Simple delivery

[2592tony]

I purchased hundreds of 1st class stamps to use for postage. From 15th March I am not going to be able to use these. EBay have ruined the selling experience. Charging buyers a buyer protection fee is basically a charge on the seller as I have had to reduce my selling price as they are mainly low price items I am selling. Time to find another selling platform until ebay goes back to the way it was

[irt303]

I feel your pain and share your anger!

I have around £200 worth of 1st Class and 1st Class Large stamps which I was going to use when I resumed selling, but Simple Delivery has put paid to that. Not many of my items would qualify for Custom Postage (that is, items under 100g and priced at £9.99 or less excluding the BPF) and therefore allow me to use stamps.

There are a few of us in this position, stuck with stamps that we can no longer use to send our items - there's at least  one other user currently active on the boards who's in the same boat. Who knows how many others there are like us, but who don't know about / post on the forums?

That "until" in your final sentence is rather optimistic - the general consensus is that eBay is getting further and further away from its roots, at least as far as private sellers are concerned, and hopes for a return to its heyday (or even how it was a year ago) grow fainter with each passing day.

I know that it doesn't help you one jot in practical terms, but I just wanted you to know that you're not alone in being left with those now-useless (at least for eBay purposes) stamps. Gutting, isn't it?

[dlas-0]

If your items are £10 or less and weigh 100g or less you can opt out of simple delivery and use your stamps.

[fantailsforme]

And what about the first class large letter stamps?  We are stuck with those.  

I only have to send two Christmas cards a year.   

Royal Mail wont buy them back so we shall be stuck with them but at least when Royal Mail changed their design of stamps they gave us a years grace to use them up and then followed with the swap out - unlike eBay with just a couple of weeks from going with an opt-out to the full blown SD.

As for the under £10 and weigh less than 100g - what happens if an auction gets a flurry of bids (unlikely I know) and it goes over the £10.  Ebay have been absolutely shocking with its lack of information.  SD is their baby and should be guiding us through this not just announce and disappear.  We are private sellers, business and tech is not our forte.

[irt303]

I'm stuck with stamps, too - about £200 worth. Were not the only ones, either, yesterday I replied to another member who also has about £200 worth, and I'm pretty sure that I saw a post from someone else recently saying that they had £400 worth! There must be quite a few more, given that buying stamps with no face value (i.e. those that just say '1st', '1st Large' etc.) is quite a canny practice as they hold their value against Royal Mail's price increases (which seem to occur twice a year now).

Most of us will have bought the stamps, and a small proportion will have received them as reimbursement for doing things like the Kantar TNS Royal Mail surveys, which involved the former company measuring the latter's performance. It's possibly a different company now; it's several years since I took part. It required a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and adhering to quite strict deadlines. So we've either wasted our money or wasted our time.

In response to your question about bids going over £10, I'm sure I read a post in which one of the community managers stated that if a bid goes over £9.99 (not over £10 - I guess that penny could be crucial!), then Simple Delivery will be applied. However, this was just in a 'normal' thread like this one, or possibly last Wednesday's Weekly Chat. I trust that someone will correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm trying to get my head around all this myself!

[suelel1968]

I don't know if it's £10 or £9.99, but yes, if it goes over, postage becomes SD.

You can use your own LL stamps on exempt items.

[fantailsforme]

Thank you irt303 and suele1968

So I wonder what will happen when a buyer's bid takes them £10 or over.  Would they see flashing lights warning them that the p&p will change or will they just find out after the auction if that £1.55 postage turns double or triple the price.

[fantailsforme]

So many questions but no answers - it really is shocking.

[insidethe93]

https://www.webuyanystamps.co.uk/services

Apart from a quick look to see if the above buy unused non-franked British stamps, I don't know anything about this company; there may be similar companies around.

It'd involve more effort than wished, but people who make and send homemade greeting cards might be willing to buy from you. There may be local crafting groups whose members might buy stamps from you in quantity.*

Or maybe just ask around generally among family, friends, colleagues, to see if they'd like to buy some stamps from you?

Perhaps consider offering a discount as an incentive?

* Of 95 homemade Christmas cards about 70 (the simpler painted/stencilled ones) go in a postbox with a stamp. I know from fellow-crafters that I'm not unusual. Timewise, many crafters start making Christmas cards and gifts in late June/early July as that's when craft supply firms release the year's new Christmas ranges, so you may not need to wait long!

