The last ship by date on the order is August 13, 2024 PDT
When you are reading email exchanges, the Amazon email translates time into your time zone.
In the first image the order purchase Sun Aug 11, 2024, 6:15 PDT
In the second email from the Amazon email client, the order purchase was Sun Aug 11, 2024 8:15 PM CST
Same time … different time zones.
So when we look at the last ship by date on the first image, it shows Aug 13, 2024 PDT.
On the Amazon email client, the last ship date is translated into your time zone so the Aug 13, 2024 PDT (which ends at 11:59pm PDT) becomes Aug 14, 2024 1:59 AM CST which is our time zone.
If you are east coast, the date would be Aug 14, 2024 2:59 AM EDT.
Same ship by time … just adjusted for your time zone when seen inside of the Amazon email client.
@Lost_My_Marbles
How do you think Amazon will implement the changes in required transit times on shipping templates this weekend? The possibilities I see are:
Transit times on Standard automatically update to the new requirements.
A bot sends an email to seller warning that transit times must be updated.
No actual changes unless and until we try to edit a template.
Since this is being done on Sunday Aug 25, 2024 at most likely 12:01AM PDT (1:01AM MDT - 2:01AM CDT - 3:01AM EDT), it would be logical that both Standard and Economy shipping would be changed automatically just like when Amazon changes USPS prices.
Standard 5-8 will be replaced with 3-5.
Economy 5-10 will be replaced with 5-8.
That would be a simple coding change on the templates. The major work would be the integration into the buyer purchasing pages and where we would expect any break down, if there is one, to occur.
What we are interested in is what happens to the 4-8 on the Economy and the 2-4 on the Standard. And will there be the 7-14 day option for Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico?
There has been no mention of these options … so we wait and see.
@Lost_My_Marbles please accept a big thank you here from your fellow Sellers! You and several others are doing the heavy lifting in this thread, and it is so appreciated.
I will confess that Amazon’s convoluted, inconsistent, and illogical changes make my eyes cross and head hurt. Is the confusion the point?
IKR. Come tomorrow I’ll have a few dozen that I would normally knock out for Monday and delight buyers, but 2/3 of them now will not ship until Tuesday.
From this I conclude that shipping on Saturday, therefore, is an especially bad idea if one is trying to reduce one’s handling time gap (assuming, that is, if the store is closed over the weekend). Have I wrapped my head around that correctly?
I’m happy to report that my HT gap is down to 1.5 days (from 1.8 days) as of this evening, after having dropped to 1.6 last evening. I’d like it to be more like 1 day. I have always had, and need, two-day handling time, and I’ve been shipping most of my orders the second day since the Amazon email went out in late July.
Thank you for that!! That explanation sounds about right to me - time zone adjustment. (And, to answer your question, I read these emails through the Amazon messaging system.)
I don’t know where you are, but that sounds Arizona-ish. I guess I’ll stop complaining about the 90s here in New Jersey. I hate summer almost as much as I hate Amazon. It’s very very close.
I probably should not be admitting this, but I have NEVER been able to remember the “order” of Arizona and New Mexico. Never!
Even when I try a donkey bridge like ‘they’re in alphabetical order’ on a map, it just doesn’t work. My mind does just not want to get involved. So I have gone through life not knowing - without looking at a map - which of those two states borders Texas.
Thus, when I said “Same thing,” I was thinking Arizona. Imagine my surprise when I learned - for the trillionth time - that it’s New Mexico.
Can someone chime in and make me feel better by saying they get confused by the Tri-State area and don’t really know (without a map) the geographical relationship among New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware?
I can assure you that 90s in NJ are as bad or worse than 100s in Arizona. When I interviewed for a job in NJ, it was 97; I thought I was gonna die. Got back to AZ, and didn’t turn on the A/C in the car, as opening the windows was comfortable. It was 111.
But give me NJ days topping out at 80 and I’ll be good.
So, today is D-DAY for the new transit time restrictions to take effect…as Lost My Marbles noted, it is not exactly clear how this will be operationalized. As soon as someone “sees” the changes, I hope you won’t mind taking a moment to share that information here.
If shipping templates get automatically modified across the board (eliminating any STANDARD 5-8 day transit times), that would violate Amazon’s July 25th News Update which stated “The 5-day maximum transit time applies to all SKUs except media such as Books, Magazines, and DVDs”. See link to the News item here: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/headlines.html?id=GV4A4SRSMXN95BMN&ref=nslp_at_20_GV4A4SRSMXN95BMN_en-US_ttl_rf_recent_news_21
As a seller of ONLY books, I am fully expecting to keep my 5-8 day transit times. In fact, I just went through and lengthened more of them to 5-8 to give myself more cushion to help avoid OTDR hits when media mail gets poorly routed or stuck in a hub somewhere. However, I do NOT trust the bots not to make an absolute mess of this!
MANY THANKS to all of you who have been taking the time to contribute your analysis, observations and concerns in this thread!
Well, as a fellow books only seller, I’m hoping for no change. Checking my templates, all have the standard 5-8, except for one template (which I’m not using) having 4-8 days. Where the heck did that come from?
I was hoping that we might get an intermediate choice between 2-4 and 5-8; there are a few places that I would be fine with 4-6 or even 3-5, but that’s not an option.
And orders that have come in today all show the normal time for “Deliver By”
It appears to me that the first step might well be to truncate long-established Shipping Template names/titles in its far-flung and poorly-cobbled databases - which, sadly, is not a movie I’ve not seen before when Amazon introduces sweeping changes like this.
