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.
