On September 30, Amazon starts requiring a Business Hour Delivery Rate of 90% or higher on seller-fulfilled orders going to Amazon Business customers. If you are still under 90% on October 30, Amazon can deactivate your seller-fulfilled offers for Amazon Business buyers.
Not your account. Not your listings. Not your FBA offers, and not your retail offers. Your seller-fulfilled offers, for one customer segment. Some of the coverage has framed this as an account suspension risk, and that overstates it — Amazon’s own wording is narrower, and the distinction changes what you should do about it.
Here is what the metric actually is, what the October 30 consequence really costs, and the arithmetic problem that nobody covering this has worked through. If you already track the five FBM metrics that decide your Buy Box fate, treat this as a sixth — except this one never touches the Buy Box, which turns out to be the whole problem with it.
Business Hour Delivery Rate — BHDR — is the percentage of your self-fulfilled shipments to Amazon Business customers that get delivered during that customer’s operating hours.
The scope is tighter than the name suggests. It counts self-fulfilled orders only; FBA is out. It counts orders going to Amazon Business customers at commercial addresses — a residential delivery address does not qualify. It runs on a rolling 14-day window and updates daily. And if you had no qualifying shipments in the window, it shows N/A rather than zero.
You will find it in the Account Health dashboard under Program Eligibilities, where you can also download the underlying report broken out by carrier. The requirement itself was published to the Amazon Seller Forums at the start of July, and Amazon’s BHDR help page is the reference document.
The dates, in order. September 30, the 90% threshold applies. Fall below it and Amazon sends a notification with recommendations. Do not fix it by October 30 and your seller-fulfilled offers can be pulled for Amazon Business customers. United States, United Kingdom and Germany.
Here is the part I would want you to take away even if you never sell another unit to a business buyer.
BHDR did not appear in July. It appeared on February 17, 2026, as an email telling sellers the number was now visible in the Account Health dashboard. The email was purely advisory. Amazon’s exact framing, quoted by a seller who posted it to the Sellers Ask Sellers forum that same day:
Maintaining a business hour delivery rate of at least 90% prevents delivery challenges, such as unattended or lost packages and failed delivery attempts, which may reduce the chance of Amazon Business customers buying from you again.
No threshold enforcement. No deadline. No consequence. Just a number and a suggestion.
The agency BellaVix wrote it up in February and read it correctly at the time: there is no enforcement today, this is advisory and not punitive, for now it is visibility rather than enforcement. They also called the shape of what came next — when Amazon adds a metric to Account Health, it usually signals growing importance.
Four and a half months later it had a threshold, a deadline, and an offer-deactivation consequence.
That is the pattern worth internalizing. A new number showing up in your Account Health dashboard with no penalty attached is not Amazon being informative. It is Amazon building the measurement infrastructure it will enforce against later. The advisory period is the window where fixing it is cheap.
A rolling 14-day window sounds forgiving. Paired with the narrow scope, it is not — and it is least forgiving for the sellers least likely to be watching.
Work it through. Say you ship 10 qualifying Amazon Business orders to commercial addresses in a fortnight, which is an ordinary volume for a wholesale seller whose B2B business is a side channel rather than the main event. One package that lands at 7pm and you are at exactly 90% — on the line. Two and you are at 80%, which is ten points into breach off two deliveries you did not control and could not have.
At 30 qualifying shipments in the same fortnight, three misses puts you exactly on the line and four puts you under. At 100, you get ten before it bites.
So the metric is noisiest precisely where B2B volume is thinnest, and thin B2B volume is the best predictor of a seller who has never opened the Program Eligibilities tab. Nobody with 40% of revenue coming through Amazon Business is going to be surprised by this on October 30. The seller who gets surprised is the one doing eight or twelve B2B orders a fortnight, treating them as ordinary orders, and discovering in November that a slice of demand quietly stopped arriving.
If that is you, download the report now, while it costs you nothing.
Amazon’s recommendations are unusually specific for once. Use reliable carriers. Set handling and transit times that reflect what you actually do. Turn on Automated Handling Time. Turn on Shipping Settings Automation.
In the US, Amazon names UPS Ground, UPS Ground Saver and FedEx Ground as the carriers it recommends for BHDR performance. That is Amazon’s own wording, from the February notification rather than the July announcement — the July notice names no carriers at all, so if you went looking for this in the requirement post and could not find it, that is why.
The one worth noting properly: Amazon says that shipments using Buy Shipping together with Automated Handling Time and Shipping Settings Automation are guaranteed to meet the requirement, as My Amazon Guy reported in July. If your B2B volume is meaningful and you would rather not manage a metric you only partly control, that combination is the exit ramp Amazon has deliberately left open. It costs you carrier flexibility. It buys you the guarantee.
The February forum thread ran hot, and the core complaint is fair: sellers do not control when a carrier makes the attempt. One seller put it plainly — how are we in control of USPS or UPS, when all of them will now attempt delivery whenever they get to it.
