Online shoppers increasingly consider shipping speed and costs when it comes time to check out.
The faster and less expensive the shipping, the less likely customers are to seek alternatives or abandon carts.
Similarly, online sellers constantly look for ways to improve order fulfillment times and reduce shipping costs.
Optimizations in these areas improve an ecommerce business’s overall competitiveness, especially in crowded marketplaces like Amazon.
Amazon’s Buy Shipping API allows sellers to find and purchase the ideal shipping services for each order based on projected fulfillment speeds and transit times.
Moreover, it provides critical account protections against negative repercussions caused by shipping delays or mishandling.
What is Amazon’s Buy Shipping and How Does It Work?
Amazon’s Buy Shipping program allows sellers to use its network of carriers and industry-leading buying power to provide affordable, timely, merchant-fulfilled shipping.
Sellers get access to many of the same reputable shipping providers they already rely on—like UPS, FedEx, and USPS—but with discounted rates, bulk purchasing options, and other helpful benefits and protections.
When a customer makes a purchase, Buy Shipping compares the estimated transit times of participating carriers and surfaces those that are most likely to be able to meet applicable delivery date promises.
Inventory location, shipping destination, and estimated ship date are all considered in this determination.
Should a combination of these factors result in a carrier offering an expected delivery date past the seller’s promised delivery date, the shipping option will not be available as a fulfillment option.
Buy Shipping also allows sellers to specify certain carriers to omit or, conversely, specify specific preferred carriers to always consider.
Once all of these conditions have been assessed, Buy Shipping automatically selects the most cost-effective shipping method that will arrive on time.
Sellers can purchase shipping labels directly from Amazon’s Seller Central—up to 100 at a time.
This process is incredibly convenient for sellers who fulfill their own orders. Moreover, the ability to purchase shipping in bulk can lead to further cost savings and a meaningful boost to profit margins.
What is Amazon’s Buy Shipping API?
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are some of the speediest, most reliable, and secure B2B connections available.
They are used in various ways to connect devices and systems across the internet.
In ecommerce, they provide the critical pathways between merchants, marketplaces, fulfillment partners, and more.
Amazon’s Buy Shipping API simplifies the use of Buy Shipping features and allows them to integrate into sellers’ existing workflows.
The Buy Shipping API allows sellers to access, purchase, and manage their Buy Shipping options through an integrated omnichannel ecommerce platform like Descartes Sellercloud.
Labels can be purchased, printed, and voided through the API.
Once an order ships, sellers can access order details and track packages as they would with any other shipping label purchase—all from within a single, unified interface.
Under the hood, the Buy Shipping API works as an extension of both the Merchant Fulfillment and Seller Fulfilled Prime APIs, which means that all the conveniences and benefits of Buy Shipping are merely a few clicks away for sellers who already use one or both of these popular integrations.
How Does Amazon’s Buy Shipping API Benefit Sellers?
There are several key ways Buy Shipping—specifically using the Buy Shipping API—helps to improve sellers’ fulfillment practices. Some of the main benefits include reducing overall shipping and fulfillment costs:
- Reduce shipping costs. The most obvious advantage of Buy Shipping is purchasing discounted shipping for Amazon orders directly through Amazon. By leveraging Amazon’s buying power, sellers can take advantage of lower shipping rates with major carriers like UPS and FedEx.
- Bulk shipping discounts. Sellers can purchase up to 100 labels at a time, achieving even greater shipping discounts than if they purchased labels individually.
- Automated shipping service comparison shopping. The fact that Buy Shipping calculates the optimal shipping options based on both cost and fulfillment speed on a per-order basis saves sellers both time and money. Not only does the service potentially reduce the overall cost of purchasing shipping labels, but it also reduces the labor costs associated with performing the same optimizations manually.
One of the most noteworthy advantages of Buy Shipping, however, is that it is less about cost and more about protecting the standing of your Amazon seller account.
Buy Shipping participants receive A-Z Guarantee claims protections to ensure that should something go wrong with shipping purchased through Amazon, Amazon takes the blame, not the seller.
If the order is not received, arrives late, or there are complaints about the order fulfillment process, the seller does not receive negative notifications or any negative impact on their Order Defect Rate.
In sum, these benefits are a clear win for Amazon sellers and Amazon. Ultimately, Amazon wants to make it easier for sellers to utilize their shipping labels, which improves delivery times and ensures that customers receive packages on time.
How Your Ecommerce Business Can Take Advantage of Amazon’s Buy Shipping API Today
To enable the Buy Shipping API, sellers must first review and accept the terms and conditions for each supported carrier. If the terms for a particular carrier are not accepted, it will not be available (or even considered) as an available shipping option.
Once Buy Shipping is enabled in both Seller Central and your integrated ecommerce platform, you are ready to take advantage of the shipping savings and additional perks that come with the service.
Amazon has partnered with Descartes Sellercloud to make it easier for sellers to fully utilize the Buy Shipping API and its associated benefits.
To do so, Descartes Sellercloud has added features that allow sellers to ship in bulk using Amazon’s discounted rates and introduced new web-based shipping functionality specifically for the Buy Shipping API.
These features include the ability to select orders in bulk and generate shipping labels in batches, all from within your account.
While other shipping integrators charge a fee for access to this service, Descartes Sellercloud offers Buy Shipping API integrations to our customers at no additional cost.
We realize the difference this service can make in being able to compete for the Buy Box and optimize profit margins.
Thousands of Amazon third-party sellers use Descartes Sellercloud to ship out millions of merchant-fulfilled orders monthly.
Contact us directly for a free demo and experience for yourself how our 350+ integrations with leading ecommerce partners and services can help take your online sales to the next level.
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