Seller Fulfilled Prime - Suspension Warning
Hi All,
We have a large 3PL company manage our Seller Fulfilled Prime orders (warehousing / pick & pack / dispatch). The’re fantastic and work with hundreds of Amazon sellers, shipping everything out the same day with Royal Mail, tracking numbers automatically sync to our dashboard etc…
However Amazon sent a warning over our SFP metrics today as they have fallen below 99%, telling us to write a plan of action to remain part of the programme. Having spoke to our 3PL, everything has gone out on time but Royal Mail are slow with the scans causing metrics to dip.
We’ve been thrown a lifeline from Amazon, they stated:
“if the SEA is missed because of the carrier, please get an acknowledgement from carrier with full details a)Date and time b)No.of Units missed c)Reason for the miss d)Precautions taken”
Has anyone been in this situation and managed to get such an acknowledgement from Royal Mail?
If not, can you recomment if it’s worth moving over to either DPD or Amazon shipping? Our 3PL works with both so I’ll switch over to whoever has the better performance metrics.
23 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
Are your 3rd party company using the correct tracked bag labels ?
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
Of course that’s presuming it’s royal mail and not DPD or amazon logistics 
Seller_9DYaWkPMIow10
Word of warning. Don’t think by using Amazon Shipping it will automatically be easier for metric issues.
Last year I had an incident where about 30 parcels never got that first scan, still unknown to this day. I informed SFP seller performance, they wanted me to ask Amazon Shipping for detailed explanation. It was sorted in the end, but it sort of felt like Amazon were asking me to ask Amazon for an apology to Amazon. 
Seller_Iti0OkAyMPN7I
Constant Battle with Royal Mail, the only thing you can do is keep onto them and eventually they may esclate your issue and something will improve, I went through a phase where part bags were scanned ontime and the remainder the following day and then where post was constantly delayed in certain areas, evidence was key in getting that one resolved still not 100% but down to about half a dozen hotspots. I did end up sending the SFP team daily dispatch and scan reports when the problem was at its worst which if it did nothing other than show I was working on the issue I never got impacted and was worth the effort.
Also worth mentioning to Royal Mail that by impacting your deliveries that will limit your ability to sell product which inturn will reduce your volume and their revenue, obviously that only works if your account manager actually cares, my first one didn’t but after the cull I have a nice new AM who does actually care and does follow up in a timely manner.
Seller_a8hmbvZlmGuF7
Just contact your royal mail manager they will do you a letter they will just need the break down from amazon of the ones missed and these are done for you. This also alerts your manager to the issue and they can atleast look into it for you also as we had a delivery office causing issues. Earlier in the pandemic royal mail replied we are to busy but now we get a letter when needed.
Seller_pSmOMHxVIzqsN
In order to resolve this you must provide Amazon with evidence this is Royal Mail’s fault and not that of 3rd party fulfillment company. If you provide this Amazon will normally just forget about the suspension and strike the warning off.
So what you need to do is:
- note all the defect tracking numbers and provide them to the 3rd Party Fulfillment company
- ask them to contact their Royal Mail Account Manager specifically about these parcels to investigate their delivery
- get the 3rd Party to provide the Royal Mail Account Manager’s response in full, preferably by a forwarded email, so Amazon can see it has not been made up as you will need to provide a screenshot of their email…
Royal Mail normally reply and detail a response per tracking number, noting whether it was a late scan or late delivery, or both and whether this was their fault or that of someone else. If it was collected on time then it is very likely it is also their fault…
So this must have happened with the 3rd Party before, not necessarily with you but with other Amazon sellers they provide a service for - Royal Mail often miss their inbound scan timeframes. The issue is you are now reliant on a) the 3rd Party playing ball and actually doing what you need b) providing you the actual response and c) that the problem was not actually their fault in the first place
I guess this is the flipside of using a 3rd Party - you are really in their hands and if they have slipped up in dispatching then even if they admit it is their fault to you, it isn’t actually going to help with reinstating SFP as Amazon will see it as your problem and the answer is not to use them (and use FBA of course but not that the response will say this part…).
I hope this helps.
Seller_gVAQeIwDyQGsP
We’ve actually had a similar issue recently affect both of our eBay and Amazon stores.
This is entirely down to Royal Mail and I believe may be something to do with their API or connection between the sites passing on tracking information.
As we use their 24 or 48 services which are only scan on delivery to customers, it’s telling us we’ve dispatched late so the tracking info is being uploaded when the customer receives the goods and not when it left our warehouse.
Hopefully Amazon or whoever else realise it’s RM’s fault and remove the negative metrics.
