I discussed this with both eBay and PayPal about a fortmight ago. I live in a particularly militant postal district, and local post offices in rural areas are only accepting letter mail as there is no storage space for packages and they cannot get mail collected by the delivery offices.

As such, PayPal have confirmed that they WILL NOT cover any transaction with their Seller Protection Policy if the seller cannot post it within the allotted time, and eBay WILL NOT protect sellers in any manner at all.

Sellers are being advised BY PAYPAL to refund all transactions that cannot be shipped and then request payment at a later date when the postal service has been returned to normal. The buyer can request withdrawl from the purchase, or the seller can then raise a dispute against the buyer to secure payment at a later date. EBay have stated that their policy is to never side with the seller in a dispute. They will only ever side with the buyer, or elect to negate a buyer's dispute against a seller.

How f'cked up is PayPal and eBay to be refusing Sellers protection during postal strikes? So be warned UK sellers. If you cannot ship and prove delivery WITHIN THE GIVEN TIME, you lose all rights to protection.

I currently have shipped stock sitting at my local sorting office, and it's been there for more than ten days now.

My advice would be to avoid UK sellers at the moment if you're looking for something quickly (ie before Xmas), or if you want something in the condition you expect it to be in from the seller. The Royal Mail are already having problems storing the overload of mail from the wild cat strilkes. Secret filming has shown mail stored soaking wet outside and under the regular wheel trafic of trucks. It's only gonna get worse as their storage problem gets critical. I'm closing my eBay store until after this shite is 'cos I already have stuff sitting in the backlogs.

Buyers - If you care about condition or delivery, don't buy from the UK.

Sellers - Don't ship until the Royal Mail have cleared their backup in full. Refund and offer the buyer the opportunity to pull out in the interim. Offer the buyer the posibility of paying for a courier company.

Strikes are horrendous, especially more so when certain critical things end being delayed or never received. I wonder how this affects the payment of bills and/ or subscription services like magazines... can only imagine the awesomeness produced.

Strikes in the UK are fairly commonplace. That's why we have a Labour Party. It's usually over a bunch of ignorant and lazy asshats wanting more money or longer smoking breaks. Generally it's your basic union racketeering BS, or working class politics. In this instance I have no idea what they're complaining about this time, but in my local neighbourhood they're on strike in small numbers most of the time, and the oil drum with the picket and the fire is a permanent installation on the kerb outside the sorting office. This is working clss politics just flairing up to a national scale for a while. You have to let the scum classes to vent every now and then, especially seeing as we're cracking down on football violence. They need an outlet.

" I have no idea what they're complaining about "

Nice to see the informed view of the middle class here. The working class are all scum, are they?

Actually, for once, having spoken to a few of them, I think the union has a point here.

However, I have no doubt that Ians bigotry will not stand in his way.

Are you really so stupid to think that the way mail is stored is nothing to do with the management?

I hadn't realised that some villages were so small in parts of the UK so as to have to interbreed so much.

Take a chill pill Ian. I run an internet business too, and its highly annoying, but the gross mismanagement thats occurring at the moment needs to be rectified.

Cheers,
Malc

lawrenson wrote:" I have no idea what they're complaining about "

Nice to see the informed view of the middle class here. The working class are all scum, are they?

Actually, for once, having spoken to a few of them, I think the union has a point here.

However, I have no doubt that Ians bigotry will not stand in his way.

Are you really so stupid to think that the way mail is stored is nothing to do with the management?

I hadn't realised that some villages were so small in parts of the UK so as to have to interbreed so much.

Take a chill pill Ian. I run an internet business too, and its highly annoying, but the gross mismanagement thats occurring at the moment needs to be rectified.

Cheers,
Malc

Looks like we posted at the same time.

In this instance my bigotry is founded on more experience that I care to admit. I have lived hearing this working class politics my whole life. It does not change. And the internal politic is often far different from the publicly disclosed politic. The management is just as bad as the workforce at a sorting office level, the only difference being that the management have an additional agenda of wanting to sit on the fence and safeguard their careers. If I am percieved as middle class, it's only through hard work and education, so maybe I'm a first generation middle class proffessional if there is such a thing. But I'm typing this from a council house and I think I'm just an educated working class bloke who realises how ignorant and lazy the people he lives amongst really are.

Gross mismanagement it may be, but the entire system is rotten to the core. From the very to down.

You're in London, Malc, so you're mail is in for a rougher time than you wish to know. The Royal Mail maintain a storage site in East Ham which is basically a brownfield site full of rusting shipping containers. This is where my Dad worked when we lived in Mill Hill East, and thsi is where they stockpile parcels when the system in London backs up. Personally I wouldn't want my products (perticularly paper products) stored in damp cold outdoor containers for weeks on end at this time of year. I bet the post office will tell you your post will be stored just fine while the strike is on. I'm sure we'll see pictures on the news sooner or later with the easy availability of camera phones.

In the UK it is more akin to 'you can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.' Without knowing the mentality of the people, the chips on their shoulders, the ignorance in their hearts, or the laziness of their lives, it is hard for you to understand them.

You have the luxury of living in a different culture and society with different political aspirations, different institutions, different social norms, and a wholely more tolerant atitude towards the lazy and the feckless.

