I have been an Amazon seller for 7 years, and have been on the SFP "waitlist" for 4 years. Well, Amazon decided to open up the SFP trial up to professional sellers about a year ago, and they have made it to where it is not possible to pass even if you are 100% perfect with all fulfillment.
The biggest issue with the SFP Trial
The trial requires a 93.5% on-time deliver rate, this does not have anything at all to do with your on-time shipment. We have now done the trial 3 times, and spend thousands on expedited shipping (losing money on a large percentage of our orders) in order to ensure on-time delivery. 100% of our orders (placed before 5pm) are shipped same day, and they are all shipped with a shipping service that states that the package will arrive to the customer on time. The problem is that the carriers do not hold up to the delivery date promise that is given on Seller Central in the buy shipping section. So we are left spending thousands on expedited shipping for the 30 day trial to ensure that our packages will be delivered on time just to check our dashboard and see that we are around 80-85% on the on time delivery metric. This is infuriating.
When a non-prime Seller Fulfilled order comes through we are shown shipping options that have "OTDR Protection", this means that the carrier is stating that the order will be delivered on time and we will not be penalized if the carrier fails to do that and delivers the package late. I have no idea why this feature is not an option on SFP orders, we have 0 control over carriers mistakes and will never be able to do anything about their failures to deliver on time (regardless of how much we pay for shipping or what service we purchase).
Other issues with the trial (second tier issues that also need fixed):
- In addition to this issue, there are others. For example, in our most recent trial we shipped all orders same day with Amazon Buy Shipping. However, our valid tracking rate is only 96%... We require all carriers to scan every single package in front of us before they leave the warehouse dock door. How is it possible for us to not have a 100% valid tracking when the tracking is purchased through buy shipping and we cannot even enter the tracking info because it is automatically submitted when you purchase through buy shipping?
- Another issue, The trial requires 100 prime orders to be shipped in the 30 days to pass. In the dashboard you are shown all metrics that you need to pass, but when it comes to order count, the counter in the SFP trial dashboard counts Packages, not Orders. For example, if you were to ship 120 packages in your SFP trial, but those 120 packages came from 95 orders, you would see on your dashboard that you have shipped 120 of the required 100 packages. Then once your trial ended you would fail, because you didn't ship at least 100 orders. This has been a clear issue on the dashboard for months (and I have brought it to many support reps). It is still not fixed.
We are starting to think that there only two scenarios where it is possible for the trial to be so broken and impossible to pass. Either Amazon does not want any new SFP sellers and is giving the trial out this way to make people think that it is available but they are not capable of meeting the standards, OR we are some of the first seller accounts trying the new SFP trial and they are using us as a test to see what needs to be fixed, meanwhile we are failing over and over and losing thousands of dollars trying to meet their standards that we have no control over.
For clarification: we have our shipping settings, zones, cutoff times, carrier options, and all metrics optimized for our account to pass this trial and give us the best shot of hitting all required metrics. It is not possible to pass unless you get extremely lucky and the carriers that ship your packages make 0 mistakes (and they won't, there will be late deliveries that are completely our of your control)
