New updates to our on-time delivery policy and shipping settings
Fast and accurate delivery is essential for customers and often determines where they choose to shop. Over time, we've learned that the best way to ensure reliable on-time delivery for customers is to set accurate handling and transit times and to choose reliable shipping services. To help reduce late deliveries and improve delivery speeds, we’re changing our on-time delivery rate (OTDR) policy.
Effective September 25, 2024, you'll need to maintain a minimum 90% OTDR without promise extensions to have seller-fulfilled products listed on Amazon.com. We will start by addressing sellers with the lowest OTDR performance. For a great customer experience, we recommend that you maintain a 95% or greater OTDR for all seller-fulfilled orders. This policy does not apply to offers using the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service because sellers are not responsible for on-time delivery promises for FBA orders.
Also, we'll make the following changes to shipping settings to help sellers with Professional selling plans set accurate delivery dates:
- Transit time settings: On August 25, 2024, our transit time requirements will be updated to match the delivery capabilities of shipping services. If you're shipping within the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, and US territories), you can set a maximum transit time of five days for standard shipping and eight days for free economy shipping. To learn more, go to Default transit time.
Note: The 5 day maximum Transit Time applies to all SKUs except media such as Books, Magazines, and DVDs.
- Handling time settings: On September 25, 2024, to help improve the accuracy of handling time, we'll enable automated handling time for sellers that have a manually configured handling time that is two or more days slower than their actual handling time (also known as a handling time gap). To see your handling time gap, review your Fulfillment Insight dashboard.
We understand changes like this are significant and require time to prepare. You can manage your delivery dates using the tools we've provided, or you can manually adjust your transit time and handling time settings. We designed these tools to set accurate delivery dates, reduce late deliveries, and to meet or exceed the minimum OTDR requirement, and because Amazon is making calculations on your behalf that affect OTDR, you will get OTDR protection from late deliveries on items shipped through standard shipping if you use all three tools as follows:
- Shipping Settings Automation (SSA), for Professional selling plans, sets accurate delivery dates through automated transit time calculations of your preferred shipping services. You must choose one of the preferred ship methods in the SSA templates, which will mark the transit time on the shipping template as "Managed by Amazon."
- Automated handling time, for Professional selling plans, sets accurate handling times per SKU based on how long it usually takes you to pass each SKU to carriers. You must ensure that automated handling time is enabled in your shipping settings.
- Amazon Buy Shipping, for both Professional and Individual selling plans, sells shipping labels that use highly-reliable ship methods. You can use Amazon Buy Shipping through Manage Orders, Shipping API, Veeqo, or select multi-channel integrators with access to Amazon Buy Shipping. You must choose shipping labels marked as "OTDR Protected" when using Amazon Buy Shipping or Veeqo.
You'll receive an email with your current OTDR and recommendations on how to improve if you're below the minimum requirement. To learn more, review your OTDR on your Account Health dashboard or go to On-time delivery.
New updates to our on-time delivery policy and shipping settings
Fast and accurate delivery is essential for customers and often determines where they choose to shop. Over time, we've learned that the best way to ensure reliable on-time delivery for customers is to set accurate handling and transit times and to choose reliable shipping services. To help reduce late deliveries and improve delivery speeds, we’re changing our on-time delivery rate (OTDR) policy.
Effective September 25, 2024, you'll need to maintain a minimum 90% OTDR without promise extensions to have seller-fulfilled products listed on Amazon.com. We will start by addressing sellers with the lowest OTDR performance. For a great customer experience, we recommend that you maintain a 95% or greater OTDR for all seller-fulfilled orders. This policy does not apply to offers using the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service because sellers are not responsible for on-time delivery promises for FBA orders.
Also, we'll make the following changes to shipping settings to help sellers with Professional selling plans set accurate delivery dates:
- Transit time settings: On August 25, 2024, our transit time requirements will be updated to match the delivery capabilities of shipping services. If you're shipping within the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, and US territories), you can set a maximum transit time of five days for standard shipping and eight days for free economy shipping. To learn more, go to Default transit time.
