UK sellers; yeah, right.

[SuperSange]

Three times in the last month I've waited ages for goods to arrive. When looking, I always use UK only as a search criteria, then check again before buying. When I've chased the (late arriving) item up, the seller invariably is quite rude and asking me to be patient, as 'in my area, there is flash flooding which will affect delivery. I live in rural hampshire and the item in question was supposedly coming from 25 miles down the road. When it eventually arrived, it had been sent from Germany. Is there anything I can do? I feel eBay should do something, but not sure they can.

in today's world:

• secondhand is probably in the seller's location
• new is very likely not - could be anywhere in the world

not many people realise quite how varied is the location from which new items are dispatched... I ordered two items from amazon the other day, sequential films (any normal person would file them in the same location ) but Amazon had them sent by different courier companies and from very different geographical locations...

better to order based on time to deliver than location...
only thing about location is that generally speaking you would expect the seller to pay any import / vat costs if they are selling it as from the UK

I think this is where I ran into trouble; both sellers said 3-5 days, so not unreasonable to think they are in the UK. I've left them all negative feedback saying why. Tossers.