On Sunday, July 28th, we will be releasing a major update to the Amazon FBA transportation workflow. The main goal of this release is to support the future transition to Amazon’s updated workflow for FBA shipments, and another release will be following this one in the coming weeks to release access to those workflows.
That said, many tweaks have been made along the way to improve the transportation process. These are the major differences you will notice:
Previously, there was a separate split shipment step that would take the plans that Amazon returned and break up the shipment into splits. Now, plans are stored separately from shipments so the original shipment item and quantities remain unchanged.
As mentioned above, the Send Shipment to Amazon button has been removed, and instead the Arrange Transport button page will take you to a new unified transportation page, allowing you to select between Amazon FBA and Self-Arrange.
FBA shipments are now shown as sub-items of the shipments which they were generated from, and marked clearly as FBA shipments. In addition, they have their own statuses that can be tracked separately from the overall shipment status.
Important Note: Existing FBA shipments will not be migrated to the new system when you navigate to the Arrange Transport page. Existing shipments will still be displayed in the list of shipments, but not using the new design until you have visited the Arrange Transport page for that shipment.
In the previous system, we displayed a dropdown box with the various options of shipping modes, such as partnered or non-partnered, and FTL/LTL or small parcel. We have increased the visibility of those options and made them the first step on the page, so it’s clear which shipping mode you are using.
In addition, you no longer need to select 2D barcodes during the shipping plan step. Instead, you can select 2D barcodes from the configuration page.
(Never heard of 2D barcodes? See here for more information)
Previously, handling Amazons submission errors had proven difficult to understand and resolve, and we didn’t have a clear record of submissions made to Amazon for the corresponding shipment.
In this release, each step of submitting data to Amazon will have its own button to submit, and if there is an error in that submission, the error will be displayed on section for that specific submission.
As before, we will automatically submit each step as it completes, but you can disable this behaviour by turning off Auto Submit (click the Auto Submit toggle to disable), giving you complete control over the submission process.
We have improved the design of some of the elements on the box contents page, and made some improvements to the workflow:
Previously, when getting the labels for a shipment, if there were any errors in the process, the labels would not be generated and there would be no way to retrieve those labels. Now, you can request labels as many times as needed for each label type, and convert them to thermal labels on demand.
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