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VTR for Royal Mail 1st/2nd class?
I've been selling with Amazon for 3+ years now and currently pulling my hair out with their whole VTRs since they changed to wanting everything bought through Amazon's "Buy Shipping".
We've put this integration off for a long time as we sell low-value, small items that can only economically be sent via Royal Mail 1st/2nd class. This was fine as these had always been exempt, but after getting my account suspended twice with misinformation from Amazon I'm trying to get to the bottom of things before I spend time and money changing processes and building new API integrations.
My concern is that I've seen some people, despite being good boys & girls and buying their 1st/2nd Royal Mail through Amazon, that because they're still essentially stamps Royal Mail doesn't scan them. This means time and effort have gone in to changing processes, all for VTR to remain poor. See below:
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/e8fa389576707d8dc17152514e18dcdc
Does anyone have any experience?
4 replies
Seller_ZJhFeE3tNKzfh
There is absolutely no need to buy everything through Amazon Buy Shipping (EXCEPT those that are Royal Mail 1st and 2nd Class Letters)
We have a Royal Mail account and buy outside of amazon and upload the tracking information as required. Currently we use Tracked 48 which has a near enough 100% scan rate.
Previosuly though, we used Royal Mail 48 for almost all orders. VTR rate never went above 80%, but as per amazons own terms, for unscanned parcels, they will verify the codes you supply are valid before exempting your ability to sell in a category - and that was exactly the case for us.
Sakura_Amazon_
@Seller_ZJhFeE3tNKzfh, Thanks for sharing your experience.
Sellers, Have you lately gone through the situation described by @Seller_gtHvqwwZhnGTg?
Regards,
Sakura
Seller_KlbXZHzQGSDZv
It really depends on what your sending as per 33.33 post.
If yur sending mainly letters and looking to stay that way then Amazon Shipping is about the only way you will get your vtr to survive.
If your sendind a mix of LL and L with the majority being LL you can stick with click and drop or however you are doing it and just change the L to LL and absorb the costs usually about 30p per letter. These then get scanned (sometimes) and Amazon "SHOULD" work behind the scenes to check and not hit you with low vtr.
If the 30p hit is too much which it can be on cheap products buy shipping is the only way and your VTR should be able to go to whatever it wants and amazon should not be penalising you.
My VTR at present 27.03
Seller_ZQyopdiwkUHOZ
There may be some misunderstandings going on here.
If the people you're talking about switched to get 1st and 2nd class postage from Amazon Buy Shipping, and aren't shipping in any other way, then their VTR will be either 100% or N/A.
If what they were seeing was different, then they either weren't sending all post that way, or they didn't understand how VTR is tracked across a date range and so didn't realise that their VTR being low was because of the parcels sent before they made their switch.
That's misunderstanding 1; misunderstanding two is that you think you need to buy your postage through Buy Shipping. You only need to do that for letter sized postage. If it's Large Letter or Parcel, you can buy it wherever you like, so long as you mark the service and tracking number/parcel ID correctly when marking shipped.
The third misunderstanding is that your VTR needs to reach a certain figure. So long as you are marking your shipping correctly (which Click and Drop can be set to do automatically for you), your VTR can be any figure and it will be fine as Amazon verify the tracking numbers and don't punish you if it's due to scan rate issues.
As said before, you can't send Letter post that way, but for Large Letters and Parcels, it's absolutely fine.
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