Amazon pays DSP operators differently based on performance — not just in reputation or contract security, but in actual cents per package, every week, on every delivery. Fantastic Plus earns 15 cents per package above base rate. Fantastic earns 7 cents. Everything below that earns nothing extra, according to Route Consultant's breakdown of the DSP compensation structure. For an operator running 40 vans at 150 packages per day across five days, the gap between Fantastic Plus and Fantastic is not a morale distinction — it's $124,800 a year.
Most operators don't have that number on a weekly dashboard. Many don't know which specific metric is holding them below the tier they believe they're running.
What Fantastic Actually Requires
Amazon's scorecard runs across multiple simultaneous metrics, each with its own threshold. Delivery Completion Rate (DCR) for a Fantastic score requires delivering more than 99% of dispatched packages, according to Amazon's published metric documentation. Customer Delivery Feedback requires a Positive Response Rate of 98% or higher. Scorecard Attrition — the rate at which drivers are churning out of your operation — must stay at or below 1.0%. Customer Escalation Defect DPMO, where Tier 1 infractions carry triple weighting and Multiple Tier Infractions carry double weighting, needs to reach zero to earn Fantastic, per the same documentation.
That's four simultaneous thresholds, all of which must be met to qualify. Missing any one of them drops the operator below Fantastic regardless of how cleanly the other three metrics are running.
And that's before the newer measurement categories. Hera Solutions' DSP performance tracking platform added direct support for Engine Off Compliance (EOC) and Proper Parking Sequence (PPS) in 2025 — two behavioral metrics Amazon now tracks at the individual delivery event level. EOC measures whether the vehicle is powered down at each stop. PPS tracks whether the sequence of vehicle and driver actions at the delivery point follows Amazon's defined protocol. Neither maps cleanly to the package count or DCR numbers operators have traditionally managed, but both now appear as trackable data in performance systems that feed into the broader scorecard picture.
The Threshold Problem
Here's where operators consistently get caught: these metrics are pass-fail at extremely tight thresholds, and the failure mode is invisible at the route level.
A 98.5% DCR is not Fantastic. It's a 0.5% miss against a 99% floor. In a week where your operation delivers 30,000 packages, that 0.5% gap represents 150 undelivered packages spread across dozens of routes and drivers. The individual causes — a failed delivery attempt, a vehicle breakdown on a specific route, a cluster of access issues at a particular complex — are each manageable. But finding them requires tracking delivery completion by route and driver on a daily basis, not discovering the aggregate at end-of-week scorecard review.
The same logic applies to attrition. A 1.0% monthly attrition threshold means losing no more than one driver per hundred each month. In a 40-driver operation, that's less than one departure per month. Miss it — one resignation, one termination — and the metric fails for that scoring period. Attrition rates, as noted in research by the American Transportation Research Institute, have historically run far higher in last-mile delivery, with annual driver turnover across the commercial trucking sector averaging above 90%. Staying at or below Amazon's 1.0% monthly floor requires active retention management, not just competitive pay.
What the Tier Is Worth
Route Consultant's DSP compensation analysis puts the annual math in clear terms: Fantastic Plus earns 15 cents per package above base, Fantastic earns 7 cents. The difference between the two tiers is 8 cents per package. At 30,000 packages per week, that's $2,400 every week from a single missed metric threshold — or $124,800 over a year.
The difference between Fantastic and no tier bonus is 7 cents per package — $2,100 per week at the same volume, or $109,200 annually.
Amazon does waive scorecard requirements during peak season and Prime Day for operators who submit the waiver request, according to Route Consultant. Outside those windows, the thresholds hold and the compensation difference is real and weekly.
The operators consistently running Fantastic Plus are not operating inherently better businesses. They're operating more precisely measured ones. They know their DCR by Tuesday morning. They know which driver's EOC compliance rate is pulling the fleet average down. They've built daily measurement cadence into their operation before Amazon's scorecard does the accounting for them — and charges accordingly.
Sources: Route Consultant, "How Are Amazon DSPs Paid?"; Amazon published metric documentation, DCR and DPMO definitions (via handsonthedash.com); Hera Solutions DSP performance tracking platform (2025); American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) operational costs report