I just had an A-Z claim for a custom item that was returned to sender, unclaimed. It isn’t being counted against my ODR, but Amazon is charging me for the refund.
Custom items are not returnable, am I simply out of luck in this circumstance?
I shipped it on time and it was scanned accepted on time by USPS.
I regularly lose AtoZ claims where the tracking shows any variation of “return to sender” regardless of what the tracking shows after that.
If the final tracking information shows that it was not returned you can try appealing but that’s not a high percentage appeal.
Another downside of the difficulty in getting to a person.
Can’t hurt to try appeal … would note that in addition to shipping on time that the order was shipped to the address provided on the order and is a customized item and therefore cannot be resold.
Would a Safe-T claim apply here?
This rarely happens to us, but it does. It is hard to avoid with USPS.
We do not appeal because the buyer did not receive the product and there is no delivery scan.
This one is Seller funded but No health impact which sounds like yours.
Unfortunately, no. The AtoZ claim makes a Safe-T claim invalid.
I hope other custom product sellers will share their experience with Return To Sender packages. My reply was not very positive or helpful.
It was an A to Z claim so we would think the customer put it in as INR … check the reason for claim.
If the didn’t hit the metric, then isn’t that like Amazon saying it wasn’t your fault?
We would appeal as safe-t claim is normally about a return refund process.
EDIT:
We do custom also and have done an appeal on A to Z and won … custom items can’t be resold
A Safe-T claim is about getting reimbursed by Amazon for money they refunded to a buyer. There is no way to ask them to refund the money, and if you initiate the refund it is not eligible for a SAFE-T claim.
So “Claims Protected” is for Item Not Received that has a delivery scan only, correct?
It appears if they refuse the package, don’t pick it up, etc, and claim Item Not Received then the claims protection doesn’t apply.
So it should be “Claims Protected” for “a few circumstances of non-delivery, but not all”.
A delivery scan is not required, but whether or not you are covered depends on what happened.
If the package is marked “return to sender” at any point, you will likely not win because Amazon assumes you got/will get the package back.
If the package is marked “lost” or some other carrier faulted issue, you will likely be covered, or at least win on appeal.
The Claims Protected works well but it is not a catch-all.
I am not sure if Amazon has found a way to charge a buyer for a product that ends up in the possession of the original seller. Meaning, tracking indicating Returned To Sender.
So I was surprised that I won this A-Z.
“We have granted an A-to-z Guarantee claim of $46.82 on the order 112-2795524-3361814. We have covered the cost of the refund and have not counted the claim against your order defect rate.”
I delivered to the Post office with a scan sheet. The scan sheet was scanned on the ship by date but the actual acceptance scan was the next day. The USPS tracking indicates the acceptance scan was the day after ship by date but Amazon internal tracking says the carrier accepted the package on the date the scan sheet was scanned. In my experience and from what I’ve usually heard, this would have normally been denied by Amazon.
