Amazon Pending Orders Cause Temporary Late Shipments
Amazon third party sellers are required to maintain a good standing to continue as sellers on the site. Sellers cannot have too many negative feedback scores from buyers and Amazon sellers need to have control of their inventory counts so that they don’t have to cancel too many orders or ship orders late. For more specific details about Amazon seller performance requirements, you can review an informative article by clicking HERE.
Recently, I learned something interesting about the Amazon “late shipment” metric. I happened to notice that Amazon showed my account has having a late shipment but I was certain that I had not shipped anything late. I reviewed all my orders, both new orders that had just arrived in the last 24 hours and all orders that I had recently shipped. I was completely baffled.
I then went through the process of downloading the details for the “late shipment” and found that the order was one that had never been transmitted to me.
The order remainded pending for almost two weeks. During that time, my metrics continued to show the shipment as being late. I contacted Amazon technical support and they provided me with the following response:
Please be informed that every order placed, passes through various security checks and this order had failed in one of the security checks and hence the details of the order in Seller Central is appearing as pending.
The security check is being re-driven by the team concern. Only once the security checks have been completely cleared, the order would be passed onto your account. These security checks are done in interest and security of merchants only.
Be informed that in these cases, the buyer is informed of the delay as our dedicated team would contact the buyer and these instances would not hamper the merchants metrics.
Thank you for selling on Amazon.com.
When I spoke with Amazon technical support over the phone, they assured me that the order would either be cancelled which would then remove the late shipment from my metric or the order would pass security and be sent to me and I would have 2 days to ship the order and, in that case, the order would not be considered late. Eventually, the order did pass the security checks and the Amazon order was sent to me to be fulfilled.
Once the order was sent to me, the late shipment disappeared from my metrics just as the Amazon technical support representative had stated it would.
One very important note is that during the time the order was pending, my inventory had been reduced. If the order had ultimately been cancelled, my inventory would then have increased back to its original level before the pending order was placed.
Excellent Information! We had similar problems and other problems with transfer of funds. The crux of the problems
was communication and payments
May
May 15, 2009