As we suspected would happen, sellers who trade on Amazon’s EU marketplaces have discovered that they’re expected to ship packages on the Easter Bank Holidays.
In this case, for a purchase with an order date of Thursday the 13th of April, Amazon instructed the seller that the Expected Despatch Date was Good Friday, the 14th of April. Needless to say, unless you visited a Post Office on Saturday, not only will parcels expected to be sent on Friday be despatched late, but you also couldn’t despatch on Easter Monday and Tuesday the 18th is the first possible day that items could be sent.
Buyers will be confused, from their point of view it’s difficult to understand why an item couldn’t be despatched until five days after the order date. If they’re not in the UK they may well be unaware of the double bank holiday.
This problem is due to be repeated another two times in the near future, the Early May bank holiday falls on the 1st of May and the Spring bank holiday takes place this year on the 29th of May.
Whilst the two May bank holidays should have a lesser impact, this Easter weekend’s double Bank Holiday will doubtless impact some seller’s metrics. Hopefully you have a good enough Amazon rating to weather the hit, but with two more Bank Holidays looming it would be wise to monitor your Amazon account and if you fear you could fall below acceptable standards, it may make sense to temporarily suspend sales on EU Amazon accounts over the next Bank Holidays.
Better to lose a few sales than to have your Amazon accounts suspended. For any sales which you are shipping late due to the two Easter Bank Holidays, consider upgrading the shipment to an expedited services if possible to minimise any adverse buyer feedback.
3 Responses
Metrics are easily bypassed.
You print the invoices and work from them. Mark the whole lot as shipped immediately. Post it days later and no problems occur.
Agreed. It might be an idea to email the buyer – especially if not in the UK – and point out that, although you’ve posted the item (lol), delivery might be delayed by the holiday period.
This, however, will only work if you have a postage method that doesn’t show the date. If you’re worried, use parcel2go or similar where the label has a date. You can still drop these off if you wish as they use a lot of convenience stores such as One Stop as drop-off points and they’re usually open over the bank holiday weekend.
Of course the other option is that amazon send an automated message with all UK orders over a certain date range to explain the delays and exempt UK sellers from reprocussions due to this…..
Oh hang on…. big company like amazon couldnt do that could they…?