OT: eBay's Top Rated Seller Qualifications Suck

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by glchen

Howard, there is a quick way to fix your problem so that you can continue to maintain the ebay Top Rated Status. You need to change your Domestic Services Shipping Timeframe from Standard Services (1-5 business days) or First Class (2-5 business days) to Economy Shipping (1-10 business days). Ebay looks at two things when determining if you meet the late shipment rate condition. Either the tracking needs to be scanned within 1 business day of the when buyer pays or the package is scanned as delivered within the shipping timeframe that you set. Therefore, if your package does not get scanned when you drop it off, it just needs to get scanned when it is delivered. If you do Standard Services, you only get 5 business days, which a package can easily miss. However, if you go Economy, you get 10 business days, so this is able to catch that virtually all packages are scanned. By doing this, I have continued to easily maintain my Top Rated Status on my ebay store.

Using the economy option has worked well for me (even saved me a few times) on the small amount of mailings that did not receive an origin scan. However, do not forget that the other end of this is you will still have to create/print your label within the TRS 1-day handling time even though you may not drop the package off within the stated handling time in order to stay qualified for the TRS benefits.