In the past week I had 2 A-Z claims opened, and then granted within a few hours. The second one counted against ODR. Now I know for a fact that neither of these buyers contacted me, because I refunded everyone who contacted me for any reason for these FBM orders. So if they did contact me they would’ve already received a refund.
I’ve opened a couple A-Zs as a buyer, and they weren’t that easy to open. Even after contacting the seller sometimes it wouldn’t let me open one (and buyer support even refused to open the claim unless another contact was made).
I do have some negative feedback as well complaining that they contacted me but the message didn’t go through. Is Amazon actually blocking buyer messages from reaching a seller now?
It seems like the contact seller requirement has been abandoned in the past year. And I seem to recall that once upon a time, earlier versions of the Seller Central homepage had a flag that alerted us to A-Z claims. Now we have to check the A-Z page regularly to see if any have been filed. The more we miss and don’t appeal, the less potential cost to Amazon when policy dictates they are the responsible party.
There’s no secret here, Amazon literally has a record of all appeals and the granted/denied rates. All they need to do to eliminate their success is change their bot to deny more claims.
This is true … but why validate it for Amazon? Amazon doesn’t go fishing just because they know the pond has fish. And then after Amazon catches the fish and changes, Amazon can say that the sellers gave input into how to make catching fish easier while the sellers scratch their heads trying to figure out how to deal with the change that they really didn’t ask for or want.
When I last read the thread, replies were (of course) not about success, but what a horrible system it is. Fortunately for Christine, Canadian sellers are so much fewer that the number of replies to most threads is not such as you see on the USA forum. And you can certainly see (for the most part) why we have the reputation of politeness. They don’t seem to torture us in Canada nearly as often as in the USA with those nonsense threads, though it has been increasing lately. In the USA forums, it almost feels as if they are trying to stir everyone up, or maybe it just feels that way because sellers there seem to vent much more than on the Canadian one.
This is why I do not “vote” in the stupid polls on the Seller Central page. They can claim that 90% of respondents were in favor of this, when most of the sensible sellers just don’t bother, so it’s 90% of sellers who don’t know better (or are optimistic newbies), or those conspiracy theorists who think they will be "punished " if they give the wrong answer.