How to Improve Your Amazon DSP Scorecard: A Complete Guide

Your Amazon DSP scorecard is not just a report card. It is the single most important number in your business. It determines your bonus eligibility, your relationship with Amazon, and ultimately whether your business grows or gets squeezed out. Yet most DSP owners only look at it when something has already gone wrong.

This guide is about getting ahead of it — understanding what Amazon actually measures, what causes scores to slip, and what the best-performing DSPs do differently every single day.

What Amazon Is Actually Measuring

Amazon tracks your performance across dozens of metrics, but they are not all equal. Some metrics recover quickly. Others linger for weeks. Some are forgiving of a bad day. Others penalize you the moment you cross a threshold.

Understanding the weight and behavior of each metric is the foundation of scorecard management.

Delivered Not Received (DNR)

DNR is one of the most heavily weighted metrics on your scorecard and one of the hardest to recover from. It is triggered when a customer reports that their package was marked delivered but never arrived. A high DNR rate signals to Amazon that your drivers are either misdelivering packages, falsely marking deliveries, or both.

Common causes include drivers delivering to the wrong address, leaving packages in unsecured locations without photo documentation, and marking packages delivered before they actually are. Each of these has a process fix, but the fix only works if someone is monitoring the data close enough to catch the pattern before it becomes a trend.

Delivery Completion Rate (DCR)

DCR measures the percentage of assigned packages your team successfully delivers in a given day. Anything short of a delivery — a missed stop, an undelivered package returned to station, a driver who ran out of time — pulls this number down.

DCR is highly sensitive to dispatch quality. Routes that are poorly built, drivers who are assigned too many stops, or call-outs that are not covered fast enough all show up here. The good news is that DCR responds quickly to operational improvements. Fix your dispatch process and your DCR numbers will follow within days.

Photo on Delivery (POD) Compliance

POD compliance tracks whether your drivers are taking required delivery photos. Amazon has made photo documentation mandatory for an increasing percentage of deliveries, and failure to comply drags your scorecard down regardless of how well everything else is going.

This is almost entirely a training and habit issue. Drivers who understand why it matters and who are coached when they miss it will comply consistently. Drivers who are never coached will slip — and your scorecard will pay for it.

Customer Escalations

Customer escalations capture complaints routed directly to Amazon about your delivery team. These include reports of rude behavior, unsafe driving, damaged property, and package mishandling. Unlike some metrics that have gradual thresholds, escalations carry immediate weight and are difficult to dispute after the fact.

Preventing escalations requires proactive driver coaching, clear behavioral expectations, and a documentation trail that protects you when disputes arise.

FICO Score

Your FICO score, generated by Netradyne, reflects the aggregate driving safety performance of your fleet. It factors in speeding, harsh braking, distracted driving, seatbelt compliance, and other safety events captured by the in-vehicle camera system.

FICO has a direct link to your insurance costs and your standing with Amazon. A declining FICO is almost always a coaching problem — specific drivers with specific behaviors that have not been addressed. The fix is systematic: pull the data, identify the drivers, have the conversation, document it, and monitor for improvement.

The Tiers: What Fantastic Plus Actually Requires

Amazon uses a tiered rating system — Fantastic Plus, Fantastic, Great, Good, Fair, and At Risk. Most DSPs sit somewhere between Good and Fantastic. Reaching and holding Fantastic Plus is what separates the top performers.

Fantastic Plus is not just about having good numbers on your best days. It is about consistency. Amazon evaluates your performance over rolling windows, which means one bad week can drag down a month of strong performance — and one strong week cannot rescue a month of poor performance.

The DSPs that hold Fantastic Plus do a few things that others do not.

They monitor every metric every day, not just when something looks wrong. They have a process for catching deviations early, before they compound. They treat driver coaching as an ongoing operational function rather than a reaction to problems. And they have someone whose job it is to watch the numbers — not as an add-on to five other responsibilities, but as a primary function.

