Common ASN Errors That Lead to Chargebacks or Manual Receiving
An Advance Ship Notice exists to let a receiving system do its job automatically — match a shipment to a purchase order, scan a label, and post the receipt without anyone touching a keyboard. When an 856 is missing a field, or that field doesn’t match what’s on the physical shipment, that automation breaks down. The shipment doesn’t disappear — it just becomes a manual problem, and manual problems are where chargebacks come from.
A few data points show up over and over across retailer requirements as the specific fields most likely to cause trouble: SCAC, BOL, SSCC, and PO number.
SCAC: The Missing Link Between Carrier and Shipment
The Standard Carrier Alpha Code identifies which carrier is physically moving a shipment — and several retailers tie it directly to how they validate an ASN against the truck that shows up at the dock.
Amazon requires a valid SCAC on every shipment and explicitly ties it to PRO number validation — the PRO number provided in the ASN must match the PRO-SCAC logic Amazon maintains for that carrier, or the system flags it during validation. Get the SCAC wrong, or mismatched to the PRO number format a carrier actually uses, and the ASN can fail Amazon’s automated checks before the truck even arrives.
BOL: The Physical Document That Has to Match the Electronic One
The Bill of Lading is the paper (or electronic) shipping document a carrier carries, and it needs to reconcile with what’s in the ASN.
Amazon’s requirements are explicit here too: the EDI ASN must always reference the PRO number and BOL number for all shipments, and the physical BOL itself must include the SCAC, all purchase order numbers, and handling unit quantities in printed (not handwritten) form. A BOL missing required information has to be corrected and reprinted at the time of pickup — meaning a documentation gap can delay a shipment before it ever leaves the dock.
Kroger’s 824 Application Advice framework reflects a similar principle from the receiving side: transaction-level errors, including missing or mismatched reference numbers, generate specific Fatal or Warning codes precisely because those numbers are what ties the electronic shipment record back to the physical delivery.
SSCC: The Carton Identifier With Zero Tolerance for Mismatch
This blog has covered SSCC-18 in depth elsewhere, but it bears repeating here because it’s consistently the single most common source of ASN-to-physical-shipment mismatch across every retailer studied.
Amazon requires every EDI-live vendor to provide a unique SSCC on each carton label, entered into the ASN’s MAN*GM segment, and states plainly that failure to provide a compliant carton content label — SSCC, BPS, or GTIN-14 depending on vendor status — results in a per-carton chargeback for “No Carton Content Label.” Amazon’s own documentation is direct about why this matters operationally: License Plate receiving depends entirely on scanning that barcode to link the physical carton to its ASN data, without which the system falls back to manual, item-by-item receiving.
Walgreens builds the same dependency into its DC shipping guide, mapping specific label zones directly to specific ASN segments — including the zone carrying the SSCC-18, which corresponds directly to the ASN’s MAN segment.
PO Number: The Field That Ties Everything Together
Every one of these retailers requires the purchase order number to appear both on the physical carton label and inside the ASN — and a mismatch here is one of the most basic ways a shipment gets flagged.
Amazon’s requirements state it bluntly: no PO number on a carton “will attract chargebacks,” full stop. The PO also has to reflect accurate confirmed quantities — overstated quantities relative to what was confirmed on the original purchase order can trigger their own separate chargeback, independent of any labeling issue.
Macy’s separates its EDI Mapping Guides from its Routing Guide and Vendor Standards, but PO accuracy requirements thread through all three, reinforcing that a mismatched or missing PO number isn’t just a mapping error — it’s a compliance failure that can be flagged from multiple directions at once.
Why These Four Fields Specifically
SCAC, BOL, SSCC, and PO number aren’t just administrative details — they’re the four pieces of data that let a receiving system connect an electronic ASN to a physical shipment without human intervention. Get any one of them wrong, and the system can’t make that connection automatically, which means:
- Manual receiving — someone has to physically verify shipment contents against the PO by hand
- Delayed processing — shipments sit until the discrepancy is resolved
- Chargebacks — most retailers assess a fee specifically for the missing or mismatched data point, independent of any other issue with the shipment
These four fields consistently separate ASNs that flow through automatically from ones that stall. Before transmitting an 856, it’s worth explicitly validating that the SCAC matches the assigned carrier, the BOL number is present and matches the physical document, every carton’s SSCC is uniquely encoded in the MAN segment, and the PO number is accurate down to the confirmed quantity. Individually, these are small fields. Collectively, they’re the difference between a shipment that receives itself and one that becomes a manual exception — and a chargeback — the moment it hits the dock.