Just received this email from Amazon:

Accurate delivery promises help customers make confident purchasing decisions. Our automated transit times use real carrier performance data to set realistic shipping promises, which builds customer trust and reduces negative delivery experiences.

Compared to seller-set transit times, automated transit times are 30% more accurate on average. This means your orders are more likely to arrive on time, which protects your account health, and can help driving sales.

What’s changing? – In 14 days, we will upgrade your shipping settings to use automated transit times on Standard Shipping templates. Amazon will handle this upgrade on your behalf. This change does not affect shipping options for Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) or Premium Shipping, or shipping templates which already had Shipping Settings Automation enabled.

This will be nail in coffin time for me if Amazon start to automate delivery windows like this instead of letting me set my own. Lets face it when Amazon say 'transit time' they actually mean the window from date of order to delivery (which includes initial handling and then the services delivery time). I have handling time set to 2 days for a reason as I am unable to post every day and usually only post Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. My customers order knowing this. So why should Amazon change it?

Its a laugh when Amazon say it will protect account health - because if Amazon do not give me that 2 days handling window then they will be telling customer an earlier date than I can actually deliver - so it will most certainly have a negative effect on my account health and there will be nothing I can do about it as it has been 'automated'

Ok, story time.

In April my listing got flagged as a children's toy and required safety certification via an Amazon third party tester. They gave me three months which was great.

The product was an adult colouring pen set.

Whilst understanding Amazons recently updated policy regarding children's toys, I contacted a third party tester and they advised me not to go ahead with the testing for two reasons:

1. Uk law doesn’t require the testing because the product is not a children’s toy.

2. The testing would cost £24,500!

They told me I “should try to get Amazon to listen”.

With this advice and what I believed to be common sense, I appealed the clear misclassification.

Every appeal was very quickly rejected via AI responses. Which means nobody at Amazon was actually reviewing my appeals.

Then moving on to seller support and account health specialists (I use that term loosely), I would go on to explain the issue.

I was told the listing or product shows child-appealing designs and play features.

I checked the listing thoroughly and found nothing that fits that description. This was confirmed by an account health specialist.

Which leaves only the product itself.

NOBODY at Amazon could tell me what had flagged the listing as a children’s toy or what these child-appealing designs and/ or play features were.

As the three months were up, Amazon closed the listing.

This left me with nearly 700 units in FBA which needed a removal order to send the stock back to me otherwise after 30 days the units would be destroyed.

One month later and the listing randomly shows active again with the product safety testing not required.

That sounds great doesn’t it?

I immediately cancelled the removal order hoping the remaining unshipped units would stay in the FC and return to available inventory.

That kind of happened.

The remaining 47 units that hadn’t been shipped are still showing as unfulfillable. After nearly a week of waiting for the units to show as available inventory I once again contacted seller support.

They had to investigate where the 47 units were. They eventually found them a week later in a FC. They were labelled as unfulfillable but couldn’t tell me why.

They have now been told by the FC that the units are defective because they don’t match the listing and attached photos of the product. The photos clearly show the correct units which are sealed in their retail box packaging.

I am still waiting for their next ridiculous response to why the perfectly sellable units can’t go back to where they were and be sold.

30 of those units are now part of an automatic removal order which can’t be canceled. The reason they are part of this automatic removal is because they have been classed as unsellable for a certain period of time.

Which is only because Amazon hasn’t added the 47 units back to sellable inventory.

I wonder which 30 of the 47 units they will decide to send me? They have all been there together the same period of time.

It’s been nearly three months and I still haven’t received all the units that have been ‘dispatched’.

The removal order has currently cost me £2500. Plus the cost to send it all back to Amazon now the listing is active again.

Plus the organic ranking which has cost over £15k in PPC to build has all gone due to the listing deactivation.

I enquired via seller support regarding a potential refund for the removal order as it was unnecessary as they caused the listing to be deactivated and then reactivated it saying they no longer require the testing certification.

Needless to say they wont give me any form of refund as they followed Amazon’s policies correctly.

I invested a lot of personal savings into building this listing from scratch and was soon to be able to turn off PPC and rely 100% on organic sales where the real profits would start and my Amazon business could start growing to multiple products with my brand.

That’s my Amazon story, I hope you all enjoyed your popcorn.

Cheers

Amazon required me to remove all affected FBA inventory because of a non-compliant brochure. My listings were removed in mid-May, and I had to wait 30 days for all incoming inventory to settle at Amazon. I then created large removal orders on June 29, 2026, with the inventory to be returned to our warehouse in Italy so that we could replace the brochures.

It is now August 24, and the removal process is still not complete.

Several removal orders have been stalled for weeks, with units remaining “In Process” and showing no movement. Several hundred units have also been cancelled from the removal orders, and I have no idea what that even means or where those units are now.

What makes this even more frustrating is that Amazon continues sending automated notifications telling me that recalled/unfulfillable inventory must be removed. However, when I try to create removal orders for the remaining inventory, Seller Central frequently allows me to remove only a small portion of the units.

For example, one ASIN showed 93 unfulfillable units, but Amazon allowed me to submit a removal request for only 8 units, while the other 85 were shown as “not available for removal.” Fine, I create a removal order for the 8 units — and then 7 get cancelled and only 1 is returned to me! This is extremely frustrating.

I have contacted Seller Support repeatedly. The responses have largely consisted of canned messages saying that the matter has been sent to a “specialized team” or instructing me to create removal orders again. But as explained above, Amazon's system will not let me do that.

Amazon has told me that the listings cannot be reinstated until the recalled inventory is removed. Yet Amazon's own fulfillment/removal process is preventing me from getting the inventory out.

Our EU listings have now been closed for over three months. During this time, I have lost sales while continuing to incur Amazon storage costs, third-party warehouse storage costs, and other business expenses. The financial impact continues to grow while I wait for Amazon to complete a process that is entirely outside my control.

My automated unfulfillable inventory settings are also configured for weekly removal, yet the remaining inventory is still not being cleared.

Has anyone else recently experienced removal orders remaining “In Process” for this long? How did you finally get Amazon to complete them?

This case has been open for a month, and no response for the last 2 weeks.

It's a 30 second fix - and I've had countless responses where resolution has been outright refused.

I just need it fixed. I'm so tired of having to go to bat for the simplest issues with seller 'support'.

our biggest problem with any handling time is that is differs from product to product! no matter what we tell the system!

The times we've had PRIME orders come in 2 hrs after our deadline (because they were 'ordered' before the deadline!) remembering the cut off is 30 minutes after ordering!!

THe whole default handling system has now been ruined