AHT - How does Amazon calculate actual handling time?

Selling on Amazon
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Does anyone have any knowledge of how Amazon calculates your actual handling time per ASIN - when it does the monthly AHT update?

I’ve been working on getting earlier acceptance scans on orders to try and get AHT to give me more automated 0-day handling times on as many ASINs as possible. Yes, I am aware I can over-ride AHT in 2 ways. The first way is the same-day handling check-box in the shipping template, where you do not lose OTDR and claims protection if using Buy Shipping. The second is to use the ASIN/SKU handling time override where you do lose OTDR protection even if using Buy Shipping. My goal is to achieve 0-day automatic handling time issued by AHT organically.

What I’m curious about - are these 3 scenarios. I am closed Saturday and Sunday and have those days set as “Prime Only” - so no regular orders are due to ship out on Saturday and Sunday. I do not actually do any SFP. So SSA and AHT show I am closed on the weekend.

  1. An order comes in Friday evening, after my order cut-off time, so the ship-by date is Monday April 13th. I ship the order on Saturday and get a USPS acceptance scan on Saturday at 10:00am Pacific Time. What will Amazon show my actual handling time as -38 hours, or 0 hours?

  2. An order comes in on Sunday and the ship-by date is Monday April 13th. I ship the order and get a carrier acceptance scan on Monday at 7:30am pacific time. Does Amazon calculate the actual handling time as 7.5 hours, or 0 hours?

  3. An order comes in on Monday at 10:30am PT and leaves pending status and becomes shippable at 11:00am PT, and is due to ship the same day because it came in before my order cut-off time. I get a carrier scan the same day at 1:00pm PT. Does Amazon calculate the handling time as 2.5 hours, 2.0 hours, or 0 hours?

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Isn’t it easier to override it simply in shipping settings and setting AHT as not active? That’s how I have it

AHT works with a rolling average of 30 days discounting the last 10 days (so uses day -40 to -30) and allegedly improves daily. If it sees that there’s not enough data (whatever that means) then it pulls the number from a hat, or uses the account default.

Regarding the scenarios, I believe (and I’m not using any of Amazon’s automations) that the units are 0 days, 1 day, 2 days, etc, not hours
So for instance

The algorithm gets confused and you are penalized :joy:
that’s 0 days

That’s 0 days

No, with all that said, the Fulfillment Dashboard does show fractions of days. In my case it shows this:

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image1679×719 71.1 KB

And that’s what leads me to believe that the fractions (hours if you may) are not really important, because Amazon will work to the 0 day, 1 day, 2day handling. 15 mins of handling.

In the old forum Racecarox would have given a lot more detailed (and accurate) answer

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Yes you can loose OTDR doing this.

This is not true.

Amazon will calculate it based on the amount of hours from order placed to order shipped.

Same as above … Amazon will calculate it based on the amount of hours from order placed to order shipped.

Same as above … Amazon will calculate it based on the amount of hours from order placed to order shipped.

When there is no data, it will pull it first from the individual handle time if set and then the default handle time.

It depends on your settings with cut off times, shipping data, store hours, vacation days, holidays … as all of those will effect the calculation of the last ship by date on the order.

We do have SSA and AHT enabled with a 2 day handle time set at the individual level for each item.

If an item comes in on Monday whether it is at 12:01am Pacific Time or 11:59pm Pacific Time, that order needs to be shipped / scanned by the shipper on Wednesday before 11:59pm Pacific Time. If I get a scan at 5:00am Pacific Time on Wednesday, it is the same as the 11:59pm scan on Wednesday … as far as the handle time goes.

If you want zero handle time, then you technically have to ship and get scanned the same day the order comes in. However … if your cut off time is 5:00pm and the order comes in at 6:00pm, then your 0 handle time is the next day. If you have your store closed on Saturday and Sunday with your cut off time at 5:00pm, then any order that comes in from 5:01pm Friday to 11:59pm Sunday will have a 0 day handle time on Monday. You have told Amazon that you are not working from 5:01pm Friday to 11:59pm Sunday so you have to get all of those orders out on Monday plus any orders that comes in Monday before your cut off time of 5:00pm.

The way those numbers work on the Fulfillment Dashboard is an average of days (not hours) per order.

Example
Order #1 = 5 days before expected
Order #2 = 3 days before expected
Order #3 = 2 days before expected
Average = 10 / 3 = 3.3 days before expected

It’s a rolling time just like the way the Fulfillment Dashboard works. Generally, we saw it update roughly 7 to 14 days (depends a little on the ASIN activity and your ability to ship consistently).

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Thanks for the feedback. I have the same day checkbox selected on all shipping templates and currently have the OTDR Protected and Claims Protected badges on all orders.

When I had the “SKU level handling time” active, we lost the OTDR Protected badge on orders.

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Update:

TL;DR: Getting 0-day handling time organically in AHT is very difficult.

After almost a month of doing early AM UPS / USPS drop-offs, and adding Saturday USPS drop-offs, it appears Amazon probably uses a P95 threshold when calculating if you get 0 or 1 day handling time awarded.

I have some ASINs that had an average as high as 8.98 handling hours and received 0-day handling time. Using a 95th percentile filter, even my ASINs with better average handling times get tossed because they have too many scans late in the day - around 3-5pm Pacific Time.

I did see an increase in organic sales on the ASINs that got 0-day handling times - even before the updated calculations took place. This suggests that COSMO has a trust factor for each seller/ASIN and sends more traffic to those with a better trust score (all other things being equal).

In order to get 0-day handling time on more of my ASINs, I’d have to do AM drop offs M-F, and continue to do USPS drop-offs on Saturdays. Sandbagging my handling time to 1 day handling will probably scare off more buyers than I’d receive from extra traffic via trust from COSMO.

That said, I’ll run a hybrid schedule going forward, doing Monday morning drop-offs for the weekend orders, and doing extra AM drop-offs the rest of the week when my schedule and volume support it without causing stress.

I’ll be ramping up the full blitz schedule in early October so that I can feed AHT and COSMO 1 month of superb handling time performance before my November 19 AHT calculation update. This should put me in a better trust position for the holiday season, where I expect COSMO to add more weight to seller/ASIN trust than it does during the non-holiday season. IT appears COSMO doesn’t wait for the monthly AHT calculation updates - as I got more traffic on my ASINs well before the AHT did its last update (which I had to force because it skipped me on April 19th).

If your AHT update isn’t happening when it should - you can turn off the Same Day handling checkbox on your shipping templates. Then turn off AHT. Let it sit for a few hours. I recommend doing this when you have your lowest sales of the week. For me that is Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday are my 3rd and 4th lowest, so I started this on Tuesday after my order-time cut-off. When I turned AHT off, I had 29 ASINs update. When I turned AHT back on, I had the rest of them finally update.

Also - the AHT update time is partially just a flag indicator - when you change the AHT status it just pulls the last time the ASIN was updated in that state. It wasn’t when I turned AHT back on that it finally re-ran the ASINs that had been stuck for a while.

This was a fun test. During this time I discovered that most of the USPS scanners and clerk station PC’s don’t have the correct time zone set. So I lose an hour shipping in Colorado as a scan for 1:00pm MT shows up as 1:00pm PT in Amazon’s order details page. If I can convince one of the USPS employees to fix this, I’m taking myself out to a fancy dinner this week.

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I think your post and all the good info already warrants a fancy dinner :winking_face_with_tongue: