Bought item today 2nd class recorded - seller has marked as dispatched?

[AmyStake]

How can this be right? I won the auction at 4pm today (and am having slight buyers remorse but that's another story!), paid for it, seller marked item as dispatched. On a sunday on a bank holiday weekend.

Is this a normal thing to do? I was a bit when I saw it!

It probably means she has printed out a Smart Stamp postage label for your parcel tonight and it will be taken to the PO tomorrow - or she has a local village PO that has taken the parcel from her this afternoon and she counts it as dispatched even though it won't be collected by Royal Mail until tomorrow. Both of these situations have applied to items I've sent although I've always sent a separate email to buyers to tell them the actual date that RM will collect it form my local PO.

Yes - if they have bought the postage online via Paypal then Ebay do mark the item as dispatched.
It is one of their "one size fits all" solutions to improve buyer/seller communication. It would work much better if sellers could mark an item as packaged or prepared for dispatch out of Post Office business hours.

I had this with a seller (bought it at 10pm and she marked it as dispatched within half an hour ). The item hadn't arrived 7 days later so I sent her a very polite message just to check when she had actually sent it, mentioning that I knew she'd marked it as dispatched without being able to send it yet. She sent an extremely rude message back having a go at me for (apparently) complaining about the item not arriving, which I actually wasn't doing. It turned out she always marks as dispatched when she prints off the address label, but didn't send my item until 4 days later!

I find this method quite annoying to be honest. I ended up giving the seller a negative, but that was mostly due to the 7 or 8 abusive and offensive messages rather than the misleading method she used.

if you print postage online with paypal it instantly marks item as dispatched and sends the buyer an email.

I didn't know that about PayPal, how ridiculous! That wasn't the case with my nightmare seller though.

oh well they were just lying then :)

i often get items marked as dispatched, don't arrive for ages, then finally turn up and postmark is many days later than the 'dispatched' day.

aswellasyou I agree with you that it is misleading the way it works. Unfortunately the sellers have no control over it, the email and status happens automatically when the postage is bought via Paypal.

I don't generally buy my postage this way, partly because I dislike the way the automation works and also because I prefer to use my local Post Office and give them the business as they are under threat of closure.

The seller in my case told me that she marked it as dispatched, nothing to do with purchasing postage from PayPal. PayPal's system really is stupid. I've never bought postage from them, now I'm glad I haven't mislead my buyers. I never mark as dispatched until after I've actually sent the item even if I'm just leaving for the PO-what if I was hit by a bus and never got there?!

Ahhhh now that makes sense! I had literally just paid for it when I got an email saying it was marked as dispatched.

Thanks :)