Ever since the launch of the OTDR metric, we've made substantial changes to our fulfillment processes (at the expense of nearly all of our profits) to try to meet the ridiculous 90%/95% metric.
We sell a lot of furniture items, so the carriers will often delay them by a day due to package size. And of course the normal unpreventable delays add up as well.
At the start of it, our Promise Extension was 3.5 days with our OTDR hovering around 80%.
We still have a 1 day handling time on most items, with a 2 day handling time on a few. Our Late Shipment rate is always close to zero.
As part of our change, we extended our shipping template by 1 day and use faster shipping services (cost = ouch).
We anticipated that in doing so, we could meet the metric and have our Promise Extension come down, maybe fixing the problem with volume.
Through some extreme luck, UPS has had a streak that brought our ODTR (without extension) to 99.1%. But our extensions have gotten WORSE, going to 4.4 days. (all to increase OTDR by a laughable 0.8%?)
1. Why if our actual delivery time is 3.6 days, is Amazon extending us by 4.4 days? This is killing our Buy Box at a degree we've never seen.
2. How is an Actual Time of 3.6 days + Extension of 4.4 days equal to 13.1 days? Clearly that's 8 days.
3. The Handling Time gap is broken too. We always ship items next day, so 0.1 day Actual Handling makes no sense. And with 98% of our items having a 1 day Handling Time, the Handling Time Promise of 2.0 Days is mathematically impossible too.
4. We thought that it was stated that no extension would be added if you had a 95% OTDR. At worst, it should have gotten better from the original 3.5 days and went to 2.5 days since we added a day to the shipping template.
We've went through hell changing things to the tune of thousands of dollars a week in additional expenses to meet the sudden OTDR metric, only have our sales crash even more due to these unexplainable calculations.
