Amazon announced it will no longer provide buyer shipping addresses in its “Sold, ship now” e-mails beginning May 21st. Sellers will need to retrieve shipping addresses from the payment accounts or from order fulfillment reports:
On Monday, May 21st, the “Sold, ship now” e-mails will be modified to remove private customer shipping information. These e-mails will only contain the following information:
- Notification that a customer has purchased one of your products.
- The quantity and product titles of the items in the order.
We will no longer include information about the buyer, such as the buyer e-mail or shipping address, or information about the order, such as the order ID or the product ID, in the “Sold, ship now” e-mails. We are making this change to protect the privacy of our buying customers.
If you rely on the order details in “Sold, ship now” e-mails for creating shipping labels and packing slips, you will now need to use one of the following methods to retrieve your order information.
- View your recent Marketplace orders or Search your Marketplace orders in Your Seller Account
- Order Fulfillment Reports (for Pro Merchant subscribers: Reports > Get listing and fulfillment reports)
- The Amazon Services Order Notifier (ASON) application
- The Event Notification Service (ENS)
We will continue to send “Sold, ship now” e-mails to notify you of new orders. However, since e-mail can be subject to delivery problems that occur outside of Amazon.com’s systems, we recommend that you also regularly check Your Seller Account for new orders, or use one of the other methods above.
Related posts:
7 Comments
I’ve always sent a detailed notification email listing when the book was mailed, via what postal service (and pointing out when I gave international orders a free upgrade to airmail or global priority), where it was mailed from, and confirming the address & title, etc. The message also had links to my Amazon store, etc.
Now I will probably not send any confirmation, because it is just too much trouble. Sigh!
I agree with the previous poster ~ yet another way to make it tiresome to sell books and CDs…my buyers have always said thanks when I let them know it is on it’s way and some come back to shop again…
I’m confused. Won’t you still get their email in the actually order form with their mailing address? Don’t most sellers use the site to ship from? Huh? Maybe I’m not reading this right. They HAVE to tell you where to mail it, and on that page, there has been a link to the seller’s email. I use this link to buyer to let them know that their order has been posted, so they can guestimate arrival times. So far, as I ship DAILY, I haven’t had unhappy delivery times. IF you wait to post several days, and the PO takes the 21 domestic days they CAN take, it really does get long for the buyer.
Debbie K.
Debbie, you’re correct, all the info is available from your seller account Web page, but it’s more cumbersome than using the e-mails as most sellers are accustomed to. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon also removed the buyer e-mail address from the seller account page too, forcing us to use a Web contact form to send a message to the buyer.
I think the point is, Amazon is erecting a barrier between the buyer and seller, and customer service (and ultimately sales) will suffer.
Steve, I believe Amazon is slowly pushing 3p sellers out of the way. The want the mega sellers and/or those who will go to fba…What do you think?
I no longer sell books on Amazon. But it doesn’t surprise me that they’re doing this. It seems like they make it harder every day to sell books.
I’ve been selling books and videos on Amazon since Sept ‘01. Personally I imagine the people at Amazon just sitting at their desks laughing their heads off. They’ve never adequately explained why they’ve made this drastic change. The “order fulfillment” that t hey recommend to generate report is a joke. It contains neither the customer’s name or address. Amazon has effectively made the order fulfillment process from a 2 step procedure to a 5 step one. Also, the seller has to do the math himself to find out what is his allotment. Its cruelty and stupidity at its apex. At first glance, Amazon could use this as a chance to sharply shortchange the seller. One has to wonder what other “changes for the customer” Amazon is going to implement.