I know the forums are going bonkers over the new automated handling time announcement but I haven't seen details regarding potentially how aggressive amazon will be in their automated settings... In our case we manually set most items to 2 day handling time with a few exceptions being set to 1 day. We ship most items same day and on the Fulfillment Insights Dashboard it shows Handling time (promise):2.8 days and Handling time (actual): 0.5 days. Questions:
1) If we do nothing and let Amazons automated settings take over could/would they set us to same day shipping or is 1 day the lowest setting for the automated value?
2) If I am correctly understanding the following sections of their email, "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" 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", this means if I do nothing then I will be stuck and locked in to their automated settings. However, if I proactively drop my current manual setting to 1 day instead of 2 then presumably the gap will will also drop by 1, which at 1.8 should allow me to disable the automated setting? Does that sound correct?
3) Is the date/time of the shipment based on tracking information provided by the carrier or the date/time of when we upload the ship confirmation and tracking of the orders? If I confirm a shipment and provide tracking at 10am vs 4pm it is the same day as far as the carrier and time in transit are concerned but does amazon consider 11am being 0.25 days less handling time than 4pm? Or is all day considered the same regardless of the time?
Sort of rhetorical question but why does handling time matter at all? Isn't the deliver by date all that matters? If I "promise" delivery by Friday should it matter what day I shipped it, as long as it arrives by Friday?
The shipping times in transit are not flexible enough to be precise so we were using the handling time as a way to pad the total delivery time on cross country shipments. 2-3 or 2-4 days + 2 days handling is fine, but may not be enough with 0 or 1 day handling. The next option is 5-8 days which is too long even with same day shipping...
