Amazon enhanced its automated handling time feature to help protect sellers from order surges and to show more accurate “delivery promises.” In Thursday’s announcement, Amazon said automated handling time sets a more accurate handling time per SKU based on past performance “to make the delivery date on your offers more attractive to customers.”
Importantly, one new enhancement allows sellers to try the automated feature and not lose their SKU-specific handling time settings should they decide to shut it off.
A video on the Amazon Seller University channel on YouTube from February goes into more detail about the feature (prior to the enhancements announced this week).
Amazon announced the following improvements for automated handling time on Thursday:
- Same-day handling time: Automated handling time will now apply a same-day handling time to SKUs that you ship on the day that you receive an order, which will show more accurate delivery promises.
- Override for order-handling capacity: Automated handling time will set your order-handling capacity based on your past performance, but you now have the option to manually override it if your operations improve.
- Option to revert to previous handling time: If you decide to switch off automated handling time, it will revert your SKU-specific handling time to what it was before you enabled this feature. Now you can try the feature without losing your pre-configured values.
Amazon told sellers to go to Automated handling time to enable the feature, and it provided a link to “Introduction to automated handling time” to learn more.
