This hit last night. If you don’t understand why Amazon is requiring proper invoices and LOAs from brands this might help explain it.
If you read this and STILL don’t think Amazon should be asking, in my opinion, you probably should not be selling anything any place.
““due to the large quantity of stolen tools, he may have been working with businesses/customers to sell the tools in large volume and move them quickly.””
The scheme went undetected by upper management for over a year until the employee ordered approximately 9,000 pounds of tools to be delivered to his Wauwatosa apartment.
The shipping company questioned the delivery address due to the large shipment size, prompting Milwaukee Tool to begin an investigation.
I was watching a show or movie, I can’t remember, where an FBA agent said something along the lines of “There is no amount of money or manpower that can aid an investigation as much as the person you are looking for being stupid.”
Exhibit A.
My friend the dumpster diver used to check out a dumpster at a record distributor.
He discovered on Friday nights there would be boxes of best selling musical media in the dumpster. They would not be there on Saturday morning.
He made sure to check out that dumpster every Friday night. There was a box of goodies for each Friday for over 3 months.
The thief did not change behavior, and the company did not notice the theft.
Who was stupid?
The store my wife and our son own is a franchise. There are a small number of them within a couple hours drive and those closest together work together on a lot of things.
One of them had a full time employee that had one job – check in and label all the merchandise that comes into the store. He had worked with him for a few years and was a trusted guy getting paid well above minimum wage.
The owner FINALLY figured out that there were items that had been ordered but never made it to the shelf – to the tune of $20,000 or more over time.
That ‘trusted employee’ got fired and prosecuted for the thefts.
It happens way more than people expect and a lot of times things are kept quiet to avoid the ‘embarrassment’ for the company.
So the crime is ok as long as it’s not noticed? Wow, that’s, quite a statement to make.
Not what I said.
Alright, blaming the victim?
I mean your statement is about as clear as mud, can you clarify it for the rest of us?
I’ll answer from MY perspective.
Business owners are responsible for running their businesses – all aspects – and that includes paying attention to such minor details as bank balances, inventory levels, stocking shelves if it is brick and mortar, and more.
My wife taught High School for a few decades and one of her students came from a family that had a very successful ‘small business.’ They made a large line of products for Harley Davidson. Their long time bookkeeper stole something like $1 MILLION from them. I knew them and had no idea their business was that big. They survived but paid a LOT more attention after that.
I’m a firm believer in the ■■■■■■ Doctrine-- Trust BUT VERIFY.
Too many people get wrapped up in the ‘team member’ crap and forget they are employees and need to be supervised.
Here is another one from a couple days ago –
It is not a theft if the items were already in a dumpster.
Depending on who puts them there and why … and also who retrieves them from the dumpster and why.
Fired a newly hired manager and his new hired liquor clerk for stealing liquor. The liquor clerk would set out the spirits beside the dumpster on the dock right before the manager got off. The manager would retrieve the liquor from beside the dumpster before leaving for the night. Took 6 months to figure out their scheme.
Another clerk that worked on graveyard seemed to have his register robbed every time there was a change in management. No one else saw anything or anyone in the store when it happened. We alerted loss prevention and the next manager change they did a surveillance of him and within a week he claimed he was robbed. He was fired and charged.
Both of those events happened within the same store. After those events, the store volume went up and became a strong profit maker.
And yet another reason why Amazon wants Invoices and LOA’s:
I think the majority of retail places I’ve worked have had at least one thief. From selling the silver tokens at a game room (the ones used for coupon specials or “game took my token”) to not ringing up all the sales (at a store with 4 employees) to manager faking time cards and faking inventory counts.
Only retail store I worked at where I’m pretty sure there was no employee theft (at least, none caught), always had an armed security guard, and if you took anything out of the store, receipts were checked. And that was possibly the most “family” like store I’ve worked at; no one took it personally.
I think @dwat0870 and @Pepper_Thine_Angus point is that Amazon wants its customers to feel confident that when they purchase something “new” on Amazon, it hasn’t been in a dumpster or embezzler’s tiny apartment, and that it hasn’t been bought and then “returned” by some rando thief while actually being stored at their home or storage building.
So when Amazon asks for invoices that show number purchased, number delivered, who, when, where, how paid, etc, Amazon is trying to check that the Seller’s product sourcing for “new” condition is legitimate, through the proper supply chain, and with a trustworthy chain of custody.
Especially for Sellers in @Sundance @ASV_Vites @VitRhea categories–and others! not meaning to leave anyone out–the storage of their inventory is as important to the integrity of products as the original source, too.
It’s a pain, but I get it for new products. And I get category restrictions that don’t allow selling as used at all.
Too bad they don’t apply this to FBA! 
Many years ago there was an employee theft ring at a Dodge Truck plant. They were driving the new trucks off the end of the line and off the property instead of to the finished vehicle lot.
I worked in inventory in Apple’s retail stores for over 10 years, and I saw a lot of different types of theft. When I was in LA, there were people stalking the delivery drivers for our store, trying to break into their trucks or jump them while they were walking from their truck to the store, so we had to get them security escorts.
We had an employee steal one of the EasyPay POS devices and watch over other employee’s shoulders to steal their logins. They then went from store to store in the area, using these stolen logins, and do fraudulent returns of high dollar items to gift cards. It took a little while to figure out what was going on, and then it was a pain in the butt to catch them because they didn’t actually have to step foot in the store to do the return. They just had to get close enough to connect to the store’s POS wifi, and we never knew what login they would use next. Corporate IT got involved and blocked the device’s MAC address and did a forced password reset for all employees at the stores in the area, and the perp was eventually arrested and charged.
Let me tell you, Apple is one company that you don’t want to steal from because not only will they make sure you are criminally prosecuted, they will also sue you for three times the amount of what you stole to recoup any losses they have incurred. The head of retail loss prevention did not mess around and had quite the reputation for nailing people, so people always got quite nervous whenever he showed up at their store. He got a little tired of people walking on eggshells around him when he was just there to oversee training, so he started a thing where he wore a Hawaiian shirt if it was a training visit. If you saw him walking in wearing anything else, you knew something was about to go down. Oh, the good old days lol
Two things can be true at the same time. Provenance is good … but it doesn’t mean Amazon isn’t ALSO using info from those invoices to approach manufacturers and cut out resellers on popular products or categories that Amazon hasn’t been able to penetrate (yet).
They probably are BUT after 20 + years of doing that I’m pretty sure they already know virtually every manufacture large enough that they want to deal with.
AND Amazon has been culling their product lines more and more. The biggest threat is the manufacturers that are deciding to deal with the headaches of using Amazon and are moving to direct sales on the site. They have NO IDEA what they are getting involved with.
I had one of my companies tell me last September they had arranged an ‘exclusive’ deal with one large seller to handle all Amazon sales as on January 1, 2025 and all other sellers would be removed.
Here we are, 9 months after that ‘drop dead, fool’ date, and I’m still selling their items as are many others. Seems their ‘exclusive seller’ can’t figure out how Amazon works…
Amazon wants to generate ad revenue and they are NOT going to pay themselves to promote items that THEY are selling and storing on their shelves. They have all the money in the world but why have it stuck in products on shelves with low margins (even for them)?
Amazon has no interest in low margin, low volume items, but those are also the items sellers care about losing the least. The high margin, high volume items are the ones Amazon wants, because the profits outstrip the ad revenue, and those are the products sellers can’t afford to lose.