That’s a nice thought but Amazon is incapable of providing proper support. We pay $2200 a month for SAS (Strategic Account Services) but it’s more or less worthless. Just an insurance policy for us if something happens with competitors / bots messing with our brands.
Amazon knows exactly what goes on and how to fix it but they make a lot more money this way - looking the other way on fraud / abuse / busted systems.
It’s all about the money and the stock price. It’s not about ethics or doing the right thing to support their selling “partners”.
It is an interesting point of view. Personally I can say I never understood it. Yes I obviously see how they save a lot of money offering cheap, overseas horrible suppurt BUT
I would venture to say the top 1% of sellers offer 60%+ of total 3rd party revenue. By not offering us proper support, I would imagine it costs them more in inefficiencies then it would cost by having qualified people, quickly and effectively solve problems.
I.e. we have a top selling ASIN which has been down for 10 days now for no good (real) reason, what AMZ is losing on the 15% is way more than it would cost having a competent person looking at our case.
Fraud is the name of the game on Amazon which is the reason why support is so terrible. Back 7-10 years ago, support was still overseas but helpful. Now they are powerless to tell us anything and any ability to actually fix something has been stripped from them because many of them were corrupted by bad actors in the past. These are just sad facts.
Now, if you can’t fix it yourself, it is more than likely not going to get fixed.
I never would have thought in a million years that Amazon was the way it is when we signed up to sell there. It’s like the bazzaro world on Seinfeld. Everything is upside down and backwards.
But then Amazon pretends to care but they don’t and that’s intentional for reasons mentioned upthread + the fraud factor that prevents sellers from getting the help they need.
I haven’t been doing this forever (6 years now) but I have seen my share of things that made my head spin. Stories read in various forums and personal BS experiences on Amazon, over and over.
Again interesting, you think the sole reason support has gotten so bad is related to the corruption of overseas employees?
I know this has happened but geez thats throwing the baby out with the bath water. For every 1 seller who got an unfair advantage, 100 sellers now get screwed?
Of course, but it also makes sense. Smaller sellers generate less revenue and there’s some fixed cost for Amazon to support them. I guess they get their 40 bucks a month subscription fee, but that’s a pittance compared to how much most sellers pay in referral fees and PPC.
For how big the FBA system is and how it’s designed around moving mass market products efficiently, I can understand why small shipments are more costly for them to process, and why they want to hit those sellers with additional fees.
In the past, Amazon wanted to support small sellers in order to increase their product selection. At this point their product selection is big enough so they no longer want to support small sellers.
Yes, been confirmed by every SAS manager I have ever spoken to. Every resource support had at their disposal has been stripped away from them. They now have what Amazon calls “Amazon’s Wiki’s” that support can search and then copy / paste the response.
When we started in 2018, there was something wrong with one of our listings and we called seller support. While we were on the phone, they fixed it, I refreshed the page, and it was live. That’s how good it used to be. Now - nothing.
Because every seller is disposable to Amazon. Amazon is too big for any 1 of us to mean anything. Doesn’t matter if you are a 7,8, or 9-digit seller. Your listings go away, something else will sell instead. Every Amazon listing has 20 others just like it from a variety of sellers / countries.
I’ve thought about this and I think the way we’ve been thinking about it is wrong. When an ASIN is down for no good reason, the seller is certainly losing money. HOWEVER, the impact on Amazon’s actual GMV is likely minimal, as if your ASIN is down a customer’s search results will simply steer them towards another ASIN. Obviously they want competition so sellers will bid against each other for PPC, but having an ASIN here and there go down for a month or two means nothing to Amazon overall.
This would explain why support is so terrible even for high revenue ASINs.
Yikes! So you are saying we have the priveledge of letting Amazon continue to ■■■■ all over us, until we have made enough money to move on from this madness.
Work at that dream in every way you can. We’ve been laser-focused on breaking away for the last 24 months. This will be the year.
Don’t rely on Amazon for anything. Could be gone tomorrow. Policy change / wild bot on crack, blackhat attack. Anything could spell the end for any of us.
I’m sure you’ve seen the story from a member here that got locked out of their account on Jan 23rd by an accident. They are still out of business today, even with legal help.
Yep, they don’t care about you, me, or any other individual seller.
There’s another thread ongoing where someone had their account shut down and Amazon obviously just doesn’t care. Even if they eventually are found liable for damages through arbitration, if they have to pay a settlement of a few hundred thousand $, they wouldn’t even blink at that. It’s a little bit stunning just how little Amazon cares. Basically if you can’t get a problem resolved through their automated system, you’re looking at months to get it resolved through some other channel, or maybe never at all.
Right and that’s a 7-digit account. Maybe multi-7-digit a year. Out to pasture, containers of inventory sitting in their warehouse they need to pay for and have nowhere to sell it.
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of everyone here, IDK what would.
This is absolutely true. When I first started doing parent/child relationships, I screwed some up so badly I didn’t even know how to try and resolve it. A seller support associate took about an hour of their time to not only fix it for me but give me a lesson in using uploads to do it properly (teach a man to fish and he can eat for life).
Now, I’m not sure seller support could even tell you what a parent/child relationship is let alone explain how it works or help you solve your issue.
I’d like to point out that my shipping inventory to far-away places does NOT speed the process of getting that inventory “in stock” in the least.
Despite items that are “received” being orderable/sellable, they do NOT count towards one’s in-stock inventory for purposes of the “low inventory” fees. One still waits the FULL CALENDAR MONTH for items sent to FBA to become “in stock”, even though some of those have already sold.
With a high-ramp seasonal product, I saw some shipments sell out before the shipment closed, but that was OK, as I viewed Amazon as a “pipeline”, and planned shipments to keep them “in stock”. But now, they have changed the definition of “in stock” to contradict the operational treatment of inventory, so my extra work and higher shipping fees have done nothing to get products “in stock” any quicker.
Its nothing but Amazon saying that they want every seller to use their maximum allocation of fee-free FBA space as a minimum inventory level, just to avoid to extra logistics work when a customer places an order. The fools think that they can make everything “Prime-ready”, and think that they know exactly which FCs need how many of which product in advance.
English translation: Someone at amazon has sold the rest of management on the concept of a crystal ball with which they can tell the future.
While I agree with you when it comes to LTL splits, SPD splits are going directly to FC’s (not DC’s) under the new program. We are shipping to places I never ever heard of before.
LTL splits are still going to DC’s, and thus, need to be split and shipped to FC’s. This in theory would be slower BUT, LTL seems to be checking in very quickly, even when split to far away places at this moment. That will surely change during higher volume periods - Prime / Q4. That will get messy for sure so more time must be allotted by sellers.
