OMG, didn't realise they have made such a drastic change to shipping template. IMHO it's not increasing "transparency" for the buyers, but increasing "traps" for the sellers, so much details have to be included in the shipping options now. I wouldn't want to promise a buyer the parcel will be delivered in 1-2 days, give the state of the courier network now, I'm not even sure whether it's going to get delivered in 4-5 days. Cut off time is also making no sense, we can't decide when a parcel gets picked up anyway. Oh well, I guess there's no going back now, I might just use "to be arranged" f...

Hi Lucy, where is the "non-rural" or "urban" option? I see only the rural option in the dropdown.

123kitchens "nationwide" is a dangerous shipping option to use, some people probably don't know until they are caught out by the shipping cost to certain areas of the country...haha

Sometimes increasing the price might help, some people watch constantly because they believe a seller will be forced to reduce price if the item is not sold. You can't stop people from watching your listings, I personally won't be bothered and don't care about them. I don't even do fixed price offers anymore, just relist at the same price or higher price, never lower price.

Yeah, you have to keep bugging Trade Me on this. There are sellers who try to game the system.

Pack and Send may be able to help you, try getting in touch with them https://www.packsend.co.nz/clarifying-lithium-battery-sending/

Callum, your "hit rate" has dropped from 67% to 50%, ie. error rate has gone from 33% to 50%. That's expected, rural dodgers will take full advantage of this flawed template design. Just like grumpy buyers will blame sellers for "promising" a delivery "estimates" and then the couriers deliver the parcels late (let's wait for statistics on these...haha). The rural/urban field can be separated into a radio button (mockup view below), but that's going to be a DB/UI/backend change, probably something too complicated by Trade Me's standard...haha  

IMHO, of course the priority goes to whoever hit "buy now" first. There's no reason to "hold" for someone who's on the way to view, what if they change their minds? Or they found the bus not suitable? If you were serious about giving them the priority, you should have withdrawn the listing. As long as the listing is still live, you can't stop anyone from hitting "buy now".

The buyer should be the one raising a dispute with Trade Me, not you. Just ask them to raise a dispute with Trade Me and stop responding to their demand. After they have raised the dispute, you explain the situation to Trade Me. Sometimes it's hard to communicate with buyers. Oh yeah, and don't forget to blacklist this buyer.

Unfortunately, there's no running away from rural dodgers. Usually when there's a need to get in touch with a buyer, I'll try to send just two emails within 24 hours and leave it after that. I reckon if the first email got sent to their spam folder, the second email might reach them, otherwise, my emails will never reach them. I'll have to wait for them to try to get in touch. I recently had a buyer like that, they won my auction and paid, but my emails to arrange pick up got no response. They eventually emailed me with a different email address (sometimes people do that, their Trade Me ema...