Amazon Shipping Is Back Up for Sellers after Outage

Sellers desperately trying to get orders out the door on Friday ran into problems when Amazon Buy Shipping went down for about 2 hours.

Sellers trying to print shipping labels encountered the message, “Buy Shipping Services are currently not available, please try again later.”

A reader alerted us to the problem: “We have orders that are time sensitive that have to ship and the service is totally down,” she wrote.

Besides the obvious inconvenience, the seller explained, “If we use another service to ship and keep our orders timely and not get marks against our metrics, we also will not have the protection that Amazon promises by using their Buy Shipping services.”

Sellers discussed the problem on the Amazon discussion boards. The outage appeared to last about 2 hours, with sellers reporting that functionality was restored about about 3:50 pm Eastern.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.