With Amazon Buy Shipping, you can buy shipping labels individually or in bulk, ship and confirm your orders and track your shipments.
Amazon Buy Shipping automatically suggests shipping services based on services that can meet the delivery promise to the customer, your carrier preference and lowest available cost. You must use Buy Shipping for at least 98% of Seller Fulfilled Prime products.
If you already have a business account with Royal Mail and want to use these rates that you have previously negotiated with Royal Mail, you can link that account to Amazon and purchase shipping labels at these rates
Now, you can use also Amazon’s Buy Shipping services to purchase Royal Mail 24 and Royal Mail 48 shipping labels at your own rates for your standard merchant-fulfilled orders.
To access these Royal Mail ship methods you must link your Royal Mail account to Buy Shipping here or by accessing your account Settings > Account Information > Buy Delivery Preferences > Manage Carrier Accounts > Link account.
There is a lot of background going on here – Amazon Valid Tracking Rate is causing a major headache for a lot of merchants and comes into effect this coming Monday the 19th of April. Requiring a 95% Valid Tracking Rate to avoid sanctions, it appears that Royal Mail scans aren’t being returned to Amazon at anything like the required rate. Amazon say that by using Buy Shipping you can avoid these sanctions.
Other options appear to be listing Royal Mail services as ‘Other’, but while this will take the services out of the scope of Amazon’s Valid Tracking Rate it does also open you up to chargebacks as tracking then won’t show for any of your sales.
The solution it seems merchants are being driven to is to use Amazon Buy Shipping, so if you use OBA then take this weekend to connect your account to Amazon and get set up for maximum protection and compliance.
It’s also worth noting that at the same time, Royal Mail are advising sellers to migrate away from OBA and to use alternative platforms to purchase postage. Honestly sometimes it seems that whatever merchants do they can’t please everyone. We’re pretty sure you’ll have strong views so please feel free to vent in comments below.
3 Responses
As if sellers havnt got enough to worry about Amazon drop this one on us.
They are a greedy disgusting company.
“Amazon say that by using Buy Shipping you can avoid these sanctions.”
Fingers crossed for everyone, (ourselves included!), who have invested in implementing this! We have linked our RM OBA and are using Buy Shipping to purchase the Royal Mail 24/48 CRL labels.
We now just need to wait until we see evidence that we have done the right thing!
We switched to using Buy Shipping via OBA last week and it’s got issues in that the labels produced have no ID numbers, so you have no way of know what order they are for, even looking at the Amazon orders screen doesn’t help, that often just says “Mrs” or “C” in many cases.
Also you can’t enter the weight of the parcels/ll in grams (unless you go into each individual order), so our averages are all out and its costing us a lot more to post.
Hopefully these are teething problems.