Amazon also rewards Fantastic Plus performance with a $5,000 bonus each time it is achieved. For a well-run operation, this bonus alone can cover a significant portion of operational costs for the period.

The Most Common Reasons Scorecards Slip

After working with DSP owners across different markets and station types, the same causes come up repeatedly.

Nobody is watching between Monday and Friday

Most DSP owners review their scorecard on the weekend or when Amazon sends an alert. By that point, a metric that started moving on Tuesday has had three or four days to compound. What could have been a quick correction becomes a scorecard recovery project.

Daily monitoring is not optional if you want to hold Fantastic Plus. It is the baseline.

Coaching happens after the fact, not before the threshold

Most driver coaching is reactive — a driver does something wrong, eventually someone notices, and eventually someone has a conversation. By the time that conversation happens, the metric impact is already baked in.

The DSPs that perform best treat coaching as a weekly rhythm, not a response to problems. They pull Netradyne data on a schedule, they review it systematically, and they document every conversation. This protects them in disputes and creates a paper trail that shows Amazon a proactive operation.

Dispatch problems create metric problems

A poorly built route creates late deliveries. A late delivery creates a DCR problem. A driver rushing to finish creates POD misses and escalation risk. Dispatch quality is upstream of almost every metric on your scorecard, which means getting dispatch right is the highest-leverage operational investment you can make.

This includes building routes well before the morning, having a coverage plan for call-outs, monitoring pace throughout the day, and having the capacity to coordinate rescues when they are needed — not when they become emergencies.

Documentation gaps create dispute problems

When a customer escalation is filed or a metric anomaly needs to be contested, the DSPs that win disputes are the ones with documentation. Coaching logs, incident records, delivery photos, driver communication records — these are what separate a successful dispute from an accepted penalty.

Most DSPs fall behind on documentation not because they do not understand its importance but because it is the first thing that gets deprioritized when the day gets busy.

A Daily Scorecard Routine That Works

The DSPs we work with that consistently hold Fantastic Plus tend to follow a similar daily rhythm. It is not complicated, but it requires discipline and someone who owns the function.

Every morning before routes launch, someone reviews the previous day's metrics. Not a quick glance — a systematic review across DNR, DCR, POD, FICO, and escalations. Any movement in the wrong direction gets flagged with context: which driver, which route, what likely caused it.

Throughout the day, someone watches pace. Drivers who are falling behind against their projected completion time get flagged before the gap becomes a rescue situation. This alone prevents more scorecard damage than almost any other single habit.

At the end of the day, incidents are logged. Netradyne events are pulled. Any coaching conversations that are needed get scheduled for the next available window. Nothing sits unaddressed overnight.

Once a week, the data is reviewed in aggregate. Patterns are identified. Coaching is delivered based on data, not impressions. The week ahead is set up with that context in mind.

This is not a large operation. It does not require a team of people. But it does require someone whose attention is not divided across fifteen other things — someone who can give the scorecard the consistent focus it actually needs.

When You Cannot Do It Yourself

Most DSP owners reach a point where they understand exactly what needs to happen but cannot personally execute on it. The operation is too demanding, the days are too long, and the scorecard is always competing with something more urgent for attention.

This is where a specialized remote operations team changes the equation. Not a generic virtual assistant — a team that works specifically with Amazon DSP businesses, understands the metrics, knows the tools, and has developed the processes to monitor and respond at the speed the business requires.

At Nizod, this is exactly what we do. Our DSP operations team monitors your Amazon Logistics dashboard daily, flags metric movements with context before they become problems, handles driver performance documentation, supports your dispatch coordination, and manages the back-office work that falls through the cracks when everyone is focused on getting routes out the door.

The DSPs we work with have achieved Fantastic Plus ratings on the Amazon Logistics dashboard nine consecutive times. The $5,000 bonus that comes with each Fantastic Plus achievement has covered the cost of our service many times over for those clients.

If your scorecard is not where it needs to be — or if you are holding it where it is but spending more time than you should to do it — we would like to talk.

Reach out through our contact page or visit our Amazon DSP Operations service page to learn more.