Article

Amazon Just Raised the Bar for FBM Sellers. Peak Season Will Be the Real Test

10 July 2026

By John Fallon – Director of eCommerce

If you sell FBM on Amazon in Europe, you need to read this one properly. 

Amazon has confirmed it will strictly enforce a 90% On-Time Delivery Rate (OTDR) for merchant-fulfilled orders. In Germany, enforcement kicks in from 1 September 2026. Miss the threshold and your listings can be deactivated and you may lose the ability to list new FBM products altogether. The UK already has the 90% requirement on paper, but Amazon has said it will start enforcing it rigorously from September too. Similar updates are rolling out across France, Spain and Italy. 

And it doesn’t stop there. From 30 September, a new business delivery metric applies to Amazon Business orders in Germany, at least 90% of B2B deliveries must arrive on time, during the customer’s business hours. Listings for business customers can be deactivated from 30 October if you fall short. 

On top of that, Amazon is going after handling times. From 15 July, accounts with a default two-day handling time get automatically moved to one day. And from September, if your handling time is set at least a day longer than your actual performance, Amazon will switch on Automated Handling Time for those SKUs after 30 days, whether you asked for it or not. 

Why this concerns me 

I’ll be honest, this one worries me, and not because the intent is wrong. Faster, more accurate delivery promises are good for conversion. Nobody argues with that. 

What concerns me is that your OTDR is now only as good as your carrier. You can pick, pack and dispatch flawlessly, but the moment that parcel leaves your warehouse, your account health is in someone else’s van. Amazon doesn’t distinguish between “the seller was slow” and “the carrier had a bad week”. A missed delivery is a missed delivery, and it counts against you either way. 

That makes carrier selection a strategic decision now, not a procurement one. Sellers need to be asking hard questions: What’s my carrier’s actual on-time performance by lane, by country? Do I have the data to prove it? Is the cheapest rate card worth it if it costs me my listings in September? 

The real test is during Christmas Peak, and here’s the part I keep coming back to: Peak. 

November and December are exactly when carrier networks are stretched to breaking point. Capacity gets rationed, collection times slip, delivery windows blow out, every seller who’s been through a Q4 knows the drill. Carriers are out the door during peak, and there is nothing in these policy updates that suggests Amazon will give sellers any sort of leeway for it. 

So the seller who scrapes 91% OTDR in a quiet September could easily be sitting at 85% in the last week of November, through no fault of their own, and watching listings get deactivated during the most important trading weeks of the year. 

Where this pushes sellers 

If FBM becomes a compliance risk during peak, the obvious hedge is FBA or at least shifting your best sellers into FBA for Q4 and keeping FBM for the long tail. Amazon would no doubt say that’s not the intention, and it has launched FBM Ship+ across the big five European markets with cashback to help fund faster shipping. But when the penalty for not meeting the KPI is deactivated listings, plenty of sellers will do the maths and move stock into FBA rather than gamble. 

Whether that’s a deliberate nudge or just a side effect, time will tell. 

If I were running an FBM operation into Germany, I’d be doing three things before September: 

The sellers who treat this as just another logistics KPI will struggle. The ones who treat it as an account health risk will be fine. 

Are you keeping your top-selling products in FBM through peak this year, or moving them into FBA? I’d genuinely like to hear how others are planning for this.