Continuing problems with Australia Post's online parcel shipping, tracking, and label printing services are raising fears about the service's reliability just weeks before the busy holiday season.

Less than a week since Aus Post's application programming interface (API) authentication service crashed on 16 October, authorization and timeout errors were plaguing the label print and shipping and tracking API systems into Tuesday.  That caused some companies to take matters into their own hands.

"We've got over three hundred customers waiting for their orders and we couldn't delay them so we had to do everything manually," said Yellow Octopus gift seller founder Derek Sheen to the Fast Company news service.  "All the office staff dropped everything and helped out in the warehouse, and even then we still had 100 orders left over at the end of the day.  But what else were we going to do?"

With Halloween just days away, online costumes store Costume Collection is also hustling to move 500 costume orders.

"We have had to patch together our own in-house solution to the labeling problem so that operations can continue and so we can still post out the orders to customers on time.  The solution involves generating the labels on our own server not on Australia Posts server," Costume Collection managing director Vilay Malaykham said, also to Smart Company.  "If we had not implemented our own redundancy solutions we would have approximately 2000 - 3000 orders pending postage as of today."

The outages also come as Amazon is getting ready to launch in Australia, and will needs partnerships with Aus Post and other entities to ship millions of parcels.