Amazon will switch off seller-fulfilled B2B offers that miss a 90% business-hour delivery rate

Amazon has added a new performance metric for sellers who ship their own orders, and it comes with a deactivation date. Starting September 30, sellers must hold a Business Hour Delivery Rate of 90% or higher on seller-fulfilled shipments to Amazon Business customers, measured over a rolling 14-day window, according to Amazon's announcement in Seller Central. Sellers below the line will first get a notification and improvement recommendations. If the rate is still under 90% by October 30, their seller-fulfilled offers may be deactivated for Amazon Business customers.

The metric measures something the existing on-time delivery rate does not. On-time delivery asks whether the package arrived by the promised date. Business Hour Delivery Rate asks whether it arrived while the business was open, as Ordoro's explainer notes. A carton left at a locked loading dock at 7pm counts against the seller even if it was a day early.

Who is in scope, and who is not

The requirement applies only to seller-fulfilled shipments to Amazon Business customers in the US store. FBA offers and standard consumer orders are not affected. Nova Data reports the same threshold and dates apply in the UK and Germany. According to My Amazon Guy's summary of the policy, custom and handmade products are excluded, and so are bulky shipments that move by less-than-truckload freight. That carve-out matters for furniture: a pallet on a scheduled LTL appointment is outside the metric, while a boxed desk, chair or cabinet that ships parcel or ground home delivery is inside it.

Amazon's recommended fixes are its own automation tools. The announcement points sellers to Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation and Amazon Buy Shipping, and says that shipments bought through Buy Shipping with those settings enabled are protected on the metric. My Amazon Guy notes two related dates: default handling time auto-updated to one day on July 15, and from September 1 Amazon may apply Automated Handling Time to SKUs whose settings underperform. Amazon Business is not a small corner of the store. EcommerceBytes reported in its earnings coverage that the B2B storefront has reached $60 billion in annualized gross sales, and Nova Data estimates business orders can be 15% to 30% of a mature seller-fulfilled catalog.

Why sellers say the target is hard to hit

The Seller Central thread announcing the change has drawn more than 210 replies, most of them objections. The central complaint is control: once a package is handed to UPS, FedEx or USPS, the seller decides when it leaves the warehouse, not when the driver attempts delivery. Sellers report deliveries to businesses that operate around the clock being scored as misses, along with PO boxes and holiday closures. Several say that even with every recommended automation switched on, their rate sits at 83% to 86%, below the 90% line.

A second objection is structural. FBA offers carry no equivalent metric, so a seller with strong B2B demand on a SKU has an incentive to move that SKU into Amazon's fulfillment network rather than risk losing business buyers in November. The pattern has precedent on both major marketplaces: Amazon spent the summer removing a performance gate on the Featured Offer, while Walmart went the other way and tightened its seller performance standards in May. This one lands closer to the Walmart model, with a hard date and a switch-off.

What the October 30 cliff means for a furniture seller

Why it matters: Office furniture, break-room seating, storage and reception pieces are exactly the products that sell to business accounts on Amazon, and most of them ship in cartons rather than on pallets, which puts them inside the metric. A seller who fulfills those orders on standard ground service with residential-style delivery windows will not know their rate is failing until the notification arrives on September 30, and then has 30 days to fix a carrier behavior they do not directly control. The practical moves are to pull the metric now, segment it by SKU and carrier, route business orders onto services that deliver on weekday daytime schedules, and decide before the deadline which B2B SKUs are worth moving into FBA.

What it means for our partners: We are checking the Business Hour Delivery Rate on every seller-fulfilled account we manage before the September 30 date, and separating business orders onto daytime-delivery services where the rate is short, so no supplier loses its Amazon Business buyers on October 30.