The examples people gave are the good part. A business in an industrial park received an Amazon Logistics delivery on a Saturday and could not work out how Amazon concluded they would be open. Another seller raised the case that has no clean answer: an order from a business in New York that closes Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, received Wednesday, with a required ship date of Thursday. Ship on time and it arrives closed. Ship late and you take the late-shipment hit instead. There is no setting that fixes that.
Where the objection goes wrong is the conclusion. The first reply in that thread was, in essence, use FBA or get out — and the seller underneath answered it correctly in six words: not a solution for custom products. That is the group this actually hits. Custom, made-to-order, oversized and low-turn inventory is a large share of what moves through Amazon Business in the first place, and it is the share FBA was never going to take. FBA has also stopped being a general-purpose answer to fulfillment metrics anyway, since the Featured Offer went fulfillment-neutral.
Two other things worth knowing. This is not isolated — Amazon has been tightening seller-fulfilled delivery standards all year, including a per-ZIP delivery promise tool for Seller Fulfilled Prime in July. And in Germany a parallel 90% on-time delivery requirement started on September 1, with Amazon warning that affected listings may be deactivated if the policy requirements are not met and that sellers may lose the ability to offer new FBM products — reported by Ecommerce News Europe in early July. If you sell on Amazon.de, that one has already started.
Now the bit that makes this different from every other performance metric you have had to manage.
When your seller-fulfilled offers get deactivated for Amazon Business customers, nothing on your listing changes. The ASIN stays live. Your retail offer stays live. Your price is the same, your stock is the same, your reviews are the same. Your retail Buy Box is untouched — Buy Box Lost will not fire, because you did not lose it. Business buyers just stop seeing you.
A seller in that February thread noticed the gap before Amazon had even attached a penalty to it. He went looking for a business-hour credential on the product page and the seller profile page, and could not find one. There is not one. There is a number on an eligibility tab.
That is the shape of where Amazon enforcement has been heading all year, and BHDR is the cleanest example of it yet: partial enforcement. One channel, one customer segment, one badge, one marketplace — removed while everything else stays exactly as it was. Full suspensions are loud. Partial removals are silent, and Seller Central is built to show you current state, never the moment the state changed.
Let me be straight about the limits here, because it matters. BHDR is a Seller Central number and you check it in Seller Central — SentryKit does not read your Program Eligibilities tab and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Nothing we send you will say your Business offers were deactivated.
What SentryKit gives you is the layer around it: account health rating movement, the Amazon notifications that tend to arrive before an enforcement action does, and a dated record of what changed on your listings and when. The value of that in November is elimination. A slice of revenue goes missing and there are three candidates — a listing got suppressed, a competitor took the Featured Offer, or an offer got pulled for one segment. The first two we can date for you. If neither fired, you are looking at the third, and you know where to go. Those three look identical in a revenue chart and have nothing else in common, and working out which one you are in is most of the job.
For wholesale sellers, where B2B is often a quiet side channel rather than the headline number, that distinction is the difference between a fix and a month of guessing.
Put September 30 and October 30 in your calendar. Then download the report — because the version of this problem that costs you money is the one where the number was sitting there since February and nobody looked.
Business Hour Delivery Rate (BHDR) is the percentage of your self-fulfilled shipments to Amazon Business customers at commercial addresses that are delivered during that customer’s operating hours. It runs on a rolling 14-day window, updates daily, and appears in the Account Health dashboard under Program Eligibilities. FBA orders and standard retail orders are excluded.
September 30, 2026, in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. If your rate is below 90% on that date, Amazon sends a notification with recommendations. If it has not improved by October 30, 2026, Amazon may deactivate your seller-fulfilled offers for Amazon Business customers.
No. Amazon’s stated consequence is deactivation of your seller-fulfilled offers for Amazon Business customers. FBA offers and standard retail offer eligibility are unaffected, and the account itself is not the subject of the policy. Some coverage has described this as a suspension risk, which overstates it.
Download the BHDR report from the Account Health dashboard under Program Eligibilities to see performance by carrier, then route Amazon Business orders through the carriers hitting above 90%. In the US, Amazon recommends UPS Ground, UPS Ground Saver and FedEx Ground. Amazon also says shipments using Buy Shipping alongside Automated Handling Time and Shipping Settings Automation are guaranteed to meet the requirement.
You had no qualifying shipments in the current 14-day window, meaning no self-fulfilled orders to Amazon Business customers at commercial addresses. The metric only populates when there is something to measure.
No. BHDR governs whether your seller-fulfilled offers are shown to Amazon Business customers. It does not feed Featured Offer selection, and your retail Buy Box position is unaffected by it, which is why a BHDR deactivation is easy to miss.
Raghav Tiwari · Founder, SentryKit
Raghav is the founder of SentryKit. He spent years running his own Amazon storefronts before building it, and writes about Buy Box strategy, competitive intelligence, and the platform shifts sellers can’t afford to miss.
