Quick answer. For seller-fulfilled orders on Amazon.com, you must keep an On-Time Delivery Rate (OTDR) of at least 90%, measured against your own “Deliver by” date before Amazon adds any promise extensions, and Amazon recommends 95% or higher. You also need a Valid Tracking Rate (VTR) of 95% or more in every product category and a Late Shipment Rate under 4%. Most late deliveries trace back to shipping settings that promise more than your carrier and your warehouse deliver, especially handling and transit days counted on weekends or holidays when nothing moves on your lane. Fix the settings first, then appeal with a plan that shows the cause, the correction and the controls you put in place.

The weekend problem is a frequent version of this failure. A shipping template counts business days, a seller turns on Saturday handling or picks a service that does not deliver on the days the template assumes, and every Friday order lands a day after the date Amazon measures. The metric drops quietly for two weeks and then a notice arrives. The sections below explain how each date is built, how Amazon scores it, and what to change before and after a restriction.

The Delivery Metrics Amazon Uses

Amazon’s Order Performance policy sets minimum standards for fulfillment, delivery and customer service on seller-fulfilled orders. You can see each metric in the Shipping Performance section of the Account Health dashboard. The delivery metrics are separate measurements with separate windows, so a seller can pass one and fail another in the same week.

These rules apply to orders you fulfill yourself. Amazon states that the OTDR policy does not apply to offers fulfilled by Amazon because sellers are not responsible for delivery promises on FBA orders. If you run both models, a delivery restriction affects only your seller-fulfilled offers, and your FBA offers stay live.

See also Amazon Valid Tracking Rate (VTR) and How Amazon Grades Your Order Defect Rate and How to Lower It.

How the “Deliver by” Date Is Built and Why Weekends Break It

Every seller-fulfilled order carries a promised delivery date made of two parts you control. Handling time is the time between the order and the handoff to the carrier. Transit time is the time the carrier needs to deliver once it has the package. Amazon adds them to produce the “Deliver by” date you see in Seller Central.

Amazon’s own example shows the math. A seller with 1 day of handling and 2 days of transit has a “Deliver by” date 3 business days out. An order placed on Monday must arrive by Thursday to count as on time. For the US store, the “Deliver by” date is measured in Pacific Time, so an item due on a given day must be delivered by 11:59:59 p.m. Pacific on that day.

Business days and the weekend switch

Amazon measures handling time in business days and excludes holidays and weekends unless you enable Saturday and Sunday as handling days. The transit time on a shipping template is also set in business days. Two settings decide what happens to a Friday order.

• Weekend handling. If you enable Saturday as a handling day, Amazon assumes you can hand packages to the carrier on Saturday. If your carrier does not pick up on Saturday or your drop-off point is closed, the package sits until Monday and the promise is already a day short.
• Transit on your lane. A template that promises 2 to 3 days to a region assumes the service you buy moves and delivers on the days the calculation counts. When the service you use does not deliver on a day your promise relies on, the package arrives after the “Deliver by” date even though the carrier met its own service standard.

We start every late delivery review by sorting late units by order day of the week. When the late orders cluster on Thursday, Friday and Saturday purchases, the first place we look is a weekend assumption in handling or transit settings, before we look at warehouse speed.

Attempted deliveries and the first scan

Two carrier events matter more than sellers expect. Amazon treats a package as received by the carrier at the first carrier scan, either at pickup from your location or at drop-off at a carrier location. On the delivery end, when a carrier attempts delivery and the customer is unavailable, Amazon uses the date of that documented attempt for OTDR, even if the package is delivered later or redirected to a pickup location. If the carrier did not record the attempt, you get no credit for it.

Promise Extensions Do Not Protect Your Metric

Amazon can add extra days to the delivery date a buyer sees. These are promise extensions. Amazon adds them for two reasons. The first is low performance, when your OTDR without promise extensions and excluding exemptions consistently falls below 95%. The second is severe weather or supply chain constraints that affect multiple carriers on specific ZIP codes or shipping lanes.

Since September 25, 2024, Amazon measures OTDR against the seller-promised “Deliver by” date before any extension is added. Before that change, the metric was measured after extensions. In Amazon’s example, a seller with a Thursday “Deliver by” date and 1 day of extension shows the buyer Friday, but a Friday delivery still counts as late against OTDR.

Extensions also feed on themselves. A seller below 95% gets extensions, the buyer sees a slower date, conversion falls, and the metric that triggered the extension still counts every late unit. The Fulfillment Insight dashboard shows the current extension as an average number of days across seller-fulfilled non-Prime orders with promised dates in the past 14 days. If that number is above zero and there was no regional weather event, your own settings are the cause.

