Just a heads up - I received an order cancellation request and did cancel the order, figured I was done with it.
Later I found a message that required a response:
Dear Amazon Seller,
This is Amazon’s Customer Service team. A customer reached out to us with some questions about a purchase they made from you. Here’s a description of the issue:
Product: B08BNQ2NT4
Order number: 112-7457979-6187414
Return requested: No
Reason for contact: I want to cancel something in my order
Please respond to this request within 48 hours.
Thanks,
Amazon Customer Service
I suspect this was a phone cancellation that triggered the customer service message, or is this a new procedure? Anyway, good thing I happened to randomly check for messages and found this response required for an already cancelled order.
Because nothing can be simple on Seller Central. Another cancellation step - check for messages.
As we all know that is Amazon talking, well actually the customer talking through Amazon. To quote loosely a country western song, “It’s the whisky talkin.”
As you know, you did the right thing. How many newbies would not. People are crazy amazon is stupid. Another country song reference.
And No I am not a huge country song person. However, another one is staying between the lines. Hey (Hay) Amazon how about telling us we have 48 hours to respond but Noooo— you give us only 24 hours.
This message went through the Amazon’s Customer Service and was NOT a direct cancellation of the entire order but that the customer wanted to cancel something within the order but not the entire order as stated in the message.
This happens sometimes with custom orders and would be handled through the email.
We would have emailed back and asked what part of the order they wanted to cancel. We then would have provided instructions on how to cancel the order if that is what they really wanted. After the customer’s reply, we would have done what the customer wanted and/or the cancellation of the order and marked the email as resolved. If the customer didn’t reply, we would have cancelled the order as customer requested and marked the email as resolved. If the order was cancelled, we would have made sure to click the customer requested cancellation as the reason why it was cancelled to protect our order cancellation metric.
You probably didn’t see a cancellation notice on the Manage Order page or the Order Detail page because this went through Amazon’s Customer Service and wasn’t a cancellation through the order system.
The could haves ...
The customer could have contacted you directly.
Amazon’s Customer Service could have instructed the customer on how to cancel an order rather than dumping the “customer service” on the seller.
I did have a cancellation on the Manage Orders page, and had already cancelled it before I saw the message.
The point is I am not in the habit of looking for messages about cancellations when I am notified on the order page and take action there. It was a fluke that I was just checking to see if there were replies to other recent messages, and found the cancellation message that required a response.
On an average day, I could have missed that.
Does this ever happen?? It’s on us to train their buyers.
If it appeared on the Manage Order page, the customer probably panicked and turned around and called Amazon Customer Services to make sure it got cancelled which created the email. At that point (since it was already cancelled), we would have just replied that the order has been cancelled per your request and mark the email as resolved.
