Royal Mail Tracked 48 — OTDR tanked by a couple of large orders, despite daily on-time dispatch. Anyone else dealing with this?
We ship via Royal Mail Tracked 48, with a daily collection that's reliable, and our dispatch confirmation rate is consistently on time (around 96% of orders confirmed before the promised ship date during the period we were deactivated). Despite that, our OTDR dropped to 56.98% and we got a deactivation notice for our seller-fulfilled offers without much time to react due to the massive impact of a few delayed orders that were totally out of our hands and after investigation I found did leave our facility on time.
When we dug into the OTDR Defect Report, the picture was pretty specific: most of our late-delivery defects came down to a couple of large, multi-unit orders where Royal Mail took an unusually long time between us confirming dispatch and their first tracking scan — in one case over 90 hours before the parcel even entered their scanned network, despite being collected on schedule. Because OTDR is calculated per unit, not per order, those two shipments alone accounted for a big chunk of our total late-unit count, even though the vast majority of individual parcels went out and arrived fine.
We've submitted a POA explaining this, dispatch has stayed consistent, and our rate has since climbed back to 63%, but the case is still under review after 5 days. And of course we are no longer able to send out UK orders due to the deactivation so I don't see how we can get it to climb higher at this point.
Appreciate any first-hand experience as we are trying to figure out whether this is a wait it out situation or whether we need to make a bigger structural change to our shipping setup.
Royal Mail Tracked 48 — OTDR tanked by a couple of large orders, despite daily on-time dispatch. Anyone else dealing with this?
We ship via Royal Mail Tracked 48, with a daily collection that's reliable, and our dispatch confirmation rate is consistently on time (around 96% of orders confirmed before the promised ship date during the period we were deactivated). Despite that, our OTDR dropped to 56.98% and we got a deactivation notice for our seller-fulfilled offers without much time to react due to the massive impact of a few delayed orders that were totally out of our hands and after investigation I found did leave our facility on time.
When we dug into the OTDR Defect Report, the picture was pretty specific: most of our late-delivery defects came down to a couple of large, multi-unit orders where Royal Mail took an unusually long time between us confirming dispatch and their first tracking scan — in one case over 90 hours before the parcel even entered their scanned network, despite being collected on schedule. Because OTDR is calculated per unit, not per order, those two shipments alone accounted for a big chunk of our total late-unit count, even though the vast majority of individual parcels went out and arrived fine.
We've submitted a POA explaining this, dispatch has stayed consistent, and our rate has since climbed back to 63%, but the case is still under review after 5 days. And of course we are no longer able to send out UK orders due to the deactivation so I don't see how we can get it to climb higher at this point.
Appreciate any first-hand experience as we are trying to figure out whether this is a wait it out situation or whether we need to make a bigger structural change to our shipping setup.
14 replies
Seller_ZQyopdiwkUHOZ
That really sucks. It's ridiculous that OTDR is calculated by the unit rather than the shipment.
Hopefully they'll accept the appeal.
If they don't, is switching to Buy Shipping and turning on SSA and Automated Handling time an option for you? If you do that, OTDR doesn't apply to you. If you can and are willing to, using that as what you'll do going forwards in your appeal will help get reactivated.
If you have a Case ID and post it here, one of the mods will be able to look into your case to see where it's up to and potentially escalate it in the event that's necessary.
Edit - Once you are reactivated, you may want to figure out what number of units in a single shipment makes sending it Tracked 48 'risky' for OTDR, and start sending those ones Tracked 24. It is a cost increase, but depending on how you're costing in shipping, it might actually still come out ahead of selling those unit numbers in single shipments at T48.
Seller_ZQyopdiwkUHOZ
If you feel like it's taking too long atm, then I would. There is a chance it could slightly delay the appeal, but since you have no transparency into things right now, it might still be better to do that and them potentially have a window into where things are up to.
It would be difficult with needing to personalise. I wouldn't do it unless you have had to say you will in an appeal in order to get reinstated.
Switching those things on won't automatically get you reinstated, but it is easier to win an appeal if that's what you commit to in the appeal.
Do you charge shipping or is it built in? Our standard shipping is 'free', so whenever we sell two items, the shipping for each as a T48 is factored in, meaning we've accounted for two tracked 48 charges which (even as LL) is more than the price for a single Tracked 24 (even as a parcel).
We'd be earning less than we would sending a Parcel as T48, but still more than if we were sending two separate LL's as T48.
Seller_d8YGbIjNqwFxn
We have switched over to Tracked 24 for all of our tracked orders on Amazon that we would have previously sent Tracked 48.
Tracked 48 is not reliable and delivered within 2-3 days. Twinned with Amazon counting OTDR at unit level it only takes one or two large orders to negatively impact our OTDR. We had this a couple of months ago when we had warnings about our OTDR so decided to switch to Tracked 24 and our OTDR is now 100%
Appreciate this costs more money but the difference in our 24 and 48 rates is not that much.
