I have an issue with inventory that has shown up on my account, but is not mine.
4802 units of ASIN B071ZMX6CT (Case# ID 15251371501) showed up weeks ago in my listings. I have contacted Support, and spent a couple hours on hold with various departments. Today a removal order was activated and I am concerned I will be charged for retuns and storage fees. No one seems to be able to come up with an answer, or solution. Support cant even say where the product is at which DC. They do acknowledge that there is no ship plan on my account showing this product as inbound. I did sell this item 3 years ago, but only sent 4 units, which Support as verified.
I cannot cancel the removal order, the button is greyed out. The product is heavy (half gallons of paint) I dont want all this coming to my house, it will total 21,000 lbs, in 2401 cases!
Lordy, I am glad this is not my problem. The guys in our basement package room would go insane!
My advice to this seller is to start calling liquidation companies to find someone willing to buy all this stuff.
There will be no other resolution to this case other than arbitration with amazon if the damages are high enough (which in this case, after whatever they get from the liquidator, probably aren’t).
The “Warranty & Support” is odd too, unless the verbiage changed recently:
Amazon.com Return Policy:Amazon.com Voluntary 30-Day Return Guarantee: You can return many items you have purchased within 30 days following delivery of the item to you. Our Voluntary 30-Day Return Guarantee does not affect your legal right of withdrawal in any way. You can find out more about the exceptions and conditions here.
you need to manually enter in a amazon.com/dp/ASIN link if there’s no sellers on it
Also, unlike the cases where some random person gets an unsolicited shipment from Amazon, in this situation, the seller let the automated removal order get placed. I would not recommend trying to refuse shipment on it as that will likely cause them additional issues like getting suspended from FBA, or getting hit with even more FBA fees.
That would probably fall under the arbitration clause. Yeah they’d probably win, but that’s not the route people generally want to go down. They probably want to be done with this headache in the easiest way possible, not be in hearings 6 months from now.
So being done with it means accepting pallets of items the seller didn’t ship to amazon?
For the record the seller didn’t “let” the automatic removal order happen. The seller stated they were working with seller support to figure out where the 4600+ units came from and how to get them off their account.
The inventory showed up weeks ago, and the removal order was automatically placed because the time limit passed and there was no resolution yet (this is their standard procedure and every FBA seller should know about this). They could’ve placed a liquidations or disposal order in prior to letting the automated removal occur (liquidations would result in them receiving a net positive amount of $, if disposal they’d still be on the hook for the disposal fee).
As I said above, at this point I would accept the pallets and find a liquidation company to buy the products and come pick them up. Amazon will not provide any kind of resolution here. It would’ve been much better to not let the automated removal order get placed, but the horse is kind of out of the barn for that option now. Getting Amazon to fix this problem will require arbitration and I’d rather deal with a liquidations company than hiring a lawyer to go to arbitration.
I’ve had inventory randomly show up, most of the time for small amounts, but one time was for a large amount (though nothing like this seller’s situation). In none of the cases did I ever try to contact seller support as I knew I’d be wasting time. If Amazon says the inventory is mine, then it’s mine and that’s their final decision on the matter.
So all 3 of your recommendations to the seller were going to cost them $$$.
Liquidation or disposal orders show acceptance on their part and would look badly on them in arbitration/court. Aka well it must be your inventory since you disposed of it!
I think the seller did the correct thing here. Let amazon continue to make the wrong choices and not touch a thing other then contact seller support. I bet seller support even told them to do nothing and that they would take care of it.
It might be time for the seller who may be forced to accept this delivery to contact his attorney, if he has not already done so, and make contact with local and national media.
The volume the seller is being expected to deal with, through no fault of his own, should provoke sufficient outrage.
GGX, liquidation after delivery of this “free” merchandise from Amazon is not an easy fix for most of us. I work at home, as do many Amazon sellers. There is probably no way to redirect this huge return shipment to a local storage facility for later liquidation.
If there’s been any viable way for 3P Sellers to opt-out of the Automated Unfulfillable Orders program since its last revision some years earlier in this decade, I haven’t seen it yet.*
I take your point - I, too believe that the OP’s AUO settings triggered the Removal Order - but I’m inclined to agree with our friends Selg & Pep, at least on my first-blush take upon the available evidence, in supposing that the root of this problem doesn’t rest at the seller’s own doorstep.
The ability to opt-in to the latest iteration of the various, renamed over time, Grading Team Opt-out program(s) would not have prevented such a spurious situation as this, methinks.*
*
I don’t lightly discount the distinct possibility that the OP of the NSFE discussion in question made a mistake on their end - goodness knows, we’ve all seen that sort of thing coming back to bite members of our Seller Community in the posterior many, many times - but given the limited information provided in said OP’s premised situation, I’m inclined to suspect that there may well be a significant chance that the actual blame lies farther afield:
I know better than to believe seller support when they say something like that.
Liquidation would’ve been the best if that was an option since that wouldn’t cost the seller anything (they would receive money from the liquidation). Disposal costs money, and accepting the removal and going to a 3rd party liquidator’s a toss up as to whether they’d get paid more than the cost of removal for the order, not to mention hassle of receiving a bunch of pallets at home.
Going to arbitration is a huge hassle and expense. I’d rather resolve it some other way even if at all possible. I don’t know what the cost for this is going to end up being so I can’t say for sure whether it’s worth it or not. Removal/disposal costs have also gone up significantly the past few years. Back when disposal cost 15 cents / unit I wouldn’t even blink if I saw inventory that wasn’t mine. I’d just click dispose and accept the charges.
I would also NEVER do anything that would risk getting a suspension from FBA, like refusing delivery of the removal order. The losses incurred from getting suspended would far exceed whatever cost/problems would occur from accepting the order and there’s no guarantee that you will ever get compensated for those losses. Even if you do by the time you get compensated you could be bankrupt.
It’s been quite a few years since I last saw reports of this, but I’ve seen reports of exactly the Catch-22 situation described in this NSFE discussion more than a few times before:
This sounds like BS. How would an “amazon associate” tell the seller that a counterfeit unit was returned? Unless someone is trained on how to differentiate between a real and fake product (or at least have detailed guidelines published by the mfg), their opinion is more or less worthless. Even if 2 side by side units of the same product look different, unless you know every single version the manufacturer ever made, you can’t tell if it’s real or not.
Not to mention FBA doesn’t do an authenticity check on a returned product. They massive cut corners processing returns on basic things, let alone spend time looking closely at the products.
Maybe the seller is confusing “counterfeit” with “brick in a box.” The latter certainly happens on a regular basis. I’ve never heard of anyone swapping out a counterfeit look alike for a return.
I myself have, and I’m quite sure that I’m not at all alone in that regard.
It’s in fact such a common occurrence that Amazon has for many years used the nomenclature “Switcheroo” as a Return Reason in the FBA Returns (link, Seller Central GUI) Report.
This also, methinks, go far to explain why Amazon originally instituted the “Materially Different” exception for the Seller-Fulfilled Returns/Refund Process.