Is eBay Changing Sellers' Working Days & Cutoff Times Without Their Knowledge?
Sellers are reporting listings showing extra long delivery estimates or being required to ship orders on Sundays - is eBay changing their working day and cutoff time settings without their knowledge?
A seller in the eBay community who goes by the ID gurlcat reported eBay was showing an 8 day shipping window on a recent order, even though the handling time set should have only been 1 business day, and that listings showed a very extended estimated delivery timeframe to potential buyers.
Look at this new one for an item I just sold about an hour ago. EIGHT days to ship?!!
Ooookay, no, no , no. Something is WRONG-wrong. I don't know why neither of us thought of this before, but take a look at the ETA for any of my current (live) listings. -Here's what I see from my buyer account, which obviously has the same zip code as my seller account. But of course I checked and my stated handling time for that item is still 1-day.
And no, I don't have any recent history of exceeding my handling time, maybe a couple in the past few months and only by 1 day. So the ETA software shouldn't be inflated for any reason. This is no bueno, probably costing me some sales.
A little detective work and help from longtime community member wastingtime101 revealed the issue may be related Working Days and Same Day Cutoff settings - but strangely, this seller said she had never even seen that page and definitely didn't set it up to show Sunday as the only working day.
Gurlcat provided a screenshot of her Working Days and Same Day Cutoff settings, which had mysteriously been set to only include Sunday as a working day.
Wastingtime101 explained how this setting could cause the issue either the extended shipping/delivery times and how to fix it, while also sharing there have been similar reports by other sellers.
And we have an answer @gurlcat. Your ship days are screwed up.
By default, no days on that page are checked for any seller. Once a seller checks days, they can no longer leave all days unchecked because you'll get an error message (at least that's how it was a few months ago). So this is what you need to do:
UNCHECK Sunday
CHECK Mon-Fri
For Mon-Fri, on the time drop-down, select Not Offered
Save changes
What's happening, is the system sees that you ship on Sunday, and only Sunday. So you have 1 biz day handling time, but a week added to all estimated delivery dates.
Note the hard-to read fine print at the bottom of that page:
Select the time by which you must receive cleared payment for an order to qualify for same business day handling. Your delivery estimates depend on your selected working days, separate from same-day cut-off times. The time it takes you to dispatch is set when creating a listing.
In other words, the times are for same-day cut off. But once you check boxes you are also telling eBay which days you ship.
It's very non-intuitive.
You're not the first seller I've seen with Sunday checked off that wasn't familiar with that page. So maybe you checked it by accident? Or maybe there's some setting on eBay that's interfering and causing that box to be checked without sellers knowledge. I don't know. BUT at least I can tell you how to fix it.
A recent reddit post also raised questions about Work Day and Same Day Shipping settings when the seller said they surprised to receive an order that needed to be shipped by Sunday, January 7th when they had never been required to ship on a Sunday before.
Ship by Sunday?!
by u/Noho_Fuches in Ebay
We have next day shipping settings and whenever we sell something on Friday or Saturday it says “ship by Monday” but now all our orders say “ship by Sunday January 7th” How am I supposed to get an acceptance scan on a Sunday???
While this seller has not confirmed what their Work Day and Same Day Shipping Cutoff settings are, it's possible this issue may be related to the other reports of eBay making changes to those settings without sellers' knowledge.
Have you seen anomalies in your eBay shipping/delivery times? Check your Work Day and Same Day Shipping Settings and let us know in the comments below if they have been changed!
