> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Dispatch SLA Compliance, Alibris > % of orders dispatched before dispatch_due_by, drives Alibris seller standing. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Marketplace](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) > % of orders dispatched before dispatch\_due\_by, drives Alibris seller standing. ## At a glance > Percentage of Alibris orders dispatched on or before the `dispatch_due_by` deadline Alibris set when the order was confirmed. Drives Alibris seller standing alongside cancellation rate; the metric buyers see when choosing between two listings of the same ISBN. | | | | --------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **What it counts** | `COUNT(orders WHERE dispatch_confirmed_at <= dispatch_due_by) / COUNT(orders)` over trailing 30 days. Both numerator and denominator restricted to dispatched orders (cancellations sit on [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate), not here). | | **API endpoint + report** | Computed locally from the Alibris Inbound Orders feed (`dispatch_due_by` field) joined to the seller's confirm-shipment events sent back via the Outbound Confirmations feed. Alibris publishes the resulting compliance figure on the seller's *Performance* tile, with a 24 to 48h lag from this card. | | **Listing-quality impact** | **Direct.** Sellers below 95% are flagged in seller standing; below 90% drops one ranking tier (\~25 to 35% traffic loss); below 85% triggers automatic account review. Alibris Library Services (institutional buyer cohort) is particularly sensitive to seller-standing tier; libraries often filter to top-tier sellers only. | | **Fees / commission** | Not applicable (count-based ratio). Commission impact is indirect: a search-rank demotion costs revenue, which costs commission paid. | | **Refunds / cancellations** | Excluded from numerator and denominator. Cancelling instead of late-shipping moves the breach to [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate), 3% threshold. | | **Currency** | Not applicable. | | **Dispatch deadline calculation** | Alibris sets `dispatch_due_by` based on the seller's published handling time (1 to 5 business days, set in seller profile) plus order placement timestamp. Clock excludes weekends and seller-marked holiday days. Most booksellers run 2-business-day handling. | | **What counts as "dispatched"** | The seller's confirm-shipment event timestamp. Not the carrier scan, not buyer-received. Sellers who confirm-and-then-pack inflate SLA by 4 to 24 hours; Alibris tolerates this but over-tolerance generates buyer complaints. | | **Multi-marketplace overlap** | Each marketplace tracks SLA independently with different thresholds: Alibris 95%, AbeBooks 95%, Amazon Books 96% (Late Shipment Rate \<4%), eBay 95%. A seller hitting 96% on Alibris may be hitting 92% on Amazon, getting the harshest penalty there. | | **Time window** | `30D vsP` (trailing 30 days vs prior 30 days). | | **Alert trigger** | `<95%`, the Alibris-published threshold. | | **Roles** | owner, operations. | ## Calculation Calculated automatically from your Alibris data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading. ## Worked example A US independent bookseller, 666 Alibris orders in trailing 30 days, two-business-day handling time, single fulfilment location. Window 02 Apr 26 to 01 May 26. | Status | Orders | Share | | ----------------------------------------- | --------- | ----------- | | Dispatched on or before `dispatch_due_by` | 624 | 93.7% | | Dispatched 1 to 24h late | 28 | 4.2% | | Dispatched >24h late | 9 | 1.4% | | Cancelled (excluded from SLA) | 5 | 0.7% | | Still pending dispatch in window | 0 | 0.0% | | **Total in numerator/denominator** | **661** | **100%** | | **Dispatch SLA Compliance (this card)** | **94.4%** | (624 / 661) | The card reads **94.4%**, BELOW the 95% threshold; alert is firing. The seller is at risk of search-rank demotion within 24 to 48h. Six things to notice that are specific to Alibris and the book trade: 1. **The 28 orders dispatched 1 to 24h late are the most preventable category and represent 76% of the breach.** All 28 came from a confirm-shipment cron job that runs daily at 23:00 EST while the warehouse pack-and-ship operation closes at 17:00 EST; the 6h gap puts every same-day shipment into the late bucket on the next-day's dispatch\_due\_by deadline. Moving the cron to 17:30 EST would absorb most of these. 2. **A 9-order >24h-late tail can be dominated by one stockout event.** Investigation showed 7 of the 9 came from a single 3-day inventory mismatch (28 to 30 Apr 26) where a warehouse pallet had been moved without the inventory tool being updated. The remaining 2 were genuine condition-mismatch events that should have been cancellations. 3. **Alibris's seller standing tile lags this card by 24 to 48h.** The bookseller's *Performance* page on 01 May 26 shows 95.1% (ours says 94.4%). Alibris recomputes the dashboard tile once a day around 02:00 PST. By 02 May 26 our card matches within 0.1 to 0.3 points. 4. **Alibris Library Services orders (institutional buyers) have a different threshold expectation.** Libraries often have internal procurement rules requiring 96%+ seller-standing. Falling to 94.4% may not just demote search rank, it may trigger your account being filtered OUT of library-buyer search results entirely, costing you the high-AOV institutional cohort. The financial impact is disproportionate to the percentage drop. 5. **Cross-marketplace consistency matters more than the Alibris number alone.