What if the item is still in transit when the buyer contacts us?
If the item is still in transit, eBay will consider the delivery estimate in the listing. If tracking indicates that the item should arrive within the delivery estimate plus a reasonable amount of additional time (3 days in most cases), the buyer will be told to wait and the seller will not be held accountable. If tracking indicates that the item will arrive outside this timeframe or is lost in transit, the seller may be held accountable.

The thing that really bothers me about the new dispute resolution is that they take the “expected” transit time into consideration. They basically say they consider the item lost in the mail if it is currently 3 or more days late. USPS doesn’t even consider items lost until 30 days after shipping (14 days for some types of mail).

An example would be buying something priority from Hawaii with the expected transit time of 5 days. I can file on the 8th if it hasn’t arrived yet and I could win even if the item arrives on the 9th. What’s even worse is that they say that if tracking indicates it will arrive after the 8th day the buyer can still win. So if I order something shipped via UPS and the tracking says (at any point in time) that it will take until the 9th or longer the buyer can win. I guess the good news is that sellers can supposedly appeal and if they win eBay eats the loss. Last time I was given the option to appeal on PayPal though I was told “Appeal – allow the buyer to keep the item and the money” (not my idea of an appeal).

My experience with PayPal is that they’ve waited two or more weeks to allow the item to arrive before finding against me which was more than fair given that it had been 2 weeks since payment.

Announcement delay – anything to do with new view item page not being compatible with IE7 etc. for all listings with a revision? Revision includes quantity top up and so is a chunky proportion of listings.

eBay….Paypal they are the same animal I doubt anything will improve for sellers, just allow buyers to be more innocently criminal.

(I don’t believe that buyers realise denying receipt of an item is actually theft like illegal downloading…)

Totally agree – guess the changes were over-hyped before the announcement. Given the stagnation in the Ebay core marketplace, and that they are now limited to rolling out changes 2 x a year, it’s very surprising there’s not a raft of radical changes afoot.

Next week’s quarterly earnings announcement will make interesting reading – maybe they’ll come in ahead of expectations as I can’t see anything here that will fundamentally re-invigorate the marketplace.

With this in mind, it’s interesting that Ebay is pulling the dispute resolution process, and shipping label production in house.

Ebay management majored on Paypal during the recent Investors day, and the moves above give Ebay end to end control of a transaction life-cycle – a pre-requisite to any intention of severing the Paypal / Ebay knot.

Its more of an advanced graphic display function than useful, multiple large images do the same function/serve the same purpose, but don’t look so good as a user interactive tool does, which is what can make a listing using those tools stand out from one that isn’t.

To demonstrate, here is one of my completed eBay listings using the magnify tool. http://prune.it/6dKG

Problem is, to use zoom or magnify tools, seller need to up their game in terms of image quality, as for both zoom or magnify, larger clearer images are required to make best use of the functionality.