Amid the ongoing fight between e-commerce behemoth Amazon and logistics company FedEx, the sellers on the platform have become an unlikely victim as they are no longer able to avail the services of the courier company. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon has asked its sellers to not use FedEx’s ground-delivery network during the holiday season because the courier company had delivered poor performance, CNBC reported. However, the same has sent many third-party merchants’ businesses into a frenzy as these sellers already have deals in place with FedEx and last moment delivery rush in one of the busiest holiday seasons will incur huge delivery costs to the sellers.
The third-party merchant sales amount to about 60% of total Amazon’s total merchandise sold. “Some sellers exclusively use FedEx for Seller Fulfilled Prime [SFP] because they have negotiated good freight rates or have daily pickups,” Steve Yates, CEO of Prime Guidance, a company that consults third-party sellers on Amazon and other e-commerce sites, said, CNBC reported. Without FedEx in the picture, these sellers will have to deploy other couriers which means giving up on already negotiated good FedEx ground rates, he added. Another Amazon seller said that Amazon’s move has caught the sellers off-guard. However, Amazon has said that the restriction on using FedEx platform is temporary.
“We have seen a drop in the delivery performance of FedEx Ground and FedEx Home ship methods for Seller Fulfilled Prime shipments,” according to an email sent by Amazon to sellers, the news channel reported. The company’s decision to restrict FedEx couriers was in order to protect Prime customer experience, the email said.
Meanwhile, the US-based e-commerce platform recently faced the heat of protestors and activists in France as they alleged that Amazon is catalysing climate change. How? According to the protestors, with Amazon’s rapid delivery, more and more consumers are buying stuff and that is leading to a greater amount of greenhouse gas emissions, BBC reported. The protestors had gathered to disrupt Black Friday sales.