You can no longer send items RM Special Delivery......

[j.p.greenwood]

I am a private seller of over 20 years on E-Bay.

While a lot of people complained extensively about the recent changes with payment systems frankly it never bothered me as I only sell bits and pieces and occasionally will have a burst of selling some specific items when I'm in an upgrade cycle (which I am currently).

The items I sell when in this 'upgrade cycle' are Tablets, I'm currently upgrading to the most recent Tab S10 series from earlier models, so as I buy one, I'll list the one it's replacing to sell.

However, some of these Tabs can have quite high values, up to £700, therefore I'm *bleep* about the shipping I use and even detail in my listings that I'll only use RM Special Delivery.

There reasons for this are numerous

Firstly RMSD is tracked all the way through the system, every depot and truck, so I know where it is within RM's network.....that gives me peace of mind.

Secondly it has a one day guaranteed delivery time, the other new Simple Delivery options do not give a guaranteed time (and I wouldn't even contemplate using EVRI to delivery high value electronics items).

Thirdly, on the very rare cases where RMSD has gone wrong, I usually get a refund cheque inside a week, once it was three weeks when we had a too and fro about the packaging, but when I provided the photos of what was used they paid out.

Fourthly, as the delivery time is guaranteed it means I get paid faster by ebay.  I don't want to wait an extra three to four days before I get paid because there's now no premium shipping service.

Lastly, buyers like it, not everyone wants to save every last penny.  By buying RMSD in the Post Office my package is weighed and the weight is on the Postal Receipt, I photo this and send to the buyer so they can see exactly what was paid and that's what the RMSD premium pricing provides......Simple Delivery is just rubbish in comparison.

[jckl1957]

If you sell any items for over £750, they will not be eligible for Simple Delivery.

Otherwise, if your item is lost by the carrier or damaged in transit, it is covered for up to £750.

The buyer can select Express Tracked Delivery.

Most sellers don't like Simple Delivery.  However, as it is rolled out to become mandatory for all private sellers across the site, the options are limited to accepting it or removing your listings and trying to sell elsewhere.

[j.p.greenwood]

Did you read the OP properly?

"......Tabs can have quite high values, up to £700....."

[*vyolla*]

eBay's Simple Delivery is supposed to cover items up to £750, above that you can set your own postage method. 

But, would I use it to send an item that sells for a couple of hundred pounds and put it to the test? No way. I don't have receipts for my vintage pieces, so would be relying on eBay using the eBay sold item price as a price for compensation.

As you point out, RM Special Delivery is tracked every step of the way and is my preferred postage method for most of my items.

[wyntersemporium]

I have a private account and didn’t bother with stupid delivery. I bypassed it and went to RM itself and printed out my own label . Just send it via RM. 

[vinylscot]

A stated above, if the value goes over £750, SD shouldn't come into it at all.

However, assuming a sale at £700, if you select "seller pays" in simple delivery when you are listing, that is the same as selecting "free postage" under the old rules, with the difference being that eBay will charge the seller (you) for the price of their postage label, and deduct the price from the amount they pay you.

However, if that label is unused, you will be automatically refunded for it after a period of time (believed to be 30 days).

You can then use whatever postage method you choose, and you will be fully covered under Royal Mail's t's and c's. You won't receive the minor extra "protection" which SD offers, and you may need to manually advise the buyer of the tracking number, as eBay will populate the transaction with their tracking number. You may also need to wait a little longer for your payment - this seems to be how eBay proposes "punish" those who don't use their SD labels.

It's not ideal, and it's clumsy and amateur-looking, but it should work.

[j.p.greenwood]

I can't see a way to do that now......you get 'forced' down the path of using some kind of delivery.

Until I think Monday, you could choose 'Custom? Delivery' and then choose RMSD, that option was no longer available from yesterday.

[jckl1957]

I did read it.

Items up to £750 will be covered by Simple Delivery.

In the case of a claim for loss or damage in transit, you would not have to deal with the buyer and Ebay would compensate them.

I do understand you cynicism.  However, you are being suspicious and critical of a system which is, for you, untested.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sellercentre/postage/simple-delivery

Get full coverage for your items

From the moment your item is scanned by the courier until delivery confirmation, the full value of the item is covered against loss or damage during transit. Plus, you won’t have to worry about responding to buyer claims.

[j.p.greenwood]

Yea, I'm not finagling some "buy the postage from us, don't us it, we'll refund you later" nonsense, the whole point of using RMSD is all the info is in one place, thus me not having to work to track info elsewhere.

Also, as I said in the OP.

