SSA/AHT enabled. USPS GA "Late Delivery Risk"

Selling on Amazon FBM
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I’m still not getting this and need help… Sorry for the long read, I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.
I’ve switched back and forth a couple times because whenever I enable SSA/AHT, 70% - 80% of the orders I get on weekends are “late delivery risk” for USPS GA. I get them a lot on weekdays also.
Back in March, when Amazon had the “USPS postage assessment” issue and my OTDR fell down to 70%, I got scared and gave in to enabling SSA/AHT. This was enabled on 3/25 which is almost a month ago.
I don’t understand this fully but if I have SSA/AHT enabled for a long time, I thought it would eventually learn and extend the dates for states that are far from me but it has not.
What do I have to do to make Amazon extend the dates a little so I have the option to purchase USPS GA with protection?
Here are my settings if any of them matter in any way:

  • SSA/AHT enabled. (I only have USPS GA selected for SSA)
  • Weekends set to not operating (I do ship Friday’s order on Saturday still)
  • USPS “last pick-up time” is set to 3PM. Order cut-off time is set to 2PM.
  • I started shipping all orders the next day. for example, if I received an order on Monday 1AM, I ship it on Tuesday. Before, I used to ship same day as long as I get the orders by 10AM.
    Here is my fulfillment dash board.

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I sell time sensitive items so I do want to ship as early as possible, but I gave up on that. I’m now more worried about INR’s. I recently learned that, if I ship with “Late delivery risk”, INRs are not protected. I Thought it would only be for OTDR, but I learned that INR is also not protected. Now I have to look at the order details to see what shipping I used before telling the buyer to file for A to Z. And if it was shipped with “late delivery risk”, I have no other option than to refund them with my money…
I can simply change to manual shipping settings again but if things like “USPS postage assessment” issue happen again, my OTDR is going to be at risk again…
Any ideas? Thank you.

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Our friend @Lost_My_Marbles is a widely-acknowledged expert on this subject - let’s see what he has to say.

He’s made quite a few posts on the topic - both here in the SAS, and over in the Squalling Termagant’s Abomination NSFE, including a blow-by-blow description of how he proactively tamed the beast, by feeling out the parameters which Amazon initially set; there’s had to be some adjustments made since those early days (last summer), because Amazon is always either tweaking or leaking this and that, but I strongly suspect Marbles may be offer to offer some insight on how to escape this damnable trap.

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AHT is supposed to use your recent actual handling times when setting your current handling time, but what that really adds up to is making your handing as low as they can get away with. SSA does not take your shipping habits into account at all and is based entirely on the shipping methods selected.

This might have something to do with it.

I would worry more about covering yourself for INRs and other issues over OTDR unless that starts to become a real problem for you, and right now it sounds like you only have issues when someone else screws something up, so…

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We have SSA/AHT enabled. Our AHT is 2 day handle time. Our SSA shipping template has only Standard shipping with only USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb).

We follow these days for shipping with AHT 2 Day handle time:

Order Sunday - Ship Monday
Order Monday - Ship Wednesday
Order Tuesday - Ship Thursday
Order Wednesday - Ship Friday

Order Thursday - Ship Monday
Order Friday - Ship Monday
Order Saturday - Ship Monday

We always use Amazon Buy Shipping Bulk.

For us, the “Late Delivery Risk” has appeared only a couple of times. The pattern early on was on holiday weekends with a Monday holiday. Another pattern seems to be when Amazon is getting ready to update USPS within Amazon Buy Shipping.

As far as INR when we have shipped under “Late Delivery Risk”, we have been fortunate and have have no claims for INR … but then again, we rarely have any INR claims.

As far as ORDR when we have shipped under “Late Delivery Risk”, we have had a couple be late but for some reason they did not hit our metrics.

SSA/AHT work best if you are consistent in your shipping process. If your items are AHT 1 day handle time, then follow that pattern. Ship on the “last ship by” date on the order. Don’t prepurchase labels the day before shipping. Purchase labels the day you will ship on.

It take AHT about 7 to 14 days to adjust to your pattern of shipping and show up on each item in your store that you have sold. Note: AHT is set by each individual item. You could have a 2 day item, a 3 day item and a 1 day item in your store under AHT.

As far as SSA, the only control you have is within the shipping template when you set it up. For SSA to work best, only have Standard shipping enabled for SSA and only have one shipping method (example USPS Ground Advantage [less than 1lb] and USPS Ground Advantage). If you only ship small items like we do, then just do USPS Ground Advantage [less than 1lb] as your shipping method. If you sometimes ship other methods, don’t worry about adding them as a shipping method … they will still appear.

