Costco Turns Away a Truck With No Appointment, and the Bill Is $500

A truck that reaches a Costco dock without an appointment is turned away, and a late or turned-away shipment carries a $500 administrative fine on top of the redelivery fees.

The 60-day dispute window is the part of this relationship you can plan around. The fine is not attached to your product, your ASN accuracy, or your packaging. It is attached to the truck.

What the fine actually is

The ordinary Costco deduction layer is $50-200 per incident, or 1-5% of PO value, priced per event across five reason codes.

The $500 sits above that layer. Costco's guidance does not tie it to a reason code, which means you cannot find it under a menu. It attaches to the arrival event. Miss the appointment, or arrive without one, and you pay an administrative fine and the load comes back a second time.

Two behaviours that are unremarkable anywhere else are money here. Booking the appointment is one. Transmitting the advance ship notice before the trailer moves is the other.

Two doors into the Vendor Hub

Everything files in the Costco Vendor Hub, at hub.costco.com, and there are two routes in.

Costco's guidance does not rank them, so treat the choice as a convenience rather than a decision. What you send through either door is the same.

The rest of the claim is identical on both routes. Enter your contact details and select the claim type from the dropdown. Attach all relevant supporting documents. Submit, then record the claim number for tracking: that number is the only handle you hold on the filing, and nothing comes back to find it for you.

Five codes, and the two you cannot win

Three of the five are marked usually disputable. That is the better half of the table, and it is not leniency, it means the evidence for the event can still exist by the time you need to show it.

COST-APPT is a document fight

Costco runs a cross-dock model, which is why COST-APPT is a routing code about arrival rather than a code about the goods. When you dispute it, the packet is three documents:

• Carrier appointment confirmation with the scheduled time
• DC delivery record
• Driver check-in log

Three parties, three systems. The appointment confirmation is yours or your carrier's. The distribution centre's delivery record is Costco's. The driver check-in log belongs to whoever was behind the wheel that day.

If your carrier produces that confirmation on request, this is a dispute you can win on paper. If it does not, the claim is an assertion with a claim number attached.

COST-ASN runs backwards from the wheels turning

The ASN: the EDI 856 advance ship notice that tells the distribution centre what is on the truck: must transmit before the truck leaves the dock. Send it late, or do not send it, and it triggers immediate rejection.

The evidence Costco wants for a late ASN is a transmission log carrying a pre-arrival timestamp. Read what that timestamp has to prove: not that you transmitted, but that the transmission beat the trailer out of the building.

The 997 you owe inside 24 hours

A second clock runs in the opposite direction and it is yours. Costco expects an EDI 997 functional acknowledgment within 24 hours of receiving any Costco EDI document.

The 997 is the retailer's confirmation that its system accepted what you sent. It is what turns "we transmitted" into evidence rather than a claim about transmitting. A filing that arrives with the 997 in the packet is a filing with proof attached; one without it is the same assertion in a better folder. Why that document decides EDI disputes is covered in the acknowledgement nobody archives.

The photograph you cannot take late

Costco's guidance here is blunt. Costco disputes often require physical documentation of pallet and SSCC configuration, photography of the actual shipment at warehouse level is frequently required, and warehouse teams should photograph every Costco shipment before it leaves the dock.

Now put the two facts side by side. You have 60 days to file. The pallet you are being asked to prove the existence of was broken down at the Costco DC long before that, and its configuration does not come back. The dispute window and the evidence requirement point in opposite directions, and the evidence requirement expires first.

The labelling code makes it concrete. COST-SSCC requires the serial shipping container code (the barcode identifying one specific pallet) on both sides of the carton, and the documents behind it are label images for both sides, GS1-128 barcode verification, and pallet configuration photos. You cannot supply the second face afterwards, and the code is marked not usually disputable. What a bad pallet label costs is worth reading next, because it explains why that code is a photography problem rather than a paperwork one.

What the packet needs, by deduction

Two things the guidance does not tell you

It does not state what event starts the 60 days. That means your internal alarm has to be set against the event you can actually observe, which is the deduction arriving on a remittance advice.

It also does not say whether a submitted claim can be amended. Costco's filing guidance stops at recording the claim number. Kroger's is explicit that nothing can be changed after filing. If your team has absorbed that habit from another retailer, do not assume the habit transfers.

Every retailer's window and portal is in the dispute window table.

The window is 60 days, and a truck that arrived without an appointment cost $500 in administrative fines plus the redelivery. Put a phone on the dock before the forklift moves, because the photograph Costco asks for cannot be taken inside the 60 days.