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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 parcel is useful. The harder question is which parcel to make — because the packing decision sets the dimensional weight and the cubic tier, and the cheapest box changes with the contents, the destination and the rate card.
There are eight situations where that decision has grown past what a rule can express. Most operations are in two or three of them.
