How marketplace SLA clocks really work (and why yours is probably wrong)
UK Mirakl operators count business hours, some operators elsewhere count calendar hours, Amazon counts 24 hours flat. A Friday 16:55 message is due at a different moment on each. The maths, with weekends and bank holidays.
Three kinds of clock
Every marketplace measures your reply time. Very few of them measure it the same way, and the difference is not a detail: it decides whether a Friday afternoon message is due on Saturday or on Tuesday.
- Business-hours clocks. Most Mirakl operators count 24 hours of working time, usually Monday to Friday, 09:00–17:00, in the marketplace’s own country and time zone. Nights, weekends and public holidays do not count. The UK operators work this way: B&Q and Argos both give 24 business hours.
- Calendar clocks. Some operators, mostly outside the UK, simply count 24 (or 48) elapsed hours, whatever day it is. OTTO in Germany, for instance, expects an answer within 48 hours on weekdays.
- Amazon’s wall clock. Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging expects a response within 24 hours, seven days a week. Saturday counts. Christmas Day counts.
The exact rule per operator lives in that operator’s seller performance policy, and two marketplaces on the same Mirakl platform can disagree. Treat the clock as a property of each marketplace, not of your team.
One message, three deadlines
The same customer message arrives at 16:55 on a Friday. Here is when it is due under each clock.
Two things follow. On a business-hours marketplace, a Friday-evening message is not urgent, and treating it as urgent costs you a weekend for nothing. On Amazon or a calendar-hours operator, the same message is a weekend job, and an inbox that shows “23 hours left” on Saturday morning is telling the truth.
Bank holidays and the Monday trap
Public holidays are where most home-made SLA spreadsheets break. A business-hours clock pauses on the marketplace country’s holidays, not yours. A UK operator pauses on the August bank holiday (the England and Wales list, not Scotland’s); a German operator pauses on Whit Monday; if your team is in a third country, neither pause matches your calendar.
The Monday trap is the other way round. Messages pile up over the weekend with their clocks stopped, then all of them start at 09:00 on Monday at once. In the data behind this article 37% of conversations started outside 9 to 5 and 12% at the weekend, and Monday was the busiest gap. The inbox that looked calm on Sunday night is overdue by Tuesday lunchtime if the team does not start with the oldest.
What pauses the clock, and what does not
| Criterion | Business-hours operator | Calendar operator | Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekend | Pauses | Counts | Counts |
| Public holiday (marketplace country) | Pauses | Counts | Counts |
| Your own auto-acknowledgement | Usually does not stop the clock | Usually does not stop the clock | Automated replies are restricted |
| Operator’s own notice in the thread | No customer SLA | No customer SLA | n/a |
| Customer writes again before you reply | Clock starts at the first message | Clock starts at the first message | Clock starts at the first message |
Two of those rows catch people out. An automatic “we will be back Monday” message does not restart the clock on most operators; it is a courtesy to the customer, not a reply for the metric. And a second message from the customer does not give you a fresh 24 hours; the clock has been running since the first one.
A checklist for your own inbox
- Write down, per marketplace, whether the clock is business hours, calendar hours or wall clock, and which country’s holidays apply.
- Sort Monday’s inbox by time remaining on the operator’s clock, not by arrival time. They are different lists.
- Count the SLA from the first unanswered customer message, not the latest one.
- Treat Amazon as a seven-day rota. A Saturday message is due on Sunday.
- If you send an out-of-hours acknowledgement, keep it to business-hours marketplaces and to genuinely new messages. Here is what happens otherwise.
- Three clock types: business hours, calendar hours, Amazon wall clock. Each marketplace has its own.
- A Friday 16:55 message is due Saturday on Amazon and Tuesday on a business-hours operator.
- Holidays pause the clock only on business-hours operators, and only the marketplace country's holidays.
- Sort by time remaining on the operator's clock, counted from the first unanswered message.
Questions people ask
What is the reply SLA on Mirakl marketplaces like B&Q or Argos?
Most Mirakl operators expect a first reply within 24 hours and count that in the operator's business hours, typically Monday to Friday 09:00–17:00 in the marketplace's country. Some count calendar hours. The exact rule is in each operator's seller performance policy and can differ per marketplace on the same platform.
How does Amazon count the 24-hour message response time?
Amazon counts 24 hours of wall-clock time from the buyer's message, seven days a week, including weekends and holidays. A message received at 16:55 on Friday is due at 16:55 on Saturday. There is no business-hours pause.
Do bank holidays pause a business-hours SLA?
On operators that measure in business hours, yes: public holidays of the marketplace's country are not business days, so the clock pauses. A message that arrives on the Friday before a bank-holiday weekend is not due until the Tuesday afternoon. Amazon's wall clock does not pause.