You don’t need to approach it that way. The way we did it was to turn on AHT and then ship everything on a two day handle time schedule. Every time a one day handle time pops up, we shipped it as two day handle time and didn’t worry about being hit with a late ship metric hit because, with AHT turned on, you are protected from a late shipment. With AHT and SSA both turned on and then shipping with Amazon Buy Shipping, both your late shipment and OTDR are protected from being hit.
Anything that is currently one day … if you ship it two day with AHT turned on, then in about a week the handle time will turn to two day. What you may see is a late delivery risk pop up and you could have an INR claim on an A to Z. Since we have maybe two INR a year A to Z claims, we think it is a quick risk to take to be able to get everything to two handle time under AHT.
What we can say is that we have maintained 100% ship on time and 100% deliver on time using the above strategy. We haven’t had a drop in sales because of transit times either. Our deliver by dates are generally 6 to 9 days out. Because we do custom, our customers don’t expect the items in two days.
AHT has increased my handling times by 1 day on most of my listings. It was at 0 days for most items, now it is 1-2 days on most of my ASINs.
My OTDR has dropped from 100% to 96.27%, showing 4 orders late. I downloaded the report, and only 2 late orders are shown. Both orders were shipped on-time and have the OTDR badge, and both were shipped with SSA and AHT.
I’m tempted to disable AHT, but its hard to tell how many late deliveries I might be protected from.
SSA, AHT and OTDR continue to be a 3-legged table.
I opened a case with Amazon, (2 actually because the first went to a dog screen)
Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
We understand that you are facing issue with your OTDR because it is only 57.14% which impact on your Account Heath.
For us to help you, we have contacted our internal team for information regarding your issue.
We will contact you as soon as we have an update or if we require further information.
We encourage you to wait for our response and assure you that our teams are working on your request.
To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
Hello The Lunatick Fire and EMS Store ,
This is Praneetha from Amazon’s Account Health Support. It is perfectly understandable that you’re very upset about what’s happened.
Thanks for contacting us about your On-Time Delivery Rate. We’ve reviewed the information provided and shared it with our internal team.
I will ensure that the relevant team is aware about this situation and we will make sure we work out a solution for you as soon as possible.
We will contact you as soon as we have an update or if we require further information. Please allow our team to complete the review before submitting another case.
Your co-operation here would highly matter to us.
I have a feeling it may be a BOT that looks at numbers that isn’t programmed to recognize using SSA and Amazon shipping
also fulfilment insite dash
On-time delivery without promise extensions: 57.2%
Download report
On-time delivery with promise extensions: 98.0%
It may be the promise extensions aren’t being fed into the OTDR
promise extensions are not included in OTDR calculation.
I checked delivery dates on Amazon website as a buyer, I realized that some of my listings had extended delivery dates, BUT when I received orders that same day, the delivery dates were not extended as shown to buyers. I were still required to deliver with tighter time frame as set in my shipping template. Only buyers are seeing a longer delivery time frame with promise extensions.
this promise extension number is just to tell you that if you change your shipping template to add 1+ more day(s), then you will achieve 98.0%.
Correction - one of my orders had a quantity of 4. And both orders listed on my OTDR report were Free Economy US - I missed that earlier. I have SSA and AHT enabled, but Free Economy does not use SSA, even though both orders show the OTDR badge. So I guess it is like “Expedited” - it can show the OTDR badge, but since it doesn’t use SSA for that option, it doesn’t get OTDR protection.
Brings me to another quandary we are having. I’m considering removing the Free Economy option. I think buyers see “Free” and assume all other options will have an added charge.
Our Free Economy option will likely show a longer shipping time than the standard SSA shipping option. I think this, combined with the “Free” bias/assumption, ultimately hurts sales.
So for 1 week we changed our Free Economy from 4-8 to 3-5 days. Then the following week we will remove Free Economy, and compare results.
Also I may remove AHT because we ship everything 0 days handling time. Amazon is hurting our promised delivery time by adding 1-2 days jail.
I will lose OTDR protection, but retain claims protection. I ship responsibly so I don’t think I’ll need the OTDR protection, but love keeping claims protection. I’d rather get more sales than protect the OTDR number that isn’t likely to go below 90%. If it does, I can adjust later.
1 order for 20 items shipped on 1/31vdid not get scanned until 2/3 (bag got left in the truck). Was still delivered on time 2/10 , but shows on the defect report.
Since it didn’t get scanned by 2/1 I assume it is no longer OTDR protected and I guess they count each item as a % not the one order. I guess I just have to wait the 2 weeks. Still assinine that it was delivered on time but counts against me.
We had noted that so many times in the past. With SSA, use only Standard shipping if you are doing it to get OTDR coverage.
We have only Standard shipping with SSA and our shipping is Free. If you have products that you need to charge shipping and some that are free always, then set up two SSA templates with one having the charge and the other having it as free. Then assign the ASINs as needed to the correct SSA template.
Although Amazon still has 5 - 8 days (or 4 - 8), when it comes to SSA enabled, Amazon doesn’t use those to base the transit time … it is based on the data collected from orders using the shipping service that you set as your primary shipping service. We suggest only setting ONE preferred shipping service (like USPS Ground Advantage).
Don’t do that. If you do, then you will have no OTDR protection. AHT learns what your handle time is for each ASIN. It will learn that you ship items as 0 days. Just keep shipping normal and AHT will catch up (we have seen it in action).
During the holiday season, it did seem that Amazon added a day to the delivery time (which wasn’t bad for that time of the year). Since then, we have seen it come back in line. Most of our items are delivered on the last deliver by date. We have actually seen orders where we thought they would no way make it there in time but did.
Our ship on time rate is 100% (we have shipped late twice to adjust AHT) and our OTDR is 100%.
How the shipping template is set up is what causes most issues around OTDR protection.
The official explanation from Amazon is that because it wasn’t scanned for a few days it is in violation of the OTDR policy despite being delivered on time.
Which means OTDR should be renamed.
Amazon
Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
We understand that you are facing issue with your OTDR because it is only 57.14% which impact on your Account Heath.
The inter team replied your case:
They review this order:XXXXXXXX and wanted to provide clarification regarding the handling time applied to this order.
They see that Automated Merchant Handling Time (AMHT) was enabled on your account on February 28. However, this order was placed on February 1, before AMHT was activated. Since AMHT was not yet in effect at the time of purchase, the system applied the manually set handling time that was configured before AMHT was enabled.
The OTDR compliance percentage is calculated using the formula:
OTDR Compliance Percentage=(OTDR Compliant Shipped UnitsTotal Tracked Units)×100
OTDR Compliance Percentage=(Total Tracked UnitsOTDR Compliant Shipped Units)×100
Plugging in the given numbers:
(2849)×100=57.14%
(4928)×100=57.14%
OTDR compliant shipped units (28): These are the units that met the On-Time Delivery Rate (OTDR) requirements, meaning they were shipped and delivered within the expected timeframe.
So On time delivery is only 1 part of On Time Delivery Rate
I’m wondering if any of this OTDR nonsense is related to the reused tracking issue. I have no evidence that it is, but it seems like the sort of thing Amazon would do to add salt to a wound.
I don’t think so, Just my bad luck that they picked up the order on Friday, the bag got left in the truck so it didn’t get scanned until Monday. (except for the scan Sheet when they picked it up), It happened to be 20 items.
Dumbest thing I have every seen. You deliver 100/100 packages on time but if that 100th package has 100 items your and isn’t scanned your OTDR is 49%. Doesn’t matter if it was delivered on time.