In the UK we reward the lazy, bone idle, beligerant and wasteful. We encorage them and reward them, and it destroys society. We do the exact same thing to wasteful, beligerant, obstructive and feckless business. We pour billions of pounds into state supported companies bloated with untrained and useless management and obstructive, lazy and beligerant workers.

The US tends not to reward such companies or people. The US believe on the whole that work and freedom mean everyone is equal and that hard work, diligence and education should be rewarded. So you are writing from a US social viewpoint which is somewhat askew from what British society is like. Here we disable our children intellectually and teach them that they need to remain as stupid as the slowest child in the class. We exagerate their abilities from birth by ensuring that 90% of them are graded better than average throughout their education, pay our universities to fudge their grading to ensure that they all pass with degrees, and when they find that they can't get a job, we pay then to spend their lives squaring off the cheeks of their arses.

There is no honour in your ideology. That is the great failing in the mindset of the socialist. It does not work. Only ignorance or wealth can make the socialist ideology work, and both require control of the ignorant. So I cannot subscribe to those socialist ideals.

Opportunity, resourcefulness, education, work and freedom are not things that are given to people by way of 'a ladder'. These things are taken by those who have the willingness and determination not to be pulled down by the environment they are born into. That is why young men walk hundreds and thousands of miles to reach their country's borders, why imigrants will always cross borders for a better life. This level of willingness to work, persivere with dogged determination, and overcome, is largeley a work ethic that is completely absent within the UK working class male/mail. British society does not know how to educate people for work, and pays them well for that failing. No amount of socialist ideology can justify it or make a society operate with that level of uselessness.

HermitFromPluto wrote:In several years on Ebay and hundreds of purchases, I have never had an item go missing - but now I have two way overdue from the UK. One that was sent to me in Australia 7 weeks ago - airmail vanished. And another sent to a friend in the UK a month ago - vanished.

I guess it will be hard to know if they are really lost or just sitting somewhere.

At the moment the odds are they are just delayed. There have been problens in a number of major sorting offices, including the hub at Heathrow, and there are backlogs of mail. But right now the storage problem is only manifesting itself in the smaller sorting offices that have been striking. So the odds are very high that if your mail is caught up in it, it;s safe and dry and sitting in a mailbag in a unitainer in a dry sorting hall.

The problem mail is yet to come as the strike escelates to a national strike. Mail will back up and be stored wherever there is space, even outdoors. Mail will begin to get damaged as they run out of unitainers and mail sacks. So I'd advise gainst buying anything or selling anything from/to the UK for the next month or so. Certainly until the backlog is clear.

I am not surprised at the package leaving the UK if it was posted two weeks ago or so. I am surprised at the package leaving Australia as I had always assumed that mail route went to the west coast directly from Oz and wasn't routed through the  European international hub.

SimperingToad wrote:We're not as different as you may think... which is a sad statement to make. You are just a little ahead of us on the scale in many aspects.

That sort of social liberalism really f'cks up a country. I have this notion that the USA is less tolerant of the willfully ignorant and intentionally lazy. You do like to exploit them for entertainment value, but that's fair game. We all like to laugh at the toothless smokers and their illiterate offspring, and we have our own TV shows for watching them fight. But my impression is that your country does not pay for their satalite TV, cigarettes, alcohol, and mobile telephones. In our country it is possible for a family with 5 children to net £100,000 a year in benefits without ever getting a job. We do veruy similar things with companies. There are industries in our country that have not been profitable in decades, and are continually subsidised by the state because we don't want to upset the assholes who believe they have a god given right to make cars/widgets whatever. The real rpoblem is not that you cannot make widgets at a profit in a factory. The real problem is the assholes who run and work in the factories.

That does not seem to happen in the US. At least you'd sack all the workers, close the factories, and leave the region to it's own economic recovery. If they don't want to grow and develop they remain dead. I have no idea what Flint is like in the US. It used to be portrayed as an economically ruined city, but let's face it. Anyone can set up a business and work and change that business and make a success of themselves. If you're too lasy to be bothered and you'd prefer to sit on your ass all nday, eating Doritos and watching Jerry Springer, you have a complete freedom to do that, but in the UK you get paid to do it and no-one gives a damn. What both countries need is a moratorium on benefits. Let's stoff nurturing and encoraging the growth of the cancers in our society and start cutting them out.

SimperingToad wrote:I'm just beginning to wonder if I should hold up on allowing people from the UK to bid on EBay auctions for a while, which I'd hate to do.

At the very least, I'd be speaking to PayPal and eBay and finding out where you stand if a buyer does a chargeback after waiting four weeks, knowing full well that the item is sitting in the UK mail system. A buyer only has 45 days to fais a dispute, and MUST dispute the transaction or lose all his rights under the PayPal Buyer Protection Policy.

If I buy, even if I cover myself with a Credit Card, I will lodge a non-receipt dispute with PayPal at the 42 day mark, because that is PayPal's policy. They will then escelate this to a claim themselves after a period of time and pay out under their scheme.

So, YES. Check the specifics of PayPal's Policy, because they will mislead you over the phone and their staff tend not to know their own policies or how they are implimented. And if you think you may lose money, protect yourself. If I were in your position I'd be selling only to UK buyers I knew. It only takes one or two items to be disputed to wipe out all the profits from a months sales.