Amazon Relay Upgrades Carrier Management: Cross-Border Logistics Providers Should Prioritize Scorecard Compliance
Amazon Relay will use AI-assisted operations and a new Scorecard to manage transportation performance, safety and compliance, and carrier scores may affect the freight volume they can obtain.
What are the key facts?
- 1Relay Assistant will handle multiple types of operational information and freight exceptions
- 2New Scorecard consolidates transportation performance, safety and compliance
- 3Relay dispute resolution is 20% faster
- 4Scores and compliance performance will affect carriers’ freight volume
What happened?
Amazon Relay announced operational upgrades for carriers on September 23. Relay Assistant will handle trailer availability, site closures, route information and some freight exceptions, and is planned to support reposting eligible Post A Truck orders through natural language by the end of 2026. The new Scorecard will consolidate transportation performance, safety, compliance and improvement recommendations on one page, while AI will identify specific metrics contributing to score declines. Amazon also disclosed that Relay dispute resolution has become 20% faster; fuel cards provide average savings of about 10%, with discounts of up to $0.66 per gallon at some stations; and collision-incident safety rewards range from $0.02 to $0.05 per mile, with an annual cap of $14,000. For logistics carriers providing line-haul, warehouse-to-warehouse transportation and peak-season replenishment for cross-border ecommerce, performance and compliance scores will directly affect the freight volume they can obtain.
What does this mean for cross-border sellers?
For carriers providing line-haul, warehouse-to-warehouse transportation and peak-season replenishment for cross-border ecommerce, transportation, safety and compliance scores may affect the freight volume they can obtain. When selecting logistics providers, sellers should include Scorecard performance and exception-handling capability in the evaluation instead of focusing only on price and risking less stable replenishment.
What should sellers do now?
- 1Ask carriers responsible for US marketplace FBA line-haul and warehouse-to-warehouse transportation for their latest Scorecard or equivalent performance records, verify transportation performance, safety, compliance and reasons for score declines, and create a carrier comparison table with improvement items flagged.Restock planner
- 2Create an exception-review log for US marketplace peak-season replenishment carriers, recording the route, site closures, freight exceptions, reassignment results and dispute status for each shipment, then produce a risk list for current carriers and flag issues requiring escalation.Inventory turnover
- 3Review carton dimensions, weight and transportation quotes for major FBA replenishment routes, record the carrier, billing basis and expected inbound schedule consistently, and produce a shipping-cost checklist for joint verification by procurement and logistics.Dimensional weight