Just curious if anyone else noticed a spike in “immediate disposal” returns with FBA?
I opened cases with seller support and it took about 15 reopening cases before someone told me that happens when the returns are deemed “hazardous”. Instead of dealing with them, FBA just throws them out and charges you for disposal.
If they were truly that bad, I probably don’t want them back, but the point is, how do I know what was actually returned? Instead of my products, the customer could return a pair of old, used socks. I also sell a lot of bundled goods. Maybe the customer took the part they really wanted and returned the rest with an old pair of underwear?
This is all par for the course with FBA, I get that. What concerns me is the volume that this happened in the holiday return period. I pulled an FBA return report from 12/1-2/29 and found I had a 16.35% immediate disposal rate on return. I then pulled a report from 9/1-11/30 and had an immediate disposal rate of 4.17%.
I have a hard time believing that customers returned “hazardous” returns at a 4x higher rate than before. My guess is it’s much faster to simply call returns “hazardous”, throw them out and charge the customer than it is to deal with returns properly during their peak return period. I might have just had a bad run of luck so I thought I would ask if anyone else noticed a spike like this?
We have not noticed a spike but being in the automotive category, we get back items that smell like gasoline or sometimes worse being we have lots of farm related products, so a few being tossed for “dangerous” is kind of the norm being we throw stuff out for the same reason.
Last week we got back a completely unused pressure sensor, but the return box must have had brake cleaner or something rolling around, as it would have exploded if someone was smoking 10’ away. Would gladly prefer Amazon not ship it back to us, let alone let USPS carry it in a truck. Left it in the sun for a day then tossed it into the scrap bin.
I completely agree and that certainly might be some of the issue but to have a 4X increase in the holiday return period?
I do expect an increase in actual return numbers (which I saw) but an increase in the percentage of immediate disposed returns was a huge surprise. Until 6 months ago I had never even seen immediate disposal of my goods before. Now having it at 16% seems a little suspicious.
I no longer underestimate the failure of dim witted consumers and shippers when it comes to return inventory. We got back a leaking bottle of corn syrup with a tail light in January and a inner tube soaked in gasoline instead of a Kubota shift selector knob in February. These are the things that actually made it back to us, so I think if anything they are failing at screening more than abusing it.
I am forbidden from replying to this comment due to accusations of misogynistic humor from my wife.
I was lonely for a few weeks, but still priceless. Sad part is, its a modern german car where you have to get the “assembly”, ended up costing more than the studio apartment I should have moved into till the humor storm ended.
There seems to have been a rash of brain dead automotive designers. I just had to replace my 2012 Mailibu when the engine went out after 210,000 miles. Shot myself in the wallet when I didn’t check the oil coming back from a road trip…
I really won’t miss it all that much because every time a headlight went out it cost $200 to $300 (depending on if I got the beginner mechanic) since you have to drop the front bumper to get to the assembly.
Other than having a full tank of gas the timing was pretty good because the same headlight had just died for the third time in about 6 years.
