Freight forwarders deliver goods from warehouses far away to nearby warehouses? Amazon cracks down on logistics chaos, and will ban accounts violating the rules

Ocean freight volumes could fall by 2.5% in 2023 amid extremely challenging market conditions, freight intelligence platform Xeneta said in its 2023 outlook .

Freight rates have been falling and no one is interested in containers. It can be seen that with the sluggish demand, this year's container shipping market is no longer as hot as before. And the freight forwarders who once made a lot of money by taking advantage of the trend have also fallen to the bottom.

In order to compete for customers, freight forwarders began to roll in at low prices, using all kinds of tricks. This also made the freight forwarding industry, which was already a mixed bag, even more turbid, and various scandals occurred one after another.

In addition to low-price declarations and running away with the money, another common phenomenon is the secret warehouse change, which greatly delays the seller's delivery time. Now that Amazon has upgraded its system, this kind of secret operation will be completely exposed to the sun.

In the tail delivery link, many unscrupulous freight forwarders often deliberately send goods to the wrong warehouse or unload goods nearby in order to save costs, under the guise of warehouse overflow. For example, the seller originally created a warehouse in the central or eastern United States, but the freight forwarder secretly sent the goods to a popular warehouse in the western United States. It is reported that the dedicated AGL trucks for the western United States warehouse are very cheap, while a truck in the eastern United States costs several thousand dollars, and the freight forwarder earns the difference.

This is also likely to result in Amazon considering the goods as being delivered to a different warehouse and thus refusing to accept them and transshipping them. In the worst case, the entire shipment may be lost, or in the worst case, the goods may be directly registered and an additional transshipment fee may be incurred out of thin air.

A seller revealed that he encountered unscrupulous freight forwarders and trucking companies a few months ago. In order to increase profits, they sent a large number of goods from warehouses in the Central and Eastern U.S. to popular warehouses in the West U.S., causing several warehouses in the West U.S. to be overwhelmed. They turned the back-end cost difference between the West U.S. and the East U.S. into huge profits, causing the seller's goods to be signed for but not put on the shelves for a long time.

Another seller who encountered the same problem revealed that the freight forwarder lied to him, saying that the truck company had signed a third-party truck delivery service cooperation agreement with Amazon and that they could send goods to the nearest warehouse to increase the speed of putting goods on the shelves.

In the past, it was difficult for sellers to be aware of such shady operations by freight forwarders in a timely manner. However, recently, Amazon has revised the shipment page, allowing sellers to directly view the shipment’s warehousing information and understand its specific delivery address.

As can be seen from the picture below, the seller's shipment delivery address is STL4 warehouse, but it was actually sent to LGB8 warehouse.

▲ The picture comes from Zhiwubuyan

After the system was updated, many sellers were hit by a bunch of far-flung warehouse and near-flung delivery operations when they checked the shipment information:

"I just checked the backend and found a black-hearted freight forwarder. Several shipments were either delivered to other warehouses or to two warehouses."

"I checked the backend today and found that all the shipments were from far warehouses to nearby warehouses. This happened a long time ago. The system assigned FTW1, but the freight forwarder sent all the shipments as LGB8/ONT2."

"I was also assigned one point and registered at three points. It was the same with several freight forwarders."

It can be seen that many "White Bone Demons" who were carrying out gray operations in secret were exposed under the golden hoop of "Xun Wukong".

According to reports, Amazon US has introduced new rules to restrict freight forwarders and carriers from delivering goods to warehouses inaccurately. According to the regulations, the accuracy of the booking manifest must be greater than 70% to be eligible for delivery to Amazon warehouses. If the account is less than 70% 4 times within 8 weeks, the operator center account will be suspended.

▲ The picture comes from Weibo

In this regard, a seller opened a case to inquire whether the difference between the shipping address and the receiving address would have any impact. The customer service replied that this was assigned by the system and would not incur other delivery costs, but would affect the normal listing speed.

▲ The picture comes from Zhiwubuyan

Some customer service staff also stated that although an incorrect warehousing address does not generate additional fees, it may result in Amazon’s rejection of the goods, which will affect warehousing performance and further confiscate shipping permissions.

Many sellers speculated that this was actually more like a bug in the Amazon system. Almost all sellers had random registration problems with card delivery, and even Air Delivery US had the same problem.

As shown in the figure below, the shipment was delivered by UPS. After checking, the address on the bill and the address on the receipt were correct, but the Amazon system showed three warehouses. There were also some full container shipments, and the truck driver at the end also confirmed that they were successfully delivered to the original warehouse, but the actual address still did not match. Therefore, it seems more like Amazon has transferred the goods internally.

In summary, there are three main reasons for inconsistent warehouse addresses:

1. Freight forwarders use warehouses far away and deliver goods nearby to earn the price difference
2. The tail truck driver delivers to the warehouse at will
3. Amazon internal transfer or system loopholes