OTD metrics are killing my account
TL;DR: How are seller-fulfilled Walmart sellers meeting OTD metrics profitably without WFS or SSS? USPS is too slow, UPS is too expensive, and SSS tanked our metrics.
Hi everyone! New here and kind of new to my company's account. I was given this account because I fix things, and this account is stressing me out more than any of my big name accounts. I work for a dropship distributor and we are feeding inventory to Walmart Marketplace every 30 minutes. I have lag time for all items set at 1 day. I configured our manual shipping based on actual performance. We mostly use USPS - our shipping software price shops for the best rate on every order and it is rarely UPS. We do not use FedEx. USPS is awful, especially since we are based out of the South, by the Gulf. I had Chatgpt classify all of our orders back in April by Walmart's regions in the templates. Nowhere, not even my area, averaged less than 4 days in transit; the worst areas averaged 9.
Our metrics are usually toeing the line (87-88.9%) and Walmart keeps trying to suspend our account or deactivate our seller-fulfilled listings. I have set up our account to say our carrier does not deliver on Saturdays to try to give us some more time even. We do not do WFS. It is not our business model. It feels like Walmart is trying to force sellers to do this so they can charge them for everything under the sun while reaping the benefits of faster shipping times.
Anyway, our account manager pushed SSS heavily since I started having monthly meetings with her. I inherited this account in January and the manager who had this account before me had en-enrolled us from SSS last year - I know she wouldn't have done that if there wasn't a good reason. But our account manager pushed and pushed endlessly, so I gave in and enrolled our account. I warned her that I did not think this was going to work, as our system does not feed Walmart's chosen carrier to our shipping software. She pushed this as the absolute solution to our problems, as it would "take us off the hook" for OTD metrics. Well, our metrics TANKED very rapidly, with over 50% of it due to carrier mismatch, even though I set the priority as cost-saving over shipping speed. It chose UPS most of the time, and we sell at a loss when we ship UPS at least 90% of the time. UPS also tanks our valid tracking metrics when we have to switch temporarily to bring sour OTD metrics up. She set up a meeting with someone from the SSS team and admitted on the meeting that she wasn't very educated on the program.
I very quickly unenrolled us from SSS and set all regions to 5 days. Our account manager said she would protect our account from suspension for 30 days, but they deactivated our listings on Friday. I was able to get them turned back on before the weekend, but I have very little faith in this whole process. How is everyone else able to operate profitably on this platform? What shipping options are you using if not on SSS? Is everyone being forced into WFS? Are there other Walmart-approved carriers that are less costly than UPS but with greater performance? This is like an endless game of whackamole, and I can't help but think that this is by design. Any advice?