Hello everyone, I received an email from Amazon today “Fulfilled By Merchant Performance Overview”. Never seen this before.
The 3 topics were Handling Time (overestimated by me which Amazon says is bad), Transit Time (also overestimated by me) and OTDR - On Time Delivery Rate. Attached is a screen grab of OTDR. On my seller central dashboard, OTDR says 100%. Never heard of this thing called Promise Extension. Anyone seen this before?
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You are not alone …
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I’ve seen a couple of those and ignore them. The one time I actually did try the automated system it actually showed SLOWER shipping so I changed it back within about four or five days.
My stuff looks pretty good – I need to slough off before Amazon does me some ‘favors’ and screw things up —
Man, am I great or what??? 
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Yours looks about the same as mine but my OTDR is low. Oh well… no plans to use automated shipping.
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Only on Amazon would shipping product out significantly faster and customers receiving their products early be a bad thing 
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It seems pretty clear here that Amazon wants to make one’s exceptional performance into a required level of performance.
They don’t want you to under-promise and over-deliver, they want you to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars, and if you don’t deliver, they will terminate your account for not meeting these new baseline metrics.
I need some help in working this out, as I have automated handling turned off, but they turned it on anyway, and apparently turned my two-day commitment into a one-day requirement, which seems to really be a SAME-DAY ship requirement, even for orders that arrive after close of business. Something is fouled up as their “end of business” date/time is 3am EDT on the so-called “day after” the order is received.
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I increased my handling time last month because usps was not scanning my packages when I dropped them at the post office, plus they were slow to deliver. After a few A to Z claims, I got a big banner on my seller central saying my account was at risk of deactivation… I have no plans to use automated shipping or to over promise and under deliver!
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This is true. And as I’ve pointed out here and on the NSFE, the threshold for them “rewarding” you with changed expectations is equal to or LOWER than the performance metric you must meet to not be in trouble.
So based on the numbers provided at one point, if you beat the promise by a day on 95% of your orders, Amazon will decrease your promise by a day. Then if you ship out 95% of your orders in the same time frame as last month, you get dinged for having 5% of your orders “late” according to the new promise.
Even worse, the recommendations are based on the “average” of shipped and delivered times; but it’s the outliers that can result in a ding.
I will continue to not only keep all automation turned off, but to also keep a percentage of my orders unshipped until the last day, just so that they don’t “reward” me with changes. Of course, this is negative customer service, but it’s still seems like the best choice (and the actual delivery is still typically faster than promised anyway).
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All too true. On the OTHER Forum a seller who has been around for a whole year actually asked why Amazon would do these changes without notice.
My only slightly snarky response to them –
"" not sure why things like this would just be changed behind the scenes."
The simple answer is that the public has been convinced that they MUST have all their needs met within milliseconds or they throw a hissy fit.
Because Amazon wants to coddle ALL their customers (LIMITED to BUYERS) they are trying to force all their peons and slave labor (sellers) to ship in minutes or be thrown to the lions of enforcement policies.
This is THEIR turf so get used to arbitrary changes that affect your life and income.
You’ve only been on here about a year from the looks.
As the old saying goes, you ain’t seen nothing yet…"
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I got a new email from Amazon Veeqo today congratulating me on opening a new warehouse and shipping from a new location.
Ummm no I didn’t…
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There’s been quite a bit of chatter about Amaglitches centered around Ship-From Address Settings, in recent months, over in the NSFE.
Mainly, those complaints have been about the ever-evolving STA ("Send To Amazon’ in ‘Amazonese’/‘Amazonish’) Workflow process for utilizing FBA - but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that whatever caused those snafus has now crept into FBM settings…
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I have a case open with what seemed to be a clueful Amazon rep, and I explained simply that orders received over the weekend, under a 2-day handling time, would be shipped by close of business, EDT TUESDAY.
Their idea of “Tuesday” was “06:59:59 UTC”, which is 3:00am EDT, so OK, Tuesday, but impossible to meet the metric unless one actually shipped by close of business MONDAY, which seems to be “same day shipping” to me for weekend orders.
The worst was ordered on Monday, after close of business, so that one was a “no-win” scenario, as it was ordered after 9pm EDT Monday, and was “late” by 3:00am Tuesday morning (Monday night). Six hours.
We shall see…
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Might be good idea to take a look at your return/shipping address(es)
Some years ago Amazon pulled an address I had used to ship to (sending a gift to my sister) and replaced my address with that one. They have to go to buyer side, find an address you used once, and then replace the address on the seller side.
But of course they didn’t really do that. Apparently I did it in my sleep.
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Yes, and the same phenomenon can (& sometimes does) happen with other Seller-side settings, such as Emergency Contact Phone Number(s) & Charge Method Manager (among others).
The root cause of such snafus is undoubtedly poorly-parameterized automated mechanisms/‘Amabots’, and/or poorly-structured database queries, but the reason why data gets pulled over from the the Buyer-side is explained in the 27Jul`22 tutorial OSFE thread “Ancient Amazonese Secret” (link, NSFE), to which both you yourself and our friend @oneida_books made valuable contributions:
You are one of the many seasoned & savvy forum veterans who has been known to stress that one simply cannot rely on Amazon’s systems to never make a mistake; and as Amazon ramps up its heady devotion to reducing support infrastructure costs w/ its heedlessly headlong embrace of AI implementations, I’d suggest that problems like these are likely to get worse.
That’s one of the many reasons why I believe that supporting a “Daily Checklist” regimen such as our friend @papy’s, most-recently posted to our friend @packetfire’s 19Jun2024 thread “Tell Me What I Should Monitor,” remains an important (albeit unwanted) procedure:
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Interesting, thanks for the tip. I remembered I updated my emergency contact info the other day at amazon’s urging. Maybe that’s what prompted the new warehouse email.
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