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.
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.
16 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_roNdLQpqbVoOH
Who would give your fine post a thumbs down?
Seller_kIukTwdhvntAp
I have a few 'fans' that down vote just abut everything but are too lazy to step up and try to help people.
Seller_2srXkS44rN39i
I mean I *could* do that, but that would mean that it would take me around 9 hours to pack all the fri/sat/sun/mon orders. I took a tuesday, wednesday and part of thursday off a couple weeks ago to visit relatives. It took me over a week to "zero out" my orders and catch up and not have 4-6 hours of work in front of me. Having a large queue of orders stresses me out.
Seller_kIukTwdhvntAp
"Having a large queue of orders stresses me out."
I know that feeling. Back during COVID when Amazon was only shipping 'essentials', I had six weeks in a row of over 100 packages that needed to go out on Monday. It was before their "reward' system so I shipped as fast as possible.
If you take Saturday OFF your 'work days' on your store settings and have two day shipping, you get this --
Thursday orders ship Friday or Monday.
Friday orders ship Monday or Tuesday.
Saturday and Sunday orders ship Monday or Tuesday.
Tuesday is now my 'busy' day, but I can alleviate that by shipping a few of those orders on Monday and NOT triggering Amazon "rewards" (sanctions) for shipping too fast.
I have everything set that way. We are going to an Easter Brunch and then heading to a hotel for tonight. We will stay overnight and come back in the late afternoon on Monday. The sturgeon are starting to spawn and it is always interesting viewing so we will do that on Monday for a few hours. Then, in order to take care of any 'must ship' orders from eBay and a couple other sites we head home.
LESS STRESS and less Amazon control over my (our) lives. If Amazon had not decided to force sellers into their AHT and other cr$# if we shipped early I would probably still be the slave to FAST shipping that I was for almost 15 years here.
In some ways I have to actually THANK them for trying to be a total control freak on this. Now I just keep my numbers UNDER the magic "2" so they can't/won't (so far) control me further.
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.
Seller_He75LUjefhVm9
On my end I just ignore that and use ground advantage even with the "late shipping" warning. Haven't has an issue yet. I also added another day to my shipping templates to combat this and opted out of Amazon's automated "you ship too fast" setting. That was driving me crazy. It's maddening to get a negative performance review due to getting orders out faster than you say you will. Sometimes I can't get them out so fast. My settings are realistic for me, the guy that is doing the shipping.
Seller_xDZRCQm1lIUcl
I was originally going to say that Amazon is not calculating Saturday into your delivery promised, but that can't be right since they are telling you to Ship Saturday -- meaning you have weekend operations enabled for Saturday.
This has to be a transit time issue.
What is your OTDR? Are most of your USPS GA deliveries being delivered on time for M-F operations?
enable SSA and you will never have this issue again.