GUARANTEED DELIVERY TIME with 100% IN TRANSIT TRACKING - only RMSD provides this, so let me have what I and a lot of buyers want.

[j.p.greenwood]

Does Simple Delivery provide a 1 day delivery service? 

Does Simple Delivery track through every stage of shipping, every depot and every truck.

Please don't insult my intelligence by telling me I haven't tried something and am suspicious.  I've been doing this over twenty years and that valuable and expensively learnt experience has taught me what does and doesn't work.  There's NO REASON for E-Bay to remove Special Delivery service...so why have they?

[lucy_farmer]

'Get full coverage for your items

From the moment your item is scanned by the courier until delivery confirmation, the full value of the item is covered against loss or damage during transit. Plus, you won’t have to worry about responding to buyer claims.'

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Hello jckl,

 Not convinced about this at all 🙁

We have had a definitive (well, one of the definitive!) answers about what is and isn't covered under S.D. I think it came from Kat@ebay

And ; 'all items that conform to S.D. terms  and the carrier's terms. ' are indeed covered.

But the carrier's terms, include the 'excluded from compensation' list. All items on the excluded list are (supposedly) excluded from S.D.

The OP's tablet is one of the many items on the excluded list.

He really needs RM Special del. and the only way to get it is the ...."print S.D. 'seller pays' label, don't use it, post how you want, get the 30 refund of postage and wait 14 days for sale payment".

Yes a clunky and time-eating method. But the only one I can work out. 🙁

[j.p.greenwood]

And not something I would even consider......

RMSD was working as an option till yesterday, it works really well and provides a level of service that no current options provide, so why was it removed?

Any first year business student would tell you that REMOVING a service to replace it with an inferior offering is a terrible commercial decision to make, to offer the new INFERIOR (i.e. less feature rich) service, WITHOUT removing the premium offering makes sense as then you're giving your customers a choice.

There's no way I'd ever consider sending an item valued at anything over £200 by any service except RMSD, 20 years of expensive experience has taught me that all other options are a false economy, will invariable end up with me out of pocket and have to waste inordinate amounts of time arguing with courier call centre staff who are working from a script and don't have the tools to do the job properly.

[aphystykqa]

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@j.p.greenwood wrote:

There's NO REASON for E-Bay to remove Special Delivery service...so why have they?

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I totally agree with you, as 'Royal Mail Special Delivery' could still have been made easily available - as after all, Simple Delivery gives their only Two options of Royal Mail and Evri

Most of the items I advertised in the past ranged between £75 to £700 - and Royal Mail Special Delivery is what I generally use for 90% of my listings, as Royal Mail Recorded Delivery only gave £20 maximum compensation, and Royal Mail Tracked 24 or 48 service offers £150 Maximum Compensation. Royal Mail Special Delivery offers up to £2,500 which is awesome, and always gave piece of mind, as I could easily track it at every stage of where that parcel is at, and also once delivered, there was a photo taken of the parcel at the front door of the address it was sent to. It is the best service of all, and Ebay should have recognized this and adopted it.

But as for Evri. Well, since I mostly sell Vinyl Records, and Evri offers 'Zero' compensation for those and many other items on their extensive compensation exclusion list, then I certainly won't be using them, no matter how cheap or valuable an item is - https://www.evri.com/send/what-i-can-and-cannot-send

Thankfully Ebay allows us to cancel out one of those options and just offer Simple Delivery via Royal Mail only. But of course, many won't know this, as Ebay's first e-mail they sent out to all UK Private Sellers about Simple Delivery being made Mandatory, was not as helpful and transparent as it really should have been.

I am also frustrated when I read that those who don't possess a Smart-Phone (such as myself) - can use a Printer Instead, and they say that we can print labels - as though we all have sticky labels sat at home to print on - when of-course, that's not the case. I thought the advice would be only to simply print out the QR Code onto a piece of A4 or A5 sheet of white paper, and then take that along to the Post Office yourself, who would have the correct labels there. Not for us to do it ourselves. Honestly, this gets more and more confusing all the time, and Ebay had the audacity to title this service as Simple Delivery. Well, it's obviously not Simple - hence the massive backlash - and Ebay sellers feeling that they have no other choice but to remove all their listings, as posting a parcel as once-was - has suddenly proven ever so more problematic - and for some shall prove almost impossible, especially if they suffer from some (or more) Mental Disabilities 

[lucy_farmer]

'RMSD was working as an option till yesterday, it works really well and provides a level of service that no current options provide, so why was it removed?'

