Amazon Updates On Time Delivery Policy, Sellers Worry About Impacts To Accounts
Amazon has announced an update to their On Time Delivery Policies causing sellers to worry they will be penalized for carrier delays that are out of their control.
The announcement, posted in the Amazon Seller Forums, goes into effect September 25, 2024 just in time for the busy Q4 holiday shipping season.
New updates to our on-time delivery policy and shipping settings
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.
- 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.
Sellers expressed their dismay with the new changes, with some saying they believe it's just another step toward getting rid of sellers who fulfill their own orders and pushing them to use Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) instead.
Phase 3 of trying to get rid of sellers who fulfill their own orders is in effect. Obviously, Amazon is edging towards getting rid of FBM. Nothing tells you how much they hate us, more than putting a metric out there that we have ZERO control over. Ridiculous. This is Amazon jumping the shark right here.
That said, we're at 96.7 percent right now. We all know what will happen during the holidays though, and it'll be game over for us all, through NO FAULT of our own.
This entire thing is an outrage, I think thats it for us were going to have no choice but to quit Amazon. They finally found the final nail to hammer out sellers and businesses with. None of it makes any sense and there is no way to manage and control all of that.
Whoever came up with this, too many geeks in the kitchen, should be fired! Total nightmare all of this is. So what exactly are they changing in the shipping templates without telling us??? its all confusing.
How will this change to Amazon's On Time Delivery Policies impact your business? Let us know in the comments below!
