Amazon recently sent an email to third-party businesses saying that they must meet specific delivery requirements, including Saturday delivery and compliance with the new one-day or two-day delivery standards. If they fail to meet the target, they may lose a coveted prime express badge, which will directly affect the sales of sellers’ products.

This email is for sellers who have their own warehouses and use UPS, FedEx, USPS or seller fulfilled prime plans to deliver online orders. According to the email, less than 16% of the products sent through the seller met the retailer’s two-day delivery commitment.

This also means that Amazon is planning to make it more difficult for sellers to deliver goods on the platform. Maybe this is a new charge for sellers, because sellers may expect Amazon to help them deal with these problems, which need to be charged.

Why does Amazon do this?

Five years ago, Amazon launched seller fulfillment prime, allowing some businesses to handle their own delivery, helping to expand the number of products that ship quickly.

The move is aimed at easing the bottleneck in Amazon’s warehouse, as products will flow directly from sellers to prime subscribers. Prime subscribers pay monthly or annual Shipping discounts and other additional fees, usually more than other Amazon shoppers.

Now, Amazon says the project has performed badly and is raising standards in an effort to reduce delivery times for many products from two days to one.

Amazon said that before the outbreak of covid-19, less than 16% of Amazon’s orders shipped in the United States through seller fulfillment prime fulfilled their two-day delivery commitment, mainly because most third-party sellers were unable to perform delivery services on weekends.

What do Amazon sellers say?

In fact, many sellers have questioned this standard of Amazon, because this new standard is a very high requirement for many sellers. Without a solid distribution channel or supply chain, it is very, very difficult to deliver packages across the United States in a day or two.

Therefore, the new standard proposed by Amazon is likely to make many sellers who use third-party channels turn to FBA.