Jumping back and forth between SSA/AHT and manual settings will not solve your problem. Being consistent on SSA/AHT is the solution … but it takes about a month to start seeing consistent results.

This is how we look

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We would note that, after the change in the first week of April, we are seeing USPS deliver late (about 30% to 40% of our orders). We expect to see that until the next USPS change which will be in July. We also would expect to see the “Late Delivery Risk” on Monday Memorial Day. Knowing this will probably happen, we will most likely print labels early on the prior Saturday and Sunday for Tuesday ship time. It will break our pattern but will avoid the Amazon “Late Delivery Risk” as the labels will have the protections. Because we are consistent the rest of the time, our AHT will not be effected.

It’s late but we did do a tutorial here on SAS about this. We will come back tomorrow, look up the link and provide it for you.

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No … it will learn your handling pattern. We have had one that was 1 day and by shipping as 2 day Amazon AHT learned it and now has it as 2 day. We also had on the was 4 day and by shipping as 2 day Amazon AHT now has it as 2 day.

As long as you are consistent, AHT will work out just fine.

We are set to weekends not operating. Shipping early on Saturday will only effect AHT for those items being shipped on that day. If you ship 100 of the same item as 2 day AHT and then ship 3 of them at 1 day, the AHT will remain as 2 day.

This is right on the money. Best to select only one method of shipping if using SSA/AHT enabled and Standard shipping only.

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Lamb, I’m fairly certain that the tutorial Marbles is referring to is this 17Aug24 SAS thread over in the members-only section:

https://test.sellersasksellers.com/t/setting-up-shipping-settings-automation-ssa/4571

That’s the tut I had in mind when I mentioned “…a blow-by-blow description…” in my earlier post upthread - but it’s not the only one of Marbles’ posts on this topic for which I’ve found it useful to place a bookmark, in order to ease future access on demand.

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yeah, I’m more worried about INRs now then OTDR. I still don’t understand why Amazon is punishing sellers for something out of our control.

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Thank you for taking the time with all the details, really appreciate you!
so many questions… so to train AHT to change to 2 day handling, I would have to ship late for the time being? Should I change to manual shipping while I train AHT then switch back?
I’ve never used bulk, is it better? my items are 99% under 1lb as well.

I purchase the day before on orders that are protected. I’ve noticed, it shows as protected but if I wait until the next day, it disappears and replaced with “late delivery risk”.

Yes, I only have USPS GA - less than 1lb. But I do have 2nd day and next day which I do use.
So my final questions is, would you recommend trying to train AHT to make it 2 handling days to avoid “late delivery risk” for USPS GA? I’ll have to take risk for the first couple of weeks. Or should I do my best to purchase label at the last minute? ← would this have a chance of making AHT change to 2 days? I’ll also skip shipping on Saturdays.

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I’ll get a start on reading this right now. thanks!

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Sure, if 3% of orders are shipping in 1 day. However, there are only 7 days in a week and even assuming an even spread of orders every day (which is not how things work for me) that’s still about 15% of orders, and that’s also assuming that every other order ships at 2 days. I don’t know what percentage of orders need to ship 2 days vs 1 day to get AHT to set your handling time to 2 days, but unless every other non-Friday order is shipping in 2 days, I think this weekend shipping could be messing with the consistency of AHT handling time.

Lots of this. On the other hand, one of the main reasons we have more than 1 day handing time is flexibility to handle the unexpected without late shipments, and Amazon’s automations are all designed to remove as much slack from your business as possible and make your processes as rigidly efficient as possible, which, as we all know, works great right up until the moment you can’t be consistent. When you need flexibility the most is when Amazon’s automations punish you for not having any.

I was under the impression that to get the protections, labels had to be not only purchased before the “late risk” window but also shipped before, much like a label must be both purchased and shipped before the ship by date. I don’t think that purchasing a label on Saturday to ship on Tuesday will get you the protections if printing and shipping on a Tuesday won’t.
Do you have any empirical evidence that this works the way you describe?
(I know that the badges will still show up on the order details depending on when the label is purchased, but that doesn’t mean Amazon will honor them if the tracking shows it wasn’t shipped until later.)

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still happens. I have contacted Support over it and gotten nothing but bs answers.

This was a serious issue for a while and was “fixed”

The actual answer from the mods on the NSFE was to just ship using GA and if you lost an A-Z to contact them for help.

