On one of the busiest shipping days of the year, just after a Bank Holiday when there’s a three day weekend of shipments to go, there’s an Amazon Orders SNAFU problem with Click & Drop. For some reason orders aren’t being downloaded from Amazon into Click & Drop.
“We have been made aware of an issue at Amazon affecting multiple systems that is preventing orders from being downloaded into Click & Drop.
We are awaiting a response from Amazon, and will continue to update this page with any new information”
– Royal Mail
This statement is interesting as Royal Mail appear to be suggesting that the Amazon Orders SNAFU has been caused by Amazon and is not a problem with Royal Mail Cick & Drop. If Royal Mail haven’t changed anything or published any software updates then their statement suggests that Amazon have changed something.
Based on what we know, we believe that this would likely be an API issue, although why Amazon would cut off API access to Royal Mail Cick & Drop we don’t know… which is why we suspect the Amazon Orders SNAFU is simply a cock up somewhere and not intentional.
If you are wanting to ship orders today and have too many to manually type them all into Royal Mail’s website, one option might be to use Amazon Shipping to purchase labels instead, although if you’re not already set up for this then you probably won’t have time to get everything lined up and your orders out of the door today.
Your biggest issue probably isn’t waiting for the Amazon Orders SNAFU to be fixed, but making sure it doesn’t cascade into hitting your Amazon metrics too badly which could have much more severe longer term impacts than simply upsetting a few customers who’s orders don’t arrive tomorrow and having a load of WISMO (Where IS My Order) messages to respond to.
We’ll update when we hear more and are crossing our fingers the issue is rapidly resolved.
Updated
This was resolved at around 3pm.
2 Responses
Got email from Amazon earlier today that my link to C&D will expire in 0 days – today – but there was no heads-up before so maybe this was the problem for others? Sudden expiration of the link between Amazon and C&D?
Amazon are corporate criminals and everyone knows that, but ain’t do anything about it.