Serious problem with EFN, can anyone help? We are a UK own brand seller. We enrolled in the EFN program in the EU some time ago, and our products are stored in FBA warehousing in Spain. Because we are only VAT registered in Spain (not any other EU country), Amazon's rule is that products can only be stored in Spain. They are then distributed to customers both within Spain and in other EU countries. This works fine. However, the problem we are having is that when a customer returns a product that they bought in Germany (for example), this product is then sent back to FBA Germany. So far, also fine, because to abide by their own rules you would think Amazon would then forward the product back to FBA Spain (these are products in sellable condition). But they don't! Not only do they keep them in Germany (and other EU countries), they charge us for storage there even though these products are not for sale because they are not in Spain. Also, because they are not in Spain when you go to Manage All Inventory and FBA Inventory, only the products in Spain FBA are listed. So we don't get proper visibility, and the number of these products outside Spain increase each time there is a return. And we are now being charged long term storage fees too, which are adding up. We have found out that only by doing a full Inventory Ledger report can these products be seen. We have contacted Seller Support and asked them these questions:
1. How do we stop returns being sent to non-Spain EU FBA warehouses?
2. How can we get the products that are already in non-Spain EU warehouse sent back to FBA Spain warehouses?
For number 1 we were initially told that the returns settings had been set up incorrectly but they were correct now, and that this would not happen again. However, it keeps happening.
For number 2 we were told that this is not possible, that they can only be sent to a third party address within the EU. We don't have such an address as we are UK based and rely on Amazon for warehousing.
We then contacted Seller Support again, and asked these questions:
A. Again, how do we stop returns being sent to non-Spain EU FBA warehouses?
B. As we did not request these products to be returned to non-Spain EU FBA warehouses (and this seems to be against Amazon's own policies), please can we be refunded the monies paid for non-Spain EU FBA storage fees?
C. As we don't have any address within the EU, if they cannot be sent back to Spain FBA our only option is to have these products destroyed (even though they are in sellable condition), so how can we do that?
For A and B we received no response about this. For C we were sent information about how to send the products to a 3rd party address within the EU (which we don't have), and the question about destroying the products was ignored.
At this point we gave up with Seller Support and I contacted a third party Amazon service provider and asked them for a quote to get these products destroyed. They have now been looking into this for a week and they cannot yet find out how to do this.
Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Or if someone from Amazon would respond and help, even better. In all fairness we should really have the storage costs refunded, and be provided with a way to stop this happening again, otherwise it is a drain on our business and undermines the viability of the EFN program.
