Seems like at this point, the only way to get protection from the INR scammers is to buy shipping through Amazon (using their recommended service, whatever that ends up being) with an acceptance scan on time.
Signature confirmation seems to have no purpose, right? Or am I missing something?
Signature when purchasing off of amazon should win you an INR A2Z.
I thought so too, but I don’t think so anymore.
IMO Signature Confirmation has a deterrent effect on some scammers, and is more likely to prevail in a chargeback dispute than tracking.
If the item costs enough the cost is trivial. If the buyer provides any warnings to make you uneasy, it is another potential piece of insurance.
Frankly, I might feel better using Registered Mail, but that seems to muddy the waters when used on online marketplaces.
It really depends on the order value. Signature confirmation costs about what, 3 bucks? If it’s the typical $30 Amazon product it’s completely not worth it to pay that cost. In the long run it’s going to be cheaper to just eat the losses.
I used a 3PL service to ship some stuff FBM and they use their own carrier accounts (and also there’s no pickup scan. Nobody’s going to manually scan thousands of packages a day at a 3PL warehouse). I’m selling in a fairly low fraud category, so it’s cheaper to just refund anyone that asks for a refund rather than take any steps to protect myself against claims or waste any time researching anything.
If you pay $3 for a sig confirmation, and on average do that 10 times to ultimately stop 1 INR scam, that’s a $30 monetary cost to stop that scam.
Keep in mind that fighting INR scammers also costs time. If you spend 30 minutes of time dealing with each claim, and you win 50%, that’s a 1 hour time cost to stop that scam. Assuming you value your time at $50 / hour, between the sig conf costs and time costs, you’re looking at $80 to successfully fight 1 INR claim. If the order value is less than that then it’s not worth fighting it.
If it’s something high value & high fraud, then buy shipping is the way to go.
should but the amazon forums are full of signature confirmation meaning nothing.
I don’t think signature confirmation is worth anything–i can find no references to it as a seller protection in the Amazon help pages. I am pretty sure it used to be the gold standard.
The buy shipping policy has changed for sure…they used to cover ‘problems with delivery’ but now they only mention that it covers ‘did not receive’ complaints…now if it’s late I guess you have to have AHT and SSA enabled for any protection. However, the problem is that it seems they frequently require we buy premium shipping options for standard shipping orders etc. I recently had to cancel an order because Amazon wanted me to pay $27 shipping for a $20 blu-ray when the buyer paid $5.99 for expedited shipping. Thankfully cancellations don’t count against my metrics when processed correctly 
WAY TOO FREAKIN’ COMPLICATED LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE HAS BECOME ON AMAZON.
In those cases you’re better off just buying shipping off Amazon.
The probability of a $20 scam order is fairly low, and if you do get scammed it’s not a big deal just eat it.
And like you said, buy shipping isn’t a magic solution. There’s plenty of cases of sellers getting stuck with the bill even for things that are supposed to be covered. Eg, an A-Z claim that was won on the account of using buy shipping, and then losing a later chargeback. In those cases the seller also wasted an hour+ of time responding to the cases.
Signature isn’t a guaranteed win. Neither is a delivery photo. Not even the GPS coordinates FedEx now records if you log in with an account.
We lost a claim where there was even a photo of their front door with the house number and GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken overlaid on a map.
I’d get shipping through Amazon because 1) then you win even without signature…whereas you could buy your postage 2) not on Amazon but still have signature…and still not win.