Our goal is for all of our sellers to succeed and meet our standards. Meeting and maintaining our standards will give members the best experience possible. Our Late Shipping rate is calculated by adding all the quantity of line items that shipped after the Expected Ship Date divided by the total quantity of line items (after removing items that were cancelled by the member) expected to ship within the given time period.

Improve Late Shipment Rate

Sears Marketplace requires Sellers to maintain a < 4% late shipping rate. If you received a notice stating your Late Shipping Rate is too high, here are some steps we suggest you to take immediately:

• Analyze the time it actually takes to ship orders
• Compare the time it takes to the order processing time that has been provided
• If you take longer than your order processing time, look to optimize your order fulfillment process
• Answer the following questions:
  • How long does it take to retrieve orders after they are placed? Can you shorten this time?
  • Are you retrieving orders often enough?
  • Are you marking orders shipped in a timely manner?
  • Is your carrier picking up orders every day? If not, ask for a daily pick-up
• If there are no improvements to be made to your order processing, and you are consistently a set number of days late, consider updating your order processing time by adding additional days. This will help to bring down your late shipping rate quickly and provide members with a more realistic expectation of product arrival times
• Are you entering your non-shipping days into your Seller Portal profile if your company is closed and has a non-shipping day?

It is proven that the lower the order processing time the more orders you will potentially receive. However, providing incorrect order processing times and shipping items late produces a bad member experience.  Each seller is required to accurately provide the lowest possible order processing time.

Improving Cancellation Rate

Sellers should not be canceling an order unless the Member requests a cancellation. Sears Marketplace requires Sellers to maintain a < 3.5% cancellation rate. If you receive a notice stating your Cancellation Rate is too high, here are some steps we suggest you take immediately:

• Review your active items and removed any that are discontinued or no longer active
• Review your inventory and make sure that they are 100% accurate and only items that are physically on hand are listed as available
• Update inventory on a regular basis, especially if you share inventory feeds with multiple marketplaces
• On hot items, only provide a portion of your inventory to ensure you don’t oversell an item
• If your inventory updates are done manually, look into automating with our API options. See our Seller API Guide for more information

Best Shipping Practices

• Only provide inventory count for items that you have in your warehouses. Do not include inventory that is on order
• Check and retrieve orders several times throughout the day
• Ship the orders by the Expected Ship Date listed on each order
  • Note: See below for how the Expected Ship Date is calculated
• Mark orders as shipped in a timely manner. Do not wait longer than necessary to update tracking information
  • If for some reason you do not get an order marked as shipped on the date it actually shipped, make sure you are putting the correct ship date on the transaction when marking orders as shipped. If your marking orders shipped the day after it shipped, the default date is the current date and it will appear to be late

Expected Ship Date Calculation

The Expected Ship Date is calculated by adding the number of days listed as an item’s “Order Processing Time” to the order date. The calculation takes into account weekends and does not count the order date as a processing day. The order processing time starts the next Sears business day.

The order date is based on Central Time Zone with the cut off time of 5:00 PM being the end of the day. If an order is placed after 5:00 pm Central Time, an extra day may be added by our system. When in doubt, always ship the order by the Expected/Requested ship by date listed on the order.

There are 6 days that are considered to be Sears holidays and are not counted (an extra day is added) when calculating the Expected Ship Date.

Examples:
An order is placed on Monday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Wednesday.
An order is placed on Tuesday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Thursday.
An order is placed on Wednesday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Friday.
An order is placed on Thursday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Monday.
An order is placed on Friday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Tuesday.
An order is placed on Saturday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Tuesday.
An order is placed on Sunday > Order Processing Time is 2 days > Expected ship date would be Tuesday.

Note:  Do not calculate the expected ship date based on the order date. Always check the expected ship date that is listed on the order. This is the date that is used when calculating if you shipped on time or late.

Holidays Already Accounted For by Sears

• New Year’s Day
• Memorial Day
• July 4^th
• Labor Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day

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