New updates to Amazon's North American Vendor Shipment Guidelines

Amazon recently made updates to their North American Vendor Shipment Guidelines and is asking that all vendors familiarize themselves with these changes.

The following outlines some of these changes, as well as best practices to support adherence.

• All certified ‘Ship in Own Container’ (SIOC) items must have a “scannable barcodes/product ID identifying the product printed on or close to the carton shipping label.” A best practice to adhere to the Ships in Own Container label requirements, is to also transition to Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) labels. SSCC labels are a GS1 barcode label format which also require an EDI 5010.

• They made changes to the Prep Matrix to include a new guided workflow: "Vendors can now follow a guided workflow to help determine what prep their ASINs will require (pg. 3 “ Prep Instruction Workflow”). Important clarification has been added regarding the ARA analytics page for prep instruction (16.5.3)

• New two day routing request cutoff: this is the new Early Routing Program that was expanded and made permanent for all vendors who ship WePay (Collect). Details on this change can be found here.

• Single ASIN pallet License Plate (GTIN) certification no longer requires images for verification and approval.

Full text from Amazon:

All,

The NA Vendor Shipment Guidelines documents on Vendor Central were recently updated (published on Jan-23). Please make sure all relevant teams in your organization are made aware of this and all quarterly updates to ensure all your shipments comply with the (latest) requirements in these manuals. Please find below an overview of the updates (also included in the 'summary of latest changes' section in the document). No immediate action is required as these are not new requirement changes, but we do highly recommend to follow these latest specifications (the routing request cutoff of two business days had already been communicated).

After reviewing the details below, please leave your feedback on this NewsFlash http://bit.ly/AmazonNewsFlash; we will use your thoughts and comments to improve our future communications.

Collect Shipments routing requirements:

· Collect Shipments (Small Parcel, Less-Than Truck Load and Truck Load) now have a routing request cutoff of two business days prior to the freight ready (pick up) date [Section 4.1 & Addendum 2, Shipping Guidelines]

Product Prep requirements:

· The Prep certification decision trees have been updated to more accurately and clearly reflect Amazon’s prep guidelines [Addendum 1, Product Restrictions and Prep Instructions]

Carton Label requirements:

· For items certified to Ship in Own Container (SIOC), clarification has been provided that there must be a “scannable barcode/product ID identifying the product (UPC, EAN, GTIN-12, or ASIN) printed on or close to the carton shipping label with the PO barcode” [Section 3.2.1.7]
· Single ASIN Pallet License Plate certification no longer requires e-mailing a sample label and image of a ready-to-ship pallet [Addendum 3, Pallet License Plate Vendor Requirements]
There is a feedback link on the first page of the manual which you can use to let the team know about any missing, incomplete, inconsistent or confusing information in any of the documents.

Have a great week!

VOLT Team