We’ve heard from a number of Amazon sellers that in the past they’ve suffered defects when selling into Europe due to inflexibility of delivery promises. That’s now about to change.
Up until now Amazon has given one setting for delivery speed which didn’t take into account that whilst you can delivery to close well serviced countries like Germany in 1-2 days, in other far flung reaches of Europe it might take 4 or 5 days for a parcel to arrive.
Sellers don’t like not being able to keep their delivery promises and even worse buyers don’t like feeling let down which often results in complaints and defects on the seller’s Amazon account.
Amazon are now rolling out a new feature to increases flexibility in managing international sales of non-BMVD (Books, Music, Video, DVD) products. From this week they’re starting to enable Ship by Region (SBR) shipping settings to enable sellers to provide a wider selection of countries to which choose to service and then to set tailor-made delivery rates and delivery promises by each country selected.
N.B. Shipping rates for BMVD products are set by Amazon and cannot be changed. If your Amazon account is enabled for listing BMVD products, you can edit the default settings for your BMVD shipping service levels but not the rates.
Benefits of Amazon Ship by Region
Amazon say that the biggest benefits of SBR are:
- Select specific countries to deliver your products to by creating a shipping template.
- Set tailor made delivery rates and transit times by country in the shipping template.
- Create multiple shipping templates in Seller Central based on your needs for different products in your catalogue. Once you create a new template, you can assign a shipping template to the various products in your catalogue.
- Retrieve all historical shipping templates in Seller Central.
- Introduce expedited delivery options for national and international customers.
Once you’ve set up your new SBR shipping rules, buyers will be shown an estimated delivery date calculated from the date the order was placed by adding your handling time and the transit time for the delivery option they’ve chosen.
Whilst this is a phased roll out, all professional sellers on Amazon will be migrated to SBR later this year.
Hopefully this will help stop the dilemma currently facing sellers – do you offer a slow delivery promise which for some countries you can easily beat, but which might put off buyers who expect to have to wait to receive their purchase, or do you offer a faster delivery promise which you know you can’t meet for buyers in other parts of Europe risking seller defects? Once SBR is enabled for your account you’ll be able to offer realistic delivery options that you are confident in achieving.