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Yes … it takes only 1 or 2 times per item. If you want AHT to be 2 day handle time, you can follow our shipping pattern. Friday and Saturday orders can go out on Tuesday on AHT 2 day but we have been doing it long enough that shipping those on Monday doesn’t hurt us.

No … you will loose the protection. With SSA & AHT enabled, you can ship one day late and not get hit on the late ship metric. If you turn off SSA, you do not have that protection.

We like bulk better as it will create the label as a PDF (and open in Adobe). We do not have a label printer and use an HP Laser printer. In doing so, we create 1/4 sheet size paper (4" X 5 1/2") and print directly to that size (you have to set up the printer parameters but that is easy). Because it opens as an Adobe PDF, we can save the label(s) if we wanted to as a reference.

When we see the “Late Deliver Risk” in bulk, we check the individual Amazon Buy Shipping as we have found that sometimes it doesn’t show as “Late Delivery Risk” there (and vise a versa).

Then make sure your SSA shipping template is set up as Standard shipping only (no Economy, no Expedited, no 2nd Day, no Same Day) and set the Shipping method to only USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb). You will still have other shipping methods like Priority Mail, UPS, Fed Ex, etc… available but your order estimated delivery times will all be base on USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb).

You are training AHT to expect 1 day early shipping which will result in seeing the “Late Delivery Risk”. Do not do this. Follow the shipping pattern we gave to maintain a 2 day handle time and set up SSA as we have suggested.

This is why you are having issues. Amazon will choose the faster service when creating the estimated delivery time which will mean that your USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb) will be at “Late Delivery Risk”.

If you can ship as 1 day handle time, then no you do not have to train AHT to do 2 day handle time. AHT 2 day handle time does not avoid “Late Delivery Risk”. Having your SSA shipping template set up correctly is what solves that problem (except for Monday holidays as Amazon has a glitch with those and except when Amazon has done a USPS update which normally take a week or two to get estimated shipping times in line).

If you want 1 day handle time with weekends set as your shop is closed, follow this:

Ordered Monday - Ship Tuesday
Ordered Tuesday - Ship Wednesday
Ordered Wednesday - Ship Thursday
Ordered Thursday - Ship Friday

Ordered Friday - Ship Monday
Ordered Saturday - Ship Monday
Ordered Sunday - Ship Monday

Remember … with AHT, the handle time is by ASIN. You can create any handle time you want by ASIN if needed but you need to be consistent with the shipping on each ASIN to make this happen. If 1 day handle time works for you on all of your items, then just ship everything as 1 day following the schedule above. Do not pre buy labels the day before as that will make AHT become Same Day shipping.

If your store is set to be closed on Saturday and Sunday, then yes … do not ship on Saturdays.

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Agreed.

Agreed.

What?

These seem contradictory.

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I read your response 2 times but I’m still a little confused.
So, to make it simple, I just want to avoid the “late delivery risk” for USPS GA.
I only have USPS GA set up for SSA. The 2nd day and next day shippings are just options I have to use and I do use them when buyers purchase them. They are not setup in SSA.
I’m in Texas and any states outside of Texas, shows up with “late delivery risk” on orders received on late Fridays and weekends. Even some parts of Texas, which is crazy…
This is the sole reason why I wanted to increase the handling time to 2 days, thinking earning 1 more day would make the orders protected, and not “late delivery risk”.
Am I understanding this wrong?

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We do custom items so all of our items need a 2 day handle time. If an order comes in after midnight, we make it during that day but our post office has very short hours (small town post office) so we have to get to the post office by 2pm. We normally go at 11am so that we can check online that the orders show up as scanned in the system by 2pm. This gives us time to call the post office to let them know that the scanner didn’t upload (sometimes it is a scanner issue … sometimes the clerk forgets to put the scanner on the charger to upload).

AHT is calculated over a period of time for each ASIN as a track record and basically added into the average 7 days after the order. If you have an item that hasn’t sold in 6 months, AHT for that ASIN will be the handle time you set at ASIN level.

We have been doing it long enough to know that this is not true. It is very consistent if you are consistent with your shipping pattern.

The automation is to be able to give the customer the best estimate of when the order will arrive. SSA & AHT enabled has meant that we are more consistent with our handling time and the transit time has been (for the most part) fairly accurate. It has not shorten our handle time nor transit time. If anything, we gained a day in processing as we now follow a set pattern no matter what (which means no early shipping even if we can have it ready to ship early).

