There is little doubt that there is a Royal Mail Amazon SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) problem that needed solving, and Royal Mail have responded by offering Amazon merchants later pick up times.
Royal Mail Amazon SFP issues
Currently, most small retailers have a mid afternoon collection from Royal Mail and no collection on weekend days. This creates a problem for SFP sellers due to two new Amazon requirements kicking in on the 30th of June:
- Starting June 30, 2021, the order cut-off time for Prime orders will be set to 16:00 (Mon-Fri), which means your daily collection time will need to be 16:30 or after.
- You will also be required to fulfil Prime orders on at least one day of the weekend and have a collection on that day.
Royal Mail don’t want to lose your business and so they are offering later collection times and weekend collections to assist Amazon SFP sellers.
Change of Collection Time and Weekend Collection Requests
If you would like to change your collection time for Royal Mail Amazon SFP compliant collections, you need to contact your account Manager or submit a request to Royal Mail. For weekend collections submit an additional request. They do say that they can’t guarantee all requests will be granted, however will do their best to accommodate requests where they can. You need to confirm your collection changes by this coming Friday, the 4th of June 2021, to ensure you are ready for the end of the month.
There may be additional charges for a timed collection and for weekend collections depending on your account status with Royal Mail.
As one of the benefits of having a Royal Mail account, you may qualify for free weekday collections if you spend over £16,500 a year on postage (£60-£70 per working week day).
Standard Royal Mail Business collections prices
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|
|
|---|---|---|
| Weekday collection |
£787 |
Allocated by Royal Mail |
| Timed weekday collection | £1,840 | Chosen by you |
| Saturday collection | £246 | Allocated by Royal Mail |
| Timed Saturday collection | £492 | Chosen by you |
Royal Mail Business collections prices with £16,500/year spend
|
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Weekday collection | FREE | Mutually agreed by Royal Mail and you |
| Single collection | £14.58 (one-off fee, exc. VAT) | Allocated by Royal Mail |
6 Responses
Well I’ve just had the reminder email land about this. Guess I must have missed the original message.
That’s the end of SFP for us then. Pretty unreasonable to expect a busy small businesses to comply with the later 4pm order cut off, but the nail in the coffin is the weekend collection. Not a chance. As if we don’t work hard enough already. I do usually work weekends but use that time to catch up from the previous week and prepare for the next.
A shame as SFP has been very good for us. All of our Amazon SFP products are our Amazon Renewed offerings. If they stop selling, then that’s the end of that too.
What they are doing makes no business sense to me.
Agree with Dave P. It is ok for the large companies to do this, they have the money and rescources to do it, but the small guys… well it is just another burden which can often not be accommodated.
I have to say that the never ending demands from people like amazon , ebay etc, let alone buyers who expect you to mind read and check what they really wanted, let alone what they actually ordered, has bmeant that despite being very sucessful, we are hanging up our gloves this year. Making money is fine, but when it becomes so stressful and joyless that it starts destroying any life you do occassionally get outside of the business, then it is time to walk away.
Still, all those easy life drop shippers and huge companies that buy shed loads of stuff they no nothing about and then ignore any buyer enquiries, will pick up all the masses of technical questions we get won’t they? I mean why not, they are happy to steal the business by sellling at stupid prices, now they can deal with the onslaught of questions.
Just reminding myself of what i am leaving behind, has left me with a sense of relief…
Toby, you have taken the words out of my mouth.
Toby,
I don’t know what you sell, but is there not another option for you than packing in a successful business? Perhaps you could drop the items that are problematic and reinvest in some trouble-free ones.
Commercially, I just don’t get this decision by Amazon.
By using SFP, Amazon are gaining use of my warehouse for their PRIME offering, without the operational overhead, and delivery is even outsourced to RM/DPD – they don’t need to physically touch anything. Furthermore, they don’t share the prime membership fee with me – they make a lot of money from it.
They are essentially reducing their prime offering as smaller sellers drop off.
Strange move.
Well, that’s that then.
I’ve just turned off Prime on Amazon and cancelled our daily SFP collection after more than 2 years and thousands of orders. No more….
What Amazon have done still makes no business sense to me.
Oh well. Onwards and upwards (elsewhere!)