Short version: We hired Amazon’s Strategic Account Services for their 3-month minimum and fired them as promptly as we could.
For those that aren’t aware, Amazon offers a program they call SAS Core and it’s meant to be a way to get an Amazon team member on your side to help you deal with issues that come up when selling.
If that sounds too good to be true, it is. In 3 months, they were fully unable to provide any meaningful support. The most interesting thing they did was offer an IDQ report that scores our item listing quality based on completeness of the listings.
All of the information they provided were in links to Seller University - a free service all sellers should already be using.
The cost of the program was $1600 plus 0.3% of your previous months sales (tax included). This is not cheap, and we received an hour and a half of conference call time, as well as 4 or 5 emails.
They make some pretty big promises, and fulfill none of them. For the amount of money they want, it’s patently unacceptable.
As ASV_Vites and a few others have stated it can be very helpful if you get the right person, on the flip side if you get a bad person its a total waste of money. Sorry you got a bad one.
Maybe. I have my first meeting with our new rep in 20 hours. Hoping for a fresh and more effective perspective but also realizing that’s unlikely to be the case. I have a feeling SAS managers are essentially robots reading off the same script.
The difference with our original rep is he was critical of Amazon and was in sync with us on our issues / complaints and honestly tried hard to fight for us. Even forwarding us internal communications we weren’t supposed to see and showing us stuff on video calls that most certainly was not meant for seller consumption.
That’s really what I enjoyed most because, after all, knowledge is power.
That stuff was almost worth the price of admission.
I’m glad I never sought to do business with them (other than what I needed done). They most certainly must work on commission or something because they are always desperate to get me to invest - to the point of sounding like a scam artist. I never do business with anyone who sounds that desperate. They also rotate constantly. I don’t know if that’s because there’s a high turnover in that job or they want to prevent anyone from staying in one place too long to prevent fraud or what. They try to develop a relationship with me and whenever I come back, they are gone.
As crappy as most of them are, those people actually serve a purpose. There’s some people who are COMPLETELY clueless about finance (they probably think companies like Apple and Microsoft are owned by 1 person like the local corner store is). So a crappy investment advisor giving a pre-set portfolio of stocks/bonds based on someone’s age is better than what they’d do with their money otherwise (spending on beer and hookers every week). Also, if you don’t like an investment advisor, they don’t lock you in for at least 3 months more of their services. That said, these folks are probably going to replaced by bots over time. Schwab has a lower fee offering that will automatically allocate contributions for people who don’t know what a stock is.
If you’re an Amazon seller who can afford to cough up $1600 / month you don’t need some moron to send you seller university links. So that’s so much worse.
