My handling time gap is 2.1 days.
No clue how it’s so high as I have same day handle times.
I read this post several times, read the announcement. I’m not understanding how I’ll be negatively impacted.
I have no issues fulfilling same day, so maybe it’s not an issue for me?
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The issue is if you ship immediately it actually INCREASES the problem.
There have been other posts both on here and in the NSFE noting that you have to SLOW DOWN your shipping.
It’s typical Amazon insanity. In the answer that I provided in your post here you need to do the OPPOSITE of what is logical.
There are dozens of posts about it and none of them are good news.
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I guess I’m still not understanding.
I’ve read the many posts, just can’t wrap my head around it
Why do you need to slow it down? Isn’t that counter productive?
Is it because Amazon isn’t making sense the reason why I can’t comprehend it?
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Because Amazon will take your best performance as the floor for future performance.
Yes, it is. But only if sellers don’t just do what they are told. The decision makers don’t think that sellers can figure anything out.
BINGO!!!
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Because Amazon is counting the time from the order to the promised time shipped, shipping faster becomes a HIGHER number – more time meaning shipped faster is BAD.
Think of it this way – order comes in and an expected ship date is three days away – handling time plus the two days that Amazon gives you. You ship immediately so you BEAT the time by 3 days! Your GAP (according to Amazon) is 3 which triggers penalties.
If you were playing hockey you would be in the penalty box for scoring a goal!
If you ship later, say on the promised ship by date the gap narrows which is a good thing. Ship the last day possible, the gap is ZERO – no penalty box!
As @Picks_by_Nisha notes, Amazon makes no sense on this.
They are like a clown car at a stoplight and the BUYERS get left in the middle of the road while the car drives off.
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By gap they mean
You set reasonable timeframes, and are often faster than you promise.
In the retail world, that’s great.
But Amazon? Lol no, it means you might be missing on sales because it’s gonna arrive in 7 days when you could really be saying 5 days. And…that means amazon is losing on some fees they could be making on those sales, and therefore you are BAD and have a GAP.
makes no sense to anyone who was raised on “deliver more than you promise” but that’s not amazon.
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This is the problem: Your handling time gap is not 2.1 days. This is your delivery time gap. This is the total time elapsed since the order was placed until it was delivered, meaning handling time + shipping time. If your handling time is 1 day and you are using 3-5 day shipping options, then your delivery promise is 6 days. The fact that you ship faster and your orders arrive faster makes the gap between how long it takes your items to be delivered and the deadline for your items to be delivered bigger.
The reason shipping slower helps is that it delays the delivery time to be closer to the delivery deadline. Closing this gap makes Amazon less likely to complain that your delivery performance does not match your delivery promises. The changes Amazon has recently announced essentially boil down to “if you actually deliver more than 2 days sooner than you promised, then your promise is bad and we are forcing faster delivery promises which you must fill or face our metrics wrath.” This displeases those of us who try not to overpromise and want to account for unexpected delays.
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Nail, meet pile-driver.
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I’m already starting to see the real world effect of this as some here have already mentioned.
If you ship slower (meaning on the last date you can ship), you risk the probability you now have to pay for more expedited shipping options in order for packages to arrive.
So in the end? Amazon will win either way. You will either ship faster or you will pay more to ship later. Take your pick.
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My pick is to do what I’ve been doing with one exception – they make using the capacity throttle riskier.
Since every order above the limit gets kicked out more days, if I ship them all quickly I make matters worse and move closer to being above ‘2’.
Now I will have to have multiple stacks of items – mail today, mail tomorrow, mail next week, mail NEXT MONTH.
Amazon is unbelievably stupid.
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Handling time gap
You handed off packages to carriers on average 2.1 days before your promised handling time.
Promise gap = Promised delivery time - Actual delivery time
Buyers received packages on average 1.9 days before the promised delivery date.
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Right. So, I ship ASAP because I’m in Seattle and everything takes forever. My OTDR was 82 when they changed the measurements, now I’m at 100. The issue is I don’t do a lot FBM so it takes 1 order to screw me. This now forces me to AHT and SSA.
Now I need to get my gap in check so when I take my two annual vacations I can my handling times instead of going on vacation mode.
I feel like I can’t win, but I think my solution is to surrender to the SSA and AHT.
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I apologize. The dashboard now shows a handling time gap. I don’t know how long that’s been there, but the last time I looked it wasn’t which shows how often I look at it.
Are all your SKUs same day handling? Or just some/most?
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FIFY.
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No problem.
Lots of changes.
They are all same day.
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It’s not even just stuff like that. Since I sell only used books, there are days where I am not at the house, because I’m at a booksale. Sometimes there are more than one in a single day. So I might be out the door at 7:00am and not back until 7:00pm. There’s no way that I can ship out orders that came in at 9:00pm the night before that are on 1 day handling.
So if I get pushed to 1 day handling, that will mean regularly going on Vacation mode for a single day. I’m no marketing expert, but I somehow think that any advantages gained by having customers buy because they see a shorter deliver time will be more than offset by my being totally closed.
What makes this extra stressful is that our mail route is being handled by a rotating group on OT. Some days the mail is not picked up until 6:00 or later; sometimes it never gets picked up. So now that I’m forced to wait until the last day to ship, I have to make sure that it gets picked up by 4:30, or drive to the PO to drop it off myself; otherwise I risk a Late Shipment.
I just wish Amazon would let us run our businesses the way that we know they should be run…
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