Amazon's business-hour delivery rule: what to fix before October 30

Six days, one number

For months, Amazon has been telling US sellers about a new requirement for orders shipped to Amazon Business customers. It took effect September 30, 2026. Your Business Hour Delivery Rate, the share of your own-fulfilled shipments to business buyers that arrive while the buyer is actually open, needs to stay at 90% or higher over a rolling 14 days.

If you were below 90% on September 30, Amazon notified you. If the rate doesn't improve by October 30, your seller-fulfilled offers may be deactivated for Amazon Business customers. Your regular shoppers still see them. Your FBA offers aren't affected. But if business buyers are a meaningful slice of your orders, losing them right before the end-of-year office ordering rush would hurt.

The good news is in how the number works. A rolling 14-day window means every package you ship from today forward counts, and the bad ones from early October age out. You don't have to repair the past. You have to stop repeating it, starting with the next box that leaves your building.

Pull the misses first

Don't start by changing carriers or settings across the board. Start with the list of shipments that missed.

Open Account Health in Seller Central, where Amazon says the rate lives, and look at the business-customer shipments that didn't arrive during operating hours. Export them or copy them into a spreadsheet. For each one, note four things: the carrier and service level, the ship date and day of the week, the promised delivery date, and what kind of address it went to.

You're looking for a pattern, not an explanation for every package. In most small seller operations, misses tend to cluster. Maybe one carrier's economy service delivers in the evening. Maybe orders that ship on Thursday land on Saturday, when offices are closed. Maybe a handful of addresses are the problem every time.

Sellers replying to Amazon's announcement have described their own frustrations, including deliveries to hotels, PO boxes and businesses that close early. Those are individual reports, not Amazon data, but they're the kinds of pattern worth checking for in your own list.

What the misses usually mean

Once you've grouped them, most misses fall into a few buckets. Each one points to a different fix.

Weekend and after-hours arrivals. If a package ships late in the week on a service that delivers on Saturday, a business buyer often isn't there to receive it. The fix is usually your handling time and ship-day settings for business orders, or a carrier service that doesn't deliver on weekends.

Wrong service level. Some economy services deliver late in the day or bundle residential-style routes. If one service shows up in your misses again and again, that's the one to change for business orders.

Optimistic handling or transit times. If you tell Amazon you ship in one day but often ship in two, packages can land outside the window the buyer expected. Amazon's own guidance says that using reliable carriers and setting accurate handling and transit times is the best way to meet the requirement.

Address problems. A business address that's really a mailbox service, a front desk that closes at noon, a building with a loading dock somewhere else. You can't fix every one, but you can see whether the same few buyers account for most of your misses.

The three tools Amazon says will cover you

Amazon makes one unusually direct promise in the announcement: shipments fulfilled using all three of Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation and Amazon Buy Shipping are guaranteed to meet the Business Hour Delivery Rate requirement.

That's worth taking seriously if you're well below 90% and short on time. Automated Handling Time lets Amazon set handling time from your actual history. Shipping Settings Automation lets Amazon set transit times based on carrier data. Buy Shipping means you buy the label through Amazon, so the carrier and tracking feed straight into Amazon's systems.

The catch is that it's all three, on the shipment. Using one or two doesn't carry the guarantee. And handing over handling and transit times to Amazon can change the delivery promises your listings show, which can affect conversion. Some sellers in the forum thread say they're still below 90% while using these tools. Treat that as a reason to check your own shipments, not as proof either way, and read Amazon's help page on the requirement before you change anything.

If your current shipping software already buys labels outside Amazon, switching to Buy Shipping for business orders may mean a process change in your warehouse. That's fine, but it's the kind of change to make carefully on a Monday, not rushed through on a Friday.

A plan for the next six days

Today. Pull your misses from the last 14 days and sort them by carrier, ship day and address type. Pick the one or two patterns behind most of them.

Tomorrow. Fix the settings behind those patterns. That might mean adding a day of handling time for orders that come in late in the week, switching the service level for business orders, or turning on the three Amazon tools for business shipments.

Through the week. Ship business orders early in the day and early in the week when you can. Watch the rate in Account Health daily. Because the window rolls, you should see it move as old misses drop off.

By October 30. If you're still close to the line, it's better to send business orders on a slower, more reliable service than to promise something you can't meet. An offer that's a day slower is still an offer. A deactivated one isn't.

After the deadline. Don't stop watching. The requirement keeps applying, so whatever fixed your rate this week has to keep working through the holiday rush, when carriers are stretched.

If your shipping rules live in three different tools and nobody is quite sure which one wins, that's the deeper problem. Our fulfillment operations team helps sellers sort out carrier rules, handling times and the reporting that tells you when something slips. Talk to us.

Related work: Paddle8.