I’ve been noticing since enabling SSA and AHT…that when we get a 2-day shipping order in, all the Amazon Buy Shipping options available with the “claims protected” disclaimer are shipping methods that don’t have estimated delivery dates by the guaranteed delivery date.
Why is this?
Obviously, expedited shipping options don’t qualify for ODTR protection no matter what. Normally, if I remember correctly, it would only show delivery services that would arrive on or before the guaranteed date.
My understanding is that the automation takes into account historical delivery times as well as promised delivery times. This leads to results where if someone lives in a better served area and someone else lives in a worse served area, even if they are both in the same delivery zone, the automation might return different options for shipping.
Of course these results are only as accurate as Amazon’s algorithms, but the protection promises should be valid regardless of how badly Amazon drops the ball.
Economy, expedited, 2 day, 1 day and same day shipping options do not qualify for OTDR protection. Only Standard Shipping orders qualify.
This is showing you that if you want to have OTDR protection, the order would need to be Standard Shipping and these shipping services along with Standard Shipping would have offered OTDR protection.
OTDR protection type shipping and Amazon’s pushing for faster delivery to customer do not work together. It makes you choose between OTDR protection and offering the customer a faster delivery option.
If you are looking for OTDR protection, you need to have your shipping template set up for ONLY Standard Shipping with ONLY the shipping service that you would use normally (ie: USPS Ground Advantage [less than 1lb] or UPS ground … etc.). All other shipping options (economy, expedited, 2 day, 1 day and same day) would need to be turned off.
If you are going to offer anything other than Standard Shipping, then you might be better off maintaining control of shipping transit times and handle times since you are not going to have OTDR protection anyhow. The trick is going to be maintaining your handle time gap to be below 2.0 days.
We have AHT and SSA turned on with only Standard Shipping using only USPS Ground Advantage [less than 1lb]. All of our items are 2 day handle time and AHT is calculating them at 2 day handle time. Most orders show a 5 to 6 days promised delivery time with the longer distance orders showing 7 or 8 days. Most of our orders get to the customer with an actual delivery time of 5 days.
We gave up expedited shipping to obtain OTDR protection (we didn’t have that many expedited so it was no big deal to us).
Cold comfort though it is, you’re not the first to report the same in seller-discussion venues far and wide - for instance, this has been a trending topic over in the NSFE for the last coupla months, so I strongly suspect that Amazon be the culprit, not you.
The best explanation I’ve seen for this sort of obvious snafu is probably best-exemplified in this 103124 post from our friend Crafts: