Avoiding Out of Stocks with an Efficient Carrier Pick Up Program
With many of Amazon’s categories now completely suppressing out-of-stock items, being in stock is more important than ever. If your items are not in stock on Amazon, they are simply not on the digital shelf and you’ll lose ground to competition. However, getting products picked up from your warehouses and delivered to Amazon in a timely manner is harder than it sounds – especially in a Collect model where Amazon controls the freight carriers. Here are some tips and tricks to ensure your products get picked up on-time and efficiently so you can focus on selling, from one of our resident operations experts, Brian Butts.
Proper Escalation
Please see the linked carrier escalation paths document for detail on how to troubleshoot a pickup or delivery issue with Amazon’s transportation team. We have provided solutions for both Vendors and Sellers to troubleshoot carrier related issues and seek a timely resolution that appeases all parties.
Risk Mitigation
Per Amazon, Collect/WePay Vendors must consolidate all Purchase Orders (POs) that share the same ship/delivery window, origin, and destination into a single routing request while adhering to the parameters provided by Amazon. By consolidating POs, you are effectively increasing the volume of your shipments and hopefully forcing a Less-than-truckload (LTL) or Truckload (TL) tender from Amazon. At the same time, you are also limiting the number of shipments that could potentially result in a pickup or delivery issue. Vendors who consistently submit consolidated and accurate routing requests will be in a strong position to maintain or even lower overall freight costs, which will help with Amazon funding asks during annual vendor negotiations (AVN).
For all Vendors and/or Sellers that have justifiable volume, we recommend following these steps from the North American Vendor Transportation Manual to work with a carrier for arranging a Drop Trailer to alleviate dock congestion.
- You must initiate communication with the carrier to see if drop capacity can be offered.
- The carrier will do an analysis of all business lines shipping out of your location to determine if enough consistent volume exists to support drop trailer capacity.
- You may be required to sign the carriers Shipper Load and Count (SLC) agreement.
- You may be required to follow the carrier’s PRO sticker guidelines in order to establish drop trailers.
- Once drop trailer is initiated, you must load Amazon orders first.
- You are responsible for notifying the carrier that the drop trailer is ready for pick up. The local terminal must be contacted by 10AM local time to schedule a driver for same day pick up. If the carrier is contacted later in the day, driver capacity is limited, and the load may roll to next day.
- When scheduling a pickup for a drop trailer, the mandatory requirements are to provide trailer number, ARNs/FBA IDs, and pallet count or cube. If there are only a few pallets loaded, the carrier may wait until the vendor/seller has additional freight to load prior to pick up.
- Upon pick up, have BOLs ready to hand to driver
Ideoclick seeks to provide clients with operational assistance as part of its complete Amazon managed services. Contact us to learn more.