impossible Saturday deliver-by dates
We're an SFP seller, using SSA on our Prime template. Every Friday, we get Prime orders that must be delivered on Saturdays, of course. But many of these are going to rural addresses than UPS and FedEx simply do not serve on Saturdays, and USPS cannot get the order there overnight. Therefore, in Buy Shipping (which we're forced to use), there are no options that can meet the deliver-by date that Amazon has set for us, ostensibly based on carrier data via SSA. That, in turn, makes it difficult to hit the 93.5% OTDR requirement for SFP.
I opened case ID 15973624151, included example order IDs and screenshots of what we're seeing in Buy Shipping and was told, "Saturday delivery is offered by UPS and FedEx for their Ground/Home Delivery services if the destination is a residential address, and the destination is eligible for Saturday delivery." (well, yeah, duh - the issue is that when Amazon assigns deliver-by dates, it's disregarding the fact that not every destination is eligible for Saturday delivery) and "Consider working with your carriers who offer special operating plans and agreements." (what does that even mean? UPS won't start delivering to every rural address on Saturdays because we reach some special agreement with them.)
We could go back to using a template that has SSA turned off - but our experience has been that this prevented us from hitting the 30% next-day delivery promise threshold. So what else can we do? Is there some shipping setting that we've potentially misconfigured?
@Jameson_Amazon I saw you commented on a very similar thread; I'm hoping you or another mod can help us as well.
impossible Saturday deliver-by dates
We're an SFP seller, using SSA on our Prime template. Every Friday, we get Prime orders that must be delivered on Saturdays, of course. But many of these are going to rural addresses than UPS and FedEx simply do not serve on Saturdays, and USPS cannot get the order there overnight. Therefore, in Buy Shipping (which we're forced to use), there are no options that can meet the deliver-by date that Amazon has set for us, ostensibly based on carrier data via SSA. That, in turn, makes it difficult to hit the 93.5% OTDR requirement for SFP.
I opened case ID 15973624151, included example order IDs and screenshots of what we're seeing in Buy Shipping and was told, "Saturday delivery is offered by UPS and FedEx for their Ground/Home Delivery services if the destination is a residential address, and the destination is eligible for Saturday delivery." (well, yeah, duh - the issue is that when Amazon assigns deliver-by dates, it's disregarding the fact that not every destination is eligible for Saturday delivery) and "Consider working with your carriers who offer special operating plans and agreements." (what does that even mean? UPS won't start delivering to every rural address on Saturdays because we reach some special agreement with them.)
We could go back to using a template that has SSA turned off - but our experience has been that this prevented us from hitting the 30% next-day delivery promise threshold. So what else can we do? Is there some shipping setting that we've potentially misconfigured?
@Jameson_Amazon I saw you commented on a very similar thread; I'm hoping you or another mod can help us as well.
18 replies
Seller_yvO8mEXSyy2K8
Also tagging @Bryce_Amazon because he commented on this very similar thread. My guess is there's an issue with the carrier data that SSA ostensibly uses to calculate deliver-by dates. As a result, Amazon is assigning deliver-by dates as if every rural address in America is served by UPS/FedEx on Saturdays. I see a few different threads on these forums about the issue, so I don't know why Amazon can't just acknowledge that it's a bug and (until that bug is fixed) grant OTDR exceptions for any order that was supposed to be delivered on a Saturday but was actually delivered Monday because no available option in Buy Shipping could've possibly gotten it there on time. This is making it impossible to hit the 93.5% OTDR requirement for SFP.
Seller_FcJ62CpbWSlbK
I have had similar orders. I really think that the buyer wants a free product due to late delivery. Business hours are clearly visible on the shipping label page. So, it's Thursday and that buyer orders 2 day shipping. Their business hours say they are closed on the 2 day shipping delivery day. Sure enough, in each case, missed delivery date is claimed playing havoc with shipping metrics as well as causing refund due to late delivery. I was able to get the shipping $ back on one through safe t.
Seller_lU3njDwc1tsUG
This is not strictly a solution to your problem, more a work around.
We just used to 'unprime' product for a day and 'reprime' once the clock moved the delivery date. Your case might be something like 10pm Thursday through 2pm Friday, but you'd have to work that out. It was simple enough through product uploads and even better if your items don;t change that much.
Our logic was it was better to lose a few hours of orders rather than the eligibility completely.
Hope you can get a proper fix, but this might help until then.
Seller_q6NkIi6kKaVTg
The same problem exists when offering Premium Shipping. It has become next to impossible to maintain the 97% on-time delivery rate due to Amazon not recognizing that many rural addresses are not serviced on Saturdays. If you end up finding a solution to this please let us know. We've opened many cases with seller support as well without any intelligent response. The best is when we called in and spoke to a seller support agent who told us to call FedEx or UPS and ask them to stay open the next day (Saturday) to make the delivery for us (like that would ever happen). Then they eventually admitted that no matter what we did on our end, our metrics would be hurt, but never acknowledged that the issue was on Amazon's side of the isle.
Seller_z4uE5P2y92SX8
What we do to avoid this is around 2pm on Thursday, we re-assign all of our SFP items to a no SFP template and then on Sunday morning, we put them back in. This avoids this issue as well as having to ship over the weekend.
Seller_mYJfEeaz23GIT
This is the exact reason we stopped offering SFP. At the end of the day we couldn't meet both the delivery guarantee and the ability to offer 1 day shipping to the proper customer views. The two options were mutually exclusive for us.
Seller_NzEmZKTEdcpPZ
Same thing here. Some rural addresses simply don't have any delivery option on Saturdays if shipped on Friday. This issue has been dinging both our SFP and non-SFP orders On-Time Delivery metrics. SS has been ignorant to the case I created (a cynical "it's your problem, work with the shipping carriers and make it happen" answer). MODs tried to help and escalate and, I believe, they understand and acknowledge the issue, but there has been no fix.
We received a message from Amazon yesterday, removing our Premium Shipping eligibility for non-SFP orders exactly because of such orders. We appealed and explained the issue, provided screenshots of Buy Shipping, SS Case ID where we were proactive and reported the issue to Amazon, asking them to fix it for future orders, etc. Naturally, nobody read the appeal and their reply was "provide POA how to fix this". Cynical and plain stupid. Wasting everyone's time and causing to miss some sales.
This won't go away and will continue until Amazon fixes the system that calculates the promised delivery date to the customers. By the way, this hasn't been an issue for us until recently. Something must have happened in Amazon's system that is now calculating the promised delivery date incorrectly for some locations when it comes to Saturday. Before, the system would correctly move such locations to Monday delivery promise date. Now it's a Saturday, even of a carrier says "nope, it's not happening, we don't deliver there on Saturday if you ship on Friday, no such option is available, sorry."
Just keep on creating cases and reporting this glitch to Amazon. That's all we can do.
KJ_Amazon
Hello @Seller_yvO8mEXSyy2K8 @Seller_q6NkIi6kKaVTg @Seller_NzEmZKTEdcpPZ
Thank you for those questions about Seller-Fulfilled Prime and Saturday delivery promises.
I shared feedback from this and similar threads with our partner teams. Those teams are reviewing cases/orders reported by sellers, and checking Shipping Settings Automation calculations. Please continue to post Case IDs here focused on that issue.
I will follow up here when I have updates to share.
KJ_Amazon
