I was listening with some sympathy to a friend who works for a French ecommerce company. With Christmas falling on a weekend she was bemoaning the fact that the French are back to work the next day and they don’t have a string of Bank Holidays to recover from the festivities the way that we do in the UK.
So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to hear that merchants selling on Amazon France have been penalised for late shipping. A seller tells us “I just check my Amazon FR account and realized my Account Status is ‘At Risk’. Immediately I checked where does it came from and saw that I had some orders with ‘Late Dispatch Rate’. However this orders were placed on the 23rd and Amazon FR state that the “ship by” supposed to be between the 26-27th“.
Of course with the 26th and 27th both being UK Bank Holidays, the only way a UK seller could despatch on those days would be to mark items as shipped even though they probably weren’t even packed. Certainly UK couriers don’t generally collect on Bank Holidays.
We’ve seen similar situations with shipments being marked as late on US sites when there are UK Bank Holidays, but this is the first time I’ve seen it for EU sites. Sadly this is likely to occur ever more frequently with the growth of ecommerce, although it is surprising that Amazon don’t recognise EU national holidays and adjust their expectations of sellers according to the country they’re registered in rather than the country site they’re selling on.
9 Responses
Yep, we copped for this. We only had a handful of orders, but are now showing as 25% late delivery over the last 7 days. We’re still well under 1% over the lifetime of the account so it should level out and we will be ok. I made sure any orders due to ship by the 2nd Jan were marked as sent in advance.
Yep we got stuffed on this as well, – for Germany and France – and more annoyingly orders for Xmas day that “appeared” after shipments posted on Thursday, .. immediately showing late. We know they were not on the system on Weds when we dispatched or Thursday (as everything posted both days), .. but still got 38 “suddenly appeared”,.. like other commentator, its our only lates on both accounts so should be ok in a couple of weeks, but it can be a nervous couple of weeks,
My account been suspended due to late shipment rate shooting to 36% as I sell quite a lot in France
Other marketplace are ok, it only affected my French amazon
In process of appealing, very frustrated
Same here our account has also been suspended, however we extended our shipping dates through our channel management tool but amazon didn’t process it apparently as it was queued :S
Why is it amazon’s problem?
The seller sells on an overseas marketplace. The seller is aware of the buyer expectations? The seller is aware that bank holidays in that country are different?
Yet amazon get the blame when the seller does not use holiday settings when the seller knows they cannot send the items out.
It is the seller’s problem. Amazon are just convenient to blame.
What i don’t understand is there was no problem in May when we had two bank holidays which the EU didn’t. Amazon took into account the despatch rate on that occasion, they didn’t this Christmas. Did they change something and not tell vendoirs?
Whilst i get that selling on an international market is a choice which the seller is responsible, no one can force Royal Mail or any other courier to open on a UK holiday to meet the dispatch requirements of international markets.
The fact is that the courier was closed on the day we were supposed to dispatch orders on Amazon.FR
Yes you can pack them and mark them as dispatched but the stuff has not moved anywhere and i am sure if one looks into the finer details of Amazon’s T&Cs you are probably not supposed to do that, i am sure dispatched means dispatched, it has to be handed to the carrier but that is impossible on a bank holiday.
Another frustration is high defect rates for items which were tracked but have been delayed by the carriers. It is a similar catch 22, yes you as a seller are responsible for choosing a carrier but realistically what can you do.
Royal Mail tracked international to Spain was terrible this Christmas with most of the packages just getting lost even with the priority tracked service.
Tracking was uploaded but our defect rates still skyrocket for late delivery.
All these types of things are difficult to manage when much of it is out of your control.
Changing courier is obviously an option but even that comes with its difficulties when you consider other factors such as integration with systems etc.