eBay and Amazon advised sellers about weather delays as winter storms had a severe impact on those living in Texas and elsewhere this week where shipping and delivery were ground to a halt.
eBay updated its initial post on Wednesday and said it was displaying a message about delays buyers when they checked tracking information. “Winter weather conditions are still disrupting transportation lines across parts of the US. We previously announced seller protections for these weather delays and we are expanding those to also cover defects resulting from transactions you cancelled,” eBay wrote in the announcement.
Amazon posted a banner on its site this week (in at least some areas it read, “Extended delivery time due to weather in your area”).
Amazon also posted an announcement for sellers impacted by the severe winter storms. “If the storm and any resulting seller-fulfilled order issues affect your performance metrics, please include a brief description of how your business was impacted when you respond to any related performance notification in Seller Central. We will mitigate any impact to your account health as a result of the severe weather and its effects on your operations.”
Amazon provided some actions sellers could take “to help protect your business,” such as temporarily setting seller-fulfilled listings to inactive.”
The announcement on Amazon Seller Central generated much comment. One seller responded by asking if Amazon sellers shipping to Texas would get dinged for delays.
Sellers should respond to this trend of impatient buyers by blocking Texans from buying. #ProblemSolved
Ebay is 100% not protecting sellers at this time from the storm defects. My most recent evaluation has two marks for tracking not uploaded on time even though we had no power for 3 days and our local PO was closed that entire time.
When asked about it I was told by Ebay on 3/1: “You can still expect to see shipment defects automatically removed in the coming two weeks for the time, and areas impacting by the significant weather. If you are still seeing them there in two weeks time, let us know. But these are being removed in batches, and you can still expect to see these removed”.
This was the same story with Hurricane Harvey. It took me two months and evaluation cycles to get those off my defect report. Ebay always says one thing and does another….I feel bad for high volume sellers in Texas right now being affected by this event which was completely out of their control.