Seller Central Help has a wealth of information on how to optimize the Shipping Settings feature in your Seller Central Account.
Configure My Shipping Settings
The Shipping Settings feature appears under Settings in Seller Central if you have permission to use this feature. User permissions can be changed under Settings. Only the primary account holder for your account (not Amazon) can grant you permission to use this feature. The primary account holder is the person who initially registered to sell on Amazon.
You can use the Shipping Manager feature to view and edit your shipping templates, shipping rates, and your shipping regions. For more information, see the Set your shipping rates Help page.
To view your shipping settings, under Settings, click Shipping Settings - the Current Shipping Rates and Settings page appears.
Configure your Shipping Template(s)
A shipping template is a set of shipping regions, shipping rates, and service levels that can be applied to all or part or your listings on Amazon.
You can create multiple Shipping templates which allow different configurations for selecting regions and shipping rates. Each shipping template can be associated with one or multiple SKUs on your inventory.
Your account will have a preconfigured default shipping template that you can edit at any time. It will be marked with a star on the shipping settings page.
Default templates
When you first set up your Marketplace account or migrate to the new Shipping Settings platform, the default template is the initial template created for your account.
The default template is designated on the Shipping Settings page. The default shipping template can be assigned to any new SKU that is added without an explicit shipping template assigned to it at the point of SKU creation.
To set a template as default shipping template, follow these steps:
The default template will contain the domestic marketplace country with the standard service level pre-selected.
Item/Weight-based shipping: You can set a flat per-shipment rate and either a per-kg rate or a per-item rate for handling. When your customer purchases your products, Amazon applies a single per-shipment price and then uses your shipping settings to calculate the appropriate per-kg or per-product rate for each product in the order.
Per Item/Weight-based shipping is the default shipping template option. The countries that you have enabled for at least one service level appear in the Shipping Rates table. If a country does not display in this table, you did not indicate in the previous step that you support shipping to that country.
The settings confirmation page appears, with your changes highlighted.
The Shipping Settings page appears, showing that you updated your shipping rates.
How Per Item/Weight-based shipping works
When you offer Per Item/Weight-based shipping, you set a flat per-shipment rate and either a per-kilo rate or a flat per-item rate for handling. When a customer purchases your products, Amazon applies a single per-shipment rate and then uses your shipping settings to calculate the appropriate per-kilo or per-product rate for each product in the order.
For example, if you use a per-shipment rate of 4.00 € and a per-kilo rate of 0.50 €/kilo and a buyer purchases two products from you, a 25 kg television and a 1 kg DVD player, Amazon calculates the total shipping rate to the customer as follows:
Product | Qty | Weight (kgs.) | Flat Rate per Shipment | Per-kilo Rate |
---|---|---|---|---|
Television | 1 | 25 | 3.91 € | 0.49 € |
DVD Player | 1 | 1 | 3.91 € | 0.49 € |
Therefore, for this shipment, the shipping rates are calculated as follows:
Ship Rate | 3.91 € | + | 12.25 € | + | 0.49 € | = | 16.65 € |
(Per-shipment rate) | (25 x 0.49 €, weight rate for the TV) | (1 x 0.49 €, weight rate for the DVD player) | (3.91 €+ 12.25 € + 0.49 €) |
Alternatively, if you set per-shipment rate of 3.99 € and per-product rate of 0.99 € and a buyer orders two products from you, a Sapphire Pendant and a Diamond Tiara, Amazon calculates the total shipping rate to the buyer as follows:
Product | Qty | Weight (kgs.) | Flat Rate per Shipment | Per-item Rate |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pendant | 1 | n/a | 3.99 € | 0.99 € |
Tiara | 1 | n/a | 3.99 € | 0.99 € |
Therefore, for this shipment, the shipping rates are calculated as follows:
Ship Rate | 3.99 € | + | 0.99 € | + | 0.99 € | = | 5.97 € |
(Per-shipment rate) | (Per-item rate for the pendant) | (Per-item rate for the tiara) | (3.99 € + 0.99 € + 0.99 €) |
Banded shipping: If you wish to offer a revenue-banded ship pricing model, you need to create price bands, such as 0 € to 25 €, 25.01 € to 50 €, 50.01 € to 100 €, and so on. Each price band has its own shipping rate. When a buyer purchases your products, Amazon reviews the total order value, identifies the band this total falls into, and then applies the shipping rate you specified for the price band.
Select your service levels and shipping regions
You can configure one or more service levels that you want to offer to your customers. For domestic shipping, there are two service levels that can be offered to customers - Standard and Expedited.
Each service level has configurable number of days, which indicates the timelines within which an order should be received by the customer which is in addition to the handling time as defined by you. When you agree to meet a Service Level Agreement (SLA), you promise that the customer will receive their order within the number of days you have inputted in addition to the handling time.
For example, the service level for Standard delivery by ground in the Netherlands is 3-5 working days. If your customer places an order and wants Standard delivery, you are responsible for delivering the order within 3-5 days working days from when the order is dispatched.
Total Delivery Time
When you set up your inventory, you tell Amazon the time it takes you to process the order for each product in your inventory. (You use the "I will ship this product within" field on your inventory information page to set this time.) The delivery method you use also specifies a time for the order to reach your customer, depending upon the delivery speed you use. The total delivery time, then, is the time it takes you to handle (process) the order plus the time it takes your delivery service to get the order to your customer.
Handling time + Selected Shipping Time = Delivery time
Select your shipping regions
In each shipping template you can customize the geographic regions you wish to ship to and the service levels you wish to offer for each region. You can remove, add or edit existing shipping regions or create new ones by grouping different countries or areas where you may offer the same shipping rate and service level.
For domestic shipping, you will see the different regions within the current marketplace, however at this point, you will not be able to unselect regions within the marketplace country.
For domestic shipping, you will see the different regions within the current marketplace, however at this point, you will not be able to unselect regions within the marketplace country. Currently, you are required to ship to all domestic regions at the same rate. However, you can choose to set a different transit time for each domestic region. If you are modifying the domestic shipping region transit times, you will be presented with the following regions within the Netherlands:
Apply Shipping templates to Listings
After you configure a shipping template, you can apply it to your listings. A shipping template can be associated with as many listings as you want. If you do not specify a shipping template for a product in your listings, the default shipping template will be applied.
Manage Inventory
The Manage Inventory page displays the shipping template associated to each SKU on your listings. To change the shipping templates associated to your SKUs, there are two options:
Applying a shipping template to multiple SKUs using an inventory file template
The following is the recommended method for bulk upload.
Applying a shipping template to one SKU via Manage Inventory
You can check the SKUs assigned to shipping templates using one of the following two ways by using the Seller Central User Interface (UI):
The Active Listings Report under the Inventory Reports displays the SKU assigned to the Shipping Template.
Latency
When you change your shipping settings, the changes take effect up to 4 hours after you click Save Changes. You can make changes to the shipping settings within the first hour after clicking Save Changes and the changes will all take effect at the same time. This latency gives you an hour to change your mind, but after an hour your changes are "locked in" and will take effect after an additional three hours have passed.
This is an example of how it works:
Shipping templates allow you to assign different shipping settings for a set of SKUs. Each shipping template contains the following shipping options:
Edit a Shipping Template