Most of our items go out Royal Mail 2nd Class via the Click & Drop system which gives a delivery confirmation tracking number. We add this to Amazon whenever we mark as dispatched. We haven’t had any complaints from customers so far.

Are your tracking numbers in a 21 character/digit format?

Do you use Royal Mail Click & Drop?

Yes, it is becoming a significant headache. We use RM Click and Drop.

We sell a wide variety of products, and it is becoming noticeable that certain SKUs are apparently not arriving. We box everything with nondescript packaging with no product identifier or value shown on the outside. It’s getting to the point where we’re looking to drop certain lines which we just end up refunding too often.

My personal belief is that Amazon preemptively shows the customer non delivered status. Even if the customer has it in their hand, but fancies a refund they’ll push back because they know we have little or no recourse.

All tracking is uploaded at point of dispatch (our order management system will not mark it as dispatched without a tracking number)

Yes same issue. Screenshots saying item might be missing and is late and that they need to contact the seller. Our tracking for barcode system is uploaded to each order via Linnworks but does not seem to help with these queries. I believe, but have not investigated that there might be a new plugin that might help with this but not certain at all.

I have had the same issue.
Royal Mail click and drop delivery confirmation shows the item has been delivered and in one case shows the buyer has collected from RM depot. Buyer opened a A-Z claim and was refunded by Amazon. Upon enquiry Amazon has stated there was no signature therefore we will not accept this tracking.
Same situation when buyer left negative feedback claiming the order did not arrive in time, tracking shows the item was delivered a day earlier than expected. Amazon refused to remove this feedback as there was no signature.

Thank you so much everyone for responding - I was just so frustrated this morning. I have a case open with Amazon and alert them everytime a new customer contacts me asking why is their delivery late or delayed but I just get an automated reply that they are investigating. I spoke to about 5 people in the past and just got passed around and wasted a day, so know there is no point calling again.
I also use Linnworks - a third party software to mark all of my orders as dispatched which uploads the tracking number to Amazon. I have now decided to turn this off and manually mark the orders as shipped on Amazon, and thus not providing any tracking number. This is obviously time consuming and has its own possible issues, but I think for now its the best way to limit the amount of times this happens with customers.
I fear that Amazon have no vested interest in solving this problem and it will be an on-going struggle. GRRRRRR!!!

Just a thought, and I may be clutching at straws here… do all the people that have problems use Linnworks to ‘mark as dispatched’?

I don’t use that and haven’t had any customer complaints… but to be fair I have no way of checking either.

There was a very similar problem t this just over a year ago when a huge number of customers were getting alerts with an exclamation mark beside their order in ‘Your Orders’ page.
You are spot on when you say that a number of buyers then take this as an opportunity to scam the seller by claiming non-delivery.
On that occasion the problem was with Hermes shipments but it was Amazon that was causing the problem as Hermes were showing the correct tracking status.
I had to ask a few honest customers to email me stating that they had received the items, and also to send me a screenshot of the alert. I sent a few of these to Amazon at the Jeff email address and they came back for a little more information but persisted with sorting it until it was fixed.
I had also sent them 20 screenshots of forum messages from sellers having similar problems but told them there were actually many hundreds of sellers having the same problem.

Good luck getting it sorted!

The new Royal Mail delivery confirmation that is the long string of numbers is NOT accepted by Amazon as proof of delivery unfortunately. Even if that tracking shows the item as delivered, Amazon will not accept it as evidence. They have not updated their systems to recognise the tracking, and so its looking for something it doesn’t find, thus reports that it is missing/delayed.

Unfortunately this quite simply rules out any arguments over delivery when using this service so when dealing with Amazon and this tracking method, you should just assume it as a non-tracked item and proceed in that manner, there is no point in doing anything else until they change their policies, which they probably will not.

In reality, Amazon change their minds about what is acceptable on a per-purchase basis. This is probably due to either bots, or untrained staff. I’ve had feedbacks removed because of this tracking when people have said its not arrived, I’ve even won A-Z cases, but I’ve also lost them as well. Sometimes they accept it, most of the time they do not.

At its worst, Amazon rejected Royal Mail Special Delivery confirmation from Royal Mails website once because it didn’t state the delivery address and so was not proof of delivery… To be fair after a brief argument in the A-Z they did relent and eventually accepted it.

Bottom line is that you really need a signature and the delivery address on your tracking to absolutely and unquestionably win an INR case.

Hope this helps, good luck!

Very frustrating

A-Z today, customer saying item not delivered, Tracking and Amazon show the item delivered the next working day…A-Z granted in buyers favour.