A “friend of mine” always puts the correct dimensions in, but not always the correct weight. UPS is using dimensional weight afaik, so hopefully no cost increase here… right. Right?! 
Just what we need…another inaccurate fee/correction to worry about.
And of course they provide no guidance for when the carrier is full of (family friendly word edit).
They would have to implement a secondary weighing to make necessary fee adjustments? Because I roll stuff in on a cart. They scan in without weighing - so all my fee adjustments should be credits? I think not.
We may have a friend in common
I think the biggest problem here is what Amazon expects versus reality.
We know what our products weigh and how big they are, and that’s reflected in the item setup.
We know exactly how heavy our full shippers are and their dimensions.
We know how tall and how heavy our pallets are.
But for some reason, Amazon’s estimates in the shipping plan creation are always way off. And if you correct them, it throws an error. An error you can bypass but nevertheless, it’s not correct.
We’ve always just let it ride if the estimate was close enough. Now I guess not so much…
I really would love to know how Amazon thinks they know how a manufacturer configures their pallets for the 2 billion different products they sell? Obviously that can make a difference in the height.
Does anyone really think Estes Freight or Central Transport, or even Amazon Freight is really going to break out the scale and the tape measurer when they pull up to the dock? LOL
Another useless thing that is going to end up costing everybody money for doing nothing wrong.
Another thing that will generate hundreds of thousands of seller support cases trying to fight BS charges…
Gee, I thought that was what AI was for. It’s supposed to fix everything, right?
My grandson is 2 years out of an engineering program and isn’t looking for a job because AI is going to take care of everything in the next 5 years or so and he won’t have to work.
I’m sure the Amazon version is smarter and more accurate than all of us. /S
I will never understand this AI nonsense. Yea, it’s amazing for writing college papers, creating graphics and advertising, and summarizing a google search.
Running life and dealing with reality - not so much. Not even close.
Amazon was one of the first major companies to really roll it out in running their operations and I see zero improvement over the last 8 years. Might have gotten worse.
Gross understatement from what I have seen and heard about on thousands of Forum posts (NSFE and earlier versions).
Sure there is a lot hype around AI, but there was a lot of hype around the .com boom I was in my early teens then. I remember. And then came the bust, but what came out of that was some of the largest .com entities the world had every seen - Amazon, Google and the entire digital economy. Ai will follow a similar arc. If you step outside of the wrapper gimmicks of the Ai world and into the LLM dev world, it’s not just college essays and ad copy - it’s foundational tech, like electricity for cognition. Get it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever asked for delivery confirmation for shipments from the LTL carriers but you can also request their weight/measure check on your shipment. Sometimes they do them, sometimes they don’t. It is somewhat random but they also know if their 2000 LB capacity electric forklift can’t lift a pallet that is supposed to be 1400 LBS, something is off. If the pallet that is supposed to be 48x40x50 inches doesn’t fit side by side in the trailer because the goods are hanging off too far (I think they give a limit of 3 inches overhang) or it’s taller than the person unloading it (no offense to shorter people), they know something is off For certain they will measure and weight those shipments at the terminal.
Absolutely the estimated dimensions and weights for Amazons palletization aren’t very accurate. They must use pallet building software to build them based on what the seller inputs for their box size/weight. I use similar programs for pallet/container building and they are more accurate than a guess based on CBM but they have limitations. They don’t have the ability to over hang the edges of the pallets, so it restricts it to the exact 40x48 dimensions.
I don’t think they are looking to use this on every shipment but I know for sure there are many cheats. For instance, one forum member many moons ago was complaining that his shipment was being held by the LTL carrier until he paid them fees for his overweight shipment. His problem was that Amazon calculated his BOL for him. Sure they did but Amazon limits pallet weights to 1500 LBS per pallet. He said he shipped in 6 pallets at 10,000 LBS. Great, but that’s 1666.66 LBS per pallet. Which violation do you want to admit to?
Time will tell how Amazon actually implements this but I try to see reason in what they do before jumping to conclusions. This one seems reasonable as long as they aren’t trying to pinch a couple dollars out of sellers on every shipment.