks when vacancies occur and be more determined to do things better and not repeat past mistakes. Or maybe ebay will just continue to decline to competition and go down in history with geocities, myspace, etc as an early Internet pioneer who failed to remain relevant. Ebay never really 'made it' in the same way as the jungle place or the search place conquered the Internet.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Perhaps I'm being a wee bit over-dramatic here, but it currently feels like the problems and issues are increasing at an exponential rate. I do know what the word "exponential" means, so I'm sure that this isn't objectively true (if it were, the platform would have already reached the point of being completely and utterly broken - not just here and there, but totally), but it sometimes feels that way. In any case, the issues are definitely increasing in number, even if not exponentially in the proper mathematical sense. It's gone way beyond 'whack-a-mole' levels - at least with that game there is a finite number of moles to whack!

 

Issues from not just days, weeks, or months ago, but from years ago remain unresolved to this day. The view from the outside is that eBay has zero interest in fixing them, or that it has attempted to fix them, but without any success, and has simply given up the ghost.

 

I had to look up what "drains up" means. That would have to be an exceptionally long meeting. I'm not talking about pulling an all-nighter, either; I think that the team would have to live in the office 24/7 for a good few weeks! Talk about having your work cut out for you!

 

I often see posts claiming that eBay knows exactly what it's doing even if this isn't apparent to us. With each passing day I question and doubt that viewpoint more and more. In many respects, it doesn't even appear to be doing what is best for itself (at least in the long run - there certainly seems to be a lot of 'short term-ism' going on). I've posted before - at tedious length - about my fascination with eBay and its utterly confounding mixture of greed and inclination towards self-sabotage. On the one hand it wants - like any commercial enterprise - to succeed, grow, and ensure its own longevity, yet on the other it appears to act in ways that ultimately frustrate those impulses. If eBay were a person undergoing therapy (if eBay were a person, it would have to undergo therapy!), their pyschiatrist would have a field day - this one patient alone would ensure a job for life!

 

I think I'm going to have to take a self-enforced break from these forums ("Yes!" I hear some members cry). It's quite addictive (for me, anyway) reading, creating, and responding to posts. I feel obliged to respond to most posts addressed to me, mainly out of courtesy but also for other reasons (to clarify points, etc.). Most of my eBay time is spent here. My email inbox quickly fills up with notifications (I know I can unsubscribe from threads, but if I do, I won't know if someone's replied to me without trawling through the various threads I've posted on to check). I've already completely lost track of what I've said to which member on which thread. I find myself reading the same posts for the second or third time until I think "Hang on, this looks very familiar..." - further complicated by the fact that some posters (and I definitely include myself) often tend to say the same thing, albeit worded differently, across a number of threads.

 

I don't - and, indeed, can't - blame forum members for that. I blame eBay for it, for having so many problems each single one of which generates several discussions.

 

Given the generally abysmal level of customer service provided, and eBay's paucity of information and communication, these forums are the place to go to for help and advice. I find them invaluable (and, of course, a good laugh at times). I quickly feel overwhelmed by it all to the point of burnout - yet I keep coming back!

 

This isn't one of those "Hey, everybody, I'm leaving"-type posts. Truth be told, I'm so frazzled with eBay (the latest issue being eBay messing around with my item description when creating a 'preview' as viewed on a mobile device - I've created a separate thread on that) that I can't actually say for sure what the point of this post is really - I guess I'm 'venting'.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

Howdy!

 

Sorry, but I've lost track of what I've said and where - what will happen?

 

"I would guess (hope) they have a plan to address most of those issues already". Yes, well, we all hope that there's a plan, but unfortunately, much evidence points to the contrary. A lot of the issues should never have arisen in the first place. It would be unreasonable to expect any company to come up with a scheme that goes 100% smoothly from day one (no amount of testing and sandbox-ing can predict every possible factor, every single permutation, every single outcome, etc.), but eBay really takes the biscuit! It's shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted, and the most we can hope for now is that it somehow manages to find the horse and put it back. If it's even still alive.

 

"... the corporate machine is a slow one" - in eBay's case, that is quite the understatement!

 

I'm sorry if I appear to be coming down hard on your post. It's just that, with everything going on, I'm in a particularly cynical mood right now. I genuinely mean no offence.

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@irt303 wrote:

I've posted before - at tedious length - about my fascination with eBay and its utterly confounding mixture of greed and inclination towards self-sabotage.


Yes it is fascinating. I'm not just here because what they are doing (and not doing) is frustrating me as both a buyer and seller but out of some strange sense of loyalty to ebay where I want them to be successful even though they are a big multinational american company and have too much of a monopoly already that they can and do abuse their users to some extent. They are stock market listed so there's a little bit of ebay that I own via my pension funds. It's a shame to see the company run so foolishly.

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Re: Simple delivery is awful

My local Royal Mail delivery office can scan the QR code and print the label.

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