Orders required to ship on Saturday against our settings. Account at risk. Seller Support abandons conversation
Noticed Sunday we had 160+ "late" orders. Suddenly order from Fri/Sat had required ship date of Saturday, in ERROR. As a DIRECT result, our account is "at risk of deactivation" due to our late shipment metric quickly exceeding the threshold.
I use the Amazon provided account health assurance feature to request a phone call regarding this issue. Wait 55 mins for someone to get on the line. Agent tells me what I of course already know and suggests contacting seller support to discuss the issue with the ship-by dates..
So I get on chat with seller support. Explain that orders were requiring to ship on Saturday out of nowhere, instead of the following BUSINESS day. I explain that our settings have Sat/Sun as non-operating days (no pick-ups), we do not use SSA, we do not fulfill SFP orders, we do not use automated handling time, and nothing in our template has changed. There is no indication of why suddenly we are expected to ship on Saturday. Agent completes their "research" which concluded with telling me how delivery dates are calculated, and below is how the conversation ended. @KJ_Amazon, are you able to advise please how to get an appropriate review of orders that were affected? A couple of examples are 111-8835235-0861000 & 111-6658353-5199409 [Note: We had Friday (Veteran's day) set as an operating day and shipped as usual.]
Orders required to ship on Saturday against our settings. Account at risk. Seller Support abandons conversation
Noticed Sunday we had 160+ "late" orders. Suddenly order from Fri/Sat had required ship date of Saturday, in ERROR. As a DIRECT result, our account is "at risk of deactivation" due to our late shipment metric quickly exceeding the threshold.
I use the Amazon provided account health assurance feature to request a phone call regarding this issue. Wait 55 mins for someone to get on the line. Agent tells me what I of course already know and suggests contacting seller support to discuss the issue with the ship-by dates..
So I get on chat with seller support. Explain that orders were requiring to ship on Saturday out of nowhere, instead of the following BUSINESS day. I explain that our settings have Sat/Sun as non-operating days (no pick-ups), we do not use SSA, we do not fulfill SFP orders, we do not use automated handling time, and nothing in our template has changed. There is no indication of why suddenly we are expected to ship on Saturday. Agent completes their "research" which concluded with telling me how delivery dates are calculated, and below is how the conversation ended. @KJ_Amazon, are you able to advise please how to get an appropriate review of orders that were affected? A couple of examples are 111-8835235-0861000 & 111-6658353-5199409 [Note: We had Friday (Veteran's day) set as an operating day and shipped as usual.]
0 replies
Seller_q6Wu7MJokcPsk
Same boat as you. We had over 100 showing late from the weekend. We didn't change anything on our end, somehow Amazon changed it. No help from seller support and now my account is at risk. $2M account potentially shut down because of an Amazon error.
Seller_QqDVZq2DoY9wC
I posted about this issue earlier today:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/d3cf8bfd-aa1d-4579-a6ab-d561b00f02c4?
I do see this new wording in the general shipping settings.
Cut off times for templates using Shipping Settings Automation and/or templates using Premium Shipping Options(1 Day, 2 Day)
Monday through Saturday or Sunday through Friday (depending on the shipping service you select) will be considered as a Delivery Day for all Seller Fulfilled Prime orders using Premium Shipping Options.
Cut off times for manual shipping templates
Monday through Saturday will be considered as a delivery day for Seller Fulfilled Prime orders using Premium Shipping Options.
**Any opinion on how to translate this? Do you think removing the "premium shipping options" from the Manual templates and Shipping Settings Automation templates and just used the "standard shipping" settings would remove the Saturday issue?
Seller_Kq4XZV75bHrZ9
Us too! Support was less than helpful.
KJ_Amazon
@Seller_0UZv0aGR9PRhU @Seller_q6Wu7MJokcPsk @Seller_QqDVZq2DoY9wC and all other sellers who are reporting Saturday shipping requirements.
I am investigating these reports and sharing the details with our partner teams on the shipping and metrics sides. I will follow up when I have more details.
As @Seller_QqDVZq2DoY9wC mentioned, Seller Fulfilled Prime requirements could be a factor.
KJ_Amazon
Seller_Enu3CU2zoKoXp
Check your emails from last week. An email was sent saying they were changing us to their new shipping schedule and it would be up to us to change things back if we did not want the Amazon new shipping plan.
Seller_8m2Vs6OC510lL
I am pretty sure it's becuase of setting the Veteran's day as an operating day. i had the same issue and I turned it off and it was fixed right away. My guess is setting veterans day as a operating day overrode the code for Saturday as non-operating day, since Veterans day was on saturday.
Seller_qMn96dRSgdSQw
We had the same issue and after spending an hour on the phone with support nothing was obvious to them as to what caused this. After doing some digging, I finally figured out that we had Veterans Day (which fell on a Saturday this year) checked as an operating day under Holiday Settings. Last year it fell on Friday so we still had the holiday set from the previous year I am assuming. Having it set as an operating day in the holiday settings overrode the operating days setting that had Saturday and Sunday marked as not operating days. You would think that the logic would be the opposite of that, but unfortunately it was not. I am sure that the same thing happened to you.
Seller_C2NiEkAU4xTGT
Um ..aside from Amazon changing your handling time or whatever the heck they did (which is complete garbage), Saturday was a legal holiday!
You couldn’t have shipped that day if you wanted to.
Seller_r9wMm8LrE5iKj
Can you translate this bizspeak? Sounds like you're saying they did something good, although what I think you're saying is "we changed something that maybe we shouldn't have."
Note that the issue is broader than you touched on here. We lost a day of lead time for orders placed over that weekend, and had our lead times silently replaced prior to that. Likely, these lead-time issues are related, and related to the recent (and mathematically challenged) default handling time updates. So, let's not minimize the scope here, redefine "adjusted" to mean "an error we won't admit to", say there's just a problem with Veteran's Day, and since that's in the past, oh well. As I fully expect Amazon to do at this point.
I would still like to see a Mod say "yes, we acknowledge an error" so we can point to that when dealing with support. Saying stuff like "providing them to the relevant team for further investigation" says "this is bad enough that it merits looking into" without saying "this is a problem." Are you contractually prevented from saying "we goofed"? (If so, is that really a sane work environment? Would you mother be proud?)
And you could also say "if this is an error, we will patch your metrics." That would go a long way to assuaging anxiety about Amazon bringing down the hammer (while implying we're bad at our jobs and might loses our money or inventory) over their own mistakes.
