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If you’re an Amazon seller using ShipStation to fulfill orders, Amazon Buy Shipping is worth using, for two reasons.
First, Amazon Buy Shipping can improve your delivery performance metrics on Amazon. That matters if you are working to hold your seller score.
Second, orders bought through Amazon Buy Shipping carry protection against A-to-Z Guarantee claims related to shipping. Amazon sets the terms of both that protection and the seller metrics above, and changes them from time to time, so check the current policy in Seller Central rather than taking either from here.
There are two drawbacks.
First, The availability and pricing of different service types offered via Amazon Buy can change for every order. For example, USPS Ground Advantage may be eligible via Amazon buy for one order, but not another. This means you can’t create automation rules to always select a specific service, because rules compare fields against values you typed in advance rather than checking what is eligible today.
Also, Amazon Buy shows you rates for both cubic pricing and standard pricing for USPS shipments. This means you have to select the right pricing option for every shipment in order to get the best pricing.
If Amazon Buy Shipping is a large enough share of your volume that this matters, we build that logic alongside ShipStation.
Knowing how a carrier prices a package is useful. The harder problem is making the right packing and rate decision on every order, when the correct answer changes with the contents, the destination and the rate card.
String builds and maintains that logic inside existing ShipStation accounts, for operations shipping roughly 6,000 orders a month or more. Below that, ShipStation's native automation and accurate product dimensions will get you most of the way there.
Eight patterns that show up when an operation needs custom shipping logic
