Most of my books have the now-default handling time of one day. I’ve been looking at Amazon’s Automatic Handling Time. They claim that many of my books will have the handling time extended to two days. That sounds good - if they are telling the truth.
I don’t trust Amazon. I’m not sure how they will screw things up, but I fear that they will. They have such a long, solid track record of good intentions and good presentations only to end up with bad results. But, like Charlie Brown with the football, I am inclined to trust them one more time.
Amazon also claims that I can discontinue AHT if I don’t like it. Are they tellling me the truth here? Or does my discontinue request get sent to some imagnary team that never acts on it?
My AHT was changed to active by Amazon a couple months ago, when I noticed it, I was able to deactive it by click a button in the shipping setting, and it was deactivated right away, and it hasn’t been changed back to active again since then, eventhough my Handling time gap were sometimes above 2 days.
If you start AHT yourself, then yes you can discontinue it. If Amazon starts it, then you are stuck with it.
We have been on it since Sept and have maintained a 2 day handle time on all of our items. The trick is to be consistent with your shipping and we would strongly suggest always shipping on the last ship by date (or at least 95%) of the time.
Just remember that AHT will learn each ASIN’s handle time individually and is an average of handle time per each ASIN during the last 30 days (that might be 60 but for some reason 30 sticks in our mind). If you have one that comes up as 1 day and you want it to be two, then ship it as a 2 day and AHT will learn that. Your Late Shipment Rate will NOT take a hit for doing that with AHT turned on. You would loose INR coverage on that one order but, in about 7 days, AHT will be calculating that ASIN at 2 days and you will be fine from there on out.
We have had no problems with AHT since we started it last Sept 2024. We had to correct two ASINs to get them to 2 days but that is it. It is very consistent now.
EDIT … set all of your new listings to 2 day handle time (or 3 day handle time if needed). If AHT does not have a track record to set to, then it will default to ASIN level handle time.
I have very few ASINs with a quantity greater than one. ( I have a few dozen ASINs where I have bought out the publisher’s last print run, and have a dozen copies or rarely a hundred or so…) But the vast majority of my sales are one-time events, and I will probably never see that ASIN again.
So let me get this straight. If I sign up for AHT…I could set all of my handling times to three days, ship soon with MM or BPM and achieve a near certainty of the book arriving on time or before. If it arrives just in time, then nothing happens. If it arrives early, Amazon will adjust the HT for that ASIN to something small, which will not affect me because I will probably never sell that ASIN again.
Have I thereby dodged the adverse effects of AHT? Or will there be an eventual attempt by some bot to adjust ‘promises’ for a certain geographical region or state?
I ask this last question because some demented bot recently set my shipping time to 3 days for all of California - without consent or notice. I am presuming that this happened because I shipped to fellow southern Californians in a certain period. This let to some insane shipping promises in northern California, often costing me more than the value of the book.
This is certainly our interpretation of the policy, however, we have not turned on AHT or SSA so have no evidence to confirm.
Your recent problems with shipments within California really suck. As a fellow California seller (I’m in the north), your points made in your other post about required delivery times made me really shake my head (there but for the grace go I). It’s true that Northern and Southern California are two very different animals, and shipping from one end of the state to the other is akin to shipping over several zones.
We are fortunate in that the postal workers in Sacramento, where all our packages are processed, seem to be really on the ball, as is our local post office. Many of our out-of-state shipments also are getting routed through Reno, Nev., with good results.
Our shipments to anywhere in California or Northern Nevada nearly always arrive in 1 to 3 days. But I am acutely aware that we are just lucky, based on the less than stellar USPS experiences of some fellow sellers.
For standard shipping anywhere in California, we are able to choose a maximum of 2-4 transit days on our templates, and 3-5 for expedited. (Yet, for free economy, which we don’t offer, the only choice for any of the lower 48 states is 4-8 days, which is simply not accurate for all regions.) We now set our SKU-level handling time to 2 days on every listing, and we have our automated handling time also set to 2 (the max we are offered). At one point, Amazon switched the automated to 1, but thankfully we were able to change it back.
What you might try doing is shipping a couple of books to Northern California via MM or BPM to test the waters, even if those choices (on Amazon Buy Shipping) are labeled “late delivery risk.”
I didn’t turn on AHT because I don’t like giving Amazon control over my business, but a co-worker turned it on because he likes to click things without talking to anyone or checking what it actually does first. He activated it on the default template.
When I tried to turn it off, it did let me… but it also cleared the template, requiring that I redo the entire thing. I was… displeased. I was more displeased when a few days later he turned it back on after I told him not to, because “no, I like it, it sounds cool” but that’s for another time.
You are mixing apples and oranges. Think of AHT as apples and SSA as oranges.
AHT is only for estimating handle time which is the time that you have to ship the order. Setting handle time to 3 days and shipping early will lead to a handle time gap greater than 2 days which will trigger Amazon to switch you to AHT with no going back.
SSA is only for estimating the transit time of shipping. How you set up your shipping templates will determine your transit time and will set you up for success or failure when it comes to on time deliveries.
All the fears we had of AHT and SSA are now in the past. We have had SSA since August of 2024 when Amazon announced that standard shipping would no longer have 5-8 days as an option and that it would now be 3-5 days. We have had AHT since September 2024 and have maintained a handle time of 2 days on all of our products and have maintained 100% OTDR.
In understanding your business, most of your ASINs are a one time sale. A few of your ASINs will have mulitple sales. You ship all of your orders MM or BPM.
If this was our business model, we would set things up this way …
Set all ASINs to have an individual handle time of 2 days and always ship on the last ship by date of the order.
We would turn on AHT as AHT will see all of your one time ASINs as 2 day handle time and will calculate the handle time of the mulitple sale ASINs based on your shipping pattern. If you always ship on the last ship by date, it will be 2 day handle time.
We would turn on SSA and set the template to Standard Shipping ONLY ( no economy, expedited, 2-day, 1-day or same day … none of these should be selected). Set this template to use USPS Media Mail as the only preferred shipping service. Amazon will then calculate your transit time based on USPS Media Mail only.
We would set our Amazon store as open on Monday thru Friday and closed on Saturday and Sunday.
We would use Amazon Buy Shipping for shipping.
Doing this … your estimated delivery dates will be 4 to 10 days plus 2 days for any weekend during the transit time plus 1 day for any holiday during the transit time (on a holiday falling on a Monday you could possible have an estimated delivery date that is 13 days in the future).
Doing all of this will protect your Late Shipment Rate and your On Time Delivery Rate.
This has worked for us 100% since we have started and we always have USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb) available to ship with through Amazon Buy Shipping (which is what we use 99% of the time).