eBayUK Warns Sellers Of Royal Mail Price Changes
eBayUK has posted the following announcement regarding Royal Mail price increases set to go into effect in April.
Dear Seller,
Royal Mail have recently announced that they are updating their consumer and business postage prices, effective from 4 April 2022.If you use the eBay labels platform, please expect to see prices updated as follows:
For a full list of Royal Mail’s price changes in 2022, click here.
Thank you for selling on eBay,
The eBay Team.
A seller in the eBayUK community also brought up some challenges posed by new Royal Mail Europe zones and had some suggestions for eBay to help sellers adjust their shipping options accordingly.
I read recently that from April 4th Royal Mail is dividing Europe into three zones with different prices, the details are here
https://www.royalmail.com/sending/international/country-guides
So using the listing tool as it currently stands (and the new listing tool that I've seen a preview of), it's not possible to set correct postage prices for countries in the different zones. As far as I can see to cover costs you would have to set a postage price for all of Europe, overcharging countries in zone 1 and 2. I can see you can set special prices for some countries, like Germany, etc but Denmark in zone 1 for example is not possible to specify individually.
This seems like something that would be simple to implement in the listing tool - just add tick boxes for Royal Mail Europe Zone 1, Europe Zone 2, Europe Zone 3, each of which would be associated with the relevant list of the countries, in the same way that you can select "European Union" at the moment for example.
While implemementing this it would be great if the same thing could be done for World Zones 1, 2 and 3 as the same problem exists there, it's impossible to specify correct postage for many of the countries in the cheaper world zone 1 as they are not listed individually. (countries in each zone are listed in the same link above)
Another seller agreed - adding in that eBay needs to provide options for sellers to have tracked and untracked shipping selections for each zone.
Yes, absolutely agree. I've raised this before as well but nothing was done. Also, as there are now 6 different international zones, ebay need to increase the number of international ostage options you can set. Currentl you can only have a maximum of five. You need to have the option of adding twelve so that, if you want, you can add a tracked and an untracked for each zone.
The original poster followed up after crunching some numbers:
Having looked at the new postage leaflet I thought it was worth revisiting this with some numbers in the hope that someone from ebay might look at this as it seems to me that it would benefit buyers, sellers and ebay itself - katie@ebay is this something you think you could pass on or that might be looked at?
I'm looking at the new price list here:
https://www.royalmail.com/sites/royalmail.com/files/2022-03/royal-mail-our-prices-april-2022-v2.pdfSo to take an example, Denmark is in Europe Zone 1, Iceland is in Europe Zone 3. The listing form does not let you specify either country individually.
A 2kg Tracked and Signed parcel to Europe Zone 1 is £15.15, the same to Europe Zone 3 is £16.80. Assuming 15% added on top of stamp price to account for ebay's fees you get £17.43 and £19.32.
So as it is, for the European shipping price you choose to cater for all countries you have to use the higher zone 3 price for all of Europe, ie almost £2 more (and of course for EU countries buyers will see approx 20% VAT on top of the shipping cost)
This 2kg tracked and signed parcel is the worst case but even on a standard parcel at 750g, zone 1 buyers will be overcharged a pound...
...Overall it's just frustrating not to be able to price international shipping properly when it would be easy to do so, especially when you bear in mind the increase in international shipping costs generally over the last couple of years as well as the added friction post Brexit.
An eBayUK community team member responded:
I have reported this to our teams to have this looked into. While I don't have an exact timeframe as to when this can be implemented I can assure you, our teams will work to get this looked into as soon as possible.
Are you a UK based seller? How are these rate increases affecting your business & is there more that marketplaces like eBay could be doing to help provide accurate shipping quotes? Let us know in the comments below!
