I also saw KJ’s post several days ago in Manaus’ discussion; I continue to subscribe to the notion - perhaps best illustrated by @Roxy’s Dec`22 OSFE thread My post-suspension post to the forum community (link, NSFE) - that KJ is among the best of the FMT/CMT members.
It has been apparent (@ least to me) for some months now that KJ is determined to provide some transparency on the arcane inner workings of Amazon’s processes & procedures, an example of which can be seen in this post from 20Nov`23 (emphasis mine):
He seems to be one of the good ones to me as well and has seemed to be the one handling issues with the transition to Ground Advantage and now buy shipping issues. He has been responsive, and on the few times I have pushed back on his explanations, he has been open to the feedback and to looking into the issue more.
The really good mods go above and beyond, within the constraints that are imposed.
Another of my faves is Sandy; s/he made 3 posts in 2022 which went went so much farther in clarifying credit card requirements that it became quite common for the seasoned & savvy forum vets to point other members of our Seller Community to them (briefly, as the advent of the NSFE pretty-much put paid on that exercise, although some soldier on in the trenches regardless).
In 2023, Sandy also took the forefront in explaining why Amazon had (rightfully) followed the USPTO’s lead re: this years crackdown in the Administrative Orders and Sanctions process prompted by Bad Actors’ attempts to circumvent the ‘Domestic Attorney’ rule.
S/he continues to up his/her game in various other areas as well, as this NSFE post from less than an hour ago vividly illustrates:
On the other hand, we have such garbage as this from Topher (who, admittedly, is typically quite helpful in my experience), referencing the badly-outdated SHC page Configure shipping rates and restrictions (link, Help Hub Revision) from yesteryear* (emphasis Topher’s) in the first reply to this discussion :
While it is true that I have enjoyed some modicum of success over the years - via the submission of succinct feedback to TPTB directly from the “Was this article helpful?” mechanism embodied @ the bottom of most all Seller Help Content pages - in getting the Editorial Team to update outdated criterion on this or that published policy, my lack of success concerning the page specified long ago led to me abandoning further attempts there.
Glutton for punishment that I am, for the first time since 2017 I just tried again after seeing Topher’s aforementioned 112223 NSFE post.
I realize I’m likely beating a dead horse here, but I’d really like to know when will Katie promulgate the memo which will finally stop members of the FMT/CMT, and the SMEs (“Subject Matter Experts”) alike, from posting links to SHC pages which reside behind the Midway Authorization Portal gateway (exclusively for the internal use of Amazonians who have the credentials to access such content, as was repeatedly pointed out during the rash of such occurrences in 2021 & 2022), as the AHT (“Account Health Team”) SME Mindy did 112223 in the below-linked post (note the ‘.dev’ domain link):
The OP of that NSFE discussion - who likely faces a Sisyphean task, unfortunately, given the original premise, as the biz model is not typically a very good fit for Amazon’s one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’ - responded thusly (emphasis mine):
Have to remove the ‘.dev’ and replace with ‘.com’ AND remove the ‘www.’ at the beginning and the ‘G’ at the beginning of the reference ‘GWHNLFB8G85QAZ5W’ for it to work.
Yokie - who is another AHT SME which I’ve generally considered to be rather helpful, @ least in most instances - has joined the ‘Midway Authentication Portal club’ with this improperly-‘signed’ 22Nov`23 post pointing (not once, but twice) behind that gateway:
To be fair, Yokie’s been around long enough to know better, as s/he has managed to link SHC pages properly in the past - which isn’t to say that some new directive handed down from on high hasn’t poisoned the pool - but your stalwart efforts on behalf of our Seller Community, here in the SAS and over in the NSFE, continue to make me think of this poignant phrase (with all due respect to where it’s due):
Yes, and KJ continues along the same track with this reply, earlier today, to one of the SAS Community’s own re: the latest rash of Shipping Overcharge Adjustments:
Only one of the related NSFE discussions which KJ linked has so much as single reply @ the time of this writing: the second, which has a ‘pablum/panacea’ reply from Dominic, followed by an incisively-biting response from the OP.
That’s something of a sea-change in how KJ has historically directed members of our Seller Community to ‘compilation/clarity’ threads; I suspect that it’s @ least a possibility that KJ taking ownership of these concerns has resulted in a determination to further efforts at consolidation by his/her own hand - which paradigm, of course, has long been in play as a desirable feature, but has been badly fractured by the dwindling of the seasoned and savvy forum veteran participation caused by the advent of Katie’s Abomination…
Afore that, there was a significantly-numbered cadre of vets who took it upon themselves to link related threads; now there’s just a precious few members of our Seller Community carrying on with this good deed (a preponderance of which cohort are also members of the SAS/BSFE).
Blake - who created that discussion, and replied to your ‘Heads-up’ thread with a promise to pass the word along - also posted a World Wide Web v. (‘xxx .www. xxx’ - which isn’t necessarily supported across all browsers for SHC, and/or for all SoA Accounts, in my experience) of the same “QZ Tray” SHC page:
The members of the FMT-CMT - especially these two, I would say - are typically pretty earnest in their attempts to help, but as is true of so much of the rest of Amazon’s support infrastructure, disconnects abound, likely because the fish rots from the head down…
Another one for the archives, posted today (9Feb`24). Roberto’s a Newbie-wan Kenobi on the FMT-CMT roster, to be sure, but still this repeated practice of posting links shielded by the Amazonian-only Midway Authentication Portal is maddening, as it smacks clearly of Amazon simply not giving a damn (no surprise there, of course, but mayhaps particularly galling is the fact that he managed to provide a seller-accessible URL for the second SHC article mentioned):
The intended file is the ‘parent’ page “Returns, refunds, cancellations, and claims” @ https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/69126 (link, simplified ‘non-G’ v., broken for Discourse display).
I’ll not, here, expound on the long-running Payoneer/Amazon synchronization problem since the advent of the SP-API & the U.S. Inform Consumers Act requirements produced the ongoing conflict between these two corporate entities, but I’ll keep recording every instance I read of the FMT-CMT making Midway Authentication Portal mistakes like this.