We’ve been examining shipping estimations on eBay for the past few days and it would appear that they have extended the estimated delivery times displayed to customers. From what we can see eBay have turned the Royal Mail 48 service promise into what displays to buyers as something more like a Royal Mail 120 service.
It’s tricky to tie down exactly what’s going on without knowing every sellers’ settings for handling time and cut off time, however we have established that for an item purchased on Wednesday this week, with a seller who’s promise is to ship on Thursday via Royal Mail Tracked 48, that the delivery estimate displayed to buyers is Monday to Wednesday – effectively 3-5 days or what we’ve dubbed Royal Mail 120.
There is no question that extending delivery promises is the right thing to do in a pandemic – there’s still a chance you might get an item after 3 days but if a buyer then goes back to eBay to ask why their item hasn’t arrived they’ll see the estimated delivery range still has a couple more days to go. Hopefully this will deter them from pestering hard working sellers who are at the mercy of their carriers.
However, on the downside it does now make it impossible to find items with fast shipping and it looks to buyers as if many items could take anything up to a week to arrive and that could potentially put some off buying. It also makes some other economy services look like they are remarkably fast as their estimated delivery windows are faster than Royal Mail 120.
The situation is similar for Royal Mail Tracked 24 where it appears the estimated transit time is now 2-4 days.
We’d like to note, our comments here aren’t intended to as a dig at Royal Mail or any other carrier. Royal Mail Posties are working their socks off to deliver the post so we’re presenting this as the reality of living in a pandemic rather than as a complaint.
Actual Delivery Experiences
We’ve already noted the actual delivery results from one Tamebay reader who reported 54% of Royal Mail 48 items posted arrived on the 7th day with 12% still not delivered by the 10th day.
These real delivery results are actually worse than what we’ve dubbed the Royal Mail 120 service, so we wanted to establish how quickly parcels really do arrive, not just via Royal Mail but with random carriers across multiple marketplaces.
Tamebay Black Friday Delivery Speed Test
Today we start a Tamebay Black Friday Delivery Speed Test. We’ve made a raft of purchases across multiple marketplaces with a variety of estimated delivery dates and different carriers. We accepted whatever the first postage offered was and also, noting that on Amazon all purchases were from Amazon FBA, wanted to see if Amazon Logistics would carry out the deliveries or if alternative carriers were used.
All purchases were made between 10.15am and 10.30am on Black Friday 2020, the 27th of November. We will be regularly updating results until all items are received. Much more important than speed, what we really want to know is if delivery promises are met. It’s worth noting the estimated delivery times have been pushed out by the marketplaces to anything up to 10 days or more.
As a side note, the prize goes to a seller on OnBuy for being first, in our Tamebay Black Friday Delivery Speed Test, to mark an item as despatched which was at 12.24pm.