On-time Delivery Rate Notification - stop counting things we can't control against sellers!
I know this has been an issue for a while, but I didn't address it before because this hasn't affected our account until today.
We received an email from Amazon, titled "[ACTION REQUIRED] Seller Fulfilled Prime Account – On-time Delivery Rate Notification", telling us that our "On‐time Delivery (OTD) for Seller Fulfilled Prime orders has fallen below the program requirement of 93.5% or greater."
I went to download the defects report for this metric and went through all orders in the report and tracked every single order to extract the delay reason. Mind that all labels were done through Amazon's Buy Shipping with their recommended shipping option to make sure that the customers get their package on time. All packages were given to the carrier on the same day on time for proper and on-time scanning and getting to the carrier's hub. Only FedEx and UPS in our case. We don't use anything else. Anyway, to stress: we did everything exactly as per SFP's rules. Every tracking confirms my words.
None of the delayed packages were due to our fault. There were only four reasons shown in tracking:
-Customer not available or business closed.
-Carrier: Delay beyond our control
-Carrier service failure
-Weather Delay
I'm creating this post to raise the awareness and in hope that Amazon's Leadership will, finally, fix this metric and stops counting things sellers can't control against sellers. Every single reason above is beyond seller's control and should be a no-brainer.
I'm tagging a great Community Manager here, @KJ_Amazon , who helped to address another metric issue previously. I hope you can help us all here too. @KJ_Amazon, I created Case ID 14691743171 in Seller Support that you can follow up on.
Thank you all!
On-time Delivery Rate Notification - stop counting things we can't control against sellers!
I know this has been an issue for a while, but I didn't address it before because this hasn't affected our account until today.
We received an email from Amazon, titled "[ACTION REQUIRED] Seller Fulfilled Prime Account – On-time Delivery Rate Notification", telling us that our "On‐time Delivery (OTD) for Seller Fulfilled Prime orders has fallen below the program requirement of 93.5% or greater."
I went to download the defects report for this metric and went through all orders in the report and tracked every single order to extract the delay reason. Mind that all labels were done through Amazon's Buy Shipping with their recommended shipping option to make sure that the customers get their package on time. All packages were given to the carrier on the same day on time for proper and on-time scanning and getting to the carrier's hub. Only FedEx and UPS in our case. We don't use anything else. Anyway, to stress: we did everything exactly as per SFP's rules. Every tracking confirms my words.
None of the delayed packages were due to our fault. There were only four reasons shown in tracking:
-Customer not available or business closed.
-Carrier: Delay beyond our control
-Carrier service failure
-Weather Delay
I'm creating this post to raise the awareness and in hope that Amazon's Leadership will, finally, fix this metric and stops counting things sellers can't control against sellers. Every single reason above is beyond seller's control and should be a no-brainer.
I'm tagging a great Community Manager here, @KJ_Amazon , who helped to address another metric issue previously. I hope you can help us all here too. @KJ_Amazon, I created Case ID 14691743171 in Seller Support that you can follow up on.
Thank you all!
14 replies
Seller_NzEmZKTEdcpPZ
Received a reply from the SS team:
"Keep in mind that our currently policies will still count all orders towards your metrics that are delivered late, and Seller Fulfilled Prime sellers are expected to manage their relationships with the carriers in order to prevent issues and to ensure customers receive their packages on time.
Unfortunately, at this time we cannot not remove the order impacting your metrics. However, if you don't meet a requirement, you'll get an email alert to improve the metrics for next weeks. "
Basically, it's our fault that the weather might go bad. And it's our fault that customer might not be at the delivery address or their business might be closed. And it's our fault that a carrier made an error and delivered late for whatever reason (mechanical break down, airport closure, flight delay, somebody messing up at FedEx/UPS hub and not doing their job). We are encouraged to manage our relationship with carrier to handle all that. And we also need to manage our relationship with God so the bad weather doesn't happen ever again.
Great answer, SS!
Seller_i4cqHIciUWg3q
Our SFP eligibility was revoked today due to on time delivery rate below 93.5%, the nationwide snowstorm last week delayed all shipments. Those SFP folks are completely out of touch with the real world. How can they mandate for Sunday delivery when no carrier could do that?
Seller_2UQL96K7Patvu
We opted out of SFP when Amazon forced us to to do nationwide prime instead of regional prime.
Seller_Tbny0fDxQrHxH
And there will be zero mods coming to this thread to address this issue because it is ridiculous and indefensible.
Seller_Qbp9D0nQghko0
SFP's approach is not in line with Amazon's strategic goals, which is why there's a stricter standard imposed on participating sellers. Amazon's preference is for sellers to use FBA.
Seller_NzEmZKTEdcpPZ
Well, as expected, a week after the first notice we received our second notice that our On Time Delivery is below 93.5% SFP requirement. The number is better than a week ago when the weather was pretty bad in some states, but we are still a bit short.
Once again, I downloaded the "defects" report and manually went through the tracking details. 100% of shipments were sent and scanned on time, 100% used Buy Shipping with Amazon's recommended shipping option (FedEx/UPS). All "defects" are still the same:
-Customer not available or business closed.
-Carrier: Delay beyond our control
-Carrier service failure
-Weather Delay
I opened another CASE ID 14724629151 with SS and quickly received a standard answer:
"I understand you are concerned about issues with seller fulfilled prime on time delivery. I will be happy to assist you today.
The only exemption to the on-time delivery requirement will be units that have promise extensions applied.
This is expected to occur only during severe weather or major events where carrier capacity is constrained.
You can learn more about this by clicking into the following link:
Seller Fulfilled Prime performance requirements
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G202072550"
For some reason, no promise extensions were applied to severe weather cases, but the point here is that there is nothing anyone can do about this metric. It's simply counting things sellers can't control and, for now, Amazon Leadership is not willing to fix that.
By the way, as we suspected, the second notice says that Amazon will soon start enforcing this requirement and remove SFP sellers who fail to meet this nonsense metric. The second notice turned the Prime badge off, but you can still manually turn it back on. The third notice promises to be hell to deal with.
SFP sellers,I strongly recommend making your own posts and/or comment here to raise the awareness. Amazon needs to fix this ASAP. Next "customer is not available or business is closed" or a bad weather day can get your SFP privileges removed in a jiffy. Amazon needs to realize the obvious that sellers cannot and should not be responsible for the instances highlighted above and fix this metric now, before they start dealing with thousands of SFP seller removals and having to deal with their appeals and such.
Amazon Community Managers, this is serious. It's time for you to acknowledge this issue and work with the SFP Leadership to address this issue. @Bryce_Amazon, @KJ_Amazon, @Glenn_Amazon, @Danny_Amazon, @Dominic_Amazon.
Thank you.
