This is an FBA order. Customer apparently hasn’t received her order and reached out to customer support. But instead of helping her, they passed it off on me, telling me to help her. My normal response would be to tell the customer how to get ahold of customer support, but she’s already done that. Any helpful ideas on how I should respond?
this, just tell her to try again. I remember on the old forums someone sending her the tracking number they received as a seller, but then that just made the customer ask the seller MORE questions (and most shipments are amazon fulfilled anyway so you have nothing). Best to stay as out-of-it as you can, as no good deed…etc.
In situations like this, we simply throw Amazon right back under the bus that the knucklehead in Customer Service tried to pin us under, and tell the buyer that our contractual arrangement with Amazon requires that IT is responsible for all Customer Service inquiries.
Haven’t used it in quite some time, but we have a template specifically geared for situations like this stored in Template Manager (link, Seller Central).
I occasionally get one of these, I just refund them and send them a canned message and that’s it. It doesn’t really impact my bottom line so it’s not worth the time to try to figure out how to resolve it some other way.
Would the grand master of all knowledgeable things template documented be so kind as to share this template specifically geared for situations like this to us … the not so knowledgeable subjects herein who be waiting for the grand master’s kind gesture of sharing?
In addition to other’s advice I would open a support ticket to tell Amazon to do their job. But yeah, I would do as @Dogtamer says throw it back to Amazon.
“Thank you for your inquiry. Amazon fulfilled your order so you will need to contact them directly at 1-888-280-4331 for further tracking information”
Besides all the above, I’d have said I’m really sorry Amazon customer service rep didn’t help to reoslve your issue when you contact them. Since Amazonfulfilled your order, they have the shipping information. They will have to be the one to resolve this issue for you.
Well, if I can find the fella you’re speaking of, I’ll certainly plead your case; in the meantime, here’s ours:
[quote]
DEAR {CUSTOMER NAME},
That stupid jerk you spoke with at what Amazon laughingly calls “Customer Service” - sounds JUST like all the rest of `em, all with their heads up th ----- Oh, Wait…
That’s not the right one for this situation. 
Seriously, though, I’m not @ liberty to divulge the one we use; despite the fact being that I’m the one who wrote it, it’s proprietary information as corporate work product.
However, I can craft a reasonable facsimile:
The intervening periods are something I added to all of our BS-M templates as pseudo-line breaks after the third-last major version revision, some years back, broke Buyer-Seller Messaging Service/Messenger formatting protocols.
[quote=“Dogtamer, post:8, topic:3026”]
Thank you so much grand master!
We have modified your first draft so that we can repurpose it internally with our team.
@Rino, maybe this?
Hello [BUYER],
Thank you for your Order [NUMBER] of [ITEM] on [DATE]. We apologize that Amazon has failed to deliver in a timely manner.
Unfortunately, Amazon itself is fulfilling your order, directly from Amazon’s own warehouse.
It is possible that Amazon has already tried to contact you with a delivery update, so please check your email or messages for a note from Amazon with the title “Delivery update”. (It might be in a spam or junk folder.)
If no such email is found, please phone Amazon Customer Support at 1-866-216-1072 and request a delivery update for Order [NUMBER], which was due on [DATE].
Thank you,
[SELLER]
Hey! You speak Dogtamer-ese! I’ve been looking for the Rosetta Stone package to learn that obscure dialect myself!
Something to consider here if you’re the brand owner. Kicking this back to Amazon’s crappy customer service (which seems to have failed already in this case) might result in a negative product review, and most certainly will make the customer view your brand negatively.
If you look around, the amount of negative reviews stemming from a failure of FBA or their customer service are a dime a dozen. I wouldn’t say those reviews are unjustified either, some stem from the product packaging being insufficient to survive FBA’s mishandling, and choosing to pass off customer service to an inept 3rd party is a business decision the brand chose to make as well.
One thing I’ve seen in supplements now, is some detail pages dedicate an image asking buyers to contact their customer service if they have an issue, to try to mitigate negative reviews from Amazon’s new inept no refund/return policy on those items.
I actually prefer THIS version. Sadly, since I don’t do FBA I would be throwing myself under the bus (again).