Seller / Referral Fees Overcharged by Amazon
I hope someone out there can help me.
Whilst doing my financial accounts recently, I spotted a discrepancy in the seller referral fees I have been charged. Perhaps I should have checked these things regularly, but probably like most people I assumed Amazon can be trusted on their fees.
On closer investigation, I found that I was overcharged by some 20% on sales between 1st August 2018 and 28th February 2019 in all 5 European marketplaces on thousands of transactions. Seller support (HA HA) told me I must submit the claim in a particular Excel format listing every order reference and many other details. It took me several days and I finally submitted it today and the overcharge is in the thousands of pounds.
The response I received just now astonished me
"Please be informed that only orders less than 12 months old are eligible for a referral fee refund. Orders more than 12 months old are not eligible for this and will not be considered.
Please write back to us with updated excel sheets with orders that were placed after Jan 29th 2019 and we will be able to process the same for a refund."
Any suggestions how to proceed would be appreciated. There can’t be a free ride to steal from you. They are not denying it happened.
Jack
30 replies
Seller_d7IktcehfQriR
With this being precisely 20% could this be down to VAT or a specific fee change for the category as the dates seem very specific?
These are self imposed time limits. If you have been overcharged then you have not been charged the fees in the fee schedule and Amazon have broken business agreement. However getting Seller Support to actually refund beyond 12 months may be difficult now they seem to have imposed this rule. Amazon often even when you provide the information do not check it properly.
You should perhaps email the MD and ask them to investigate. If you don’t get a satisfactory response you may then need to file a court claim to obtain a refund of any overcharged fees.
Seller_wjMQaBVbFvYO1
Thank you for the replies.
TUF - your comments are very helpful and I hope you sort out your own charges issue. I am still uncertain whether to appeal to the MD now or try to still fight it out at the lower level first.
Neil - The invoices do not show any VAT and Amazon says they did not charge me VAT on the seller fees. Where the VAT does come in though, is for advertising where they did not charge VAT for those registered for VAT, but late 2018 they started to charge it on the invoices. So I have to reclaim some VAT from HMRC for those.
PeterB - Interesting question, although not applicable in my case. I stopped using the VAT calculation service because on returns, Amazon only ever credited based on the net sales price and left me with the VAT to pay even though the sale had been cancelled. The same really also applies to the FBA inventory credit which I deduct from my sales figure as Amazon ignores the VAT element.
Thank you again for responding.
Jack
Seller_wjMQaBVbFvYO1
Yes, now I treat it as an insurance payment, but I used to have it as part of my sales figures and so do plenty of others until they realise what is going on. Many sellers are not used to dealing with figures and tend to rely on Amazon doing the right thing.
Seller_qCHuTn5dPLaer
You should complete the form and send to them, we do this on a regular basis and they refund us each time. Although there is a big one with DE which is still not refunded for exactly one year as of today. Do pester them, there are thousands of sellers who blindly trust amazon with their fees, but the problem is that amazon have no idea that you have been overcharged as everything is automatically calculated. For FBA fees I think the limit is even less - 90 days (yes, they do overcharge FBA fees as well, as their measuring robot can’t measure correctly either).
Seller_hMBZxXLE8ZIqI
uuuufff slightly worried now if we have been overcharged… but how on earth to easily calculate this. x.x
Seller_wjMQaBVbFvYO1
Katzenworld, what a nice name.
It is very easy, once you know what you want to find, but it never occurred to me to check as I had full trust in Amazon.
Click on Reports, select payments and from the new screen select date range reports. After that select Generate and a box opens up allowing you to select various options. Initially just to do a quick check, select summary and a month you want to check. Press Generate and on the main screen the report selected shows up as in progress, which then changes to Download when its ready. Press download and you get a monthly report of your sales and any other receipts on one side and expenses including the various Amazon fees on the other side. Just take the total of seller fulfilled sales + FBA product sales. On the expenses side take the Seller fulfilled and FBA selling fees total. Work out the percentage you have been charged. If the charge is supposed to be 15% and you were charged 15% then all seems OK. If however you see a higher percentage it indicates there is a problem.
If there is a discrepancy, generate the monthly report on a transaction basis which will give you an Excel spreadsheet listing each and every transaction. You can manipulate the information to get Excel to calculate the % charge on every sale which will identify where there was an overcharge.
Hope this helps.
Seller_nu5xcryAsHGpz
This happened to me at the end of last year (2019) and I contacted them as it was an error with launchpad. I used to be on Launchpad but came off as I could not see the benefits of launchpad for the extra 5% of commission.
They said they are looking into it and will reimburse me when they have worked it out.
