As there are so many in our community that are selling on Amazon.com, I will continue to publish the most pressing issues that arise from our group so that everyone can best be informed. Amazon policies are extremely rigid and they don’t allow much room for error. One minor mistake can get you shut out of your account and be catastrophic for your business. There is no account too large for them to suspend and your definition of large and theirs is likely very different anyways. The goal of these articles and our group is to try our best to avoid compliance issues and best deal with them when we do get into trouble.
1) Some sellers have gotten into very serious trouble for not closing out old pending return requests. This is true even if the order has already been refunded a long time ago. Kindly make sure all your old returns are closed out even if you refunded the customer already. Please do this for your international accounts as well.
2) Amazon requires we respond to messages within 24 hours. Most, if not all e-mail auto responders will not count as a valid Amazon response. If you answer Friday and then Motsai Shabbos, you will likely miss a few emails outside of the 24-hour window (which isn’t much of a big deal unless you’re a huge account). There is help software that seems to resolve this issue. I am working to get 100% confirmation that Amazon allows it before I publicize. DO NOT CLICK ‘NO RESPONSE NEEDED’ AND THEN REPLY TO THE MESSAGE. THIS IS A VIOLATION AND SELLERS HAVE BEEN WARNED ABOUT IT. Even if you go on Vacation mode, they expect you to answer within 24 hours to messages.
3) It is possible for a buyer account to get suspended. For example, if you have too many returns or if say something you shouldn’t to a seller via amazon messenger. If they do suspend your Amazon buyer account, your SELLERS account will get suspended as well regardless to how much you sell (this exactly has happened to people). Therefore, If your sister-in-law or whoever uses your account (because you have Prime and she doesn’t) to buy 10 pairs of shoes and returns them all, Amazon can suspend you as a buyer and your seller account will go down with it.
Solution:
a) Have a separate account just for buying and do all your buying on this account
b) Remove everyone from your buying account and explain to them why others can’t use your Amazon prime account. If you use it yourself responsibly, probably no need to open a separate buyer account
4) Amazon has been very rough it seems on Late Shipment as well as on Cancellation Rate. As a precaution you can extend the handling time for longer than the default 2 business days which will give you a cushion in case you can’t ship right away. Below is how to change the handling time for all your MF items in Bulk. It’s important for a time when you will miss a few shipping days (i.e. Yom Tov, simcha) but don’t want to go on vacation mode.
a) Inventory -» Inventory Reports
b) Open Listings Report Liter (gives you MF sku and quantity). Download.
c) Top column A, B is seller-sku, quantity. Change to sku, quantity, and lead-time-to-ship
d) Column C header is lead-time-to-ship. Populate value for all skus to desired handling days (change to 4 or whatever you want)
e) Save as tab delimited file.
f) Go to Inventory -» add products via upload -» check and upload your inventory file
g) Upload file. File type -» Price & Quantity File. Upload.
h) You can double check by going to item, Offer, Fulfillment Latency. (you can upload just one item first time to make sure you did it right.)
Ed Rosenberg – to join an incredible sellers group of like-minded sellers, e-mail [email protected]
Ed, you’re a tzadik!!!
Thanks for posting this. Very informative.
Is there any way TLS could link all of his articles from TLS on the bottom of this article?
Thanks