Amazon are writing to merchants informing them that Shipping Settings Automation are being applied to their accounts. Shipping templates will be upgraded to enable Shipping Settings Automation based on their existing shipping preferences including their ship from location and chosen carriers.
What this means is that it will override your existing estimated delivery dates with some clever calculation in the background coupled with the performance of the carriers you use and coupled with your actual delivery performance. Amazon will also take into account the customer location and performance of carriers to that location so one customer might see a next-day delivery promise while someone the other end of the country might see a two-day delivery date estimation.
Shipping Settings Automation is an enhanced shipping template that automatically calculates the delivery date that customers will receive your product based on your warehouse location, your customers’ location and up-to-date performance of the delivery methods you use. When SSA is enabled, you no longer need to manually estimate transit times to deliver products; SSA handles this for you by setting more accurate and automated transit times that are closer to your actual delivery speed. Additionally, with SSA enabled, you are protected from carrier performance issues.
– Amazon
For many merchants, this is a double edged sword as many will routinely add in a day or so to their delivery estimates to give them so leeway. For instance, if you are a small business and have to shut up early one day and miss shipments, it’s not a problem if you’ve added in an extra day to your handling time.
Amazon look at this and consider that 99% of the time your packages arrive a day earlier than you promised and think it’s a better consumer experience and probably you’ll get more sales if they override your settings and at the point of sale estimate that a purchase will arrive sooner than your promised delivery date. An Amazon stat states that sellers overestimate shipping times by 53% so this is a sizeable issue that they are trying to address.
Not only is it a better consumer experience resulting in more sales, but Shipping Settings Automation should automatically take care of events such as the current raft of Royal Mail strike days or any other disruption to carrier networks.
If you opt out of this upgrade Shipping Settings Automation, Amazon will will require you to create a shipping template and manually estimate transit times.
One Response
Hi Chris I am not 100% sure that this happens :
“Not only is it a better consumer experience resulting in more sales, but Shipping Settings Automation should automatically take care of events such as the current raft of Royal Mail strike days or any other disruption to carrier networks.”
Can you confirm with your source at Amazon please?