Trouble w/ Guaranteed Delivery Metrics

[T-Satt]

Below are the excerpts from our discussion on how the Guaranteed Delivery metrics have a very low number

Hello Troy,

I had planned to call you tonight regarding the eBay Guaranteed Delivery program. Unfortunately, I was in a meeting at the time and could not call. I found information for you about the evaluation period for eBay Guaranteed Delivery. The eBay Guaranteed Delivery dashboard reflects the past 50 transactions over the previous 2 weeks. If you don’t have 50 transactions, the dashboard goes up to 4 weeks to get the 50 transaction minimum. We still show you meet the requirements for the Jan 31, 2018 evaluation. If you have any questions please reply to this e-mail.

Thanks,

eBay Concierge

So my next question is what is considered a transaction? As you can see on our account, we have more than 50 shipments per week.

Can I see the full report of how we are measured? Not just the defects, but the full report?

Troy

Hello Troy,

For the guaranteed delivery seller dashboard, we look back two weeks. The minimum requirement within that two weeks will be 50 transactions, we will not stop at 50 if you go over the amount, but if you are under the 50 we will expand to a 4 week look back.

Whenever the buyer completes check out with one of your items include we will consider this a “transaction”. If a buyer buys 3 items from you but checks out all 3 at once, we will consider this one transaction. If a buyer does 3 separate transactions and checks out individually we will count it as 3 transactions.

There is not a way to download the report of all the transactions being considered in the 2 week look back, only the transactions that have defects are in the report. I know you said you were not looking for it, but in case you wanted the defect report we do provide I attached it to this email.

Thanks,
eBay Concierge

What dates are the 53 transactions taking place over? Based on my numbers

Sales 12/17-12/23: 73
Sales 12/24-12/30: 58
Sales 12/31-01/06: 62

Based on the sales that I have had, using only 53 transactions is not even a full week within that timeframe, much less a full two weeks. Can you provide the beginning and ending date of this evaluation, and let me know why you are only seeing 53 transactions?

Thanks for your help in understanding this metric and resolving this. I realize that some of this is new, but I want to ensure I understand the metrics to make sure that our process is complying, as well as ensuring that I understand the metrics that are being displayed on Seller Hub.

I can certainly appreciate your concern about the difference in the numbers on the dashboard compared to the number of actual transactions you’ve had over the evaluation period. The reason for the discrepancy is that not every transaction is going to be eligible for guaranteed delivery because different services take varying times to get to different places in the world. For example, if we look specifically at 162848666887 and put in a zip code for New York since it’s farther than most from your location (I used 10020,) the media mail option puts the delivery estimate as late as February 9 (this being calculated on January 30.) In this case, since the estimated delivery date is beyond 4 days, we wouldn’t give this transaction the eBay Guaranteed Delivery status, which would then not include it on your dashboard.

At present, we don’t have a tool that will separate the specific transactions that are counting from those that are not. Guaranteed Delivery is still a very new program, and going through a lot of changes as we perfect it, so this is something I’d be happy to recommend implementing to give sellers better tools to guarantee their success.

<They don’t have my follow up, but I was essentially still trying to understand that if the buyer chooses a shipping option that they think would not get delivered in their timeframe, they don’t consider that transaction as counting for their EGD metrics.>

Great follow up questions. To start, yes, you got it. Only sales that would qualify for EGS are included in he metric. You had mentioned that you weren’t sure why you had such a low numbers of sales that qualify. I want to address that the best I can, because with Guaranteed Delivery, it helps to think of it as a two step qualification. The first step is the listing, and how it shows in the search results. Having that priority option that does ensure the guaranteed delivery along with your same day handling time will ensure you’re listings come up in search when a buyer filters by guaranteed delivery. This increased visibility is one of the biggest benefits of the program and absolutely, 100% of your listing meet this requirement. The second qualification piece comes in the actual transaction, which is based entirely on the expected delivery time. Even priority shipping can’t be guaranteed within 4 days to all locations (AK and HI seldom get the guarantee.) Also, many buyers prefer to save money than get an item fast, so they’ll go the first class route, which will also push out that delivery date. We don’t include transactions where first class, or another option that would fall outside that 5 days, on the dashboard because there’s not a guaranteed date that we could hold you to. It comes down to if it met the guarantee, didn’t meet the guarantee, or there wasn’t a guarantee to meet. If there wasn’t a guarantee to meet, we can’t include it with the other data.

So it boils down to the EGD metrics are currently only counting transactions that they think would have been part of EGD. So media mail, SmartPost, and many First Class transactions are not part of the metric. So looking at our numbers, about 1/3 of our transactions would “count” towards EGD. That means that the number of evaluated transactions is much smaller, so if we get a scan missed, or miss some packages, we are out of EGD pretty quickly until the next evaluation.

That was our warning originally. When they had the issue of losing 7 of our tracking numbers, suddenly we get the message that we are out of EGD for not meeting the metric. These 7 were eBay’s fault, but they messaged us anyway. Fixed now, but still…

[Jay]

Thanks for sharing this conversation. eBay doesn’t do it itself any favors by making it so complicated, and then not giving sellers the right tools to see the measurements. It’s all so opaque.

[Author]

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