Note: The 5 day maximum Transit Time applies to all SKUs except media such as Books, Magazines, and DVDs.
- Handling time settings: On September 25, 2024, to help improve the accuracy of handling time, we'll enable automated handling time for sellers that have a manually configured handling time that is two or more days slower than their actual handling time (also known as a handling time gap). To see your handling time gap, review your Fulfillment Insight dashboard.
We understand changes like this are significant and require time to prepare. You can manage your delivery dates using the tools we've provided, or you can manually adjust your transit time and handling time settings. We designed these tools to set accurate delivery dates, reduce late deliveries, and to meet or exceed the minimum OTDR requirement, and because Amazon is making calculations on your behalf that affect OTDR, you will get OTDR protection from late deliveries on items shipped through standard shipping if you use all three tools as follows:
- Shipping Settings Automation (SSA), for Professional selling plans, sets accurate delivery dates through automated transit time calculations of your preferred shipping services. You must choose one of the preferred ship methods in the SSA templates, which will mark the transit time on the shipping template as "Managed by Amazon."
- Automated handling time, for Professional selling plans, sets accurate handling times per SKU based on how long it usually takes you to pass each SKU to carriers. You must ensure that automated handling time is enabled in your shipping settings.
- Amazon Buy Shipping, for both Professional and Individual selling plans, sells shipping labels that use highly-reliable ship methods. You can use Amazon Buy Shipping through Manage Orders, Shipping API, Veeqo, or select multi-channel integrators with access to Amazon Buy Shipping. You must choose shipping labels marked as "OTDR Protected" when using Amazon Buy Shipping or Veeqo.
You'll receive an email with your current OTDR and recommendations on how to improve if you're below the minimum requirement. To learn more, review your OTDR on your Account Health dashboard or go to On-time delivery.
509 replies
Seller_r9wMm8LrE5iKj
Maybe one of the mods who is cowering in a corner instead of answering our questions can answer this: Currently my (automated by Amazon) handling time says this: "Your carriers delivered packages on average 0.3 days before your promised transit time." (5.3 v. 5.0 days). Just under half my packages probably arrive "late" if this is true (using the same shippers Amazon uses!). Which means -- even using your own d*amn automation -- I will quickly fail to meet this new metric. The only protection I have is to turn on automated handling as well. Aside from the other issues with this, this will modify handling time if 85% of my shipments are faster than my estimated handling time, but my account will be shuttered if I don't hit 95%.
What I'm hearing -- and please tell me where I have this wrong, Amazon -- is I now have the choice of having my account shut down and funds seized for using your automation, OR for not using your automation; either for OTDR, OR Handling Time violations.
In other words, use FBA, where we can lose/steal/resell your inventory and take an even bigger bit of your sales, OR use FBM, and go out of business.
Thank you for being so pro-choice. It's nice to have options.
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
Boiling Frog Syndrome
If a frog is placed in a pot with boiling water, it would jump out immediately; however, if we put it in water at ambient temperature and start heating it up gradually, the frog will start adjusting its body temperature to the new environment instead of jumping out. The frog will not realize that the water is boiling, and when it does, it will be too late for escape.
The essence of the boiling frog syndrome is that when our living conditions deteriorate gradually, we adapt to these conditions instead of getting rid of them, until we are no longer strong enough to escape. The boiling frog syndrome may occur in our relationships, interactions, or work-related situation.
Seller_ZWJu6SC7QqWWD
Could someone at Amazon at LEAST extend this policy. The holidays are coming, we all work very hard , at least extend this disaster until February so we can all get used to this. The holiday season is no time for this , carrier delays are a given with the holidays and winter weather delays. Do you have fun stressing the sellers or something ? Have a little consideration for us please.
Seller_CA70ZtA5VBcto
Disconnected! You guys are so clueless. Big ole Amazon doesn't even understand Small Business USA.
We have 5 business days set for our products. This gives us plenty of gap to fulfill incase of weather events or personal events(small business). We pre-print orders selecting a shipment date ahead. These labels are attached properly to orders so when ready, ready to go. So we ship faster than 5 business days? of course
You are causing us internal confusion if an order goes to fulfillment now without a label. We sell elsewhere! So you just screwed up our entire operation by making part of it different.