This is still true and is true to get both Claims and OTDR protections. Now, if you have SSA & AHT enabled and you ship one day late, you will not be hit with a “Late Ship” on your metrics but you will get the “Late Delivery Risk” with the label purchase. We had to do this a few times early on to be able to get all of our handle times to be 2 day in AHT.

On the holiday Mondays with the “Late Delivery Risk” issue, sometimes it has worked. If it doesn’t, then you try Monday ship (even though you will be shipping on Tuesday) or Sunday. If a label with Sunday selected as the ship date works, then we would wait until Sunday to print the label. For those reading along, this is only something that has been needed on Monday holiday weeks.

Since September of 2024, we have had SSA & AHT enabled. We have been through several holidays with this and have been able to …

  • Adjust our AHT on ASINs without taking a metric hit
  • Have not had a Late Ship metric hit
  • Maintained 100% OTDR

If you are not consistent with your shipping and/or the SSA shipping template has more than one shipping method, then there will be issues.

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Then you have them turned on within your SSA shipping template. Do you always see this on your orders?

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We are in Texas also (Lubbock area). The only time we see “Late Delivery Risk” is on the Monday holiday weeks (it’s a known glitch) and when Amazon adjusts the USPS parameters in buy shipping like they did at the beginning of April (which lasted for 4 days and we were able to avoid it on 3 of the 4 days … 1st day we couldn’t).

2nd day and next day options DO NOT QUALIFY for Claims Protection or OTDR Protection.

Yes … increasing to 2 day handle time will not resolve your issue. If you have 1 day shipping and do not have a problem with 1 day, then stay at 1 day shipping. Just do not ship before the “Last Ship By” date on the order. Be consistent.

Get rid of 2nd Day and Next day delivery on your shipping template. If you are trying to make SSA & AHT enabled work to get Claims Protection and OTDR Protection, then you will need to make this change.

Again … 2nd Day and Next Day (actually anything but Standard Shipping) are not covered under Claims Protection and OTDR Protection.

And follow this shipping pattern for 1 day handle time …

Ordered Monday - Ship Tuesday
Ordered Tuesday - Ship Wednesday
Ordered Wednesday - Ship Thursday
Ordered Thursday - Ship Friday

Ordered Friday - Ship Monday
Ordered Saturday - Ship Monday
Ordered Sunday - Ship Monday

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I only have USPS GA checked in SSA. I do have 2nd/next day enabled in the template, not the SSA setup screen. I can’t find the page where it has your screenshot. Where can I find this?

Lubbock is one of the areas we get “late delivery risk” LOL. I’m from Philly and been in TX for 2 years now. I would love to visit all parts of TX…if I can take time off from Amazon..

I get a lot of business for 2nd/next day orders and would hate to lose them. I am aware that premium shipping is not covered and I’m fine with that.
So, I guess the only way to make “late delivery risk” go away would be to get rid of 2nd/next day?

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If the shipping template you are using is SSA enabled, then you would need to uncheck the box on both 2nd day and next day as those shipping options are not covered under Claims Protection and OTDR Protection.

If you want to use USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb) on orders, then yes. If you want to keep 2nd day and next day, then you will have to use the shipping method that Amazon provides as the shipping method that will make it there on time (the shipping methods will vary based on the delivery location) and you will not have OTDR Protection (Claims Protection coverage will have to meet normal ship on time parameters).

We do not see “Late Delivery Risk” to anywhere in the lower 48 states normally (with exceptions being Monday holiday weeks and when Amazon updates USPS parameters in buy shipping … so it is rarely) and we ship 100% USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb).

To use USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb) and not get the “Late Delivery Risk”, you have to control what Amazon uses to calculate the estimated delivery time given to the customer. This control is done with your selections within your shipping template.

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Order detail page

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No

MONDAY - Ship Thursday, Friday, Saturday orders (this is modified and will work)
TUESDAY - Ship Sunday orders
WEDNESDAY - Ship Monday orders
THURSDAY - Ship Tuesday orders
FRIDAY - Ship Wednesday orders

Standard 2 day AHT should be (in the beginning to train AHT)

MONDAY - Ship Thursday orders
TUESDAY - Ship Friday, Saturday, Sunday orders
WEDNESDAY - Ship Monday orders
THURSDAY - Ship Tuesday orders
FRIDAY - Ship Wednesday orders
SATURDAY - (none)
SUNDAY - (none)

CORRECT for 1 day

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