The OTDR figure on the Account Health dashboard includes Amazon’s exemptions. The figure Amazon uses to decide extensions excludes them. A seller can therefore see an OTDR above 90% on the dashboard and still receive extensions because the unprotected rate is below 95%.

How Amazon Calculates OTDR and VTR

OTDR

OTDR is the average across all of your tracked shipped units, not a single SKU or shipment. Amazon pulls units with a promised delivery date in the last 21 days and drops the most recent 7 days, because those packages may still be in transit. If you had 130 units in the 21 days and 30 of them fall in the last 7, Amazon scores the remaining 100. If 90 of those arrived on or before the “Deliver by” date, your OTDR is 90%.

Because of the 7-day lag, a fix you make today does not move the metric for about a week, and the full 14-day window turns over in about three weeks. Plan your appeal and your monitoring around that timing rather than checking the dashboard the next morning.

VTR

VTR is the share of seller-fulfilled packages with a valid tracking ID over 30 days, calculated by product category. For packages shipped from the US, Amazon treats a tracking ID as valid when it records at least one physical carrier scan from an Amazon-integrated carrier. Amazon’s report checks four conditions on every package.

1. The carrier is an integrated carrier chosen from the drop-down on the Ship Confirmation page.
2. A tracking ID was provided at ship confirmation.
3. The package was ship-confirmed before it was delivered.
4. The carrier sent Amazon a tracking scan.

A tracking number that works on the carrier’s website still fails if the carrier did not pass a scan to Amazon. Typing an integrated carrier’s name into the free-text “Other” field also makes the tracking invalid. Cross-border shipments to the US carry extra scan rules. From China, Canada, American Samoa or the US Minor Outlying Islands, packages valued at $5 or more need two valid scans, one at arrival at the carrier facility and one delivery or attempted delivery scan. From India or the UK, the threshold is $15.

Amazon exempts a short list of shipments from VTR, including digital products, domestic USPS Standard Mail or First Class Mail envelopes under $10, and domestic heavy or bulky freight carriers on Amazon’s named list. Seller Fulfilled Prime packages have no exemptions and must meet a 99% valid tracking standard across all categories.

See also Amazon Valid Tracking Rate.

The Handling Time Requirement From June 29, 2026

Amazon now requires Professional sellers to set accurate handling times for seller-fulfilled SKUs. A handling time counts as accurate when actual handling consistently matches the configured handling time for each SKU. The requirement sits inside the order management policy that already requires on-time shipping and a Late Shipment Rate under 4%. Warning notifications began on June 29, 2026.

Long handling times used to look like a safe buffer. Under the new rule, padding is itself a compliance problem. Amazon reviews the trailing 30 days of orders, calculates the fastest handling time you could set while staying under the 4% late shipment threshold, and flags a SKU when you consistently ship at least one day faster than its setting. After a notification, you have 30 days to correct it. If you do not, Amazon manages the handling time on that SKU for the next 180 days, grants Late Shipment Rate protection on it, and locks you out of changing it during that period.

Amazon recommends Automated Handling Time, which sets handling per SKU from your shipping history and gives Late Shipment Rate protection. It can only be enabled at the account level, not for selected SKUs. The requirement does not apply to custom, handmade, perishable and heavy and bulky less-than-truckload shipments.

Ship confirmation must match the first scan

Amazon compares your ship confirmation date with the carrier’s first scan. You must confirm shipment on the same day you hand packages to the carrier. Confirming before the first scan can restrict your ability to sell seller-fulfilled orders under Amazon’s pre-confirm shipment abuse rules. Some sellers confirm early to protect Late Shipment Rate. That habit now creates a separate violation, and it also makes Amazon’s handling time calculation read your warehouse as faster than it is.

Tools for weeks you cannot ship normally

• Order handling capacity. Set a daily order limit. Orders above it get one extra business day of handling.
• Seller-set holidays. Mark a day as non-operating. Ship by dates move to the next business day while your offers stay live.
• Vacation status. Remove seller-fulfilled listings from detail pages and search while you are closed.
• Restock date. Keep selling an out-of-stock item with a delivery date built from the restock date.
• Temporary SKU handling increase. Raise SKU handling time during an operational disruption, then revert it when operations return to normal.

OTDR Protection and Amazon’s Shipping Tools

Amazon removes late deliveries from your OTDR when it controls the delivery date calculation. On standard shipping, a late unit is protected when three conditions are met. The SKU sits on a shipping template with Shipping Settings Automation enabled, your account has Automated Handling Time enabled, and you bought an “on-time delivery rate Protected” label through Amazon Buy Shipping or Veeqo. If you use SKU-specific handling instead of Automated Handling Time, a 0-day or 1-day setting with the other two tools also qualifies, provided you shipped on time as measured at the first carrier scan.