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Well, it  hasn't been removed, per se.... What has  been removed is your ability to choose anything other than S.D..

In other words you've just been 'rolled into' mandatory S.D.   We'll all be in sooner or later...☹️

Simple Delivery does have some good points - the 'covering loss and damage' point being the main one. For lots of items it's going to work fine....

But ebay have never made it plain that a rather large amount of items *won't* be covered. The evri exculsion list is as long as your arm ; and so, to be honest, is the RM one; but that's why RM offer special  delivery.

Ebay staff have said that 'items on the exclusion list are excluded from S.D'.

I don't believe that means they are excluded from the 'listing it ' end of the operation; I think that would be impossible considering just how much stuff/items would be affected.

I believe they'd simply be excluded from the compensation end of the process, should it be needed.

We won't really know, until some poor soul turns up on these boards, having had something 'on the list' broken or lost in the S.D. post.

They'll be wondering why ebay won't compensate after saying 'it's all ebay's responsibility now you've handed it over to us! '

I reckon the the answer from ebay is likely to be 'tough. You didn't read the 'small print'.

I hate to be so pessimistic about this whole thing, but I just can't see how else it'll work.

Otherwise, from ebay's point of view, they'll be risking dozy plonkers posting glass-jars wrapped in string and sealing wax and expecting compo from the inevitable breakages.....

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To anybody who doesn't know about the carrier's lists : there is the 'prohibited list'- items which carriers *will not* carry for safety reasons. (often includes batteries for carriers that use aircraft and don't want to risk mid-air fires)

And there are 'excluded from compensation' lists. Items that *will* happily be carried, but not paid out on if anything goes missing or is damaged. These tend to encompass anything breakable, fragile, expensive or vitally important!

(ebay have stated that 'fragile items' can be sent with S.D. Unfortunately most fragile items are on the exclusion lists....)

[j.p.greenwood]

I get that for many people SD will make sense.

However, for high value electronics items, so think all the phones, ipads, Tabs just as a starting point, using EVRI as a shipping option is a non starter for anyone who's done shipping for a while (just because the only five items you shipped got there OK doesn't mean much, when you've shipped hundreds of items and have had to deal with EVRI customer service more than once you'll never use them again) and as you've rightly pointed out the Simple Delivery likely won't cover high value items, as well as NOT offering a guaranteed delivery time, nor allowing tracking info to be visible all the way through the shipment process.

Is RMSD more expensive than other services, yep, but twenty years of doing this has taught me that using low cost delivery services is both a false economy and a potentially huge drain on my time and patience.

Simplistically, till RMSD is enabled again I'm out, as there's no way I'd be shipping £500 Tabs without the huge peace of mind that RMSD gives me.

[wintersdawn1]

If we go down the route of buying the SD postage label, not using it and getting refunded in 30 days, can we get rid of the eBay's SD tracking code and put our own in? Thanks.

[j.p.greenwood]

Someone else mentioned that as a suggestion.

Personally, I'm not buying two lots of postage and then having to track whether I got a refund on one of them, nor am I willing to wait 14? days for payment because E-Bay systems now can't track RMSD as they could a couple of days ago!! 

Oh The Humanity!!!!

[wintersdawn1]

Agreed, a private seller shouldn't have to go through all that rigmarole just to use their own postage label.

We've already had to go through enough hassle on account of eBay's relentless greed, which they put before anything or anyone else.

[ruby*ryan]

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@aphystykqa wrote:

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I am also frustrated when I read that those who don't possess a Smart-Phone (such as myself) - can use a Printer Instead, and they say that we can print labels - as though we all have sticky labels sat at home to print on - when of-course, that's not the case. I thought the advice would be only to simply print out the QR Code onto a piece of A4 or A5 sheet of white paper, and then take that along to the Post Office yourself, who would have the correct labels there

If you have a printer (to print out the QR code) why not just print the label and stick it on the parcel with tape?

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[j.p.greenwood]

Honestly, I don't mind greed if it provides a needed service.

What I do object to is the knee jerk reaction E-Bay implements things because they've continually shown they don't think things through properly.

To remove a service and replace it with an inferior offering and expect people not to kick of is just laughably the behaviour of someone with a mental age of ten.

There are people here that have already argued that the compensation is the same (although having read the small print this morning I'm not convinced), but even putting that aside, Simple Delivery does NOT provide a guaranteed delivery time, not does it provide the fantastically transparent and complete tracking info that Special Delivery does, for me, peace of mind when shipping items worth up to £700 is important enough for me not to do it if it gets too convoluted.