I think sellers are going to destroy you in the long run, like they did to eBay. Sure eBay's still around. But instead of being a 20-25 billion dollar profit corporation annually, they're under 3 billion and slowly losing market share.
Can your theft of manufacturing contacts from your sellers keep you afloat as you create many brands and products? Maybe.
Seller_cNW6MlgXqxf5o
I am a small book seller. On my stats I see this:
Total Amazon Business shipments: 3
Amazon Business shipments delivered within business hours: 2
Business hour delivery rate: 67%
Business hour delivery rate target: 95%
Checking the tracking shows all 3 were delivered earlier than the expected promise time, yet the spreadsheet reads this way for the one "supposedly" offending book:
Promised Delivery Date: 6/17/24
First Attempt Delivery Date: 6/8/24
First Attempt Delivery Time: 12:43 PM
Business Hour Delivery: No
Failure Reason: First Attempt On A Closed Day
Yet the tracking shows Package delivered.: Sat, Jun 8, 2024, 9:43 AM PDT
So, I don't understand how this error in programming (possibly?) is going to affect my ability to sell a few books per month.
Also, I agree that sellers shouldn't be business-responsible for carrier activity, especially when there were recent congressional hearings aimed at trying to get the Post Office to reconsider its efforts to "slow down" the mail (while at the same time continually increasing rates).
Seller_2VxWanW2tXZSq
I have SSA and AHT enabled, and all labels are purchased through Buy Shipping.
Why do I not see the ODTR protected badge? One person told me it's because you only get protection for standard shipments? not premium? How would that make any sense?
If that's true, you'd like me to stop shipping fast and switch everything to standard?
Seller_TTc5Vo48AaOHg
post. Is there a way to deactivate Premium Shipping in the SAS?
I'm over being mad and just trying to move on and adapt. In trying to get my head around this thing, at first I thought, well, if they are going to protect if use the tools, then just enable them and do it their way and don't stress it, see how it works.
But then I backed out of the set up when I couldn't figure out how to set it and actually be fully protected because we primarily use Premimum Shipping. If I backed out and unchecked it in the beginning, it was there at the end of the set up with the check box grayed out. There seems to a Gotcha no matter what you try to do.
Our current workflow works well. We have Free Standard Shipping with a 4 day handling time, and generally use Priority and UPS. Within those 4 days we make shipping decision by destination, not by sku. Our OTDR is currently 100%. We did have a business order over the 4th that we had to cancel due to no carriers available that could deliver within their business hours. But that seemed to only be counted in the Business Metric and not the overall.
Now we are looking at a scenario where our handling time will be randomly shortened to 1 or 2 days with no means (that I can find) for us to know which skus have what, in concert with a shorter estimated delivery windows and the counting of weekends as business days. Somehow this seems to be a set up to fail and actually designed to push the OTDR below the metric. A mandate to use FBA (over something we cannot control, no less) would be catastrophic. Our products are perishable, require specialized handling depending on destination, so are definitely not suitable for FBA. Sales thru Amazon make up 70% of our income.
A Mod also posted over on the Handmade Board that you can ask for a policy exemption, but there was no information to guide how to do that.
I keep thinking I must be misunderstanding or missing something?
If I am not, then the only workable solution seems to be to diversify further and try to mitigate the risk of 70% of our cash flow being suddenly gone. How can I continue to justify the amount of time and focus that has become necessary here? Lately there is never time to add products, EBC, run experiments, set up advertising, or do much of anything that might actually be of business benefit because I am always navigating the mine field of metrics, bot mistakes, and fending off the growing numbers of scams, entitled buyers, unethical competitors and dropshippers. It has literally seems to have become all that I do every day.
Jim_Amazon
@Seller_2VxWanW2tXZSq
The current OTDR protection policy only applies to the general account-level OTDR policy. The PSO and SFP programs continue to have their own policies specific to those orders and we are continually evaluating improvements to those programs. We will take your feedback into account.