[clearingmyshelves2025]

Same here. If I'd known stamps were no longer going to be usable on Ebay I would have listed as many items ASAP. But as we were limited to 300 per month probably I still wouldn't have got rid  of as many as I would have liked.

[fantailsforme]

clearingmyshelves 2025

Me too.  If I had of had more warning that this was going to be implemented with no opt-out, I would have listed my heaviest items to use the stamps up.  As I said earlier, at least when Royal Mail changed their stamps they gave us a years grace to use them up and then had the swap-out.

Saying that though, wasn't Royal Mail going to have a shorter time limit of using the stamps up but some 'body' insisted that more time was given?  

[clearingmyshelves2025]

Thank you for that link. Certainly an option & I'll look for other similar companies. I'll try and sell off some of my books on Twitter (someone also suggested Abebooks).

[magpiecorner1]

I'm a business seller and bought thousands of stamps a few years ago, even swapped over thousands.   Some if those stamps are worth twice as much now, and luckily I can still use them.    If you list yours I'd buy them and so would many others, if you priced them reasonably!

[ruby*ryan]

I have a load, but wouldn't list them on here, as I don't want the buyer screaming 'Fake!' leaving me to refund (they were bought directly from RM, so they are not fake).
I may list them on Marketplace in small lots for cash on collection.

[pauuk.35za36]

If you do sell an expensive item or someone is demanding next day guaranteed delivery (not sure if there will be an exception for this in SD???) then you could still use the stamps for special delivery.

[irt303]

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@pauuk.35za36 wrote:

If you do sell an expensive item or someone is demanding next day guaranteed delivery (not sure if there will be an exception for this in SD???) then you could still use the stamps for special delivery.

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Hi, are you sure that stamps can be used for Special Delivery items? I thought that they couldn't; I know that they can't be used for RM Tracked 24/48 (at least, that's what I was told by counter staff at more than one Post Office).

Edit: from what I can gather from the following page (the site is a very useful resource), it looks like you can, but it also looks like many PO staff are unaware of this and will say that you can't!

https://blog.norphil.co.uk/2024/07/you-can-use-stamps-for-posting-special.html 

When you say "not sure if there will be an exception for this in SD", do you mean that there is currently no option under Simple Delivery for Special Delivery? [Bit unfortunate that both terms start with the same letters, as abbreviating them has already caused the odd bit of confusion on other threads.]

I thought that I was starting to understand Simple Delivery, at least in principle (and only by closely following several threads on these boards), but questions, doubts and uncertainties keep popping up to remind me that there are still gaps in my knowledge, gaps which are mainly down to eBay's ham-fisted rollout and lack of clear communication.

Will eBay ever add Royal Mail's 2 - 5kg band? And why wasn't it already there when Simple Delivery started to be implemented - did they honestly believe that none of us would notice? Is its absence attributable to incompetence (highly plausible), sheer greed (also highly plausible), or an unholy combination of both?

What on earth is happening with regards to combined postage? The inability to send invoices - which different eBay staff have variously referred to as a technical bug which is actively being worked on or as a deliberate change - has been going on for weeks now. Quite apart from the headaches it causes sellers, it's unacceptable that buyers have to pay the BPF on every item in what could - were the facility there - be a combined package.

The more you tease out the threads, you more you realize the extent and the effort to which eBay have gone to control and monetize as many aspects of Simple Delivery as possible. Increasing the price the buyer pays for Evri / RM if the seller de-selects one of them is another example, one that strikes me as being particularly harsh and unnecessarily punitive. And what is the buyer charged if eBay overrides the seller's de-selection - are they charged at the lower rate, i.e. the rate it would have been if the seller had allowed both carriers as buyer options?

Oh, and of course we cannot ignore or forget the blatant profiteering evident in eBay's Simple Delivery rates for Royal Mail (I can't speak for the Evri rates) being more than they would be if you purchased direct from RM or the Post Office, so apart from Simple Delivery-exempt sales, private sellers are forced into paying more than the going rate (with the usual caveat that nobody is actually forced to use eBay at all, just to head off that objection). I may voice my concerns about this - as others already have - to the CMA.

There's more I'd like to say on all this, but I have to head out now.