Delivery Settings, Handling Time and Buffer Time

Hi all, I’m hoping to get some help with our shipping and handling settings as any actual support from raising a case seems to be non-existent. This is not for Seller Fulfilled Prime, but for FBM orders.

We offer same day dispatch for next working day delivery on orders placed before midday. This is not something we can change for Amazon as it’s a company policy for us.

Last year, an account manager reached out to us about some shipping settings and because the earliest time you can set the cut off at in Amazon is 2pm, he set our ‘buffer time’ as 2 hours, meaning in effect, we did have a midday cut off and our orders were going through as expected and we weren’t getting hit with late dispatches.

Recently I’ve seen a number of orders count as late and when I’ve looked in to it, they are orders from post midday that Amazon expects us to ship on that same day, which we can’t do.

I attempted a livechat with Amazon who went on about SFP and told me repeatedly that the cut off can not be any earlier than 4pm (even though I can set it from 2pm onwards). Then I opened an email case and explained the issue again, to which I have been told ‘Even though we are aware that this may cause an issue for your company, we cannot take any action on this regard.
We can only inform on Amazon Policies and how to navigate through them.’

I have asked them what they suggest my shipping/handling settings to be, but I’m not getting any clear advice or help, just fobbed off.

As it is, the delivery estimates are later than is accurate as we can’t display next working day - I assume so as not to compete with Prime. We could in theory increase the handling time by one day and then items arrive earlier and avoid the late dispatch issues, but is there a better way to more accurately manage this does anyone know?

Thanks in advance