What changed: Amazon is tightening the performance rules on merchant-fulfilled (FBM) listings across three dates. Since 15 July 2026 the account-level default handling time only offers 0-day and 1-day. From 1 September 2026, any SKU whose handling time has run a day or more longer than its actual shipping performance for 30+ days gets switched to Automated Handling Time — Amazon shortens it for you. From 30 September 2026, the Business Hour Delivery Rate stops being an informational metric and becomes a requirement at 90%. FBA offers are not affected by any of it.

What changed

Amazon posted the Business Hour Delivery Rate change to Seller Central news in late June. Ecommerce News Europe, ChannelX and SellerLegend each covered the wider FBM package separately through July. The three pieces:

  • Business Hour Delivery Rate — 90%, from 30 September. Amazon defines it as the percentage of your seller-fulfilled shipments delivered to Amazon Business customers within those customers’ operating hours, measured over a rolling 14-day period. If you are below 90% on 30 September, Amazon notifies you with recommendations. If you have not improved by 30 October, your seller-fulfilled offers may be deactivated for Amazon Business customers. Amazon’s own wording is explicit that FBA and retail offer eligibility are not impacted.
  • Handling time defaults — since 15 July. The account-level default handling time now shows only 0-day and 1-day options. Accounts that had it set to 2 days were moved to 1 day.
  • Automated Handling Time — from 1 September. If an SKU’s stated handling time exceeds its actual performance by a day or more for over 30 days, Amazon enables Automated Handling Time on that SKU and sets the promise from your real shipping data.

Scope: the Business Hour Delivery Rate announcement above is the US one. The same 90% requirement and the same 30 September / 30 October dates are reported for the UK and Germany by ChannelX and SellerLegend independently. Germany also gets a separate enforcement step — a 90% On-Time Delivery Rate, with affected listings liable to deactivation from 1 September.

What it means for a private-label seller

If you are pure FBA, none of this touches you. That is the honest first answer, and most coverage of this story does not lead with it.

If you run any merchant-fulfilled listings, the piece that matters is not the B2B metric — it is the handling-time change, and it is easy to underrate. Plenty of private-label brands keep FBM backup listings sitting dormant, switched on during an FBA stockout, with a padded handling time as deliberate slack. That padding is a shock absorber: it exists so that one missed carrier cutoff does not become a late shipment. From 1 September, if you have been beating your stated handling time, Amazon removes the padding for you.

That is a real trade-off and worth naming honestly, because it cuts both ways. A shorter handling time means a faster delivery promise on the detail page, and a faster promise converts better — that is genuinely in your interest, and it is why sellers who pad reflexively are leaving sales on the table. But the buffer was absorbing variance, and once it is gone the variance lands on your On-Time Delivery Rate instead. Amazon is making that trade on your behalf, based on a 30-day window that may not include your worst month.

The Business Hour Delivery Rate has a different problem: you do not control it. You choose the carrier and the ship date; the carrier chooses whether the van arrives at 10am or 7pm, and a business address that closed at 5pm counts as a miss. For most private-label brands the realistic answer is not to engineer your way to 90% on a metric a driver decides — it is to stop taking Amazon Business orders on FBM and let FBA carry them.

What to do about it

  1. Check whether you have live seller-fulfilled offers at all. Not whether you meant to — whether any are active right now, including dormant backup SKUs. If there are none, you are done.
  2. Before 1 September, compare stated handling time against actual ship performance per FBM SKU. Anything padded by a day or more is on the list to be adjusted. Decide it yourself rather than finding out from a changed delivery promise.
  3. Where you cut handling time, watch On-Time Delivery Rate for the following month, not the following week. The buffer was doing something.
  4. If Amazon Business orders reach you on FBM, look at your Business Hour Delivery Rate now, while it is still informational and nothing is at stake. If it is nowhere near 90%, moving that selection to FBA before 30 September is a cleaner fix than a carrier change.

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