Amazon just looses my stuff. Always, each item is scanned, counted, and confirmed at the initial FC to which I ship, and then, on FC transfer, entire cartons of 48 units, or lesser numbers of “loose” units are lost.
Somehow, Amazon wants to claim “We have no record of receipt”, when their own inventory ledger certainly does, so it costs me time and effort to “open a case”, supply packing lists, cut and paste from the inventory ledger to show them that the loss was internal to Amazon, and follow up when the reply is non-responsive boilerplate.
But how to account for it all? When reimbursement is made, some of it is paid in cash, and some of it is in “found” products… but the “adjustments” are not flagged as to the shipment to which they are credited, or the reimbursement to which they are related. Does anyone have a tool to pull the reports and sort the mess out, or do I have to audit all this with spreadsheets? It’s a significant issue - they’ve lost over 1300 units since May 2023, and its only August.
And what happens when they find all these missing units? Are they going to charge me for storage on stuff they could not find?
FBA has its pros and cons this just happens to be one of the major flaws. You will most likely get charged, I’ve been fighting a battle with a shipment in FC transfer for over a year that I still pay LT storage for. Like all things “Amazon” they will never admit fault, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
With reimbursements I get paid whatever Amazon deems its worth and then months to years later take it away because inventory was found but then damaged and sent back to me. You can’t “win” you just need to factor it into your margins. Sorry for your lost units but that’s the gamble we play when you use FBA.
Hold on, I get paid what I would have made if the item sold if Amazon loses it. If they later find it, and it is damaged, then they can’t claw back the reimbursement, as I also get paid the same amount if they damage a unit. So its all the same, except for the issue of storage if they find this very seasonal spring/summer product in the slow season, winter.
In a perfect world maybe. If you are the only seller and you maintained a price for an very extended time, sure. There has been countless times a reimbursement has been clawed back, put back into inventory shipped to a customer who says it is broken. From my experiences Amazon does not often admit damage was their fault. I should have prepped it better or known the UPS/Amazon driver wanted to play soccer with the mailer bag they put my product in.
That’s not much of an exaggeration - UPS sorting centers have conveyor belts, and arms that push boxes off those conveyor belts onto lower ones after a bar code is read to “route” the package. The idea is to get all the packages sorted and onto the correct truck, and the distance a package falls between the conveyor belts is between 3 and 6 feet. Multiple drops are required to sort any one package.
I’ve been in the Manhattan sorting center, and there’s a good reason it is 6 stories high - they fit miles of belts and chutes and other Rube Goldberg contraptions into the place.
