How do you handle fraudulent customer returns on FBA?
Hi All,
We wished to seek guidance on how to tackle bad customer behaviours from Amazon customers on FBA? 99% of the time, we have legitimate customers (we’re very fortunate) but there is a small set of customers with a repeated pattern.
They will use the product, and very close to the 30 day mark, they’ll return this suggesting this is defective and FBA without question always offers a full refund. We then inspect this on removal orders. Our product has multiple of the same item in the same pack so we typically see them using a bit of what they need and then returning this and we find a couple are missing so clearly they’ve used what they needed and returned the rest. It’s always ‘missing items / accessories’ or ‘defective’ - we check our products visually, by weight and it is double checked by human when leaving our warehouse.
We’re comfortable with an acceptable level of returns but there is a pattern. Surely if you saw something missing, on expedited shipping you would let us know within the first week, not the last 48 hours before the 30 day period. How have the experienced sellers on this forum tackled this and has SS been helpful at all? We have tried a couple of times to address this so this can be investigated in warehouse and provide us with photos but it’s a hassle so we’re finding inspecting ourselves is easiest.
Welcome any guidance or thoughts.
Thanks,
2 replies
Seller_esvgLzKXw2YAl
It’s not really something that you can do an awful lot about.
That is one of the drawbacks with using FBA. As you are basically handing all responsibility to Amazon for this kind of thing.
I guess you could monitor specific customers and report them as such, but actually connecting a returned item, to a specific customer is not easy to do with FBA, as the items are returned to Amazon first, then you can have them returned to yourself. But there is no guarantee, that the item you received back, is from any particular customer.
So most people will add in a small amount to the selling price, to allow for this kind of thing.
It’s the only practical thing that you can actually do.
Seller_Q37LYkGg0XfSU
Thank you Neil. We appreciate your response.
We’ve factored in the cost as you suggest, it was more if there was some sort of magic workaround but it sounds like it’s something we may have to live with. That’s a fair point regarding what is returned to us as we’re of course not aware in which condition it was returned.
Thanks for the guidance here.