** The same bookseller's [AbeBooks SLA Compliance](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/abebooks/dispatch-sla-compliance) is 95.8% in the same window. The difference is the confirm-shipment cron runs daily on Alibris but hourly on AbeBooks; Alibris orders are actually dispatched on time but reported late. Fixing the Alibris feed cadence to hourly would lift Alibris SLA into compliance. 6. **The 7-day recovery path is well-defined.** If the bookseller fixes the cron schedule today (01 May 26), the daily SLA contribution flips from 90 to 95% breach rate to 99% on-time tomorrow. The 30-day rolling figure climbs by \~0.4 points/day; back above 95% by 04 May 26 (3 days). Search-rank demotion typically reverses 7 to 14 days after the metric clears. ## Sibling cards merchants should reference together SLA Compliance is the operational vital sign. Pair with these to interpret it: | Card | Why pair it with Dispatch SLA Compliance | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate) | Booksellers can hide late-dispatches by cancelling instead. The two share a budget; pushing one down often pushes the other up. Alibris polices both. | | [Pending Dispatch](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/pending-dispatch) | Leading indicator. Orders past 75% of `dispatch_due_by` budget are about to become breaches. | | [Avg Time to Process (hrs)](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/avg-time-to-process) | Distribution view. SLA compliance is threshold-based; this is the mean. Both move together at different speeds. | | [Inbound Orders File Lag](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/inbound-orders-file-lag) | If inbound feed lags, your dispatch clock runs before you see the order. 6h feed lag eats 6 hours of the 2-day handling budget. | | [Last Successful Upload](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/last-successful-upload) | Outbound-confirm uploads are how Alibris learns you dispatched on time. Failed upload reads as late dispatch. | | [Total Revenue](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/total-revenue) | SLA breaches dropping below 95% trigger search-rank demotion costing 25 to 35% of organic traffic. Revenue impact lags by 3 to 7 days. | | [AbeBooks SLA Compliance](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/abebooks/dispatch-sla-compliance) | Closest peer. Multi-marketplace booksellers should track both; same fulfilment team usually drives both numbers. | | [Amazon Books Late Shipment Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/amazon/late-shipment-rate) | Amazon's equivalent with tighter 4% threshold (96% on-time). Same operation will read better on Alibris/AbeBooks than Amazon. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in the Alibris seller dashboard:** Two views matter: 1. [**Sellers → Performance Dashboard**](https://www.alibris.com/sellers/performance). The official seller-standing view with the rolling 30-day on-time-dispatch percentage. 2. [**Sellers → Manage Orders → filter by Late**](https://www.alibris.com/sellers/orders). Row-level audit of every late-flagged order with the actual late delta. **Why our number may legitimately differ from the Alibris dashboard:** | Reason | Direction | Why | | --------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Refresh cadence** | Theirs lags ours by 24 to 48h | Alibris recomputes the Performance Dashboard once daily around 02:00 PST. Our card recomputes every 4 hours on every feed refresh. By day 3 the two match within 0.2 points. | | **Time zone** | Boundary days | Alibris uses US Pacific Time on the .com flagship; the connector uses UTC. Boundary effects shift one or two orders per day. | | **Outbound-confirm latency** | Ours can show late even when Alibris shows on-time | If your outbound-confirm cron runs daily and an order shipped at 16:00 yesterday but the confirm event landed at 06:00 today, Alibris records dispatch at 06:00 (potentially late). Run hourly to avoid. | | **Cancellation reclassification** | Either | A late-dispatch retroactively converted to cancellation moves out of the SLA denominator. Alibris's dashboard sometimes lags this re-classification by 24 to 48h. | | **Holiday-day handling** | Tiny | Sellers can mark vacation/holiday days in their Alibris profile; on those days `dispatch_due_by` pauses. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** The dispatch-SLA concept exists on every marketplace, but threshold and clock-stopping rules differ. Treat each platform's number on its own terms. | Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [`abebooks.ab_sla_compliance`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/abebooks/dispatch-sla-compliance) | Same operation, often different number. | Feed-cadence differences (daily vs hourly) and AbeBooks's slightly different `dispatch_due_by` rounding can decouple by 2 to 5 percentage points. | | [`amazon.amzn_late_shipment_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/amazon/late-shipment-rate) | Inverse-direction metric (Amazon counts late, this counts on-time), tighter threshold. | Amazon's clock starts when paid, not when seller is notified. Amazon penalises seller-error cancellation harshly; Alibris tolerates up to 3%. | | [`ebay.ebay_late_shipment_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/late-shipment-rate) | Different scoring model entirely. | eBay measures by carrier scan, not seller confirm. Booksellers who confirm-then-pack see eBay tighter than Alibris. | ***
