Gotta say Amazon in consistent in Fuc king things up.
It started slow with the ODTR slowly dropping. Between me being forced to wait till the last day to ship and their horrible calculations the OTDR has plummeted.
I hope this “Delights” customers.
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Went to SSA…
You gave Amazon MORE control over your account???
Are you okay? Should we be worried about you?
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Do you have …
- AHT enabled?
- SSA enabled?
- Use Amazon Buy Shipping?
- Avoid “Late Delivery Risk” labels?
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Just laughing on how they were supposed to be more accurate, The bigger joke is most things still get there early.
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We have had no problem in maintaining 100% OTDR and we ship 100% USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb). During Holiday Season, we had one late and one MIA packages. Neither hit our OTDR since we have AHT, SSA and use Amazon Buy Shipping. AHT has not been a problem and we maintain 2 day handle time on all of our items.
Since you do everything but AHT, is there a reason why you have stayed away from it?
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We have a buffer built in in case anything untoward happens. I am down to a 1 man show. Some items we don’t keep in stock but can get in 1 business day (or less) AHT would have lowered our handling time to 1 day or same day. I don’t like taking that chance.
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AHT will learn the handle time of each ASIN. If you are consistent with your shipping and consistently ship as 2 day handle time, then all of your items will be 2 day handle time. If you have an item that is always 3 day handle time and you ship as such, then that one item would be 3 day handle time. If you have AHT enabled and an order comes in as 1 day handle time but you need 2 day handle time, then you ship it as 2 day handle time. AHT will adjust the next orders (our experience was within about a week). With AHT enabled, you will not get hit with a late shipment metric hit for shipping a day (or 2) late. With AHT enabled, you will not get hit on the OTDR metric (since you already have SSA enabled and use Amazon Buy Shipping).
We have always been 1 or 2 (depending on the wife’s health).
We do custom items so everything is created on demand of order. We have always needed the 2 day handle time and understand having a built in buffer.
We avoid AHT for a long time; however … with the Amazon changes last fall, we decided we needed to learn better how it would work with our business. Now that we understand how it functions, we look back on the gamble of changing to it as one that has paid off.
If you are struggling with OTDR and have SSA enabled and use Amazon Buy Shipping, we would suggest using AHT.
If you set up new ASINs, just remember to set the item level handle time as that is what AHT will use in the beginning until the ASIN has a handle time track record (which is something that you control).
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My concern is that AHT will do some BS like set the handling time to 1.5 days I need a 2 day handling time. We ship only 3x a week due to reduced sales volume (ah the days when 150 orders was a slow day, now 4 is a slow day).
We also still have items that we never set a handling time because the default was 2 days. We are working on weeding that out.
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This won’t happen.
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I’m went all SSA and AHT with SKUs that were originally set for 2day handling. Since the change date (Sept 25?) I just started shipping next day on everything…all with claims and otdr protection. No problem for me as I was not as busy in years past. I’m under the impression I should have extensions giving me 100%OTDR yet I’ve been below 90% on the account health dashboard with extensions on the promise extensions dashboard just above 90%. Here is how it sits today.
I don’t really care about the numbers as long as I’m “protected” for OTDR and account at risk but it seems what I’m doing should have my promise extensions at 100%. I could not do any better than Amazon is asking.
Outside of that what makes me the most angry is getting an order at night, shipping it early the next day and Amazon is still forcing me to buy Priority over the GA preference setting (which in reality only saves one day at best). I realize there are snow storms everywhere right now but why can’t they add one more day on the delivery promise to the buyer using GA instead of making me buy Priority?
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We went all in around Sept 25, 2024 also.
- AHT handle time is 2 days and item level handle time at 2 days.
- SSA set as Standard Shipping ONLY (NO Economy, Expedited, 2 Day , 1 Day or Same Day).
- SSA has only USPS Ground Advantage (less than 1lb) as shipping option.
- Old shipping templates were removed.
- We ship always on the last ship by date shown on the order as a rule (there has been an order or two we shipped one day early and there has been an order or two we shipped one day later … these were done to train AHT and correct those item’s handle time).
- None of our SKUs are Seller Fullfilled Prime.
All of our orders show
The result for us is
Make sure you see this (so you know all of your SKUs are SSA)
The only thing we have had happen is seeing the Late Delivery Risk warning on labels when we use Buy Shipping in Bulk. When this happens, we use the Buy Shipping from the order detail page and the Late Delivery Risk doesn’t appear.
If you have Seller Fullfilled Prime items, that could be your issue. Otherwise, we would be revisiting our shipping templates. Delete anything not used … and we would recheck the SSA template settings.
We haven’t paid attention to those numbers (they have been glitchy). What is on the Account Health page is what we pay attention to.
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Well we were up to 93% and now down to 77%
Fortunately haven’t had any customers complain, yet.
I miss my under promise and over deliver where the customers got their package on average 3 days sooner then expected.
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Amazon has been sending me emails trying to set up a meeting to push me into using more automation. My responses were a little too spicy to hit “send” but they felt so good to type out.
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Something is not right on the Amazon system over the last few days. We had the same problem down to 67%. Today we are up to 97% most of our products are our own brands, so we have very few listings that we compete for this buy box.
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Do you get any warning message about account health from Amazon when you were at 85% (in Jan) and at 77% now ?
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We are back up to 99%, never a warning, never a change on our part.
I think it is just “Glitchmass” in February.
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I feel for you!!
Ours is 88.9-and we’re not signed up for any of TPTB’s automated crapola- don’t use AMAZON shipping.!! But the darn gap is .7 Yesterday(gap and OTDR checked each day, just as check for returns or a-z’s), it was..5
Gonna start shipping the orders as we used to, next day at least and begin holding 'em again when we creep up to 2%, Before all this GAP idiocy began, used to sometimes ship same day. Then our gap was 3.2% 
but our OTDR was 98-100%. 
.
Remember, USPS is slowing down(2-3 days) for rural deliveries that aren’t within the delivery area of the final hub. A noticeable difference in how long MM is taking-at least 2-3 days slower and even GA is taking 6 days to smaller towns-alas, we live in one of these rural towns ourselves-though we ship at a Tucson hub.
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No but my point is we went to SSA and our OTDR went from 97-100% DOWN to now 73%
not a single late shipment. Also because of Amazon insisting on us not shipping until the last day of handling time orders that used to ship the same day now wait 2-4 days.
Our Customer service is wayyyyy down but Amazon is happy we are following their rules LOL
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Did you also do AHT?
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not yet I am still trying to weed out the 1 day handleing items
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