Anyone for whom it is true, they don’t need to announce it to the forum in order to access that preferred treatment. They don’t go to the forum or open a case with front line support, they call their dedicated service reps. Their dedicated service reps already know who they are and how much their job is to bend over backwards for those sellers and do not need to be reminded.
Additionally, any reps who would see their post on the forum or read their support tickets would not have the ability to give them preferential treatment even if they wanted. You have to go pretty high up the ladder for that.
That’s why I’m calling BS on this forum post. If they were really a 100M seller they would have preferential treatment and would not be complaining on the forums about this issue.
Sorry, no seller gets any special treatment. Amazon cares the same about a 4 digit seller as it does a 15 digit seller. Doesn’t make any business sense but it’s true.
As we ascended the digits, nothing special happened. In fact, things got so bad that we had to pay for SAS to get anything done or “special treatment”
I’m usually a skeptic about these posts, but I think that this one is trying to draw attention to the fact that likely even with access to all the extras that a large account can afford, Amazon can’t even fix this very basic issue.
A lawyer can’t fix a post card getting mailed or not, or lost.
SAS reps can’t fix a post card getting mailed or not, or lost.
Amazon’s system is so dysfunctional that even a Seller in the 1% of Sellers can’t get a simple thing addressed effectively.
I think this is the point, and frankly, I completely agree. Look what @Tried_Tested is having to go through because Amazon can’t even hit an undo button.
This. This is all a SAS rep does in a nutshell. We can’t talk to anyone directly except our representative who then reaches out to another team and relays back their response.
We’ve been told there are different levels to the SAS reps based on what you earn. However I consider the source who told us that to be unreliable. They also said they all did the same thing. It was just how high level a person they could reach out to in the same team. Given how things tend to roll downhill, that task or question still likely gets delegated to the same person a lower level rep would have contacted.
Maybe having a higher level SAS rep, if they even exist, speeds the process up. Maybe not.
My opinion is a SAS rep is a glorified customer service rep. They only are given that title to make the seller think they are getting “extra”, but they might as well just throw their money out the window, cause the whole SAS program is just in place by name to get your money.
Do you have SAS because I would totally disagree with your assessment of the program.
Just to name a few things we’ve done with SAS that you can’t do with Seller Support:
Brand Name Changes (for legit reasons)
Shutting down 4 competitors for fraud
Lots of buyer reviews removed because they were obviously from black hat competitors
Instant geolocation of lost pallets and into receiving within 36 hours
TONS of really knee biter issues resolved
And many more…
BTW - Being with SAS covers 1 Deal fee per week. If you have the sales to have SAS, you should be running at least 1 deal a week anyway. That’s $600 a month right there you get back against the payment for SAS.
A/B/C sellers is how this works. There is no difference in the service but the A sellers get more experienced managers.
Should every seller have access to this type of support? - I think so, but that’s not possible with the numbers involved unless we all want our ordinary fees tripled or more.
We’ve been lucky with the 3 SAS managers we’ve had so far (they shuffle people all the time which is annoying). Guess Amazon doesn’t want sellers getting too friendly with their SAS managers to prevent some sort of fraud… Like major banking workers that are forced to take off 2 consecutive weeks a year, totally disconnected from their firms.
We think the service is well worth it but if we weren’t in a category so rampant with fraud, never would have considered it because it’s not necessary.
The main reason why we got SAS originally was for inventory limit exceptions which you got with SAS. That’s not part of the program anymore sadly but buying capacity when needed is so cheap it doesn’t matter, especially when what you sell is tiny like ours.
No, we don’t and have been able to do about 1/2 those things without SAS. I think it’s just how you handle the issue and getting the right support (may take a few tries), but we always seem to be able to handle issues without paying extra.
Yes, we do have SAS. We transitioned to a new manager in January and they don’t seem as on the ball as our previous one. They do work more with our marketing department than anyone else. Our monthly business meeting with them is usually marketing and brand focused.
For things I deal with they’ve been less than helpful. As an example, I brought up our recurring triangulation fraud issue in June. As of August 26th they’re still trying to find the correct team to speak to regarding that.
Edit: And I’m not sure if this an indication of what level of seniority they are, but our previous rep had a signature stating they were a Senior Account Manager with Strategic Account Services. Our new rep has a signature stating they’re a Senior Customer Success Manager with Strategic Account Services.
An interesting development on the challenges faced by Ukraine-based sellers, re: SIV (‘Amazonese’ for “Seller Identity Verification”) in the Age of the INFORM Act:
I’ve heard tell of such an alternative being in play (due to my studious perusals of non-NSFE discussion venues related to Selling on Amazon), and rather-vague references to that possibility have indeed been posted by both members of the FMT-CMT & the AHT SMEs cohort over the last 19 months - but this is the first time I’ve seen a member for the FMT-CMT state that such a workaround actually is being supported…
@GGX I also think, though it wouldn’t be stated, it’s not just the monthly fee that gets you service.
You have the SAS monthly fee and lower revenue than they hope, the help isn’t coming. Sure, they’ll talk to you and sound nice, but nothing really worth it on their end.
You cranking higher revenues, they are more inclined to make adjustments on your behalf, because an improvement to those revenues represent a larger improvement to their revenues.
Seems like basic shitaki to me…I concede though that normal support or rather sub-normal support wouldn’t allow for this
