FBA policy changes again? Defect rate over 50% will be banned for 30 days!

Recently, Amazon FBA warehouses are facing serious warehouse overflow problems, and sellers frequently encounter difficulties in making appointments for goods to enter the warehouse. Freight forwarders in the United States reported that when making appointments, the system often displays "Delivery date outside of PO's delivery window", which means that the warehouse entry time exceeds the warehouse entry time scheduled by the purchase order (PO).

Last May, Amazon introduced the highly anticipated new PO number regulations to address the chaos in the back-end truck booking and delivery process. This move sparked widespread discussion in the cross-border circle.

According to recent industry reports, an Amazon logistics manager revealed that in order to standardize operating standards and improve logistics efficiency, Amazon FBA will implement a new policy starting July 1, 2024, which mainly includes the following three independent defect rate calculation methods:

According to the new FBA regulations, the accuracy of appointment POs has been recalculated since July 1. If the three defect rates involved reach the preset data threshold, Amazon will directly close the relevant appointment delivery account and delete all future appointments.

Amazon's reservation policy is not new, but has always existed. In early February this year, Amazon implemented new regulations for warehouse entry. Sellers need to fill in the warehouse entry date for each shipment, and it must be consistent with the scheduled warehouse entry date. If the dates are inconsistent, it may be impossible to get an appointment, and even affect logistics performance.

In April, some sellers had their shipments marked with a red exclamation mark saying “delivered outside the delivery window” because the actual time the shipment entered the warehouse was earlier or later than the time they started filling out . Some sellers even received performance notifications from Amazon.

It can be seen from this that the PO number is very important. It is related to whether your goods can be successfully warehoused and put on the shelves. The defect rate and accuracy rate are directly related to the reservation account, and even serious cases may lead to account suspension.

PO accuracy refers to the comparison between the number of POs entered when booking (carrier) was made and the number of POs received by Amazon. According to previous data from "Amazon Carrier Central", Amazon requires that the carrier's booking defect rate should not exceed 5% and the order accuracy rate should be higher than 95%.

Amazon reserves the right to give priority to carriers with a reservation defect rate higher than 10% or an order accuracy rate lower than 85%. If the defect rate exceeds 50%, the carrier account will be banned for 30 days!

Amazon divides defect inspection points into three categories:

Sellers need to be more cautious and accurate in logistics and delivery to ensure that the cargo information is consistent with Amazon system data and is delivered to Amazon warehouses on time. In order to avoid subsequent delivery impacts, the following points need to be paid attention to:

1. Ensure that the PO is valid and accurate. Pay attention to the validity and accuracy of the PO. Before the seller ships the goods, confirm the accuracy and validity of the PO before placing the order. When creating the PO, the number of boxes must match the actual number of boxes. This will avoid problems such as PO invalidation, inability to make an appointment, not being put on the shelves in the backend, inability to open the goods, and even causing the transportation account to be blocked.

2. Handle invalid PO. If the PO is expired or invalid, the seller needs to reactivate or create a new PO and cover the label before delivery can be completed.

3. It is recommended that the same batch of goods be delivered to the same logistics company. Regarding the issue of repeated deletion of appointments, Amazon explained that the repeated deletion of appointments may be because the seller assigned the goods to different recipients in the PO . The Amazon system will automatically assign and delete other appointments . In order to avoid delivery delays, it is recommended that the goods of the same batch of PO be delivered in a centralized manner, and not dispersed to multiple sea containers or assigned to multiple warehouse freight forwarders.

4. Choose a channel with stable pickup time. Avoid changes in pickup time, and do not cancel or modify the appointment within 72 hours, which will result in failure to deliver the goods.

Finally, if you have a large shipment of the same item, you can use multiple warehouses to reduce the risk, because if the truck cannot deliver all the items at once, it will be difficult to make another reservation with the PO number.