royal mail Now started charging 30 pence for collecting Simple delivery ebay parcels

[tickswift2]

Royal mail are now charging 30 pence for collecting postage labels that were purchased using simple delivery

so now ebay Labels that you have to purchase with no other alternative option Sellers are getting charged with 30 pence per item // Just happened to 

[akemp1]

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@vinylscot wrote:

Some of the postings on this board have been laughable in their over-reaction.

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Some sellers have invested a lot of time in creating large quantities of listings in the expectation that ebay would remain a reasonable selling platform for the time it takes them to sell. Surely you can understand why they are feeling emotional that the proposition has deteriorated so quickly? Especially after ebay did the crazy period with no fees.

I can't see this settling down for ebay unless they make substantial changes as their position is now so unreasonable and wasteful (eg no combined buyer fee or postage) and the competition are doing this stuff significantly better such that their users don't hate it.

[wintersdawn1]

So, with this new change, if a private seller puts buyer to pay postage on a listing and when it sells and the buyer pays ebay for the postage label and ebay sends the private seller the label they then have to go to the royal mail website and pay an additional 30p to have the item they have sold collected.

The main problem I see is that the private seller can't add this additional cost to the postage as they have no control over postage prices once simple delivery is mandatory and is just another way the private seller is losing out.

[technthread]

Until some point last year (maybe the year before) there was an extra charge for Post Office drop offs of certain size parcels. I think it was an extra 16p on a Tracked48 small parcel and one day they just stopped the extra charges. 

I wonder if this home collection charge will go away eventually. As useful as these collections can be they can also be a real pain when they happen a lot later than the ETA, or don’t happen at all and they email after 4pm to let you know it failed. That’s not the end of the world when it’s free but I wouldn’t pay for it personally. 

[vinylscot]

I have no inside knowledge of eBay's contract with RM, but I have been involved in contracts involving a fraction of eBay's volume, and these regularly involved savings of over £1.00 per package. eBay will easily achieve that figure, probably significantly more.

This is how huge sellers like MusicMagpie and WorldOfBooks manage to offer free postage on items which often cost only a couple of quid, often less than the postage would cost for you or me. The difference there is that these sellers are passing the savings on to their customers. eBay is not.

[parsley2003]

Yes that and the packing materials though i recycle a lot there's still tape, paper, printer ink, envelopes and card, it adds up to quite a lot

[department28]

I don't mind paying RM a collection fee. I do mind eBay charging much higher prices for RM if you deselect Evri.

And can someone confirm that there a price difference for a Simple Delivery postage label, depending on who pays, buyer or seller? If so, why?!

All this 'seller pays/buyer pays' business is really kettling my swede... 

[the-nutwood-collection]

 ... then have to go to the royal mail website and pay an additional 30p to have the item they have sold collected.

I can't understand how a charge can be made for a managed shipping label.  If the sender buys a label, RM have their charge card data from the purchase transaction - so they can charge another 30p.  When T24/48 sent via the PO cost 20p (before the option existed to include the charge in the original transaction) my card was charged 20p for every package.

But ... the sender hasn't paid for the label - eBay has paid for the label.  Therefore, eBay should be charged 30p. 

To charge the sender, RM would have to recognise the transaction as eBay managed shipping and provide a dialogue box to collect the card details of the sender - which would be a crazy amount of bother and development cost to garner 30p.

Am I missing something here?  I'm a business seller, and can't get my head around this managed shipping fandango with labels and freepost and who gets refunded and when.  Also, I've only used the collection service once for a 12 kilo parcel that I didn't fancy hauling to the PO.  RM failed to collect - probably thought it was too heavy for the postie to manage - so I had to deal with it myself.

[akemp1]

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@parsley2003 wrote:

Yes that and the packing materials though i recycle a lot there's still tape, paper, printer ink, envelopes and card, it adds up to quite a lot

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Yeah but in practice I chose to absorb that but I resent ebay's intent to force us to that.

[jackthebordercollie]

Same here.  With eBay fees and now postage fees I’m going to lose a lot of money 

[bobbingirl2013]

why don't you use Royal Mail collection ?  and why should I subsidise your trip to the Post Office ?  Your argument is ridiculous !!! 

[akemp1]

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@bobbingirl2013 wrote:

why don't you use Royal Mail collection ?  and why should I subsidise your trip to the Post Office ?  Your argument is ridiculous !!! 

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I don't need royal mail collection as I am out for most of the day so it would be inconvenient to schedule and a waste of their resources. I think you may have misunderstand my point.

