Important: Drop Shipping Policy update
If you fulfil orders using a third party, a practice known as drop shipping, you must follow all Amazon policies in order to ensure a consistent customer experience that easily identifies only you as the seller of record.
As an important reminder, all violations of the Drop Shipping Policy can break customer trust. As a result, any violation of our Drop Shipping Policy will negatively impact your account health and your ability to fulfil future orders using our Merchant Fulfilled Network (MFN).
The following drop shipping methods are strictly prohibited on Amazon:
- You may not purchase products from another retailer and have that retailer ship directly to customers, if:
- the shipment does not identify you as the seller of record
- anyone other than you appears on packing slips, invoices, or external packaging
Note: This means that the name, logo, or any other identifying information from the other retailer may not appear on what the customer receives.
- You may not ship orders with packing slips, invoices, external packaging, or other information indicating a seller name or contact information other than your own
If you fulfil using drop shipping, you must strictly adhere to following requirements of our policy:
- You must always be the seller of record of your products, meaning you identify yourself as the seller of your products on all information included with the item.
- Remove any information identifying the third-party drop shipper before shipping.
- Be responsible for accepting and processing customer returns.
You should comply with all terms of your seller agreement and applicable Amazon policies. If you have questions, see the Drop Shipping Policy page.
Seller_No516SrfKk7pE
This is interesting. Every order that I have ever fulfilled for dropshippers has not adhered to these requirements, in that it was my own return adress on the package rather than that of the drop shipper.
I wonder if Amazon are going to issue any guidelines on what to do if a drop shipper orders something without providing their own address.
And if the drop shipper does provide their own address and you then put it on the package as the return address, is it not the case that you are then contravening Amazon’s own edict:
‘You may NOT ship orders with packing slips, invoices, external packaging, or other information indicating a seller name or contact information other than your own’.
Of course just cancelling the order would currently damage the metrics of the real seller.
Has this been thought through properly?
Seller_xUKHc5xSYJmI4
Purchased several products from eBay and when the order arrived came from Amazon.
Seller_No516SrfKk7pE
Why would you put another return address other than your own?
Because that is what the update is saying:
-
- Note: This means that the name, logo, or any other identifying information from the other retailer may not appear on what the customer receives.
- You may not ship orders with packing slips, invoices, external packaging, or other information indicating a seller name or contact information other than your own
Seller_Bk7jexQ5nCzO5
Seller_zMdVY1OvvxqwA
Amazon touts this policy as an ‘update’ but I thought these had always been the rules, not sure what’s changed, and drop-shippers have always ignored them. There are some who make contact after placing a drop-shipped order to say it’s a ‘gift’ and ask you not to include any paperwork but beyond that, they don’t care.
Seller_n33KwLeg9XOvi
From experience with bad buyers - most dropshippers use amazon as their stock source - to fulfil their orders on other platforms, as refunds can be requested and granted easily on amzn. So I don’t get how amzn can police this updated policy !!
