eBay Continues Seller Performance Rating Protection to Sellers Affected by Severe Weather in the US

Last week, eBay announced it would protect the performance ratings of sellers impacted by severe weather that affected much of the East Coast.

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But with another storm this week affecting parts of the Midwest and that is continuing to move to the East Coast, eBay confirmed it will continue to support sellers and protect the seller ratings for all sellers impacted by winter storms and other weather events.

“Severe storms and flooding have been frequent during the last several months. We want you to rest assured that while we may not always announce measures we’re taking to protect you every time a disruptive weather event occurs, we’ll continue to protect you.”

eBay Statement

Sellers located in the impacted areas and are not able to ship orders are recommended to:

• Communicate with buyers to advise them of the situation.
• Extend handling times on listings if expecting delays to fulfill orders.

If a seller’s business is impacted, eBay will automatically protect the seller’s performance metrics, including:

• Late shipment rate.
• Valid tracking upload rate.
• “Item not received” cases due to late delivery provided the seller uploaded tracking before the case was opened and the shipment(s) have a physical scan from the carrier.
• Defects resulting from transactions sellers had to cancel.

eBay to Remove Negative Ratings and Feedback

eBay will also remove any associated negative and neutral feedback and these cases will not impact seller service metrics rating.

The company previously said sellers may see late shipments due to weather events on the seller dashboard, but they will be removed before the next seller performance evaluation.

While eBay says sellers do not need to contact customer service, we always advise tracking all shipments, including those that may travel through impacted areas.

When shipments are marked late but not removed, seller may need to contact eBay Customer Service to request the company remove the negative rating.

In some cases, the first-line customer support agent may be bound by origin (seller) and destination (buyer) zip codes and if a shipment was delayed in transit, as it had to travel through a weather impacted area, sellers will need to escalate the case and explain this detail. This strategy is not always successful, but it’s worth a try.

It is believed that eBay uses zipcode tables to automatically identify impacted areas, but sometimes there can be mistakes and there can be issues if the origin and destination zip codes are not included, but the package had to travel through the impacted area.