Amazon and Royal Mail strikes

There have been a series of strikes this summer in the UK with the rail network particularly impacting on customer travel and disruption to rail services. We do not of course yet know quite what the  medium to longer term impact with regard to traveller behaviour or change will be.

Shifting focus from transport to delivery, Royal Mail have been pulled into the arena of industrial action, with a series of strikes announced (see Royal Mail’s website update page) which also happen to coincide with the annual August Bank Holiday period.

Amazon have provided the following statement on their position, as the strikes largely impact on seller fulfilment more than Amazon-Fulfilled services:

“Due to expected Royal Mail strike action and disruption to delivery services across the UK, we’ll extend customer-facing delivery promises for all seller-fulfilled offers, including Seller Fulfilled Prime, in the coming weeks.

We understand that these events might cause significant disruptions for some sellers. We’re committed to working with you to mitigate any negative effect on your account health.

The strikes are planned for the following dates:

Friday, August 26
Wednesday, August 31
Thursday, September 8
Friday, September 9
To minimise the impact to your operations, we recommend the following best practices:

Inform your carriers in advance of volume forecasts and changes in demand.
Consider using multiple carriers to ensure that you can ship products out on time.
Provide customers with correct tracking information and regular updates if their order is delayed beyond the expected delivery date.
To avoid potential harm to your cancellation rate, continue to fulfil orders as soon as you’re able.
If you’re unable to process customer orders at all, update your Listing status for holidays and other absences 1 to deactivate all of your seller-fulfilled listings for the UK. You must still process and ship all orders that you receive up until you deactivate your listings.”

It’s rare for Amazon to take a position like this with regards to dispatch and carriage. Whilst it remains to be seen what the delivery date promise will be that customers will see, it’s a slightly surprising positive to have a position outlined prior to any expected delivery disruption.

eBay have gone further than this, which comes as welcome news for sellers. Their position can be found at this eBay page, announcing an amnesty on any seller performance from 22nd August to 18th September. That may seem a long window, however, the Royal Mail strikes do occur around the August Bank Holiday of Monday 29th August. There is usually a knock-on effect on Royal Mail delivery services of around 5-7 days following a Bank Holiday weekend, so all in all despite 4 days being announced for Royal Mail staff industrial action, we can view potential delays and disruptions to last for a few weeks.

Other carriers are of course available, and there are plenty of other online selling platforms, too many for us to detail here, hence us highlighting the largest two with Amazon and eBay. Many sellers will use Royal Mail in conjunction with another service carrying less impact driven by the industrial action.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz