Relax: Amazon is still shipping products despite what you may have read
Headlines doing the rounds are pretty misleading – for the time being, at least
You may have spotted a headline doing the rounds on social media telling you that Amazon has stopped shipping products from its warehouses, save for medical supplies and high-demand products.
If you just absorbed the headline and didn’t click through to the article, it sounds pretty alarming. But read on and you’ll see that, for now at least, it’s nothing like as restrictive as it sounds, because the suspension only refers to third-party merchants.
You know when you’re shopping on Amazon and you see a product labeled “Sold by X, fulfilled by Amazon”? That means the version Amazon is promoting actually comes from another venders’ inventory, but is sitting in its own warehouses for faster dispatch. It’s these that the company is temporarily suspending.
The report says nothing about Amazon not shipping products that it sources itself, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding what you need on the site. All it’s doing is clearing space in its warehouse for more of the stuff that people are buying in large quantities – which sounds pretty sensible to us.
“We are temporarily prioritising household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand products coming into our fulfilment centres so we can more quickly receive, restock, and ship these products to customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
“We understand this is a change for our selling partners and appreciate their understanding as we temporarily prioritise these products for customers.”
Yes, a change for ‘selling partners’, but probably not for you. So carry on as before.
Of course this isn’t to say that more restrictive measures won’t be coming down the road as the coronavirus crisis bites harder. But for now, Amazon shipments carry on as before – and judging by the firm’s decision to hire an extra 100,000 full- and part-time staff members in the US, it seems likely that the company is going to try its hardest to pursue business as usual for as long as possible.
(Image: Mike Mareen / Shutterstock.com)
