Your account has been selected to be auto-enrolled in Automated Handling Time (AHT). This change will occur on May 15th with no action required on your behalf.
Automated Handling Time will set more accurate Handling Times for each of your Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) offers. With this upgrade your offers will have a more accurate delivery date, which is normally shorter and more appealing to buyers, typically resulting in more sales.
When Automated Handling Time is enabled, your ship-by date will be automatically adjusted for every SKU based on the actual time it has historically taken you to pack and ship confirm orders of that SKU.
Your account was selected for this upgrade because your Actual Handling Time is 2.3 days faster than what you had configured in your settings. This made your delivery dates unnecessarily long, making your offers seem less appealing to customers.
Worried about your account health?
For the first 90 days after this change, your Late Shipment Rate (LSR) will not be impacted if you have a late shipment because Automated Handling Time set a faster Handling Time than your original configuration.
Additionally, you now have the ability to set your Order Handling Capacity when AHT is enabled. This feature sets a limit for how many orders you can handle in a day. Once this limit is reached you get an additional day of Handling Time for every subsequent order. Click to learn more
After Automated Handling Time is enabled, if you prefer to manually set your Handling Time per SKU, watch this video to learn how. After you configure your SKU-specific Handling Time, you can disable Automated Handling Time on your Handling Time Settings.
I had decided (in a moment of temporary insanity) to actually try that.
As near as I can tell it has resulted in fewer orders, quite possibly because of situations like this one where the order is going 60 miles away in the same state –
I notice that they are always quick to point out that LSR will not be dinged for the first 90 days.
But I’ve never seen the answer the question about whether or not INR complaints will be covered if shipped according to your original settings.
Why can’t Amazon let us run our own business???
BTW, as a result of this chaos, I’ve changed my way of handling orders; low value orders don’t go until the last day, and I don’t ship anything on Monday; this way, I don’t have to worry about hitting that magic 85% mark of shipping early and then getting “rewarded” by having Amazon mess things up.
Ugh I hate this. I have a 10 day processing time because my life does not revolve around my business. Sometimes I get orders out in 2 days but other times I am busy with my kids or just don’t feel like working…especially with school wrapping up this month, I don’t even make it out of the house in a timely manner. Maybe the order gets made the same day but it takes me a few days to get out of the house to get to the post office.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. Because if they were doing something that didn’t hurt the seller, they would be making that very clear. They only hide when they know that it’s wrong.
Same wording except my actual handling time is 2.2 days. The reason I can often ship “faster” is because I’m retired and don’t have as many appointments and obligations as working people.
I just returned home from paying a bill and grabbing lunch to discover that two new orders showed up on my account. Both those orders will go out tomorrow rather than today because I have a dentist appointment this afternoon. It will help slow down my handling time too.
We also received this today. After reading about this on SAS previously we slowed down our process for shipping, hoping to avoid it. No such luck. Our Actual Handling Time is 1.7 days faster than our current settings. Guess we didn’t slow down enough.
I’m also retired. Online selling is what I do to help support a non-profit and I’ve been able to do it for years on my own schedule. Pretty sure I’ll be setting a low Order Handling Capacity once this goes into effect.
I assume Amazon is calculating our actual handling time from when the order is placed to when shipping is confirmed, whether by using Buy Shipping or confirming shipping by entering a tracking number. Our mail carrier picks up before noon every day so we’ve continued to get packages ready in the evening but not printing labels until the next morning.
Makes no sense to me why Amazon feels the need to do this. We’ve never had a late shipment and we’re low volume, so in the end this probably won’t have much of an effect on us. Just aggravating that we abide by Amazon’s rules - then they change the rules.
Too late to help you, but you can select a date in the future for the Shipping Date; although I can’t say for sure that it actually makes a difference in whether or not Amazon decides to mess up your settings.
It will be interesting to note whether or not Priscilla, or one of the other members of the FMT who are known to post in the NSFE’s semi-“closed” Handmade Artisan forum (Rose, CR, et al.) addresses your concurrent “STOP messing with my order handling time.” post (link) there.
Still, I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation of that proving to be the case…
I’m sure she will just copypaste whatever she says on any of my posts…always some word salad about bringing my concerns to the team. Same old song and dance one trick pony show
Just an update to this since I turned off the automated junk yesterday.
Order flow still sucks along with the rest of Amazon.
It still shows insane delivery delays BUT I have to admit, turning it off now says it will only take TEN days instead of TWELVE, despite going several hundred miles further!
I got the same email with the same May 15th date. It is now the 16th and my settings still say that automated is not active, and my default is 2 days, as it was before.
Is this a ticking timebomb that could go off at any time after the 15th? Like I have to check it every day so I can then start the process of turning it off? I am Handmade, so I have SKU level production times, and I still don’t know if these will be over ridden.
We would check just to be sure; however, we have item level handle times set and have not had the item level change (we do custom items). Handmade may be exempt but, since you got the email, it might be in your interest to monitor the setting for a couple of weeks to a month especially if not all your items are set at item level.
We had to add a monitoring-review task for this to our “Daily Checklist” last year precisely because we cannot be sure that Amazon won’t change something w/o notification.
