Home Depot Vendor Turn Time (VTT) Guide: Dropship Suppliers

Vendor Turn Time, or VTT, is the metric Home Depot uses to measure how quickly a dropship supplier picks, packs, and ships an order after receiving it through Rithum. It runs continuously from order transmission to ship confirmation, excluding weekends and Home Depot-designated holidays. For most parcel SKUs, the standard is one business day, and repeated misses show up directly in compliance performance.

This guide covers how VTT is measured, where to check your numbers, how to request changes, and the inventory and shipping rules that determine whether your orders count as on time.

What Is Home Depot Vendor Turn Time (VTT)

VTT measures the elapsed time between two events: when Home Depot transmits a purchase order to you through Rithum, and when you confirm that order as shipped, also in Rithum. Weekends and Home Depot-designated holidays do not count against your VTT clock.

The 1-Day Standard for Parcel Shipments:

Home Depot's standard VTT for parcel shipments is one business day, but only for SKUs classified as Ship-Ready. A Ship-Ready SKU is one that is not marked Made-to-Order in Item Data Management (IDM). If your item is Made-to-Order, a different processing expectation applies. Check your IDM settings if you are unsure which category your SKUs fall into.

How VTT Performance Is Calculated:

Home Depot does not average your ship times to score performance. Instead, it measures the speed at which 90 percent of your orders ship. In practice, if 90 percent of your orders ship within roughly 1.7 days, that becomes your reported VTT performance, even if the remaining 10 percent take longer. A small number of slow outliers will not tank your score the way an average calculation would, but consistent lateness across a large share of orders will.

Where to Check Your VTT:

Home Depot splits VTT visibility into two separate locations. Checking the wrong one is a common mistake.

How to Change Your VTT

Temporary Warehouse Closures

If your warehouse is closing temporarily for a holiday, maintenance, or any other reason, submit the Vendor Request Closures Form in Supplier Hub. The following rules apply:

• Minimum 4-week notice is required before the closure
• You can submit up to 5 closures in a single form
• Closure dates cannot overlap across submissions
• The form must include your correct PVendor Number, found in the upper left corner of Supplier Hub, or it cannot be processed

Home Depot-approved holidays do not require a closure form. Currently listed holidays:

Any other closure, planned or unplanned, requires the form.

Here is how a closure shifts your ship deadline. Assume your IDM VTT is 1 day and an order arrives on Thursday, 12/21:

A single closed day pushes your ship deadline back by exactly one business day. That small shift compounds quickly if you are not tracking it against actual order volume.

Permanent VTT Changes:

For a lasting change to your VTT, email your OMSID, your current VTT, and your proposed VTT to HD.com_Dropship@homedepot.com. Any increase requires an explanation to your merchant and Merchandising VP approval before it takes effect. This is not a same-day change, so build in lead time if you plan to request one.

A Worked VTT Example:

Here is how timing plays out in a normal week with no closures. An order is received on Friday, 4/17. Your IDM VTT is 1 day. Since Saturday and Sunday do not count, your expected ship date becomes Monday, 4/20, by 11:59 PM EST. This is the detail suppliers most often get wrong: a Friday order does not give you until Saturday; it gives you until the next business day.

Inventory Rules That Affect VTT Compliance

VTT compliance and inventory accuracy are tightly linked. Keep the following rules in mind:

• Only load positive inventory in Rithum if the item is physically available to ship. Orders route to you only if there is enough inventory to fill the entire line item.
• Inventory loaded in Rithum must be dedicated to HomeDepot.com. It cannot be shared with other retailers or with Home Depot stores.
• Update your on-hand inventory daily. Rithum does not automatically decrease available stock when units are sold or shipped. You must do this manually.
• Do not decrease on-hand quantity for open purchase orders that have not shipped yet. If you have 100 units on hand and receive an order for 20, your feed should still show 100 units until that order is ship-confirmed.
• Once an item ships, promptly ship-confirm the purchase order in Rithum and then decrease your reported on-hand quantity.
• If a product must be cancelled due to an out-of-stock situation, update the on-hand quantity to zero and cancel the line with the correct reason code immediately.