The 30p is a contribution to the costs of RM performing a collection so that the cost is not built into the main postage product that the rest of us buy. If the cost was built into the main postage product then it would be those of us who do not use collection subsidising those that do.

So in itsself the 30p is not unreasonable. However is causes a problem with SD as it's another P&P related cost that ebay expects the seller to absorb in their item price.

[tom-sales-london]

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@peturning wrote:

What we do need is more postage products though,there's a big gap between Tracked and Special Delivery services that needs filled. Something with £150-£750 of insurance for example, SD is great but expensive and it's annoying how often you have to use this expensive service because Tracked doesn't offer enough insurance.

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Business accounts with Royal Mail got access to a cheaper Special Delivery product a year or two ago without the "by 1pm" guarantee. So same £750 insurance/priority handling but just without the 1pm which made it cheaper.

Would probably benefit retail customers from cheaper prices and RM would prefer it as the extra effort of getting to places by 1pm, but part of the problem for personal services is they can only sell regulated services VAT free (and the by 1pm is a regulated service, introducing an extra service at the moment would require VAT to be charged and make it uneconomical to offer).

[dch2112011]

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@the-nutwood-collection wrote:

Am I missing something here?  I'm a business seller, and can't get my head around this managed shipping fandango with labels and freepost and who gets refunded and when. 

The way SD works is that the buyer chooses and pays the shipping cost to ebay on behalf of the seller - any postal label cost refund goes back to the payment source  ie the buyer on behalf of the seller

Therefore the cost of an extra service by a third party carrier such as collection from home is the responsibility of the seller  as is the cost to deliver the parcel by a seller to a carrier collection point.

It is not rocket science all a seller has to do to recover the cost of collection if they want or need to use it  is add the collection cost to their sale price as they would do with packaging. 

If this makes their items more expensive so be it - the other alternative is absorb the cost in line with most sellers incurring the cost of delivering the package to a collection point.

Why would anybody think that someone using collection should be cost free when the vast majority delivering to a collection point incur costs ?

This is not discrimination against disabled, ill or busy private sellers - it is a very normal fact of selling with delivery no matter what the individual's circumstance, business, non business.

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[podlingsmum2007]

You have copied this from a post by Value Added Resource. They are not your words.

[podlingsmum2007]

It would not surprise me if The Post Office introduced a processing fee for Simple Delivery labelled parcels. The staff of the small family run post office I use told me they are receiving the same volume of parcels but are not selling any labels themselves and without revenue would be unable to pay their overheads. They are concerned that Simple Delivery could cause them to shut their doors and are having to wait and see how it pans out for them.

[valueaddedresource]

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@podlingsmum2007 wrote:

You have copied this from a post by Value Added Resource. They are not your words.

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@podlingsmum2007  to clarify, it's the other way around - that was a quote of a post pulled from this thread.

[podlingsmum2007]

Oh I see. Sorry I am mistaken 

[snowylilliput-2]

Add this 30p on top off all private sellers are not being able to recover any type off packaging costs . I know ebay say you should add a small amount to each listing to cover this which means they take more fees from buyers . Maybe only small on one parcel but over 1000s it all starts to mount up . I am not sure if other sellers have also noticed prices are falling at a time when any type off sale is getting harder . I do understand Ebay have to take some sort fee but there must be a fairer way off doing this both for sellers and buyers . I am not sure if other private have taken a look at the buisness selling boards who are also moaning about how this has affected them as well . I am wondering how many people who has seen the latest Vinted advert on tv which now mentions there buyers protection because off all the bad press since Ebay have copied then.  

[dch2112011]

The private seller no longer pays any fees, so theoretically the advertised price has been reduced by the seller by removing the seller fees - this price will still include the packaging costs - it is not something new !

The proportion of buyers fees paid on any packaging element is hardly noticeable -  a plastic bag and some bubble wrap or a box and bubble wrap for an individual package would be less than a pound and only a few pence if the seller bought in bulk  - so the buyer would pay a few pence on the costs hidden in the sellers price.

No buyer looks at an item price and analyses the price to care what proportion of the fee is paid on packaging, item cost, the sellers electricity bill, the printer ink,  or the amount a seller might have increased the price to pocket the difference.

A buyer only looks at the total price of the item - or the item price and the postage .

The difference between seller fees and the new buyer fees are the  the difference between 30p plus 12% and 75p plus 4% which marginally increases some prices but equally reduces other prices !  (unless the seller has not reduced their price by the old seller fees in which case the buyer is paying both sets of fees )

[vinylscot]

Post cancelled - clarified later. Thank you for the apology.