eBay not acting on unscrupulous seller practices

I have noticed that more and more sellers on eBay are marking orders as sent and adding a tracking number despite the item not actually being sent until days later -- or longer.

Through Australia Post (and some other freight companies), a tracking number can be generated in advance of the item actually being collected by Australia Post or dropped off to a post office.

When you track these deliveries on the Australia Post website or eBay, they show as something like "Shipping information received by Australia Post" with no tracking history.

Some unscrupulous eBay sellers are using this to falsely comply with their advertised posts within timeframe.

There are also plenty of sellers who don't maintain any stock locally and order from China as soon as you place an order.

eBay does display a wide potentially delivery date window, so often even if the item is not posted within the advertised number of days, it can still arrive within the window.

I recently dealt with a seller that marked my order as sent and added one of these tracking numbers. After a week it was still not showing with any tracking history, so hadn't yet made it to Australia Post.

What can you do in this situation? As far as eBay is concerned, the order has been sent but not delivered so you can't open an item not received dispute until the maximum estimated delivery date.

You can request a refund from the seller earlier, but if they don't accept refunds then there is no obligation (through eBay) for them to provide a refund at this point in the process.

Unfortunately, while eBay continue to tolerate this practise, all you can do is wait for your order to arrive and if you feel like the seller has not acted appropriately, share your opinion via negative or neutral feedback to potentially warn others.

If it doesn't arrive by the maximum estimated delivery date then you can open a dispute, but you will have to wait for up to another seven days for the seller to either respond and either provide a refund or dispute your dispute. If they don't respond after seven days then you can make another request for eBay to step in and provide the refund.

According to eBay Australia's seller standards policy, eBay do actually monitor the actual shipment date (based on the first scan) when a tracking number is entered. But a high late shipment rate on its own won't cause a seller's account to be evaluated as "below standard". A low rate is only required for "top rated status". So this means that if the seller does not also have a high number of cancelled orders or certain types of disputes then there is zero punishment for sellers who don't ship within their advertised handling time.

Perhaps eBay could add a dispute process for item not shipped within the advertised number of business days, so that buyers actually have the opportunity to report this practice.



But given that eBay still allow other unscrupulous seller practices we shouldn't hold our breath for any action in this space.

Another unscrupulous practice is allowing sellers to list different types of items in the same listing so that an item will appear in search results as a lower price. For example, sellers can list a toaster for $20, but they can also add an option to the listing for something unrelated like a $1 keyring so then the toaster shows up in listings at $1 (or $1 to $20 depending on which device and/or app is in use).

Or what about this listing for a sofa cover that shows up first when you search and filter by lowest price? You can buy 1 seater cover for $16.14 or you can select "free to contact us" for $1.08.

eBay should only allow one type of product with only variations in a single listing.