One shipment to an Amazon warehouse can come from several collection points, but it has to reach the gate as one countable whole. In practice that means gathering the goods at one site, building the pallet units there, counting them once, and only then tying them to the announced shipment. The reverse order, announcing the shipment before the goods are assembled, is the source of most discrepancies in this model.
One shipment has one identity
Goods from three suppliers means three collections, three source documents and three different packing habits. What has to arrive at the warehouse is something that looks like one delivery: pallets built the same way, continuous unit numbering, and one figure to compare against the announcement. That jump from three streams to one batch has to happen somewhere physical, and the only place it can be done calmly is a warehouse, not the consignee’s yard.
So on this kind of order we work with two transhipments: the first at the hub in Poland where supplier goods converge, the second in Milton Keynes if the batch still has to be split across different receiving appointments. The economics of that arrangement are described in the article on consolidation through the Polish hub.
The last collection sets the departure
This is the simplest and most often ignored planning rule. The departure date does not depend on the first supplier but on the last. If two suppliers are ready on Monday and the third on Thursday, the shipment leaves on Thursday and the first two suppliers’ goods simply sit for three days. The practical conclusion is that on a shipment with a booked appointment you negotiate the readiness date of the slowest supplier, not the average. How the collection route is planned is covered in the article on collecting from several suppliers in one run.
What to do when one supplier is late
There are two ways out and they differ in cost, not in quality. You can move the whole shipment to a later receiving appointment, which is cheap in transport and expensive in sales, especially in the peak described in the article on fourth-quarter delivery slots. Or you can split the batch: what is ready travels on the booked date and the rest goes separately. A split needs the announced shipment corrected before the vehicle arrives, otherwise the warehouse sees fewer units than announced and opens an investigation.
What is not worth doing: sending an incomplete batch without a correction and trusting that the rest will catch up and everything will square itself. In this model nothing squares itself.
Who counts, and when
Counting happens once, at the hub, while the units are being built, and that is where the schedule is created: unit number, content, source supplier. From that moment every later document refers to this schedule rather than to the individual suppliers’ paperwork. It is the only way that a later discrepancy can be traced to the stream a missing item came from. The numbering rules are covered in the article on marking and numbering pallets, and the build of units holding several product codes in the article on the mixed pallet.
Consignment notes with several collections
The rule is a separate consignment note per consignment, because each collection has a different sender and a different loading place. The exception is where the whole batch travels under one contract to one consignee: then a single document covers it all. Which applies when is unpacked in the article on consolidation to the UK, one CMR or several. Separately, remember that the customs documents cover the whole batch, so data from every supplier has to reach the entry before departure, not somewhere on the road.
The mirror case: one collection, several warehouses
The same mechanism runs in reverse. One shipper can have goods destined for several different warehouses, and then the job is to divide the batch before departure and plan the run so every point can be served inside its booked appointment. When that pays off is covered in the article on a dedicated vehicle or groupage for Amazon deliveries. The carriage of pallet batches out of Poland runs on our groupage service, with scheduled line departures.
More on this: One collection, several Amazon warehouses in a single run.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central UK: creating and correcting an announced shipment
- Amazon Carrier Central: palletised delivery booking and unit counts
Gathering goods from several suppliers for one UK delivery? Describe the collection points and dates in the quote form and we will send back a consolidation plan counted from the receiving appointment. The full lane is described on the United Kingdom transport page.
