What To Do If An eBay Buyer Requests Delayed Shipment
Buyers and sellers have been asking eBay for years for an easy way to buyers to request a delay in shipment without it causing any harm to the seller's account status.
While it's not exactly easy, an eBay community rep did confirm in last week's chat that as long as the request is made through the eBay messaging system, the seller can call customer support to have the late shipment ding removed.
When is eBay going to recognize that buyers sometimes wish to delay delivery after buying an item? How can a seller respond to buyer requests that will result in a late shipment according to eBay? Who is right - the buyer or eBay?
A late shipment ding can be appealed by Customer Support if the buyer requested you to delay shipment after they paid. Just make sure that the conversation happened in eBay messages or as a note to you when they checked out (CS will need to be able to see the message from the buyer).
It's a good start, but sellers shouldn't have to rely on an appeal process that under-trained customer support personnel may not understand or be informed they have the ability to action.
A better solution for eBay's tech led reimagination would be to create a way for the buyer to submit the request when completing the transaction and have the system automatically adjust the expected shipping date accordingly, thus avoiding any "dings" in the first place and not adding additional call volume to an already overburdened support system.
I had a customer open THREE separate INAD cases back to back in Feb. She told a bunch of falsehoods in her comments on the case and refused to provide pictures to back up what she was saying, so I called her out on in it with proof that her statements were untrue.
Even though I knew she was trying to scam me, of course, I approved the returns [all 3] and provided a pre-paid shipping label.
She never sent anything back. I got 3 messages from eBay's system saying "We've closed your buyer's return because we have no record that they shipped the item back to you."
However, eBay's system counted all of them against me in my Service Metrics, causing my "Item not as described returns" rate to be: 0.98% even though the buyer was an obvious scammer and didn't return the items.
I didn't have to refund her since she never shipped anything back so there's not a problem there and eBay did remove her feedback, but eBay still counted the cases against me in my 'service metrics' percentage making me look bad in comparison to my peers.