I’ve seen this question pop up quite often of late due to COVID-19: Ebay buyer bought your item, expected it to arrive in a few days and now it’s been over a week and is in USPS limbo. Usually you’ll get a nastygram from the buyer telling you of this. First off, you want to apologize to your buyer and say something like, “Sorry, due to COVID, USPS/Fedex has been running behind. Why don’t we wait a few more days to see if it moves along?”
Hopefully the item has moved in the next few days. If it doesn’t, the buyer will email you again. That’s when you tell them to file an Ebay ‘item not received’ case. When you get Ebay’s message, then you go into it and enter in the tracking number once again. Once that happens, you’ll have about ~5 days before the buyer can escalate the case to Ebay, so hope your item is delivered by then.
If after 5 days, you’ll probably get an Ebay message saying the case was escalated to Ebay and you lost the decision. At this point, I believe you’ll have about 14 days to appeal the case. If your item gets delivered in these 14 days, you can appeal and win the case (this happened to me once and I won the appeal.) When you win the appeal, the buyer can’t even leave negative feedback anymore, so win-win. If the item isn’t found in the 14 days, then you can file a claim with USPS and if it was shipped PRIORITY, you’ll get $50 for the item (more if you paid extra for insurance.)
When this happens to you, just relax and let the process play out. Usually the item is found in a few days; if it hasn’t, then you’ll have about ~3 weeks for USPS to find your item.