They sure were. It was sugar coated though (as usual) with if you agree to the splits, no worries. I think that’s where a lot of us were at when it was announced. The unit volume you need to get to in order to get a split that’s fee free is way higher than the bar that was set previously (rebates)
This seems way different of a reality of what we were told. Maybe it’s just me.
It sure was sugar coated. But I personally was expecting that the splits might be 5, 7, or even more ways for no placement fees. So the fact they settled on 5 actually makes me happy.
I thought the same thing, as long as we are OK with splits we wouldn’t have to pay the fee. VERY different from reality.
-Ana
Our shippers are 144 units. 5 will now be the min we send, which will work for us but I see a lot of sellers getting really punished by this.
I was talking about if they split it into 5 LTL shipments. I don’t care about the single shipment placement fee, that’s almost always going to be the worst option for large shipments.
Do the math on that though. 26 pallets on a truck.
Best case scenario is $100 a pallet but the further destinations will avg $176 a pallet.
Plus all the extra labor and room for error.
I’m just going by the fact that the poster didn’t even consider that option. Gotta consider all options now. It could be worse to split it, but the placement fee is such a ripoff for large shipments it’s hard to imagine that.
Yeah that’s why I was leaning towards 3X costs for splitting FTL, since FTL is cheaper per pallet. Still better than 6X. Could be wrong
Confused af.
So split shipments are not an option like they implied?
And am gathering that volume has to do something with it? Meaning, if its a single pallet - that will not be split, but if its 5 pallets - it will be?
Explain it to me like I’m Amazon Seller Support - don’t add too much information, my head will explode.
They are, it depends on if you built the shipment as a pallet or a case.
Number of pallet OR number of cases determine if split. Obviously 1 can’t be split, but usually its partial split at 3, and usually full split option at 5. like this…
How are split pallets going to be handled in terms of pickups?
Is Amazon actually going to send 5 different trucks (or the preferred carrier)?
Just like any other shipment with multiple shipments. Amazon split multi pallet shipments before this change. Today we had one Estes pickup and one TFarce pickup.
The follow up process after split selection has not changed.
This is going to be a nightmare… 
Sometimes, though, and for some reason, certain SKUs do not get the free optimized spit option, no matter the quantity you enter in the shipment.
For example, take a look at this ASIN that we always ship in pallets due to its weight. I’m not getting the free optimized split even when trying to ship 20 pallets (we normally do 2-3), and the placement service fee is outrageously high:
This is highly problematic. We’ll have to wait and see if that fee is still there when the time comes to restock it; I’ll probably have to create new shipments every few days to see if the free optimized split becomes an option at any point in time. If not, it’s clear we’ll have not choice but to raise the price of the product.
I don’t have a problem with splits in general, but the fact that you just can’t get the free optimized split for some SKUs sucks.
What kind of product is this? Assume oversized?
We have the same issue with Hazmat where there are only 2-3 FC’s in the country we know of.
No; it’s large standard.
Just like before I’m assuming.
4-5 pallets are split into 7 pallets for example - usually has 2 carriers
4 for one carrier
3 for another carrier
Some permutation/combination of the above - on my split shipments I would have 1 pallet split into 2 so it would be 10 cartons (case pack) and 3 (case pack) going to two different destinations - I would markup the weight on the second pallet with only 3 pallets but it worked because I was getting rebates - but those are gone now so have to reassess ishit as in when I can
