Thank you for taking the live questions. I wanted help with an issue where we set the same day cut off time for handling the order to 3PM and we clear all orders before that time on the day. We then have staff working an evening shift from 3pm to 8pm who I need to continue processing the next days orders. The problem we have faced since doing this our late delivery rate went from 0.25 for years to 2.5% so we stopped.

The postal service selected is Royal Mail 48/2nd class and cut off set to 3pm so the buyer will see shipping when purchasing as 2 to 4 days from the next day.

Royal Mail get the mail at 8pm but they don’t process it until the next day.

I don’t see an difference to a private seller/smaller seller using ebay labels and printing a shipping label for Royal Mail in the evening and then taking it to the post box the next day.

The difference is we need to do this on thousands of orders each week so we are worried our late delivery late will go sky high when it’s not actually late.

We are unsure if eBay are counting the first day as the day we mark the order as shipped which could be 8pm.

Could you advise?