I’m sure you are all aware and have been contacted by Amazon about the new initiative regarding the Valid Tracking Rate (VTR) and the need to hit 95% VTR.
We have done the required changes to ensure the correct carrier code that Amazon requires is sent over along with the tracking reference.
I’m sure you know we also have the ability to send up Royal Mail Deliver Confirmation Numbers (DCN) optionally. This was switched off by default as there have always been doubts as to Amazon accepting these as they are not true tracking numbers and are also not You too
guaranteed to be scanned as this a free service provided by Royal Mail.
We have recently been made aware that Amazon are now recommending to customers that they buy their RM shipping via their seller central account as they will consider any label bought via them as valid regardless of further scans. Obviously as a StoreFeeder customer this is not practical for you. However we do have the ability via our Amazon Logistics courier integration to be able to buy RM services automatically. While possible this also comes with 2 main drawbacks:
- Amazons own API limits the amount of requests that can be sent per second to 10 and it automatically refreshes. This means that the sizes of pickwaves that can be sent at one time is hampered. From internal testing we would initially recommend pickwaves of 20 to avoid any issues with throttling from Amazon.
- If using scan and despatch the labels are fetched at the time of despatch. Fetching these labels from Amazon are slower than from RM and can lead to 3 – 8 seconds delay per order as we wait for the label to be returned from Amazon.
While there is little we can do in situation 2 above, we have also been working on ways to make situation 1 a little more free by adding small delays into the pickwave generation procedure to allow larger pickwaves to be created. This in theory should allow you to create larger pickwaves but we would still advise smaller pickwaves if possible.
Royal Mail have created an FAQ detailing how to connect your RM services via Amazon Buy Shipping which you can find here
This contains information about the manifest procedure and your account charges.
In order to set up StoreFeeder to be able to buy your RM labels from our Amazon Logistics courier integration we have provided the following knowledgebase:
We will be updating this knowledgebase with more of the exact Royal Mail shipping service names that Amazon require as we find them out. We are also separating them as Prime and Non-Prime specific. You can then use those codes to request a specific Royal Mail service from Amazon (Please be aware this may fail to generate a label if the chosen service doesn’t meet Amazons promised Delivery Date (PDD))
One final thing to be aware of if using Amazon to generate your Royal Mail labels is that you will no longer be allowed to merge orders as Amazon shipping requires the exact order details to generate a label. This unfortunately means that we have had to disable automatic merging for all Amazon integrations.
Finally, with regards to the data that is sent over to Amazon for the correct carrier, we have put in place functionality to map the recognised carrier details in StoreFeeder to be the exact values that Amazon require without causing any backward compatibility issues. This will all be done without the need for you to do anything. If anything changes we are able to get updates out rapidly so you shouldn’t see any issues with incorrect values being sent up
As always if you have any specific concerns about this then please get in touch with us via our Support Team.
Thanks,
The StoreFeeder Team
