I hope its ok to vent and get some feedback on how other sellers deal with this.
As said in the title, I am just tired of Amazon stealing from me.
A few examples
Not honoring written policies in regards: missing inbound inventory, erroneous A to Z claims, accepting fraudulent returns, or just the total inability to fairly/objectively looking at issues when the arrise.
We are a long time seller and we appreciate our Amazon business but the slow bleed on the “nickel and diming” is just becoming wearing and starting to equal thousands and thousands of dollars annually.
What is the answer (rhetorical) other than just continuing to get slammed?
Usually for inbound inventory discrepancies you can submit MFI cases to get reimbursed. We use Getida, but @VTR does it himself and has outlined how to do so on the forums.
Over time, it can add up to be quite a bit.
Sorry just saw this and thought I would respond - I’m going through some amazon stuff myself atm
SAS has been awesome in terms of support.
At the least, you will find great leads in this fine forum.
There is a nonrhetorical answer to this actually:
Increase prices to account for the fact that there’s additional “costs of doing business” for selling on Amazon, and spend less time and frustration fighting uphill battles against Amazon policies.
Greatly appreciate your feedback but to be honest we can’t increase prices because of additional competition, if anything our prices and margins continue to lower.
And in regards to fighting uphill battles, we are not fighting “against” Amazon policies, we are frighting for them to “enforce” written amazon policies.
We have issues where we have cut and paste Amazon policy into our argument and they will reply “a final decision has been made and we will no longer respond to you…”
Imagine if we told Amazon “we will no longer respond…?”
Obviously this is not completely avoidable, but there are things we can do to reduce the attrition.
For example, when it comes to returns I don’t take any crap from bad buyers. FBM or FBA, if a buyer tries to play games with returns I open a claim. I don’t always win and I don’t always get as much back as I should, but I get more than enough to make it worth my tine, plus the satisfaction of making Amazon pay for the fraud they encourage. If they want to get into it with the buyer that’s up to them. As Amazon is fond of pointing out (when it suits them) these are their customers not ours.
The same goes for inbound inventory and similar issues. We don’t take it lying down. We can’t stop Amazon from letting my money fall into their account through negligence, sloppiness, and apathy, but we can fight to get as much of it back as possible, and we do get back enough to make it worth the fight.
As far as AtoZ’s go, I made a point of getting to know the policies intimately, and then getting to know the process just as well. One thing I learned from other sellers early on is that a successful AtoZ defense is 49% being right as per Amazon policy, 49% knowing how to write an AtoZ defense that overworked, underpaid non native English speakers with no incentive to do any extra work and lots of incentive to decide quickly will accept, and 2% hoping Amazon isn’t glitchy that day.
I have been having plenty of AtoZ garbage going on since the New Year, but so far I have won all the claims that I could have won, ie. claims where Amazon doesn’t have a BS policy on the issue in the first place. That’s really the best any of us can do.
If you have any specific issues we can try to offer some targeted advice, but generally speaking, it boils down to a conscious decision I made to not give Amazon one free penny I can get back. It’s a pain and a time sink I can’t always afford, but the alternative is to just roll over and let Amazon damage our business at the expense of their “mistakes” and I simply won’t.
Well, there’s some cases that you should usually win if you know how to write a case/defense. Some cases usually won’t go in your favor. The trick is knowing which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t.
Sometimes if they decide that something’s final, even if it’s wrong, there’s usually not much you can do about it unless it’s something big enough that warrants legal action.
As far as your declining margins, that’s an issue many many sellers are facing as the race to the bottom only intensifies over time. What I’ve done and would suggest that everyone do is carefully evaluate products on a regular basis, and wind down sales on products that no longer make sense to sell. It’s a constant game to get on new products and stop selling old ones. There’s some brands that used to be a top seller for us that are basically out of business now due to how much has changed over the years.
Provide a specific example so people can provide you a pathway for resolution. Many times you simply need a tool in your toolbox, instead of burning down the house.
Again thanks everyone for the feedback and support in walking us back from the cliff.
Some specific examples :
We ship a box with 100 units with partner carrier and they say they only received 1. We show them a invoice for the units, we show them the UPS POD and site AMZ policy that we are covered while using partner-carrier and they keep responding “we have no record of receiving units” and refuse to reimburse.
Another Example:
We have missing inbound inventory, we provide a valid invoice (weve been selling for years, we know what a valid invoice is) and they keep responding we need a “valid invoice” in cut and paste.
Another example:
Customer starts A to Z w/o ever contacting us, never returns the item and AMZ refunds the money anyway and wont reimburse.
Another example:
Customer bought an item for $20 2 years ago, now item costs $38 as they dont make it anymore. Customer complains that they were overcharged and should be $20 bc thats what they paid last time and AMZ reimburses them and says we are not entitled to reimbursement on it…
Just a few examples of the endless “unfair” giving of our funds away or failing to reimburse.