For Seller Fulfilled Prime and Premium Shipping, protection requires Shipping Settings Automation, a protected Buy Shipping label and an on-time handoff. Easy Ship orders shipped on time are eligible, and Easy Ship with Automated Handling Time gives full protection. Free Economy and other options outside standard, premium and Seller Fulfilled Prime are not eligible. OTDR protection currently applies only to Professional sellers who ship from the US or China.

The protection is unit by unit. In Amazon’s example, a seller ships 100 units and 15 arrive late. If none of the 15 used all three tools, OTDR is 85%. If 5 of them did, only 10 count and OTDR is 90%. A partial rollout of the tools therefore helps in proportion to the share of volume it covers.

Amazon also limits transit settings. Within the contiguous US, the maximum transit time for standard shipping is five days, and for free economy it is eight days. The five-day cap applies to all SKUs except media such as books, magazines and DVDs. For shipments from China to the continental US, the maximum is 20 days. Separate from the tools, when Amazon identifies a major disruption affecting two or more major carriers in a region, late deliveries caused by it do not count against your account.

What to Do When OTDR or VTR Drops

1. Download the defect reports. Get the OTDR defect report from the Shipping Performance section of Account Health and the VTR report from the same page, filtered by carrier or category. Only orders in the current report count against the metric.
2. Classify every late unit by cause. Compare the order date, the ship by date, the first carrier scan and the delivery or attempt scan. Each late unit falls into one of three groups. Late handoff means the first scan came after the ship by date. Slow transit means the handoff was on time and the carrier took longer than the template. A wrong promise means the template or handling setting promised days the operation does not support, such as weekend handling.
3. Fix the setting that produced each group. Late handoffs call for handling time and staffing changes. Slow transit calls for a faster service or a longer transit setting for that region. Wrong promises call for removing weekend handling, correcting templates and moving SKUs to Shipping Settings Automation.
4. Correct tracking errors within the window. Amazon recommends updating tracking details within 24 hours of ship confirmation. You cannot change tracking after the promised delivery date. Edit the shipment in Manage Orders and re-confirm it. Allow 72 hours for reports and metrics to update.
5. Appeal from Account Health. On a first OTDR restriction, use Submit appeal at the top of the Account Health dashboard. Amazon states the request is reviewed within 72 hours. For VTR, use Submit Appeal next to each affected category.
6. Reactivate partial deactivations. If only some offers were removed for OTDR, open Other Policy Violations, find listings marked “Order Performance – On time Delivery Rate” on the Product Policy Compliance page, and submit an appeal. Amazon states the listings reactivate automatically once you complete the steps.

What the appeal must contain

Amazon asks for three things in an OTDR appeal. The issues that led to the low rate, the actions you will take to improve it, and the steps you have taken to prevent future problems. When all seller-fulfilled offers are deactivated, Amazon asks you to identify whether the cause sits in handling time, carrier performance or fulfillment performance, and to show improved practices such as more accurate delivery dates, changed shipping services or operational changes.

The evidence that carries weight is operational and specific to your account.

• The count of late units from the defect report, split by the cause groups above.
• Screens or exports showing the corrected shipping template, transit times by region and the handling time settings, including whether weekend handling is now off.
• Confirmation that Automated Handling Time and Shipping Settings Automation are enabled, or the reason they are not.
• The carrier service change, with the reason it fits the lanes where late units clustered.
• The monitoring cadence and owner, such as a weekly review of the OTDR defect report and the Fulfillment Insight dashboard.

For an appeal against automated handling time on SKUs, Amazon asks you to pick 3 to 5 representative SKUs and provide tracking IDs, label purchase records, ship confirmation logs such as SP-API responses or feed-processing records, and carrier handoff or first-scan records where available.

Mistakes That Make It Worse

• Confirming shipment before the carrier has the package. It hides a late handoff for one metric and creates a pre-confirm violation on another.
• Padding handling time across the catalog. Under the June 2026 requirement, a SKU that ships a day faster than its setting is flagged, and an uncorrected SKU loses manual control for 180 days.
• Typing carrier names by hand. Misspellings, extra words or an integrated carrier entered under “Other” make tracking invalid even when the package moved on time.
• Editing tracking after delivery. Tracking updated after the order is delivered does not count toward VTR because the customer could not use it.
• Blaming the carrier in the appeal. Amazon measures the promise you set. An appeal that says the carrier was late, without a change to the service or the transit setting, describes the problem and leaves it in place.
• Treating promise extensions as a buffer. The extension changes the buyer’s date, not the date OTDR uses.

First-Time Versus Repeat Violations

A first OTDR restriction goes through Submit appeal on the Account Health dashboard with the three-part explanation. If OTDR is still below 90% on a later violation, the path moves to Resolve issues on the “Complete your priority actions” banner, and the requirements change by seller type.

