New OTDR On-time Delivery Policy explained for international sellers

What is Amazon’s policy for on-time delivery without promise extensions?

Effective September 25, 2024, you must maintain a minimum 90% on-time delivery rate (OTDR) without promise extensions to have seller-fulfilled products listed on Amazon.com. An OTDR below 90% can result in restriction of your ability to have seller-fulfilled products listed. For a great customer experience, we recommend that you maintain a 95% or greater OTDR for all seller-fulfilled orders.

What is changing?

Our updated policy requires a minimum 90% OTDR without promise extensions to have seller-fulfilled products listed on Amazon.com. An OTDR below 90% can result in restriction of your ability to have seller-fulfilled products listed. To help provide a positive customer experience, we recommend that you maintain a 95% or greater OTDR for all seller-fulfilled orders. 

We are also changing the way we measure OTDR to now measure the percentage of your tracked seller-fulfilled items that were delivered on or before the seller-promised “Deliver by” date prior to promise extensions being added. Before this change, OTDR was measured after promise extensions were added. Promise extensions are additional days that we may add to the delivery date to account for logistical factors that may delay a delivery such as extreme weather, transportation network constraints, or recent history of a seller delivering shipments after their set delivery date. This policy does not apply to offers using the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service because sellers are not responsible for on-time delivery promises for FBA orders.

Note: We will communicate as we roll out the OTDR policy, and any changes from the policy as it stands today, that may affect you.

What will happen to my account if my OTDR falls below the 90% minimum requirement?
An OTDR below 90% can result in restriction of your ability to have seller-fulfilled products listed. If that happens, we’ll notify you of the policy violation and you can appeal by clicking the Submit appeal button at the top of your Account Health dashboard to request reinstatement of your capabilities to list seller-fulfilled products. 

The request will be reviewed within 72 hours and should include the following information:
The issues that led to a low on-time delivery rate
The actions that you’ll take to improve your on-time delivery rate
The steps that you’ve taken to prevent future issues regarding on-time delivery

On subsequent policy violations, if your OTDR is still below 90%, you can appeal by clicking Submit appeal at the top of your Account Health dashboard. 

To get reinstated:

Sellers on Individual selling plans or sellers on a Professional selling plan but shipping from outside the US must submit an appeal request indicating how they will improve their OTDR. Professional sellers that ship domestically within the US will be required to meet the 90% OTDR requirement by using the following Amazon free-to-use fulfillment and shipping tools for their seller-fulfilled orders for the next 180 days:

Shipping Settings Automation (SSA) to set accurate delivery dates through automated transit time calculations of your preferred ship methods.

Automated handling time to set accurate handling times per SKU, based on how long it usually takes you to pass each SKU to carriers. For new SKUs, the default handling time will apply until there are enough shipments for your automated handling time to be calculated. 

Amazon Buy Shipping to buy shipping labels that use highly reliable shipping methods for both Professional and Individual selling plans. You can use Amazon Buy Shipping through Manage Orders, Shipping API, Veeqo, or select multi-channel integrators with access to Amazon Buy Shipping. 

How is OTDR calculated?

OTDR measures the percentage of your tracked seller-fulfilled items that were delivered on or before the seller-promised “Deliver by” date. OTDR is the average of all of your tracked shipped items, not just a specific SKU or shipment. 

To calculate OTDR without promise extensions, we’ll consider a 14-day window of time. We’ll pull data from shipments that had a promised delivery date in the last 21 days, and exclude the most recent 7 days as the shipments from last 7 days may still be in the process of being delivered. For example, if you had 130 orders with a promised delivery date in the last 21 days, and 30 of those has a promised delivery date in the last 7 days, OTDR will be calculated excluding the 30 orders from the last 7 days (130 – 30 =100). Of those 100 orders delivered, if 90 were delivered on or before the promised “Deliver by” date, your OTDR would be 90%.

Seller’s promised “Deliver by” date is calculated using seller-set handling and transit time, prior to the addition of promise extensions. This date may be different than the delivery date shown to customers if promise extensions were added.

For example, for a seller with a set handling time of 1 day and set transit time of 2 days:
The promised “Deliver by” date will be in 3 business days.

So, if an order is received on a Monday, this order would need to be delivered by Thursday (seller-promised “Deliver by” date) to be considered delivered on time.

However, if 1 day of promise extensions was added to that offer, the promised delivery date the customer saw while purchasing would have been Friday. Irrespective of the date shown to the customer (Friday), sellers must deliver by their set “Deliver by” date (Thursday) for the shipment to be considered delivered on-time.

Shipped units will be considered as OTDR compliant if either the delivery occurred on or before the “Deliver by” date shown on Seller Central, or the following 3 conditions were met: 

The shipped SKU was assigned to a shipping template with Shipping Settings Automation (SSA) enabled.
Your account has automated handling time enabled.
You bought an “OTDR Protected” shipping label on Amazon Buy Shipping.

Note: OTDR Protection is only applicable to Professional sellers shipping from the US, as all of the required tools are currently not available on Individual selling plans or to Professional sellers that are shipping from outside of the US.

Does Amazon offer tools that can help me improve my OTDR and meet the Amazon’s OTDR requirements?

