When Did eBay Remove Carrier-Specific Discounts?

[jfs]

Previous you could set commercial or retail rates independently for each carrier; however, now its retail or commercial rates for all carriers.

I have customers pay retail rates for USPS and I pay the lower commercial rate, with the difference paying the FVF on shipping.

I can’t use the same strategy for UPS as commercial rates can be as much as 83% less than retail rates. I instead calculate the maximum possible shipping rate and increase the price of the item by 20% to cover the maximum FVF on shipping.

Most of my items are shipped via USPS. UPS is mostly used for bulky items as the rates will be cheaper. This now means I can no longer use UPS for shipments and I can set UPS to commercial rates.

A 34 x 24 x 20 package that weighs 30 pounds and is restricted to the Lower 48 States would have the following costs.

USPS is too expensive. UPS Retail is too expensive. There is no way to offer UPS Commercial as I need to offer Retail rates on USPS, which are the bulk of my shipments.

USPS Ground Advantage Commercial $240.43
USPS Ground Advantage Retail $253.25

UPS Ground Commercial $118.83
UPS Ground Retail $194.72

[rlmartin]

Have you looked into “business policies” on ebay? You set up business policies and choose the proper shipping method on GS.

[jfs]

Attached is a screenshot of eBay’s current Shipping Discount Settings:

That preference previously allowed you to set commercial or retail rates individually for FedEx, UPS and USPS.

Now you can only set commercial or retail for all carriers.

I can already determine which carrier to offer on individual listing via a extensive set of GS templates based on shipping scenarios; however, there is no way to set retail for USPS and commercial for UPS.

eBy’s business policies are simply a vastly more inefficient form of the templates I already have in GS, whose rates are also governed by the same settings in Shipping Discount Settings. If I had to use eBay business policies I would not list anything. I created my GS templates years ago and have had to make one recent change - a bulk edit to convert First Class to Ground Advantage.

My account is currently suspended for nonpayment due to a dispute. eBay customer service are such compulsive liars they told me the reason I wasn’t seeing the previously carrier-specific discounts on the preference page was because my account was suspended. In order to see them I would have to pay off the balance. The people that work for eBay, from upper management to their Indian call centers, have no conscience at all.

The last rep on the phone, after about 20 attempts, claimed the changes were made because sellers asked for the discount page to be made less complicated. He claimed they were getting confused with the carrier-specific discounts. Yeah right.

Of course that makes no sense as its now a lot more complicated.

If I want to offer retail rates on USPS, but offer commercial rate on UPS I can’t do that. I’ll need to open a new account just for items shipped UPS.

Now that eBay has adopted Cubic rates there is now way to offer Cubic rates unless you change USPS preferences to charge commercial rates. There is no way to override individual listings with commercial rates. Before I could have could have USPS Retail Ground set as the default, but override this by selecting Parcel Select.

So now if you want to offer commercial rates on some USPS packages to take advantage of the Cubic rate you need to open one account with the preferences set to commercial rates. To offer retail rates on USPS packages you need to open a second account. To offer UPS commercial rates you need to open a third account. Yes, much more simple now.

I’d like to see a eBay employee trying to list 100 random items they have never seen before - they would be totally lost.

[Vaguery]

<sarcasm> I’m sure this will all be greatly simplified if the USPS is privatized in a few months.</sarcasm><sob />

[jfs]

The post office has been partially privatized for a long time and Congress has interfered with its operation during its entire history.

One of the largest cash cows for legislators, governors, and similar officials in the “good old days” was accepting political contributions (i.e., bribes) in in exchange for appointing people to local postmaster positions regardless of their qualifications.

Originally letters were only transported from post office to post office. That meant anyone sending you a letter had to address it in care of a post office that was the most convenient location for you to pick it up. If you lived directly on a post office to post route you could sometimes give the carrier a little extra money (i.e., bribe) to stop at your home, although this could end up getting the carrier fired.

Home delivery was not authorized until 1863 and it was limited to towns with a population of over 10,000 and with $10,000 in gross revenue in order to financially support the effort. There were only 65 cities with home delivery in 1864.

The post office experimented with free rural delivery as early as 1896, but it did become common until 1902. This was a boom to mail orders companies like Sears. These new requirements; however, forced more expenses on the post office, causing a $17 million debt by 1909. From 1863 to 1940 it operated in the red all but 8 years.

Railroads transported mail for over 100 years. I got to talk to some old timers back in the late 1970s and early 1980s who worked for the local post office back got five mail trains a day.

Airmail was handled by many private contractors. Passenger airliners were also used to transport mail.

USPS used many different contractors to move mail over the world’s oceans via surface mail. I had some pen pals back in the 1970s and 1980s and it would take weeks for a letter to reach them via surface mail.

FedEx is USPS’s largest air contractor. Dejoy has wanted to move this to back to surface transportation as hiring FedEx greatly increased costs.

USPS uses many ground contractors, including such large companies as J.B. Hunt.

We had a local gentlemen who worked as a post office contractor for multiple decades. He used his own straight truck to pick up mail and packages from various post offices on a route and deliver them to a large regional post office that served as a central distribution site to a post office sorting center about 80 miles away.

There are over 2,700 contract postal stations operating in various locations such as grocery stores. Back in the 1990s a local town of just 150 people had a post office operating out a portion of the postmaster’s house.

The post office hires various other contractors to do work. The local post office has a janitor come in to clean it who is not a postal employee. I was even the local post office’s snow removal contractor for 20 years, starting in junior high school.