Cancelling Orders to Known Scammer Freight Forwarders
I have been receiving and cancelling orders from well-documented Scammers. This saves me the headache, but hurts my numbers. What is the best way to communicate this to Seller Support for review? Also why are these people allowed to continue on the platform?
26 replies
Seller_4zBzdtgCyS9EI
I have been shipping to freight forwarders for 15 years and not one single time had an issue.
Thing is, they receive hundreds, if not thousands of shipments a week and if there are issues with even 1 or 2 of them, over the course of a year, they have 500-1000 "issues" that people are running on reddit and what not to report. The other 50.000 wont go there and report they had a successful sale.
So it looks like they got a ton of complaints, but it is not in relation to their completed transactions.
You have better odds to get scammed on Amazon by a US buyer
Seller_dkvNFPkFjSVLg
If you want to elect who you can and cannot ship to, you need to have your own website, not sell on Amazon.
If you cancel orders to anyone, that WILL impact your ability to sell here.
If you do ship and use Amazon Buy Shipping, you should have absolutely no issue with any type of scam that may occur. Especially with freight forwarders, as once it shows delivered to the forwarder, your obligation is complete and it doesn't matter what the end customer claims.
Like @Seller_4zBzdtgCyS9EIsaid, we have been shipping to them for 18 years with no issue.
If you want to reap the success on Amazon, you also have to deal with the hassles that their rules may create for you. It is their ecosystem - learn to live in it!
Seller_V5l9UBkHDQEjb
I used to not have a problem with freight forwarders, but lately I've found myself with a very high return rate (well over 50%) from one of them, and they always will use a seller-faulted reason even though it is never the case. amazon doesn't even auto refund them anymore probably because they have such a high return rate but they will occasionally swap the item for a damaged one and it can be a battle to win an a-z if they don't like their partial refund.
it can't just be me either, but amazon lets them keep buying anyway.
Seller_w6aLwkKdfu3L0
The freight forwarder isn't the scammer. It's more that the person buying either poorly communicates with the forwarder or they think they can lodge a complaint with Amazon and get free items and if they get banned open a new account with a new payment and try again (though its probably a cumbersome process and Amazon still has things to auto vet them). And chances are people in the same country will use the same forwarding agency as that agency probably heavily marketed to their region those services.
Freight Forwarders are business and as such need information to efficiently receive and process inbound packages. The biggest thing they need is an "account number" but foreign buyers are notorious (or buyers in generally) for thinking they're special so they put the least amount of effort and let others solve it. They'll use their names (which can have spelling errors and difficult to look up in a database as "Jose" and "José" are different and "Mary Fernando-Perez" is different from "Mary Perez" but account BZD5468 will always be BZD5468 even if there are - since the worker will know where to add or remove them.
Use Amazon's Buy Shipping. If it shows delivered and you shipped on time, Amazon covers claims and Amazon will have to deal with the buyer. Buyer exports its out of the US and complains about damages, again, Amazon handles it as they have policy that if items are exported it is on the buyer to have it inspected before it leaves.
Seller_qMgi7qxvEo7f1
I have issues with them. If I see those weird addresses, there is a 50-50 chance that someone is going to try ripping me off. Last time someone was mad at me for not doing 1 day delivery there. Even though his order was 5 bucks, shipping included. So... yeah...
Seller_08TZq9sOIaGvv
If they are an actual freight forwarder, I have great success with them. The other type of buyer advertises your items on Walmart or other platforms. When they make a sale, they order your item and have you ship to the Walmart customer. Then, they do a return on Amazon and send an empty polybag back to you with tracking number. Now the last time this happened, I responded to the AtoZ with a pic of the empty polybag and won the case. I will assume that these scammers do not last too long before amazon catches them and perhaps that is why I won the case so quickly.
Seller_yYmMTCwJZOpvV
My best costumers from what i have seen are freight forward and drop shippers.
Seller_7lHJxpNXp7zBS
We're in the cellular industry, and only ship domestic for a large number of reasons. Every Amazon order we receive with a freight forwarding address the buyer attempts return fraud by claiming some insane issue with their order in hopes that our company just issues a refund. When we follow Amazon policy and request the buyers open a return request they try every excuse under the sun because they know they're in the wrong, and these are some of the most toxic and hateful messages we receive, most of the times the toxicity is right off the bat from the first contact (again, another tactic they believe will result in the seller issuing an immediate refund). We stick to our policies and let them reveal themselves through messages. Just don't get angry/frustrated and do your business as usual, if they open a return and never send it back because they can't they will eventually have to give up their game. I do believe Amazon should look into this, as using freight forwarders in the US to circumvent sellers who do not ship internationally and then expect that seller to provide an $80 international return label is ridiculous.
As mentioned already, you can't block buyers on Amazon. With our processes explained above it works out for us since no matter what, at the end of the day our return policy is our return policy and even Amazon's return policy documentation states that a return is processed when it's received (unless of course you sign up for certain Amazon programs like "refund at first scan"). We are also able to report these scam attempts through the Amazon messaging in slight hope that it does help Amazon identify bad actors.
