eBay Seller Metrics and Royal Mail Tracked 24 & 48 concerns

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We’ve heard from a couple of sellers in the past week, that eBay and Royal Mail‘s Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 services aren’t working as well together as might be hoped. There are a number of separate issues which added together can make it a tiresome pain point for retailers.

eBay Delivery expectations for Royal Mail Tracked 24 & Tracked 48
Firstly, a retailer was surprised to hear that they didn’t qualify for eBay’s premium service badge and were told this was because Royal Mail Tracked 24 isn’t a service which delivers on the next day. eBay say that to qualify for eBay Premium Service, you have to offer ‘1-day or same-day dispatch’ and ‘An express delivery option – offering delivery within 1 day’.

Whilst eBay display the delivery expectation on the postage section buyers as for Tracked 24 ‘1 day’, Royal Mail say of the service “We aim to deliver Royal Mail Tracked 24 the next working day but deliveries to certain postcode areas may take longer”. That doesn’t seem good enough to be classed as delivery within 1 day for eBay, even though perversely they tell buyers that a 1 day service is what they can expect.

Similarly eBay indicate to buyers that Tracked 48 items will be delivered within 2 days, not the 2-3 days which Royal Mail anticipate.

Are acceptance scans happening for Royal Mail Tracked 24 & Tracked 48?
The next issue concerns Royal Mail acceptance scans. Typically if you take your mail to a Post Office, Royal Mail will have an acceptance scan for each individual parcel. Not so for retailers who pay for a business collection, you bag up your parcels and the collection postie simply scans a collection bar code on a notice in your warehouse for the entire collection. Crucially, each individual parcel isn’t scanned on collection.

One seller looked at his reports and found Tracked 48 scan at delivery is being shown in the report as first scan and so its shows on eBay as late despatch / late delivery.

Are you seeing problems with your eBay On-Time delivery metrics?
We know that many Tamebay readers will use Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 services – we know that it’s well priced and a quality service compared to alternatives.

It’s worth bearing in mind that eBay have protected sellers from late deliveries when shipping with Tracked 24 and Tracked 48. Protection ended on the 1st of March, so you may only recently have had your eTRS status reassessed with these deliveries taken into account for the first time.

Let us know in comments below, if you use Tracked 24 and Tracked 48, if you are seeing any issues with your eBay metrics. We’d also be interested to hear from you if you do use these Royal Mail services and your metrics are fine.