As the leader of cross-border e-commerce platforms, Amazon's every move affects the nerves of countless sellers.
Recently, Amazon has made a new round of adjustments to its logistics and return policies. These new changes not only reflect the platform's strategic layout for future development, but also directly affect the actual operation of sellers.
01Delivery time reduced to 20 days
A few days ago, Amazon released the latest logistics policy, starting from October 25, 2024, the shipping time settings for shipping from China to the mainland United States (excluding Hawaii, Alaska and United States Protected Territories) will change significantly. The range of sellers' choices on shipping templates will be shortened from 2-28 days to 2-20 days, and the maximum shipping time will be shortened from 28 days to 20 days.
At the same time, the platform will enable the automatic processing time mechanism, and for SKUs that manually configure processing times that are two days or more slower than the actual one, Amazon will automatically adjust their processing time, and sellers cannot disable this feature.
The new policy quickly sparked a strong response among the seller community. Many sellers said that the policy does not take into account a variety of variables in actual operations, such as logistics delays, product characteristics, processing time differences, etc., which has a particularly serious impact on self-fulfilled sellers.
Sellers are concerned that shorter transit time requirements will directly lead to higher logistics costs, while increasing the risk of late deliveries due to uncontrollable factors.
What is particularly puzzling to sellers is that this new policy also seems to set up an "invisible punishment" for sellers who ship too quickly. Some sellers have reported that even if they complete the order processing and ship in advance, they may be considered as late delivery because they do not ship according to the newly set time frame, which in turn affects the on-time delivery rate (OTDR) of the store:
01
"Am I right? If our shipping speed is really faster than the time we manually configured, will Amazon punish us for shipping too fast?"
02
"We shipped on time, and now we're responsible for delays that are out of our control. Is this fair?"
03
"I have 8 orders marked for late delivery. I downloaded the report and the report itself for 7 orders with delayed deliveries indicates that the delivery date was on the promised delivery date or even earlier. ”
04
"Of all the changes to Amazon, penalizing sellers for early shipping is the weirdest."
In this regard, some industry analysts pointed out that Amazon's adjustment of logistics policy seems to be intended to clean out some small sellers and amateur sellers, so as to better serve medium and large enterprises that can provide efficient, fast and stable logistics services.
In addition, the new policy has also brought unprecedented challenges to the transportation of some special commodities. For example, sellers who sell live plants say that the automated processing time mechanism simply cannot adapt to their operational needs due to the additional processing time required by the characteristics of the product. Similar problems also exist in other goods that require special handling, such as fragile goods, dangerous goods, etc.
02Cargo processing time reduced to 2 days
At the same time, Amazon also recently announced an important update to its international return policy from September 16, 2024. The new rules require international sellers (sellers who do not have a default United States return address) to provide a returnless refund or prepaid international return label within 2 days of the return request, which is 3 days shorter than the current 5 days!
Amazon will send an email notification to sellers as soon as the refund process starts, which includes an "Authorization Request" button that allows sellers to upload the shipping label required for their return directly by clicking through the "Returns Management" section of Seller Central.
It is important to note that if the seller does not respond to this request within the established timeframe, Amazon may subrogate the refund and transfer the corresponding amount directly to the seller's account.
Historically, Amazon has been generous with customer return windows, especially during peak sales seasons, which can be extended to as long as three months. However, in view of the two new policies launched by Amazon this time, it is not difficult to foresee that sellers will face more severe risks and challenges of "wool picking".
This not only means a direct loss of the product itself, but also a non-negligible return processing fee, which further compresses the seller's profit margins.
Therefore, as the source of the seller, we should be more aware that we must firmly grasp the initiative to solve the problem in our own hands, and only high-quality products and excellent services can defeat the risk of returns.