I had a huge amount of inventory randomly moved to defective. There was no notification or any information given, all I see in the inventory ledger are 2 entries that look like this:
There’s another entry earlier where the first 198 were moved into defective.
ASIN is still active and selling, just with the majority of the inventory now marked as defective. When I contacted seller support they said they have no information and all I can do is remove the “defective” inventory.
Any ideas here?
I can’t remove it as I don’t have a location to receive returns.
There’s been quite a bit of chatter, over the last 5-6 months or so over in the NSFE, about occurrences of this unwelcome phenomenon.
The only positive remarks that I’ve seen are several separate reports of the problem clearing by itself w/o any user involvement, which leads me to think that this could be an artifact of Amazon’s poor control of its code…
I had exactly this happen last year. They put a good portion of one ASIN into defective. A couple days later it was put back in as sellable. No one could tell me what happened but it did solve itself.
It might be somewhere along the line a transfer in/out of the FC mistakenly scanned the units as defective instead of receiving them like they were supposed to but that’s just a guess.
Amazon routinely makes mistakes and marks our stuff “expired” when it can’t be, even on a first shipment of something with a 36 month shelf life. That’s just a unit here and there, which we write off. Maybe a dozen units a year max.
I would at least bring back a few units to check to wherever you live, if you are in the US.
I don’t want to give them a linkable address, and also don’t want 100s of units being shipped home. I also have the expired unit here and there (which may be explainable by the expiration date actually being illegible, whether it wasn’t printed perfectly or it got rubbed off while being handled), but this is diffferent. They were all received as sellable, then randomly 85% of the inventory turned into defective for no reason.
I MCF stuff to my home address from both of my accounts all the time for personal consumption if we don’t have it around or for friends / family. Amazon doesn’t care as long as you follow the rules.
I’m one of those people that will just do what I know is right and justified and will fight to the bitter end if I get unjustly attacked or punished for something I can prove I didn’t do.
The reality is Amazon knows exactly where you are and lots of things you might not know they know about you and your business.
Curiosity would get the best of me in your situation and I would have already removed some of that inventory to check it.
When I first started (my other account), someone told me that Amazon picked 2 singles for 2-packs when ordered and you didn’t need to pack them up that way.
Long story short - we sent about 1000 units in for our first item which was a 2-pack.
After we got lots of complaints, I figured out quickly that I was a moron and recalled it all to my house. It all came back (lots of damages btw), with some of the units taped together with packing tape…
It took weeks to get it all back and we must have gotten 75 UPS boxes in all. That was a hard lesson to learn. Quite embarrassing too! LOL
Yeah, in theory you can fight it and prove whatever, in reality Amazon bankrupts you by pushing a button.
The way this happened it’s almost certainly a glitch.
The other issue is even if I send all this stuff back to our warehouse, the amount of time lost processing and resending all the inventory would cause us to miss deadlines for other things. It’s not like we’re going to get everything back packed neatly and ready to go back out, it’s going to come in 100 different boxes with damage, so every unit needs to be inspected and graded, relabeled and reboxed.
Well, a big company defending lawsuits is a bit different. If you get a reputation for paying to settle frivolous lawsuits, it opens the door to having more of them filed against you. Remember how many copycat mcdonalds hot coffee lawsuits there were?
Gotta at least be a little afraid of Amazon if you’re relying on it. I think you’re most likely in the right with that brand, but for whatever reason Amazon is siding with them and told you to stop so you have to stop if you want to continue to sell there.
Well, out of 774 defective units, 13 got moved back to sellable a couple days ago, rest are still defective. So it seems like it has a chance of eventually resolving itself.
All non-reserved units were now moved to defective. This seems to be hitting the other FBA sellers too as all FBA delivery dates are now pushed out 10 days, which implies that everyone else’s available units were also marked defective leaving only their FC Transfer units available for sale.
