Amazon Shipping SNAFU day before Prime Day

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There appears to be an Amazon Shipping SNAFU the day before Amazon Prime Day. Merchants trying to create shipments today are receiving the message “Error retrieving shipping services”.

The error is not only appearing for merchants trying to create shipments via third party integrations but also directly on the Amazon Shipping page on the Amazon website.

This will impact merchants on Seller Fulfilled Prime as well as those using Amazon Shipping to despatch products on their own website and other platforms including eBay.

Amazon are suggesting merchants ship parcels using another carrier to avoid missed delivery for urgent orders. They are also informing merchants that if they are worried about their metrics being affected due to this and negative feedback they can contact the Seller Fulfillment Prime team (sfp-uk-notifications@amazon.co.uk) to indicate that the Amazon Shipping SNAFU is being looked into. This of course won’t apply to your metrics or negatives feedback on eBay and other platforms.

This winter is going to be particularly testing for the entire carrier industry who have been up against capacity limits during the pandemic. Carriers simply don’t have spare capacity to flex and the run up to Christmas is going to be interesting to say the least! However, today’s Amazon Shipping SNAFU once again demonstrates how crucial it is to have back up carriers in place for when things go wrong.

If you don’t have alternative plans in place for if ANY of your carriers performance or capacity throws up issues then now is the time to make sure you sign a contract to get emergency capacity in place. Whether it means switching parcels to Royal Mail or having a standby courier contract in place you should address this now rather than waiting for an issue to arrive.