How fast an item will arrive can be a major factor in whether a buyer will make a purchase online. As part of our overall reimagination of our marketplace, we are helping our sellers ship items faster and more accurately predict when they will arrive for buyers.
Over the summer, we updated our shipping rate tables to offer sellers more flexibility of choice when shipping an item overseas to a buyer. With this latest refresh, sellers can now select which shipping services they plan to use – such as SpeedPak – to send an item to a buyer’s doorstep.
How It Works
Previously, under our legacy experience, when sellers used rate tables, eBay would calculate an item’s estimated delivery date (EDD) for sellers by using a generic shipping service. This could lead to buyers seeing slower EDDs compared to faster international shipping services and potentially impact buyer conversion rates.
To help speed up delivery for our sellers, we worked on offering them more choices within our rate tables themselves, where they could select different shipping services that would best meet their needs and for their buyers. With this new update, sellers can choose a shipping service for a particular region and service type inside the rate table itself — which would then take precedence over the standard default service when EDDs are calculated, as well as for the shipping service shown to the buyer.
On the first day we launched on our U.S. site this summer, nearly 100 sellers set up 79,000 listings using the new international rate tables. They chose SpeedPak for 8,000 listings.
And, within just one month of launching, 1,235 sellers began using our new CBT rates tables resulting in more accurate delivery speed for 1 million listings. As a result, 180,000 items purchased in July in the U.S. had more accurate EDDs. And 29,000 of those transactions leveraged SpeedPak, reducing delivery estimates by an average of 20 days.
At eBay, our business teams continue to work on activating the rate tables for additional markets while our product teams are working hard to further simplify the rate table for high volume international sellers.
What’s Next
With this latest shipping update, we’re helping our sellers attract more prospective customers and streamlining the experience for our buyers.
Looking ahead, we plan to launch this feature in the domestic rate table for Australia this winter. Next year, we plan to test and launch the feature in the international and domestic rate tables in the U.K., Germany and other European markets. We’re also working to build an application programming interface (API) solution for sellers who use and update rate tables frequently.