You're graded on the driver.

Happy Friday,

There's a tile on your Account Health dashboard that has done nothing for roughly two years. Business Hour Delivery Rate. Informational only. No penalty. Decorative.

It grew teeth.

Starting September 30, professional sellers need a Business Hour Delivery Rate of 90% or better on seller-fulfilled orders to Amazon Business customers, measured on a rolling 14-day window. US, UK, and Germany.

Below the line on September 30 and you get a notification with recommendations. Still below on October 30 and your seller-fulfilled offers get deactivated for Amazon Business buyers.

Here is what the metric measures: whether your package arrived while the buyer's office was open.

Not whether you shipped on time. Not whether you picked a competent carrier. Not whether the tracking scanned. Whether a driver you have never met, employed by a company you do not control, working a route you cannot see, chose to arrive between the hours a business you have never visited happens to keep.

Sellers are reporting deliveries at midnight. Deliveries before opening. Deliveries on a federal holiday, to a closed building, counted as a miss.

You also cannot block Amazon Business customers from buying. So you can't opt out of the population you're being graded on.

Amazon's recommended fixes are reliable carriers, accurate handling and transit times, Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation, and Buy Shipping.

Sellers point out, reasonably, that these are the tools they already run while sitting below 90%.

There is one clean exemption. FBA offers are unaffected. So is standard retail.

The one way to be structurally immune from a delivery-timing standard is to stop doing your own delivery and pay Amazon to do it.

Read that as cynicism if you like. The forums have. But the mechanic is the mechanic. The standard applies to the fulfillment method Amazon doesn't get paid for, and doesn't apply to the one it does.

The machine grades your returns now. FBA return processing auto-assesses incoming units as sellable, damaged, or customer-damaged. Customer-damaged routes to unfulfillable inventory. Some of those units are fine. There's no reimbursement for a misgrade — just a removal order, so you can drive over and check the algorithm's work yourself.

Returns got more expensive, for exactly one side. Prepaid return labels are now mandatory in most categories, refund timelines shortened, and buyer-seller messaging during returns was removed. Each of those lands on seller-fulfilled operations. None of them land on FBA.

Your inventory is insured up to a number Amazon picked. Per-unit reimbursement limits apply by marketplace when FBA loses or damages your stock, and they haven't moved for 2026. On higher-ticket units the cap doesn't reach replacement value. The gap between what Amazon lost and what Amazon pays is a conversation with your insurance broker, not with Seller Central.

Open Account Health, go to Eligibilities, and read your current Business Hour Delivery Rate today. It's already there. It's been there.

Then give someone one page to build: your ten highest-volume FBM SKUs that see Amazon Business demand, each with its current BHDR, its carrier, and its Business-customer share of units.

Anything under 90% with meaningful B2B volume gets a decision before September 30 — switch carrier, switch to FBA, or accept the deactivation and price accordingly.

Artifact: a ten-row exposure table with a decision column. Not a discussion column. A decision column.

The number on that tile hasn't changed in two years.

What it costs you has.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite