Thank you Indy for sharing this guidance. Preparing for Q4 is critical, but I want to raise a serious issue that directly undermines all of these efforts.

For the past year we (and many other sellers) have been experiencing systematic refund abuse, mainly targeting non-returnable products fulfilled under Prime MFN. The pattern is always the same:

– Orders are placed correctly, fulfilled via Amazon Buy Shipping, and delivered with full GPS, photo, and weight/dimension proof.

– Buyers (often linked to external resellers on eBay/OnBuy/TikTok) then claim refunds using seller-responsibility reasons such as “wrong item received” or “damaged item.”

– Amazon Customer Support grants the refund without any buyer evidence or return.

– Safe-T claims are denied even when sellers provide complete delivery proof.

The financial losses are one side of the problem. The other is that these fraudulent refunds are now triggering account health violations:

– “Inauthentic” product complaints.

– “Wrong item” or “damaged product” complaints.

– Listing suspensions and authenticity document requests for genuine products.

So while sellers are being advised to optimise for Q4 with inventory, ads, and promotions, many of us are being drained by refund fraud and penalised with account health flags for products that were delivered correctly and are 100% authentic.

The question is: How can sellers plan and invest for Q4 when refund abuse is left unchecked and sellers are punished twice – once by losing the refund and again by account health warnings?

This needs urgent attention alongside Q4 readiness, otherwise the impact of this fraud will wipe out any benefits of seasonal planning.

The optimization checklist is useful, but I’d like to highlight how ongoing refund abuse makes it almost impossible for sellers like us to follow this guidance effectively.

– Review last year’s Q4 performance data: Our data is heavily distorted by fraudulent refunds on non-returnable items. Instead of seeing true sales and margins, we’re seeing losses created by refund abuse, which makes forecasting unreliable.

– Update keywords / refresh images / plan promotions: It’s hard to invest in listings, ads, or promotions when we know many of these sales may never result in actual revenue. Fraudulent refunds mean that money spent on advertising and seasonal content is essentially wasted.

– Set inventory reorder points: We’re now reluctant to commit large volumes for Q4, or any quarter really, because these same products are being targeted by refund abuse. The higher the stock levels, the greater the potential losses.

– Customer service capacity: The abuse has also generated false authenticity and “wrong item” complaints, which eat up our customer service resources with no resolution.

The checklist assumes sellers are protected when fulfilling orders correctly. Right now, we are not, and have not been over a year. Until refund abuse and its knock-on effects on account health are addressed, all of these optimisation steps carry much higher risk for sellers.

If anything Q4 will actually let the scammers increase their activity leading to more losses, directly fuelled by Amazon and its own policies.

I hope you are able to give some genuine response and not just "we are working on it" as we have been reading and hearing to that for the past year.