If your inventory feed stays accurate and current, cancellations should be rare. When one is necessary, Home Depot accepts only three cancellation reason codes in Rithum: Out Of Stock, Discontinued, and At Merchant's Request. The process differs depending on whether the SKU will be replenished.

If the SKU will not be replenished long-term: set inventory to zero, clear the ETA, mark the item Discontinued with a discontinued date, cancel with the Discontinued code, and remove it from your active feed.

If the SKU will be replenished: leave the status as Available, zero out inventory, enter your next expected in-stock date and quantity, and cancel with the Out of Stock code so Home Depot's system can generate a backorder once you are back in stock.

Shipping Requirements Tied to VTT

Hitting your VTT does not matter if the order does not ship correctly. The following requirements apply across all shipment types:

• Follow the Expected Shipping Method exactly. The one exception: if a purchase order states Ground, carrier not specified, but the shipment exceeds 25 cartons or 500 pounds, ship via LTL instead.
• If you need additional carrier pickups, contact your local carrier hub or terminal directly with details on pickup frequency and product type. Parcel pickups need roughly 4 hours of advance notice; LTL needs up to 24 hours.
• If you are shipping Collect, use Home Depot's third-party account number.
• Carrier and tracking information entered into the Rithum ship confirmation is emailed directly to the customer, so accuracy is critical.
• Never ship confirm an order before it has physically left your facility.
• To count as on time, an order must be ship confirmed by the Expected Ship Date shown in Rithum, not merely handed to a carrier by that date.

How Shipping Method Maps to Rithum

Best Practices for Maintaining VTT Compliance

Suppliers who consistently meet VTT standards tend to follow a small set of disciplines:

• Review your SPM Compliance Tool on a fixed schedule, not only after a compliance issue surfaces. Current-month reports contain the most actionable detail.
• Treat ship confirmation as a same-day requirement tied to the moment a shipment leaves your facility, not an end-of-day task.
• Keep inventory feeds current as stock levels change, rather than waiting for a mismatch to surface on a cancelled order.
• Submit closure requests well before the 4-week minimum to avoid processing delays.
• Verify that your PVendor Number is correct on every closure form to prevent rejections.

These practices require consistency rather than complexity. The Supplier Hub contains the tools necessary to track performance, address issues early, and maintain standing on the Dropship On Time metric.

Managing Home Depot Deductions and Compliance with iNymbus

VTT feeds directly into the same Dropship On Time metric that appears in your broader Supplier Performance Management score, so a slipping VTT rarely stays isolated. Even with disciplined portal monitoring, deductions and compliance chargebacks are difficult to eliminate.

OTIF assessments, shipping violations, and inventory mismatches accumulate across the scorecard each month, and each one arrives with supporting documentation that must be pulled from the portal, reviewed, and disputed within Home Depot's timelines if a claim is not valid.

For vendors managing a high volume of Home Depot purchase orders, this reconciliation work is time-intensive when handled manually. Deduction backup documents must be retrieved individually, matched against invoices and ship confirmations, and routed for internal review before a dispute can be filed.

Missed deadlines or incomplete documentation frequently result in deductions being accepted by default, regardless of whether they were valid.

iNymbus addresses this workflow directly through automated deduction and chargeback resolution built for high-volume retail vendor relationships, including vendors supplying Home Depot.

By automating the retrieval, matching, and disputing of Home Depot chargebacks, iNymbus allows vendor teams to focus on the compliance issue itself, such as correcting an inventory feed or adjusting a shipping process, rather than the administrative burden of processing each deduction individually.

For vendors evaluating how to reduce chargeback exposure without expanding internal resources, iNymbus provides a structured, auditable alternative to manual deduction management.