They aren't doing anything outside of the norm, except not counting late shipment defects.
They do not understand that a significant amount of Canadian sellers only have untracked services available to them at a price that makes it possible for them to bring adequate value to their customers.
eBay should be doing more to give buyers realistic expectations. It seems to me like their strategy has been to try and take advantage of the opportunity that Amazon at the start of the pandemic giving realistic expectations to buyers created. Let people buy things, thinking they'd arrive at normal times, and then have sellers deal with the extra customer management that is inevitably required when items take 20-30 days due to postal delays.
I also think, they should not allow cases to be opened for 45 days after a purchase. A worst case scenario with Letter Mail right now is about 35-40 days. Same with Small Packet Air. Unfortunately for Small Packet Air, while it used to have tracking in "My Ebay", it is now a toss up whether an order will be tracked. Like I said before, Canadian sellers have to use these services to remain competitive. The amount of money I've lost to INR cases has gone up substantially. It is not relative to my sales.
My experience is that, I don't think buyers as a whole are trying to game the system. Obviously there will always be a scammer here or there, but they would scam you regardless of COVID. If you tell 100 buyers that their item might take 30-40 days, most will wait, but there will always be a handful who get anxious and open a case, which then has to be refunded within 3 business days because there is no tracking info. At that point, the buyer can be instructed to let you know when an item arrives so that you can send a new Paypal invoice, or refuse the package so that it will be returned. Some people will do that, some people won't. If you have to send an INR refund, it is best to consider it lost revenue until proven otherwise.
Now that the quarantine sales bump is over with, I have less incentive than ever to sell. eBay isn't really doing much to equalize against the added challenges that come with operating in a pandemic. My margins are higher due to INR cases. Sourcing is more difficult because less places are open. I also have to devote a much greater amount of time to customer service because of postal delays.
eBay did give a coupon for 25 percent off final value fees for items in a category I sell in, but unless it only applied to newly listed items. So I only ended up getting it on about half my sales, since the other half weren't re-listed after activating the coupon before selling.
Each seller has to decide whether there is enough incentive to continue operating with the added challenges of the pandemic. My guess is that eBay feels sellers have enough incentive, because they've done very little to try and swing seller behavior into selling more during the pandemic.
