@femmefan1946 wrote:
I don't think it is helpful to the Buyer. It may be intended to help Sellers who are having difficulty meeting delivery deadlines.
I wonder if the extended delivery also affects the Seller's placement in Search?
Precisely, it is a punitive measure for the seller meant to push them to the bottom of consideration for shoppers. If you look at the changes here as well as the performance metrics they are implementing now in the dashboard they are quite clearly creating a seller deranking profile. There are quite a few of these that go into best match, but expect them to be used on other areas of the site like this, which have a strong impact on buyer conversion.
If you look at how ebay is changing from a marketplace/venue with sellers to a retailer with sla...err fulfillment partners, they are removing the voice of the fulfillment partner and replacing it with ebay as the authority. As an example you may state in your listings that items will take on average XYZ weeks/days, but may take longer. That really doesn't matter as they will control what actually gets shown to the buyer as an estimate and if you don't meet that threshold with enough regularity they'll lengthen it above what you have the ability to set yourself. Eventually anything you can write in a description will be removed as well with the full transition to the product catalog.
Collectively this along with other measures should be look at as an effective shadow ban of a seller that doesn't meet eBay's desired standard as a seller. They are happy to collect fees from you but they'll make it as hard as possible for you to actually sell something. On the surface that isn't necessarily a bad thing as ebay has no shortage of **bleep** sellers, but ebay also has a horrible track record for tracking metrics with the desired degree of accuracy and many buyers abuse certain things that effect our metrics (ie return request reasons) to reach a desired outcome in their favor.
