Account deactivated for late deliveries after 4 appeals

No, the Executive Escalations Team should be only used as the last resort.

Please post your appeal here to see, what is missing and how it could be improved.

Dear Amazon Seller Performance Team,
Please find below our revised appeal against our account suspension for seller fulfilled orders. I am emailing this appeal as the option in the link in your previous email takes me to the Contact Us page in Seller Central which does not have sufficient space to post an appeal. In addition I was not able to reply to your email of the 6th December at 15.21 asking for further detail to our initial appeal. I have copied in the text of your email below for your reference. I hope this format is acceptable.

Thank you for the opportunity to make this appeal and address the issues that have been highlighted. We hope the measures listed below sufficiently address Amazon’s concerns. We are confident that they will improve our service levels and our customers’ buying experience.

1.   the root causes of the issues:
   

I understand that our seller-fulfilled delivery performance has fallen below both Amazon’s and our own standards of customer service. Our late shipment and confirmation rate is significantly higher than Amazon’s goal of less than 4%. We have a LDR of 66.7% during the month of November which is clearly an unacceptable level of customer service. The reasons why this has happened are listed below:

· Change of login details and password at end of October 2018 (when previous staff member left the company) meant that we had to provide identification to gain access to our account and as a result lost access to our account for a week. This resulted in orders being shipped up to 4 days late in the first week following the handover. We failed to take into account the time involved in making these changes. We consider this a one-off incident that should not be repeated as we will learn from this mistake in the event of future changes .

· Inadequate handover from departing staff member to her replacement. Replacement staff members were not aware of the 1-2 day default handling time and in some cases this resulted in shipments being made late.

· Failure to cover part-time order processing staff member sufficiently. This combined with lack of awareness of handling times led to some orders being shipped a day later (in one case by 4 days) than the default handling time of 1-2 days.

· On one occasion (27/11/2018) an email was missed and as a result the order was shipped five days late. This has taught us the importance of pro-actively going into Manage Orders to check for any unshipped orders.

· New staff members had not received any general training in Amazon’s policies and guidelines with regard to shipment and confirmation of orders.

· We had failed to notice an unshipped order from 1st November due to not pro-actively checking the summary page in Manage Orders. This order has now been confirmed and we have apologised to the customer and sent her a free product as compensation.

· Orders that came in after office hours on Thursday afternoon have run the risk of not being noticed in time for timely despatch due to relevant staff member working part time on that day. This will now be resolved by cover being put in place during that time.

· We failed to monitor performance to ensure we were shipping and confirming in the default handling time of 1-2 days.

· Amazon was unable to reach us because it did not have a number that is manned out of office hours.

2.   Actions taken to resolve the issue:
   

We have taken the following steps to resolve the immediate problems and improve our overall performance:

· We have shipped the remaining unshipped order and apologised to the customer, sending a free product as an apology.

· We have studied our performance data to identify why the late shipments occurred (please see attached for list of late deliveries and comments)

· We have carried out staff training amongst several members of staff to ensure that there is clarity about Amazon’s customer service requirements and outlined a process for the daily monitoring of orders and prompt shipping and confirmation .

· We have put a holiday and sickness cover process in place to ensure that we are always checking Amazon for orders and shipping and confirming within the required timeframe.

· We have made it possible for staff members working from home or away from the office to monitor orders and make shipments. This will enable orders to be monitored daily.

· As suggested on Amazon Help for The Order Process, we will pro-actively, at least once a day, go into Manage Orders and double check for unshipped orders rather than rely on email notifications which run the small risk of being missed.

· We have taken steps to educate ourselves about Amazon seller policies and guidelines, especially with regard to order shipments,and we intend to make continuing education in this area an ongoing process amongst our team.

· We will regularly monitor our shipping and general performance and take steps to redress any issues as they occur.

3.   Actions taken to prevent this issue happening again
   

To maintain our account health once it has been restored to its previous good level we will implement the following:

· Continue to check Manage Orders more frequently to ensure all shipments confirmed.

· Continue to check performance metrics more regularly

· Continuing education on Amazon’s policies and guidelines

· We have increased hours of our part-time staff member and put cover in place for when she is not working.

· If our account is reinstated we will amend the primary contact number to one which is manned out of office hours so that if Amazon wish to contact us about any concerns they are able to do so. We are hesitant to do this at this stage in case the change causes additional security issues. We have discussed this with Amazon helpdesk and are waiting to hear back as to whether this will cause any security issues.

· We have input an emergency contact telephone number into our contact details.

· If our account is reinstated we will explore the Buy Shipping option as we believe this may streamline the current process and enable immediate shipping confirmations. We are unable to investigate this option while our account is suspended.

· If our account is reinstated we will explore the possibility of extending the handling time to 1-3 days (if possible) as an extra safeguard against unforeseeable circumstances. Our aim, however, will be to ship within 1-2 days as we feel that our customers value speedy delivery. We are unable to investigate the specific options available to us in this area while our account is suspended.

4.   We have provided  (attached) an outline of our  revised order fulfilment process, including holiday cover schedule,  and also an annotated copy of our Late Despatch Report showing where orders were shipped late and a brief explanation of how this came about.
   

We hope that the above shows that we are now aware of the importance of immediately confirming shipments and totally committed to confirming on the day of despatch. We feel that we have learned a lot from this process and are well placed to meet Amazon’s standards and very committed to doing so.

I hope the above is sufficient to allow you to restore our seller-fulfilled privileges.

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Dear xx,

We received your submission but do not have enough information to reactivate your account at this time. To reactivate your account, please send the following:

– Greater detail on the root cause(s) of ${Seller specific violation – e.g. “higher than expected cancellations”}.

– Greater detail on the actions you have taken to resolve ${Seller specific violation – e.g. “higher than expected cancellations”}.

– Greater detail on the steps you have taken to prevent ${Seller specific violation – e.g. “higher than expected cancellations”} going forward.

– Greater detail on evidence or examples that demonstrate that your account has complied with our policy.

How do I send the required information?
Submit this information at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/cu/contact-us.

What happens if I do not send the requested information?
If we do not receive the requested information within 14 days of the original notification, your account will remain deactivated.

We’re here to help
If you have questions about this policy or information requested above, please contact us at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/cu/contact-us. Additionally, please find assistance creating a plan of action at https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/G201623610.

You can view your account performance at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/performance/dashboard?ref=ah_em_op or select Account Health on the home screen of the Amazon Seller app on your iOS or Android device. The Account Health dashboard shows how well your account is performing against the performance metrics and policies required to sell on Amazon.
– Download iOS App at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/amazon-seller/id794141485
– Download Android App at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.sellermobile.android&hl=en_GB
Sincerely,
Seller Performance Team
Amazon.co.uk