This part sounds an awful lot like once automation is turned on, you are no longer responsible if you ship late. How is that a sane policy? What other way is there to interpret that sentence (we’ll close your account, take your money, but leave your listings up?)? How will this be “more appealing to buyers”?
And if only FBM is subject to stringent metrics on transit time, how can Amazon justify awarding the buy box to FBA, all things being equal? FBA will never buy more expense shipping to meet some bullshirt metric, but FBM will have to.
Hi, first ever contribution as newbie. We seem to have 0 or 1 day handling time as our only option for some time now. Can anyone get 2 day as default handling time currently ? One the new OTDR stuff comes could be academic. Thanks
The solution is to ignore default handling time. You can no longer depend on it. If Amazon has taken away your ability to choose two day default – it won’t come back. But set everything at SKU level. And then keep an eye on that automated default to get rid of it as soon as it shows its ugly little head. As soon as Amazon switches that back on the SKU-specific times are ignored. But switching away from automated restores them.
Welcome and good luck out there (you’ll need it!). As April said, set sku-level settings. But as Amazon said, expect those to be taken away REAL SOON. What Amazon hasn’t said is how they will reconcile previously announced “auto-handling can only be 0 to 1 days” with “we will force auto-handling if your handling gap exceeds two days” which is highly unlikely (smirk) to be the case if you were operating on 0-1 day shipping. Assuming Amazon didn’t totally drop the ball – which we can’t rule out – my guess is that auto-handling will soon be calculated, and you have no control over it, even if there’s a very good reason (and there are several) to have a 2-day gap.
Obviously, if you swap to FBA, you will have helped Amazon achieve their underlying purpose, and will no longer have to worry about this. Instead, you can worry about a ton of other issues specific to FBA. For good reasons based on past experience, plus the horror stories we read here, we will never go to FBA, and would rather simply go out of business once Amazon achieves full market dominance and fails to be punished for IP infringement that they commit (as opposed to the infringement they fail to catch on their platform).
A Mod said, in direct contradiction to the terms of the announcement, that they would not enforce this metric for shipments from disaster areas (with Amazon deciding what a disaster is). Of course, that promise is worth nothing when they shut your account, nor does it account for shipments into or through a disaster area (or routing around one, adding to transit time).
Here’s the quote from Jim_Amazon: “If there is a major disruption event that impacts all sellers shipping to a specific region, we will not count deliveries that are late as a result in your OTDR. Whether a disruption is considered to be major is a discretionary decision made by Amazon.”
Amazon rarely backs down, but this OTDR change seems so destined to fail that either (a) it will be modified to some degree, as it already has or (b) it will push FBM off the platform, which I suspect was the whole purpose.
As per Amazon’s wishes as stated in their news release and email I shall be slowing down my shipping and taking more time between order and transfer to the carrier. Oh well hope that works.
To keep it short, here is the core of what I said and how we run our business. Amazon, all businesses are not cookie cutter homes in the suburbs. We are often different from each other.
Our handling times;
Handmade 1-3 weeks
Custom 3 days
Production On Demand 2 days
In Stock 1 day
These times can not be changed. They are dependent on science and technology. Some things take time to cure. Some things can be picked and packed same day. Other items need to be painted by an artist.
This whole thing is another reminder - we need to build/restructure our businesses in such a way that we can thrive without Amazon. We all know… the day is coming…
LMFAO, so we opted into the automated handling time today just as a test. We normally have 2 day handling time on 99% of our listings and a few have 1 day handling times.
Since we opted in, half of these orders have 3-day handling time now…LOL…whatever.
As I remember your handle from @ least as far back as Q1 2017 (you were one of the very first seasoned and savvy booksellers I can recall overcoming an unwarranted suspension over Amabots balking at Used/New Conditions, as was explained in your now-sequestered 23Jan`17 thread “Account suspended - Need help with appeals - Used/New condition guidelines books”), I’m not surprised to find that your first trot to the plate here in the SAS (“SellersAskSellers”) Forum has resulted in yet another ball being knocked straight out of the park.
In my instance, the ferry can go out of service at any time due to crew shortage or mechanical reasons delaying the USPS trucks. I have an extra day in SKU level handling for that now but that will go away if I keep trying to delight Amazon customers
Have you considered entering tracking on the day the item will arrive at the customer’s location, rather then when it’s available? We will be doing this to avoid automated handling (we are currently at +2.2 days, and for a good reason). We may miss a couple and end up with invalid tracking, but at this point it’s about managing Amazon’s 'tardy metrics so we don’t get shut down (not that we’re doing anything that any customer has ever been unhappy with).
Amazon wants crappy FBA sellers, not good FBM sellers. It’s about margins, not about customer satisfaction. And that’s the really surprising part: almost everything prior was about making the customer happy (at the expense of sellers, in most cases). This is a huge change in approach, and it will have consequences for the platform.
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the HANDLING “gap” is measured in calendar days (plus some other errors, possibly introduced by time-zone math and/or poor coding), while the TRANSIT “gap” which this announcement is supposed to be handling is measured in business days. Pretending it even makes sense to conflate handling and transit times, it doesn’t make sense to use one measure for your settings and another for the metric.
But since it pushes sellers to FBA, it’s all good. I’m sure if the error went the other way, it would be fixed. Keep failing upward, Amazon.
Yeah, I mean we do not have higher than 2 days handling time on any of our items.
The ones they changed to 3 days are showing a history of taking 3 days to ship because they are likely Thursday or Friday orders that did not have to ship until Monday.
I am curious to see if they make us ship any orders on Saturday under AHT…hopefully not. Otherwise, AHT doesn’t seem too bad.
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