-Jim
Seller_7lHJxpNXp7zBS
Our OTDR is 96.62%. We use Amazon Buy Shipping services for 99.99% of Amazon orders (Exceptions when Amazon expects us to pay $40+ for postage on very rare occasions). Every single order on this new OTDR clearly shows we shipped the order 1 day before the promised ship date.
Looking at the OTDR report, I'm a little confused, particularly with the two columns in the report "Delivered after promised delivery date without a promise extension" and "Delivered after promised delivery date with a promise extension". 6 out 7 of these "late" orders are marked both late with promise extension and without promise extension. What is a promise extension and how can an order be marked as both?
This is a bit confusing and feels we are getting dinged even when using Amazon Buy Shipping service. Sellers have no control over how shipping carriers run their business or if there are any natural disasters that cause delays.
Seller_KTqTsOaEk9w9z
If you're shipping stuff by post office to Houston this week, prepare for your OTDR to get crushed.
Seller_19GF8wBfQaqJL
@Jim_Amazon
@SEAmod , This is an Issue.. We are in a small rural area and USPS has just Added 4 days to all rural mail routes in Our State. We can no longer ship Anything on the same day as they only have one out going pickup at 8am before they open.
USPS expects us to get Mail to them the day before we need to ship it out .. And as we can see into the Future we cannot do that.. So any order we get now ships out 24 to 48 hours after we receive the order. Because The Post Master has now removed the ability for us to ship out on the same day.. And On weekends we can't ship anything out until the following Tuesday!. Your system of messing with our handling times will not work here!.
USPS have removed all local sorting hubs.. and USPS will no longer deliver anything on Saturdays /(nationwide) except Priority mail.. You are attempting to destroy the rest of us by forcing unreal Handling and Shipping times upon us..
Please do not mess with our Handling Times as this will just make all Amazon customers very unhappy. USPS has made sever changes to the Delivery system in the USA and you should already know this..
Extra 4 days for all Mail delivery now is standard for all address in the USA and No more Saturday deliveries except Priority mail ..
Amazon making changes to our Preset handling times should not happen and should not be allowed..
WE work for ourselves, not Amazon!. @SEAmod Please do not let them do this.
----------------------------------------------------------------Your account has a gap of two days or more between your set handling time and your actual handling time. You can choose to close this gap by manually setting an accurate handling time on your account and SKUs or by enabling automated handling time.
On September 25, 2024, your handling time gap will be measured, and if it remains above two days as per our policy for on-time delivery, you will be auto-enrolled into having automated handling time enabled and will no longer be able to disable automated handling time. To learn more about how your handling time gap is calculated, go to Fulfillment Insight dashboard.
Seller_2VvE1As3Hvl6A
Enough already Amazon!
I opted out in past times that you tried to push automated handling times on MY business and I will keep doing so.
I don't care if you think it is costing me sales. My handling time is setup to meet MY needs. If I happen to get some items out earlier than my specified time frame, you decide to punish me.
I think I know how I want to run my business and my life better than you.
Seller_VHyac3lhWgOvN
Here's another great edge case I just found by digging into our On-Time Delivery Rate report.
Ya'll will love this one
- Customer enters address
- Address is deemed as incorrect by USPS or UPS
- Sellers are not allowed to change addresses using Amazon Buy-Shipping
- Return to sender is processed
- Seller receives negative mark on ODTR metric for not delivering the package on time.
Beautiful!
So if a seller gives the package to the shipping carrier on time, uses Amazon's Buy-Shipping module...even though they have no control over what the customer enters into their address field & even if there's a delivery attempt at the buyer's requested address before the "deliver-by" date...the seller's metrics take a hit & are potentially suspended depending on how many customers entered an incorrect address.
Question - why wouldn't a bad actor just buy a couple of items from a competitor, send it to a fake address or refuse the shipment, get a full refund, have the seller lose money on the shipping label & potentially get their competitor suspended?
We feel so confident in Amazon's abilities to anticipate what sellers face every day!
