I was just charged today (05-02-23) for this advertising invoice:
Invoice Date: 02-05-2023
Invoice Period: 02-04-2023 to 02-05-2023
Payment Type: Seller Account
The amount for the one day invoice period is 5.5 times my daily budget limits. Much higher than I have ever been charged, and why would I get a one-day invoice?
Anyone else get a random ad charge today?
So sorry! Strange! And to be charged 2 months late.
No. My ad spend charges are always on the second day each month for a whole month, never more than my daily budget.
Good luck on sorting this out.
Thank you for the good luck wish. I will be calling them in the morning and hopefully can get my money back. I paused all ads when I found this, I spot check the Spend, Sales and ROAS and have never seen a spike in one day cost like this one. The daily budget should have capped the cost.
This does not make sense.
Apparently there is something very wrong with their web page display, I downloaded the statement for the example above and it shows this:
Invoice Date: 05-02-2023
Invoice Period: 04-02-2023 to 05-02-2023
So I decided to look back to prior months online displays.
This one claims to be for nearly a whole year, but it is not and the amount is nowhere near what a year would cost.
One day Invoice Periods:
2 months on this one:
This period started in April and ended back in February!
They also show the payment for this period as received 2 months before it was billed
I am really not looking forward to the future of more bots in more aspects of my life. Escalating in the very near future.
Yes, I fear the future is here. Woke up to a bunch of products put into (incorrectly) Fulfillable HazMat. No smart human even looks at this stuff anymore. Though that is assuming they have smart humans.
Our ad spend on the second.
Seller Account $1.29 02-05-2023 Succeeded
Only because we shut them off a few months ago. We did see trends over a long period of time and turned a small segment of them on for one day as a test.
The only thing that has happened… Our cashflow has increased many hundreds of dollars. By not paying for ads. Still not sure if we are losing sales, hard to prove that.
That sounds like a bad mess to untangle. If even bots could be designed by smart humans it could be better. I think they get released without much testing, tested live on the site at our expense, and expected to learn to be better. Like starting in kindergarten over and over.
I paused all mine last night when I first saw the invoice and panicked that suddenly I could be overcharged daily. Because Amazon. I started them to help launch products, this could be a good time to do a no-ad test.
One seasonal product that used to be top of search organically now has a lot of PRC competition in the category, the kind that has their identical product under multiple brand names. Not an identical design to mine but serves the same function at much lower quality. The ad for that one might need to continue to keep from getting buried even worse.
Good luck with the HazMat trouble.
I’m seeing it the same way. I think it’s just how they are formatting their dates in the report. Listing as day-month-year instead of month-day-year is European. When the day can also be a month, it’s harder to spot…but check out mine below, which was issued 5/2.
A quick glance at all of your samples shows that they are probably correct, just formatted inconsistent with the rest of the platform.
I believe you are correct, I did not consider the possibility of a different date format but looking back over these it does make sense, even this one:
The downloaded invoices do not use that date format. They are month-date-year.
I should not look at important stuff late at night.
Agreed, once downloaded they show “normal”. They also show Month Name, Day Year on the summary of the billing activity screen in both the Invoice Issued Date and Due Date columns. I can totally understand how you were confused. I don’t think I remember seeing it this way before, so this must be a new “feature”!
Gotta love the new features we get!
I keep a close eye on my campaigns every day because sometimes the charges rack up real quick on a campaign with nothing to show for it. That happened today. When the bill suddenly rose to $20, I went and turned off everything that was causing the billing to rise so quickly. Ever since turning it off, the charges have been declining. It’s as if Amazon caught a bad actor and is erasing suspicious charges? Right now, it’s down to a little over $17. I’m hoping it goes lower than that.