Nine days until Business Hour Delivery Rate starts costing you offers
On 30 September, a metric that has sat quietly on the Account Health page for about three years starts having consequences. Sellers who fulfil their own orders to Amazon Business customers need a Business Hour Delivery Rate of 90% or better, in the US, the UK and Germany.
That is nine days away, and there is a way to be exempt that takes an afternoon to set up.
What the metric measures
The share of your seller-fulfilled shipments to Amazon Business customers that arrive inside that customer’s stated hours of operation. Business buyers set those hours in their account; where they have not, the default is Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 local time.
Amazon’s announcements describe it over a rolling 14-day window. An older help page defined the same metric over 30 days, and it is not clear from the public pages whether the canonical definition has been updated, so treat the window as the one thing here worth confirming in your own Account Health page rather than taking from an article.
What happens if you are below 90%
Not what most of the coverage says. This is not an account suspension.
If you are under the threshold on 30 September, Amazon notifies you with improvement recommendations. If the rate has not improved by 30 October, your seller-fulfilled offers may be deactivated for Amazon Business customers. Retail offers are unaffected, and FBA offers are unaffected. It is a visibility suppression in one channel, not a strike against your account.
That matters for how much attention this deserves. If Amazon Business is a rounding error in your revenue, it is a calendar note. If you have built a B2B line on amazon.de or amazon.co.uk, losing the offers on 30 October is a real hole in Q4.
I have not found a documented appeal route for this specific requirement. The only mechanism described anywhere is the thirty-day warning window between the two dates, which is presumably the point of having them.
The exemption most sellers can take
Shipments fulfilled using all three of Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation and Amazon Buy Shipping are covered. Amazon’s US announcement says such orders are guaranteed to meet the requirement; the UK wording puts it as those orders not counting towards it. The mechanism differs, the practical effect does not.
All three together, not any one of them. That is the detail to check before assuming you are already covered, because plenty of sellers run Buy Shipping without the other two.
For most FBM sellers this is the cheapest route by a distance. The alternative is controlling delivery timing precisely enough to land inside someone else’s office hours, using carriers who do not guarantee a delivery hour, which is exactly the criticism sellers raised when the requirement was announced in June.
Why this arrived now
The metric itself is not new. Business Hour Delivery Rate has been visible in Fulfillment Insights and later under Eligibilities on Account Health since roughly 2023, explicitly informational, with no penalty attached. Anything you read from before June 2026 describing it as advisory was accurate when written and is now out of date.
What changed in June was the 90% threshold and the enforcement dates, announced separately for each store: a standalone post for the US, and bundled into broader seller-fulfilled requirement updates for the UK and Germany. Reading only the US announcement leaves you thinking it is a US change. ChannelX covered the UK version on 30 June, and Amazon’s own US post sets out the definition and the dates.
Before 30 September
Open Account Health and find your current Business Hour Delivery Rate. If it is comfortably above 90%, note the date and move on.
If it is not, or if you cannot find the figure, check whether Automated Handling Time, Shipping Settings Automation and Buy Shipping are all switched on for the orders that go to Business customers. Switching on the two you are missing is a smaller job than redesigning your dispatch around office hours, and it is the option Amazon has explicitly blessed.