The United States Postal Service (USPS) Ground Advantage domestic shipping service is now available for your Amazon shipments.
This service consolidates the current First-Class package service, Parcel Select ground, and Parcel Select Cubic shipping methods into the following ship methods:
• USPS Ground Advantage Light : For packages that weigh less than 1lb
• USPS Ground Advantage Heavy : For packages that weigh 1lb to 70lbs
• USPS Ground Advantage Cubic : Cubic prices based on package size and distance rather than weight
USPS has adjusted its shipping service prices with the USPS Ground Advantage launch. These new prices have been reflected in Amazon Buy Shipping.
When you purchase Amazon Buy Shipping labels, you can now choose USPS Ground Advantage. Your existing shipping templates will automatically update to the equivalent USPS Ground Advantage ship method over the coming weeks.
If you use a third-party order management tool, or your own software, to automate order fulfillment, you may need to manually update the ship method name to ensure you can continue to automatically purchase USPS labels.
Your existing shipping templates will automatically update to the equivalent USPS Ground Advantage ship method over the coming weeks.
How many “weeks”, I wonder?
These new prices have been reflected in Amazon Buy Shipping.
Um, yeah. The new prices have been there since the first day the rest of the ecommerce world made the switch to Ground Advantage.
As a side note, is there any reason that Amazon programmed Ground Advantage light and Ground Advantage heavy separately? It’s the same service now. Maybe no one told Amazon?
OK, this could f-k some people over, so everyone beware (it’s a cut-off time issue, explanation below) -
Let me elaborate. I have my shipping settings set to let me ship ‘today’ until 5 pm local time (Pacific time). It’s just before 4:30 now, meaning any label I buy is expected to ship “today”. At 5:01 pm, Buy Shipping treats any label I buy as shipping “tomorrow” instead, even if leave the Ship Date set as today.
What this also means is that any label I buy prior to 5 pm will show an estimated delivery date one day sooner than if I manually switch the ship date to tomorrow. As an example, look at the first-class option (which shouldn’t even exist anymore, but that’s another story) in my screenprints.
Ship date today → estimated delivery Aug 28
Ship date tomorrow → estimated delivery Aug 29 (a day later, since it’s shipping a day later)
Then compare the GA dates.
Ship date today → estimated delivery Aug 31
Ship date tomorrow → estimated delivery Aug 31
Since the estimated delivery date doesn’t move forward a day for Ground Advantage when I change the ship date to tomorrow, that means that Buy Shipping is already treating the GA label ‘as if’ I’m shipping tomorrow. That means Amazon is treating the cut-off time for buying a same-day shipping label as earlier in the day for GA than it is for other services.
This is going to create a bunch of ‘why can’t I buy the shipping label I want’ in the NSFE tomorrow. Anyone who wants to screw Amazon over ( ) should simply post that the solution to this problem is available in SAS, for any sellers who need to know the answer.
For a Zone 5 shipping tomorrow 8/25 everything shows 8/29 except PM GA Cubic which is 8/28…
For this type of order, this would be the normal 3 days plus 1 weekend day with PM GA Cubic being interestingly faster (which we have been seeing with some of our shipments that have used PM GA Cubic … Zone 6 to OH was 2 days with cubic … on each of the 4 times we used it)
We cut our full sheets into 4 x 5 1/2 (get 4 labels a paper). Then we sat up a preset in our laser print for that size set to the manual tray (can hold about 40 of the 4 x 5 1/2 labels). When we print labels, we set the printer to the preset. All of the USPS labels print fine. Use the “fit to size” print option and it should work.
would give you a nice, half page, PDF label that fit perfectly on a shipping label. No need to set anything up in the printer, or cut paper/labels or anything else. Just insert label sheet into manual feed and print. But for GA, the label is coming out printing as if you’d chosen the 4x6 PNG option instead, despite properly choosing the ‘PDF’ label format.