• Individual sellers and Professional sellers shipping from outside the US and China. Submit an appeal that states how you will improve OTDR.
• Professional sellers shipping from the US or China. Meet the 90% standard by using Amazon’s free tools for seller-fulfilled orders for the next 180 days. That means Shipping Settings Automation for transit times, Automated Handling Time for handling, and Amazon Buy Shipping for labels.

A repeat case is no longer an argument about what went wrong. It becomes a commitment to run the account on Amazon’s tools. For sellers whose margin depends on a carrier contract outside Buy Shipping, the cost of that commitment should be weighed before the second violation, not after it. For late shipment specifically, read Amazon suspension for late shipment.

US Versus UK and EU Rules

The OTDR policy described above, including the 90% minimum without promise extensions and the September 25, 2024 change, is published for Amazon.com. The UK and EU stores publish their own versions of each metric, and the details differ.

• Late shipment in the UK. Amazon.co.uk measures late shipment, also called late dispatch, over 10-day and 30-day periods. Eligible sellers whose offers are at risk of deactivation may see an option on Account Health to take a five-question quiz on the policy. Deactivated offers go through Submit appeal with a plan of action.
• VTR in the UK. The 95% standard applies to domestic UK shipments and to cross-border shipments of £20 or more, which need a tracked service with at least two scans. Shipments from China to UK customers need one scan below £10 and two scans at £10 or more. Exemptions include letter-method shipments under £20 to and from ten named EU countries, untracked Royal Mail 1st and 2nd Class letters bought through Amazon Buy Shipping, digital products and self-delivered shipments.
• EU stores. Read the Order Performance and VTR pages in the Seller Central account for each store you sell in. Thresholds, exemptions and appeal paths are set per store, and a setting that keeps you compliant on Amazon.com does not carry over.

How to Keep Your Metrics Healthy

Prevention is a short list of settings and a weekly review. The order matters, because each step removes a cause that the next step would otherwise have to absorb.

1. Enable Automated Handling Time, or review the handling time report under Manage Seller Fulfilled Products and Product-level Shipping Preferences and set each SKU to what you ship.
2. Turn weekend handling on only if a carrier collects from you on those days.
3. Move templates to Shipping Settings Automation or set transit times by region to what your service delivers, inside Amazon’s caps.
4. Buy labels through Amazon Buy Shipping and choose services marked “on-time delivery rate Protected” where the cost works.
5. Pick carriers from the drop-down, confirm shipment on the day of handoff, and use Add a Package with separate tracking for multi-package orders.
6. Review Shipping Performance in Account Health and the Fulfillment Insight dashboard weekly, including the promise extension figure.
7. Use vacation settings when you cannot ship. See our guide to Amazon vacation mode.

Our Amazon account health maintenance service monitors these metrics for sellers and flags drift in the defect reports before the window closes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good On-Time Delivery Rate on Amazon?

Amazon requires at least 90% for seller-fulfilled orders on Amazon.com and recommends 95% or higher. Staying at or above 95% without exemptions also keeps Amazon from adding promise extensions for low performance.

Do promise extensions help my on-time delivery rate?

No. Since September 25, 2024, Amazon measures OTDR against your “Deliver by” date before extensions. An extension changes the date the buyer sees and nothing else.

Does Amazon count weekends in my handling time?

Not by default. Handling time is measured in business days and excludes weekends and holidays unless you enable Saturday and Sunday as handling days. Enable them only if your carrier picks up or accepts drop-offs on those days.

What Valid Tracking Rate does Amazon require?

95% or more in each product category on Amazon.com. Below that, seller-fulfilled listings in the affected category can be suspended, and premium shipping eligibility can suffer. Seller Fulfilled Prime requires 99% across all categories.

How long does an OTDR appeal take?

Amazon states that an OTDR appeal is reviewed within 72 hours. Allow another 72 hours for reports and metrics to reflect edits, and about a week for corrected settings to start showing in the 14-day OTDR window.

Get Help With Delivery Metrics

Submit your case for a free assessment, or book a consultation.

Our Amazon account health maintenance team can take the case from here. If the account itself is restricted, start with our Amazon suspension service. You can also see all our marketplace suspension services.

Sources

• Amazon Seller Central, Order Performance program policy
• Amazon Seller Central, On-time delivery rate
• Amazon Seller Central, Amazon promise extensions
• Amazon Seller Central, Handling time requirement
• Amazon Seller Central, Valid tracking rate (VTR)
• Amazon Seller Central, Late Shipment Rate
• Amazon Seller Central, Default transit time
• Amazon Seller Central, Create, edit, or delete shipping templates
• Amazon Seller Central UK, Late shipment rate
• Amazon Seller Central UK, Valid Tracking Rate (VTR)