First, have a great Thanksgiving if you’re in the US. If not, then enjoy the sales that come from Black Friday! Second, extend your handling time! Right now. Really, I’ll wait.

Around holidays like Thanksgiving, I don’t want to have to worry about shipping items. I’ll be traveling a bit this year, and the added stress of messaging buyers with a “sorry this will be late” or the impact to my eBay DSR is just too much. Instead, I’ve extended my handling time to 2 days on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving so I can just ship any sales out on Monday morning!

For anyone who hasn’t extended their handling time before, you may want to know the implications.

What’s your shipping time?

For a new eBay seller, the handling time is always very stressful. If you’re like me when I started out, you don’t have any of the right materials. You don’t have poly bags, plastic bags, or boxes.

You go to Staples or Lowes to buy a box after you have a sale. You have to buy a bigger one that you can cut down just to fit the item. You don’t have any of the free USPS boxes. On top of that, you drop off your items at the Post Office and only have a short window during your lunch break when you can bring your item.

Needless to say, that process makes it hard to meet a handling time that eBay nearly imposes on you (or at least entices you with discounts), especially when you sell something at 11 pm at night after you’ve gone to bed!

Don’t fret. We all started out in a place like this. In the beginning, I had a 3-day handling time.

Now, my eBay process (and impact on life) is a lot different. After a long time of dealing with this kind of thing, I ended up moving towards a 1-day handling time. Most times, I’ll ship anything that was ordered overnight the next morning.

This was all well and good before kids, but there have been a few times when the stress came back recently. It seems like my 3-year-old loves to throw a fit when I have a busy morning. We’ve tried to move as much as possible into the nights, but we also want to get our sleep.

I cannot wait until my infant sleeps through the night. That will make me feel human again.







Update Your Handling Time with the Bulk Editor

But back to the holidays, I’m going to bump my handling time to 2 days for all of my items. For someone like me, this is a quick fix. I can edit 500 items with my store (premium) in the Selling Manager Pro view by selecting “All Listings.”

If you have a basic store or below, you can edit 200 items at a time. Go into your My Selling page and select Check the little box at the top of the list to select all of the items on that page and hit edit. Here you can update the handling time.

Now, if anything sells, you won’t have to ship for two business days. I just changed mine this morning. That means that anything I sell today can be shipped out on Monday (since Thursday isn’t a business day).

Does this impact your sales?

You’ll lose the following:

The Top Rated Plus seal (Top Rated Plus seal) displayed prominently

A 20% discount on final value fees (this applies to the final item price only, not to shipping charges)

USPS Commercial Plus pricing I’ve been corrected on this. You only lose the Commercial Plus discount if you lose TRS status. Learning something new every day.

The important thing to remember is that this is only for items that sell within the 2-day handling time window. If you switch it back to 1-day, you’ll be back to receiving your TRS bonuses.

In the long run, this isn’t that much. It can hurt if you have a few high dollar sales, but the impact really shouldn’t be that much. People will still find your items, and you’ll still get a discount on shipping from printing out your labels on eBay instead of buying them in the post office.

This eBay hobby isn’t worth it if I can’t enjoy a few stress-free days with my family.

OK, OK, there MIGHT be a little family stress. Without that though, we’d all be pretty lonely. I think it’s worth it!

Have a great Thanksgiving!

-Chris and Family

Image Credit: Library of Congress