Majority of Saturday Shipped Orders with USPS have Late Delivery Risk
I'm an FBM seller using custom shipping templates that work perfectly fine every day of the week except orders where the Ship By day is Saturday. When I get orders that have to be shipped out Saturday, USPS Ground Advantage shows 'Late Delivery Risk' for nearly every one. This forces me to either pay much more for shipping than I want to or risk losing the item and the sale if the customer claims it wasn't delivered. What is the explanation for this?
I would like to continue having Saturday be a business day but I'm uncomfortable shipping so many orders without protection from customer claims.
9 replies
Seller_kIukTwdhvntAp
"I would like to continue having Saturday be a business day but I'm uncomfortable shipping so many orders without protection from customer claims."
You have placed yourself directly between a rock and a hard place and (at this point) refuse to move!
How many orders do you get that HAVE to ship Saturday as a percentage of your total orders? I'm just going to guess it is NOT an even distribution across every day of the week (6 days if you don't ship on Sunday).
I have 2 day shipping and have NEVER included Saturday in my business hours. In the old days (before Amazon decided they would 'reward' us for shipping quickly) I did ship on Saturday.
Now, any orders from Thursday are set for shipping on Monday so I don't ship too quickly and end up in their snares. Friday orders are shipped on TUESDAY, as are Saturday and Sunday orders.
In the past MONDAY was a busy day. Now I get to sleep in. This week I actually am shipping a few orders scheduled for Monday today (Saturday) because I am going out of town for the weekend.
I will get back Monday night in time to go to a baseball game and to face a busy day for shipping on Tuesday.
Good luck -- YOU have to decide exactly how much control over your life you want to give Amazon.
I chose SOME freedom, not total slavery.
Seller_kWzASERYhgus6
Same here. This week is the first time I am seeing this on 80%+ of orders.
This has not one thing to do with my shipping settings, which have not changed in months and have been absolutely perfectly fine until TODAY.
Someone at Amazon decided to add a day to the USPS delivery promise again I suppose.
Sorry that the Amazon shills on here want to blame sellers for everything that happens, when the truth is that Amazon is a nonsensical, random place to do business.
Seller_L8ivIDNqgkpGJ
I'm not sure if this will address your problem, but do you offer expedited shipping? If so, might that be the reason that you are expected to ship so quickly? I have never offered expedited shipping on Amazon for any number of reasons, including this situation, and I have only had two "late" shipments over the past two years.
Seller_8HBeojhszSviQ
Starting at the beginning of April USPS has changed many of their operations. Another round of changes is coming July 1st. To sum up my tread; USPS is discontinuing transiting packages on Saturdays. Also, unless your local post office is within 50 miles of one of the 60 hubs, end of day pickups from those local post offices to the hubs are being discontinued. They will only have morning pickups while the large semis/panel trucks are delivering from one of the hubs to the local post office. That is a double whammy for 75% of local post offices.
I don't know all of the specifics of your business but, I have a couple of ideas that might be helpful. This is by no means an exhaustive list of ideas, only you know what works best for your business.
One option, not the best for sales conversion, you might want to reconsider if having Saturdays as transit/delivery days in your settings is now serving you well.
The better of the two options that I would go with and would be least disruptive to my business: You can set up a shipping template for items that you know will not typically be going USPS Ground Advantage. Will it be perfect, no, but at least you can estimate your OTDR impact as you ship these items on a regular basis. This way you can still take advantage of A-Z claims protection while not impacting those normally higher weight/higher value/higher multiples purchased together items.