Marketplace-peer documentation cross-reference Dispatch SLA is the most-watched seller-standing metric across every marketplace. Thresholds and clock-stop rules differ; the cross-link is for navigation. * [`abebooks.ab_sla_compliance`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/abebooks/dispatch-sla-compliance) * [`amazon.amzn_late_shipment_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/amazon/late-shipment-rate) * [`ebay.ebay_late_shipment_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/late-shipment-rate) (when connected)
## Known limitations / merchant FAQs **My SLA dropped to 92% and Alibris just demoted my listings. What do I do?** Three actions in order: (1) **Look at [Pending Dispatch](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/pending-dispatch) right now**, drain the queue if anything is sitting past 75% of its budget. (2) **Audit [Top Upload Error Types](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/top-upload-error-types)** for outbound-confirm failures, a broken upload cron is the most common cause of false-late readings. (3) **Extend handling time from 2 to 3 business days in the seller profile** if workload outgrew capacity. Once SLA recovers above 95%, the search-rank demotion typically reverses within 7 to 14 days. **Why does this card differ from Alibris's own seller-standing percentage?** Alibris recomputes once daily (around 02:00 PST); we recompute every 4 hours. By day 3 they match within 0.2 points. If they're more than 1 point apart over a 30-day window, the cause is usually outbound-confirm latency, dispatches happen on time but the confirm event reaches Alibris late. Run outbound-confirms hourly to fix. **Vendor (Alibris) vs commerce-platform (Shopify), why doesn't Shopify have a dispatch SLA card?** Different contract. Shopify is your DTC site; you set the shipping promise; the buyer accepts it; if you miss it, the buyer is unhappy but no third party imposes a threshold. Alibris is a marketplace; Alibris sets the buyer's expectation, owns the buyer relationship, penalises you for missing the deadline. Marketplace-side dispatch SLAs require different operational discipline than DTC shipping promises. **Are fees deducted from this calculation? Does payout timing matter?** Neither, this is a count-based ratio. No fees, no money. The relationship to fees is indirect: SLA breaches that drop you below 95% trigger a search-rank demotion that reduces revenue (and therefore commission). Alibris doesn't directly fine the seller for SLA breaches. **Alibris Library Services / institutional buyers, do they affect SLA differently?** Yes, importantly. Library buyers often use net-30 terms and have internal procurement rules requiring vendors to maintain 96%+ on-time-dispatch. Falling below 96% can trigger automatic exclusion from library-buyer search filters even though Alibris's published threshold is 95%. The financial impact of dropping from 96% to 94% is disproportionate because it loses you the high-AOV institutional cohort. Treat 96% as your real internal target if you do meaningful Library Services volume. **My multi-marketplace pricing arbitrage means I sometimes cancel Alibris orders to ship via AbeBooks instead. Does that hurt this card?** Cancellations don't hit this card directly (excluded from denominator), but they do hit [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate) with its own 3% threshold. The arbitrage strategy you're describing is also a violation of marketplace terms (selling outside the platform after taking the order); Alibris closes accounts for repeat patterns. Don't do this. Take the listing off Alibris proactively, not after the order lands. **Inventory-sync lag, the book sold on AbeBooks 5 minutes before Alibris confirmed the order. Will this hurt SLA?** Stockout cancellations sit on [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate), not here. Excluded from this card's numerator and denominator. They hurt seller standing differently: Alibris tracks "seller-error cancellation rate" with a 3% threshold; oversold-stock breaches that. Real-time inventory sync via single-source-of-truth platform is the structural fix. **ISBN match quality, does it affect SLA?** Indirectly. ISBN-mismatch flags trigger Alibris to ask for refund, becoming a cancellation, hitting [Cancellation Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/cancellation-rate) not here. Booksellers with chronic [ISBN Coverage](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/alibris/isbn-coverage) issues have higher cancellation rates and worse seller standing overall, but this card is structurally insulated from ISBN-data quality. **Rare books vs commodity books, do they have different SLAs?** Same SLA threshold (95%), same clock, same penalty. The difference is operational margin: rare books are slow-pick (find the book in the rare-book room, double-check condition, package carefully), commodity is fast-pick. Most booksellers run a single 2-day handling time for both, which is fine for commodity and tight for rare. Booksellers selling >50% rare typically need 3-business-day handling. **Why does today's number swing so much, and should I worry about a one-day dip to 92%?** Today's number swings, especially on lower-volume booksellers. A bookseller doing 22 orders/day will see this card move 4.5 points per single late dispatch. The 30-day rolling number is the only one to act on; one-day dips below 95% are noise unless you see a structural cause. *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Dispatch SLA Compliance* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Alibris and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.