eBay handling and dispatch times updates

eBay have added the option to manually set your handling and dispatch times for each day of the week rather than having a simple blanket policy across the board.

What did we get?

The main changes are that you can now:

• Set same day cut-off times for each day of the week

  You can now have a 2pm cut off on week days and 10am on Saturdays

• Choose your working days for each day of the week

  Don’t have a courier collection on Sundays? You’re not the only one so you can now specify it as a day off. However if you’re one of the few that do have collections on Sunday then why not offer Monday deliveries for weekend purchases?

The changes will be applied at account level from mid-November, to see these go to your Postage preferences settings. In the mean time, your default options will remain active until the new features are manually activated in your account settings. Any changes can take up to 24 hours to be reflected in buyer-facing delivery estimates.

The default cut-off time is 2pm (Monday – Friday). Saturday and Sunday are automatically considered non-working days unless you manually change this.

What did we want?

We’re liking this, if by any chance you knock off early on a Friday for pub o’clock work drinks (yeah I know, the pubs are all shut during lockdown at the moment) then you can have a late cut off time but shut up shop earlier on a Friday.

However, although it’s a start, and shows eBay are looking at cut off times, what we’d really like to see are two additional changes, namely:

• The ability to vary cut off times by carrier & service

  If Royal Mail collect from you at 3pm you might want a 2pm cut off but if your courier doesn’t collect until 5pm then why can’t you carry on selling until maybe 4pm for these items? One size doesn’t fit all as all carriers don’t turn up at the same time!

• The ability to very handling times by destination

  While it makes sense to have a cut off time for listings offering next day delivery, if an item is going to take two or three weeks’ transit time to Australia then how quickly you pick and pack the item is totally irrelevant. What might however be relevant is that you need to book an International Courier for overseas shipping and that might add a day or so to your despatch times.

What sellers need is more flexibility and be able to offer latest same day dispatch times and handling times by carrier, by service and by destination…

…and what sellers really really want, having specified next day shipping if you order by 2pm, is for eBay to then offer a search option so that buyers who want items in a hurry can actually find them! (Hint for eBay… If you added a search filter for eBay Premium Service listings then all the listings returned would have an option to upgrade to next day shipping.)

Postage Rate Table updates

Alongside this change, eBay are also launching a new Seller Postage Rate Table by the end of the month. This will let you create up to 40 postage rate tables for specific regions in your postage settings and easily manage multiple postage rate tables through the new user interface..