Yes. You can manage your delivery dates using the tools we’ve provided, or you can manually adjust your Transit time and Handling time settings. We designed these tools to set accurate delivery dates, reduce late deliveries, and to meet or exceed the minimum OTDR requirement. And because Amazon is making calculations on your behalf that affect OTDR, you’ll get OTDR protection from late deliveries on items shipped through standard shipping if you use all three tools as follows:

Shipping Settings Automation (SSA), for Professional selling plans, sets accurate delivery dates through automated transit time calculations of your preferred shipping services. You must choose one of the preferred ship methods in the SSA templates, which will mark the transit time on the shipping template as “Managed by Amazon”.

Automated handling time, for Professional selling plans, sets accurate handling times per SKU based on how long it usually takes you to pass each SKU to carriers. You must ensure that automated handling time is enabled in your shipping settings.

Amazon Buy Shipping, for both Professional and Individual selling plans, sells shipping labels that use highly-reliable ship methods. You can use Amazon Buy Shipping through Manage Orders, Shipping API, Veeqo, or select multi-channel integrators with access to Amazon Buy Shipping. You must choose shipping labels marked as “OTDR Protected” when using Amazon Buy Shipping or Veeqo.

Note: OTDR Protection is only available for items shipped through Standard Shipping, items shipped through other shipping options such as Free Economy, Standard Prime, or Premium Shipping, are not eligible for OTDR protection.

For example, if a seller shipped 100 orders and 15 were delivered late:

Scenario A: If a seller did not use all three of Amazon’s free fulfillment and shipping tools for any of those 15 late deliveries, all 15 of their late deliveries will negatively impact their OTDR. As a result, their OTDR will be (100-15/100) = 85%.

Scenario B: If a seller used all three of Amazon’s free fulfillment and shipping tools for 5 of those 15 late deliveries, only the 10 late shipments that were not using Amazon’s tools will negatively impact OTDR. As a result, the seller’s OTDR will be (100-10/100) = 90%.

Note: OTDR Protection is only applicable to Professional sellers shipping from the US, as all of the required tools are currently not available on Individual selling plans or to Professional sellers that are shipping from outside of the US.

Can I be exempted from the OTDR requirement if delivery delays are caused by weather or carrier network issues beyond my control?

Sellers must meet the 90% OTDR requirement without promise extensions. However, if there is a major disruption event that impacts all sellers shipping to a specific region, Amazon 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.
What changes are you making to handling time and transit time settings?

Transit time changes: As of August 25, 2024, transit time requirements will be updated to further align with the delivery capabilities of shipping services. If you’re shipping within the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, and US territories), you can set a maximum transit time of 5 days for standard shipping (previously 8 days) and 8 days for free economy shipping (previously 10 days). To learn more, go to Default transit time. If you’re shipping internationally to the US, there are currently no changes to the transit times that you can configure.

Handling time automation: As of September 25, 2024, to improve handling time accuracy, automated handling time will be enabled for sellers who have a handling time gap of 2 days or more between their set handling time and their actual handling time. To help you keep in good standing with other account health metrics related to handling time, if you have automated handling time enabled, your seller-fulfilled listings will not be deactivated if your late shipment rate (LSR) does not meet the LSR policy requirement. To see your handling time gap, review your Fulfillment Insight dashboard.

How can I view my on-time delivery (OTD) metric and report?

To view your OTD metrics and report on Seller Central:

On the Performance menu, select Account Health.
Locate the Shipping Performance section and select On-time delivery rate.
You can see your OTDR metric on the Shipping Performance page. Only orders included in the current OTD defect report count against the OTDR metric. If the report contains no orders, it means either all of the orders were delivered on time or they fulfilled using Amazon’s free fulfillment tools.
To download the OTD defect report, click View details and then Download report.

Important: Allow 72 hours for the report and metrics to reflect any updates or edits.
How can I maintain a healthy OTDR?

To keep a healthy OTDR without promise extensions we recommend that you do the following:

Review your OTDR without promise extensions metric on your Account Health dashboard. You can also download a report of which orders were delivered after the delivery date without promise extensions.

Review the “Deliver by” date for every order. This date corresponds to the expected delivery date without promise extensions. Note that the actual delivery date that customers see may be longer because of promise extensions. 

If you are a Professional seller, use automated handling time to set accurate handling time per SKU based on how long it has taken you historically to hand off each SKU to carriers. Additionally, with automated handling time enabled, your seller-fulfilled listings will not be deactivated if your late shipment rate (LSR) does not meet the LSR policy requirement.
If you are a Professional seller, enable Shipping Settings Automation (SSA), which sets accurate delivery dates for your orders by automatically calculating transit times of your preferred ship methods from your warehouse to each customer’s location.

Select a ship method with a high reliability to deliver your order on time. You can also use Amazon Buy Shippingto buy shipping labels that have been identified to have a high reliability for On-time delivery based on Amazon’s data from millions of shipments. These ship methods have a shield icon next to them, marked as OTDR Protected. You can use Amazon Buy Shipping through Manage Orders, Shipping API, Veeqo, or select multi-channel integrators with access to Amazon Buy Shipping. To learn more about purchasing OTDR protected shipping labels, go to Amazon Buy Shipping.