After years with only a handful of damaged items being declared “unfulfillable” for one reason or another, each year, we suddenly have half a dozen in a month.
Curiouser and curiouser, they are all (but one damaged item) in brand-new condition, nothing wrong at all.
I am not sure how to address this with Amazon. I do not want them shipping out damaged items as “new”, but are they taking the customer’s word for it, when the customer might claim “damaged” to simply get Amazon to pay for the return shipping?
This sudden upswing made me realize that I do not know the metric for “customer damaged”, or how Amazon decides something is “damaged”, and puts an LPN sticker over my barcode, and sends it back to me at my expense.
I see more and more of these also, most on an item that clearly states the fitment range on the detail page but buyers don’t read. So it doesn’t fit, they return it as ‘defective - doesn’t work’ and there is nothing wrong with it, but the package has been opened.
Opened package is now ‘not new’. Also their LPN label on the package makes it ‘not new’.
It is frustrating.
Amazon FC workers do not know or care to know about your product. We have items that have the plastic bag torn from tape being stuck to it in the box, and it was retuned as “Customer damaged” we have also tracked “defective” returns where the bag was unopened and returned to stock for sale probably because the bag was not opened and was evaluated as such.
Is amazon 100% accurate? No, but the FBA returns for the most part, have a valid reason for being sent to us to be evaluated for packaging if not use. Over 90% of our returns only require poly bag replacement and then resold, so evaluate your packaging and act accordingly.
If you are genuinely concerned about micro managing your return data watch your returns at this link and look for things like this that give you the straight picture.
This item was returned as “defective” but was considered in sellable condition meaning it was not opened and still in a sealed poly bag.
Amazon allowing a customer to return an item is not something you should care about if using FBA as you knowingly abdicated your ability to do anything about it when you signed up, so I wouldn’t give myself an ulcer or stroke over it and simply ensure your packaging and product is the right fit for FBA.
I have another hypothesis for why this might happen.
Consider the possibility that the amount of space allocated to this SKU of an ASIN has been reduced because of your success at selling the product. When the return arrives there is no space on the shelf for the returned product, so it gets a damaged label and no one needs to move any product.