Ya, shame I have not written about this exact thing and how to remedy it for years now. Use the reports to bring facts to the table.
Hundreds of threads on how to resolve this also. Contacting you is bypassed if the bot establishes a tracking problem or other issue that Amazon knows will make the claim get approved. Why give a seller the option to annoy a customer via communication, when they are going to fund it regardless. Buy shipping claims, and other appeal process’ work the overwhelming majority of the time for the overwhelming majority of sellers who follow directions, and do not go off script. The EXACT details matter.
Makes no sense. There are probably more details lost in paraphrasing. Seen this hundreds of times when a seller simply did not offer a return label.
This is one of those situations in which I question your strategy, and the risk you have chosen to take.
Amazon is a site for the sales of in-production, brand new, box in/box out products.
Your new old stock is a risky offering. Amazon could require you to provide them with invoices within the past 12 months for your purchase of the product.
You should consider selling new old stock on a different venue which is both known for and tolerates geriatric products.
As for your other issues, if your invoices for missing inbound inventory are similarly aged, the may be being ignored.
There is an obvious and uncommunicated model for what is sold here and how it is sourced. If you sell other than this model, you will have problems. You might not lose every claim, but you will have more and lose more if your merchandise and documentation do not meet the expectations of Amazon bots or human prototypes for bots.
Exception handling is a major deficiency on Amazon, and will always be because it requires intelligent human beings to deal with the process.
Sorry to seem unsympathetic but someone has to provide the negative news, and as anyone who has known we over the years will tell you, I can accentuate the negative/
In this situation, is there anything that may have caused them to receive the 100 units as 1 unit? Such as there being a UPC or FNSKU on the outside of the box? I have seen that happen before because the receiving guys are working fast and just looking for barcodes to scan. They don’t know what the product looks like, so if they see a scannable barcode, they don’t think to open the box to look inside. They just scan it as 1 unit and move on.
Is there any more information related to this issue? As far as I know there’s no customer complaint path for “The listing is overpriced but I chose to buy it anyway and want a discount after the fact.” The only option the buyer has here is to request a return, which you must accept, and if they actually return it you have to refund them. Amazon does not have any type of price match guarantee.
Easy to determine with the receiving reports. The vast majority of the time there is either a negative receipt at a further destination being transferred too, OR a UPC was left on the outside of a case receiving it as a single unit. (we have done this too many times)
People definitely need to watch out for this one. It’s not an unusual practice to have a UPC on the outside of the case to show what’s inside of it, and if Amazon’s automated processes detect a UPC matching what’s supposed to be received then it’s going to assume that’s the item. In this situation, it’s the seller’s fault and Amazon will not reimburse. It can also cause you some grief down the line if it was a large case size since whoever ends up buying it may decide to sell it back on Amazon under your ASIN.
In my experience, MOST problems I’ve had with FBA receiving were our fault. There’s the occasional Amazon faulted issue, most of the major ones were reimbursed by Amazon. The occasional missing unit (eg. you send 3000, they receive 2995) are a cost of doing business with FBA, but that number ends up being very small.
The item had no other upc marking on the box/case and we checked inventory report and it never got scanned in. We suspect that the box might have opened during transit or was “re-packed” by UPS but our major issue was either way, it should be covered by Amazon policy.
I totally agree it makes no sense, then we had to wait 60 days because it "was not eligible for refund, until the 60 day mark to see if the customer would return (which obviously they would not) and then the first 3 layers of support denied the claim, until we finally pushed the issue and got reimbursed.
Again super appreciate all the useful feedback and we are very happy to a part of this new forum! I guess our overall (misguided) view on this is, Amazon has more than enough data on everyone that they know who the good guys vs the bad guys are.
If we’ve been selling for 10 years, have no history of sending empty boxes, have proper invoices for our goods, along with UPS POD chances are we are correct and god forbid Amazon was the ones to actually make the mistake. Just as customers are constantly given the “benefit of the doubt” a 10 year seller with know “un-tort history” should be deserving of some of that same grace as well… and sadly that just never seems to be the case.
It’s not misguided.
It is a long shot based on Amazon’s philosophy.
My thing is that if Amazon sees an error or mistake from a Seller with a proven track record, fine, but there should be a simple, “express” way to resolve it–maybe just a “do over”?–that doesn’t penalize the Seller, without all the bot and copy/paste hassle.
But we know that isn’t the case, and will never be. Even the elite SAS (Amazon service, not SellersAskSellers) program requires a ton of work from the Seller, in communication, research, even “waiting patiently,” etc.
Amazon specifically prohibits post-sale price-matching in their policies. Did FBA handle this? I would personally escalate so that this doesn’t spread.
Indeed they do, but if it costs Amazon money to use it, that is contrary to strategy.
I was told by one of the past heads of the OSFE - before Susan, that there was a metric which identified the good and bad guys and it was used to assess risks. But he did not say it would be used to make Amazon cover losses.
