Dear Amazon,
It is a bit discouraging in that I highly doubt this will get escalated to the point where a real solution will arise but I just wanted to share this frustration with the community. Hopefully this gets the attention of the category manager who I was trying to find at the Accelerate conference. We are a large seller for over many years in the women's shoe category and ever since 2021 where there was a change to the return policies our return rate have sky rocketed and the fees charged to our account has made it so that doing business on Amazon is impossible and we are moving our business away. I also believe many sellers even Chinese sellers will be doing the same soon.
To be more specific, the problem is rooted in 2 parts of amazon's return policy. The first is that Amazon does not take responsibility for customer damaging a product. The second is that even though there is a 30 day return policy, Amazon reserves the right to reimburse and issue a refund to customers after the 30 days, which we have seen happen repeatedly. These two policies combined essentially incentivizes women to "rent shoes" for an event, wear them over the weekend and return them leaving the sellers to eat the cost. On average we pay around $12 to Amazon when a customer decides to refund. Before 2021 through FBM there was a way in which the sellers could make the buyer verify that the products returned were not damaged or worn but now that's also changed with the updated return policy.
The result has been a larger increase in returns, higher return rates, massive losses incurred by the seller and way more customer abuse when it comes to products in our category. In the last 2-3 years, the amount of customers that wear our shoes for a weekend to party and return them completely destroyed has increased so much that its now just a percentage of the business. On average 20-30% of our returns are damaged and "unfillable" which are just the metrics you are showing. Furthermore FBA also doesn't have the best "return processing" quality check which has resulted in Customers receiving "used and worn shoes" that were not our fault but dings our reviews and our listings.
This is a CATEGORY WIDE problem because of the shopping behavior of women when it comes to shoes. It needs a more balanced policy where we sellers can be protected from this type of abuse.
The solution is actually quite simple: For the shoes/clothing category - update the policy so that 1) Customers cannot receive a refund for worn and damaged products to the degree that it cannot be re-sold. Requiring customers to take photos of the products prior to return would be nice. Essentially, do the same FBA quality check ahead of time (instead of waiting until you receive the product back). Let Amazon decide if you will accept the return because they are the ones determining if they are going to keep it within FBA as a "new" product anyways. Or at minimum have a policy where it allows for disputes arising out of these situations so that it gives seller a chance to file a case and get refunds reimbursed. 2) Enforce a rigid 30 day return policy when it comes to this category, no exceptions. This will help sellers in this category with cashflow.
Other channels like SHEIN, TEMU, TIKTOK, WALMART have much more competitive policies and its the reason why lots of business will be moving over there soon because we can sell on those platforms with prices that our cheaper and make more margin AND maintain customer satisfaction.
