How serious is receiving "Shipping box overweight" defect 3 times?

Yes, looking forward to that sweet sweet email reply when you tell Amazon to suck it.

Middle finger emoji, butt hole emoji, rick sanchez insult emoji, Amazon Merchant Inbound Coaching Team die in a fire emoji, honey badger emoji, ad nauseum.

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Thanks for sharing your thought. Totally agree that $15K is a lot of money no matter how big the business is (and my business is not big and going down hill every year :face_exhaling:)

Frankly I’m hoping for that. I also created 20 shipments (each shipment only has 1 carton) trying to “dilute” the incoming negative score. Hopefully that helps.

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If you’re gonna roll the dice, if the problem triggers a coaching call, wait until all 5 shipments get their problem before doing the call. If you do the call and another problem comes in afterwards that has a higher likelihood of a more severe problem

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Thank you for this great logical thought. In the past, I would have paid $15K to stop the shipments in a heartbeat because the business made way more than $15K a month. Sadly in the past few years, a lot have changed; many of my top selling products have become dogs, new products didn’t gain tractions, Amazon have introduced new fees left and right, etc. The business revenue has dropped over 70% a year in the last 2 years. It’s very painful. Nowadays, the business doesn’t profit more than $15K a month. Hence, I’m going to roll the dice :frowning: … Man, I miss the good old day when people made good money selling on Amazon.

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Please update us the result of the dispute. I tried to dispute twice. Both got denied. So I don’t plan to do any more dispute..

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Thank you so much for this insight! :pray: I wouldn’t have known and would do the first coaching call when first offer trying to show Amazon my prompliness.

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I would not worry too much, in our expereince, the coaching levels are gated to events, so you will probably just get lectured being you don’t have a long history of shipping meth, explosives, and other violations elevating your coaching level. You will just have to be OCD for about 6 months to a year on your inbound specs.

We got hit with the bar code un scannable and simply ignored the warning and only sent in inventory every 120 days ish afterwards till we changed packaging. We still periodically get warnings, but don’t care because the time between warnings do not trigger coaching.

Just get a parrot to squak “uh huh” while you set the receiver down when they start talking, because nothing you say will matter, so don’t bother listening.

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Thanks for sharing your experiences. How many warnings (aka defects) do we have to get to be coached by Amazon?

Thanks for this tip :grin:

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Not sure, we had a pile of events because we made like 30+ SPD shipments and a bunch of them flagged due to going to problem receive centers, so it could be 10 shipments over 180 days.

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Thanks. I think I asked the wrong question (how many warnings). Amazon goes by percentage. If you got flagged 10 shipments out of 100 total shipments of your account, that’s 10%. I’m currently at 7.32%. Do you remember the percentage that got the coaching to be triggered?

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It’s not about total shipments I don’t think, it’s about the units counted not shipments. Our issue was a unit percentage not a shipment percentage.



Box shipment overweight is not measured by quanitity of shipments but by shipment boxes I believe.

You don’t have a time machine and you are not on currently on parole. I think you are worrying about your first slap on the wrist, as if you are going behind bars. We have screwed up very badly in the past, and never once got shipping privileges suspended, other than the auto kind forcing us to dispute reports to make new shipments.

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It doesn’t work like that. Amazon dictates everything on Amazon. If they deem a call is needed, they tell you when.

Like I mentioned upthread, and from my experience, those “coaches” are US based and reasonable human beings. Maybe we got lucky and maybe the OP will be too. They weren’t 20lbs over. They were 3lbs over.

I really think this isn’t as big of a deal as some are saying here. There’s all this massive fear of Amazon based on nightmare stories, and there are plenty. There are also stories you never hear about because things actually work out most of the time for most sellers that try and do the right thing. Mistakes happen.

I can’t even begin to count how many problems we have had with Amazon (even before SAS), and TBH, we had a lot more problems before SAS than after. Things have always pretty much worked out. Sometimes it took a lot of time and effort, and sometimes it was easy.

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I just found the answer to my own question. So I’m posting it here, hopefully it would be useful for other sellers in the future. In order to “dilute” the bad score, Amazon is using either “boxes” or “units” depending on the type of defect. Luckily, they let us know how it’s measured (see the red box in screenshot). Hence for my case, I’ll flood Amazon with many good boxes (not overweight) to make the 7.32% score lower.

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Aha and thank you!

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I agree. Because of one situation where labeled products were accidentally shipped to FBA in multiple shipments, my defect rate is 0.87 and I’m supposed to be no more than 0.88. So, I started sending my most profitable items that have high sales to FBA in case my ability to create shipments gets suspended. I’m going to pay for this with peak storage rates, high storage utilization ratio, etc. but hopefully I won’t get bit on the hiney too much.

Edit to add: I looked at how my defects were being calculated and it’s by units. Since I just sent it a ton more of inventory than normal, might that help lower the defect percentage?

Also, I quit “resolving” the defects since it doesn’t make a difference. Or does it?

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You should we resolving one way or the other. Either accept blame or open a dispute.

Not answering those shipment problems is almost the same in Amazon’s eyes as not appealing a violation.

We dispute every single one of them and win almost every single one of them. Our issue is no-scans of a tiny portion of the shipments.

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I’m in the same boat as you are. So far I’ve created many shipments preparing for the possible shipment suspension. Just curious, how do you know that 0.88 threshold number? Was it the APR (average defect rate) that Amazon shows for each defect category?

Did you mean quit the dispute? We have to resolve the issue by clicking the Acknowledge button. So Amazon would allow us to continue creating new shipments. I also stop the dispute because I tried twice and failed both.

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Yes

I have not “resolved” each infraction or anything. I’ve just let them sit there.

Point well taken. I have disputed everything that wasn’t too old to dispute. I doubt it will do anything but I guess this is my Hail Mary pass to the endzone from my own 20-yard line.

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Stranger things have been known to happen…

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If you could just let it sit there, then your case wasn’t as bad as mine. Amazon blocked me from creating a new shipment until I resolve the issue by clicking the Acknowledge button and answering the simple 4 multiple choice questions correctly. After doing that, I could create a new shipment again.

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