Brutal, just brutal
So I've been selling on Amazon for over 12 years....99.999999% of my orders are FBA, read on....
I had a couple of customer returns...so I listed one of them as FBM.
The item sold, I took it to the Post Office the next working day, handed over the package & thought no more of it.
about 5 days later I got a message from the Customer "I have a Royal Mail Card here...asking for £5 for the postage deficit"
Odd, because I sent via Evri...I checked the Evri tracking & the last update was "You parcel has been dropped off" - in other words, no updates since I dropped it off at the Post Office.
then the penny dropped...someone at the Post Office has placed my Evri parcel into a Royal Mail Bag ...when this happens, rather than send the package back to where it came from, the Royal Mail actually attempt to deliver it - but apply a £5 charge.
I instantly sent a replacement package to the customer (using Royal Mail this time) & upgraded the postage to 24hr delivery - the customer received the replacement without issue (he was fine about everything)
This morning, I logged onto the mobile seller central App...to see an Orange Banner "Your account is at risk of deactivation"
My heart stopped.
Because I have no FBM order history...and because this one order that was sent FBM didn't go smoothly (through no fault of my own), my order defect rate is now woeful! And that's what the warning related to.
Feedback to Amazon - never (& I mean NEVER) send out an "Your account is at risk of deactivation" when what you really mean is "your account is at risk of having FBM Order fulfilment disabled"
I don't know how you guys cope wit the stress of FBM.
Brutal, just brutal
So I've been selling on Amazon for over 12 years....99.999999% of my orders are FBA, read on....
I had a couple of customer returns...so I listed one of them as FBM.
The item sold, I took it to the Post Office the next working day, handed over the package & thought no more of it.
about 5 days later I got a message from the Customer "I have a Royal Mail Card here...asking for £5 for the postage deficit"
Odd, because I sent via Evri...I checked the Evri tracking & the last update was "You parcel has been dropped off" - in other words, no updates since I dropped it off at the Post Office.
then the penny dropped...someone at the Post Office has placed my Evri parcel into a Royal Mail Bag ...when this happens, rather than send the package back to where it came from, the Royal Mail actually attempt to deliver it - but apply a £5 charge.
I instantly sent a replacement package to the customer (using Royal Mail this time) & upgraded the postage to 24hr delivery - the customer received the replacement without issue (he was fine about everything)
This morning, I logged onto the mobile seller central App...to see an Orange Banner "Your account is at risk of deactivation"
My heart stopped.
Because I have no FBM order history...and because this one order that was sent FBM didn't go smoothly (through no fault of my own), my order defect rate is now woeful! And that's what the warning related to.
Feedback to Amazon - never (& I mean NEVER) send out an "Your account is at risk of deactivation" when what you really mean is "your account is at risk of having FBM Order fulfilment disabled"
I don't know how you guys cope wit the stress of FBM.
0 replies
Seller_j30KQjgEjnF6v
[Moderator Edit: removed inappropriate commentary]
Seller_19xPhE8YgkmxW
Hi HankMcSpank,
It's probably an automatic message when you infringe a certain limit on any of the mesures
But (usually) Amazon does not deactivate for 1 order... (but BE STILL MY BEATING HEART!!)
All Best
Brian
Seller_TqdgVQYUGnWHb
Full time SFP/FBM seller here... im shocked your even on this platform 12 years. The other usual banners dont appear to be out of the ordinary, my dashboard lights up weekly
Seller_Hy3M3wKRmOFRV
The whole account health thing is one of many things I hate about how Amazon operates.
Small business' are judged as the same a a big company.
When big company who sell hundreds or thousands of items a day has 5-10 items that don't get delivered on time or don't get sent out on time in 30 days it means nothing.
However if you are a small company who only sell 5-15 items a day if you have 1 in 30 days it immediately becomes a problem.
I have always sold as FBM, when I first started selling on Amazon my accountant told me to never sell FBA.
To be honest I hate selling on Amazon, if I didn't have consistent sales I would not sell on here, they do everything possible to get you to sell FBA by putting more and more restricting rules on FBM sellers.
I find if quite ironic how Amazon treat sellers. No sellers = No business, they do everything they can think of to make it better (easier the play the game) for the buyer, whilst making it harder and harder for the sellers especially Small businesses.
The latest one is this DD+7!! Which accountant came up with that one? I wish I could walk into B&Q get some stuff and walk out saying "I'll pay you in 7 days".
Amazon need to employ people who have actually sold on their platform and ask them if a new policy is a good idea rather than listening to accountants.
Seller_N0kQDKMgwda6y
Well, I think Amazon are wonderful. And its a real privilege to give them a full third of the value of your goods for an electronic transaction that costs them about a penny.
Seller_C1SkC4KxmyscM
You will not be deactivated for one error like this. But I do know that feel. Send a message over to support to make sure it's on record that this was undeserved is all you can do.
Seller_cDSFGJTixuvGG
I had a different but relevant experience.
Most of my orders are FBM as they are customised and for years we have always had a 100% on time shipment rate.
However, One customer ordered 47 items but failed to add the customisation details.
I contacted the customer but didnt get a response. I emailed and left answerphone messages but they did not answer or reply.
I ended up with my account at risk of deactivation as Amazon had counted all 47 items as individual late deliveries despite it all being one order.
Seller_jtuvpXnocNHFN
Would not worry about the banners displayed until they send performance notification. The banner is just a warning that things can go wrong drastically fast however currently you are not under investigation up your game and resolve the issue after all its a platform not your own website...
Seller_8mrawJx3pdUiW
We have had a 97-98% OTDR for 6 months straight, they tell us the min metric is 90%, but insider information told us it was actually 97% to show next day to the customer. Despite even being above this hidden metric, we will still get penalised when we get a drop from 98% to 97.5%, and then dealing with seller support to explain to them their own policies aren't even being enforced.
Next is getting 1 customer out of a historic 6000 orders on one particular sku, saying it's inauethentic for a free refund, and then amazon penalising you with a policy violation, and then the alogrithm doesn't allow you to be picked for the buybox for a few days.
We can send out everything on time perfect, then Royal Mail can do a late scan, we then get penalised for things outside of our control, Amazon couldn't care less.
With FBA when you get multiquantity orders, Amazon treats everything as a single order, and then they pocket the savings in the shipping. You can get 10 orders on one item and FBA will give you single unit profit x10, they claim some of the units are in different warehouses, which is may be true, so why don't we get the savings on the ones that are obviously kept in the same warehouse?
Despite all my complaints, FBM is actually thw way to go forward until they strangle us even more, the mutliquantity orders are massive ROI, for example our business earns 3x Profit per item on average with FBM than FBA, sometimes for the exact same items that we fulfill on fba and fbm we can see 3.5x just due to the profit margins on saving on shipping labels with multipacks.
Obviously in the future I would highly suggest you diversify through other marketplaces and direct selling, it's the only way you can be secure when Amazon enforces things their policies don't even outline
Seller_GefJGAjR9q1Vx
Ours got deactivated due to Royal Mail & DHL woeful delivery issues . We provided letters from both companies to validate their issues , did not make one bit of difference .
Here is to week 4 of account being down
