Amazon incorrectly remeasuring small and light and stealth charging
So just stocking up on some products and noticed that one of my best selling asins fba charge had doubled in price.
It is a low margin product with quite good volumes. The dimensions are only slightly above the lowest FBA standard letter threshold and I have been honest with my dimensions and recorded them as large letter size. The dimensions of the product when wrapped is actually 25cm x 10cm x 1cm. weighing 40g
There are quite a few variations of the same product in different colours with the same dimensions and all was ok.
Today I noticed that the fBA price had risen from £1.41 to £3.23. It now means that every product that is sold is now costing me instead of making.
I wasn’t given any notification or warning of the change in fees. I phoned today and was informed that my product had been measured and was coming in at the following
40 grams
Package dimensions
36.2 x 24.8 x 1.4 centimeters
I mean everything stacks up apart from the length and width. The length is probably 24.8cm but I have no idea where they get 36.2cm from. The width is 19cm, nearly half of what they are stating.
Seller support said they will remeasure and “IF” they see it is wrong it will be changed back and I should be reimbursed.
This is all well and good if this happens but the fact is that it could easily have gone unnoticed as it has done for the past 2 weeks. To me this is fraud from Amazon whether this was their intention or not and it is not acceptable for Amazon to just dismiss it.
I simply got the old statement saying we will pass it up the line to the relevant department and you should hear something soon. It is extremely serious to mess with the fees and accounts like this and is very irresponsible and there should be some sort of safeguarding for sellers against this type of punitive behavior.
45 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
are you the only one on the asin ?
did you get them to remeasure the asin rather than the fnsku ?
maybe someone else has stock send in larger packaging ?
Seller_DTufFoxJuMU0M
I regularly keep a check of my fees because this happens all to often, even if I am the only one on the sku at some stage it seems to trigger a remeasurement and the remeasurement is sometimes 10 times what the actual measurement is. Many cases later I eventually get it changed enough that I am at least charged the correct fees and a refund for any incorrect fees charged in the recent history (which sometimes can be close to £20!)
Seller_wAn7LAlr0jsID
This is an ongoing problem we and I’m sure many other sellers have, many measurements and weights are wrong.
The re-measurement is limited to 20 ASINS a month. They probably introduced this as there were too many requests per seller but if if they measured and weighed them correctly in the first place sellers wouldn’t have to keep requesting re-measurements.
Seller_esvgLzKXw2YAl
Without wanting to point out the obvious, but if you are thinking these are on Small and Light, they aren’t, as neither of those fees are S&L fees.
I’m guessing that you mean they are standard FBA. You really should look at changing them over to S&L, as it will save a small fortune in fees.
Seller_ICqvJVQurZXgc
IS it possible that its the packaging that amazon provides for the item which is causing the problem? we often have amazon deliveries coming with 90 air inside the package.
Seller_6sxtIS0RbZ5k7
I’ve been struggling with their sizings for months. I changed the size of my packaging to bring everything into the 60p bracket and have been using my 20 ASIN allowance each month to get everything remeasured. I’m lucky if they get 60% of them right first time each month and I’ve had some corrected after reopening it with them.
The trouble with some of the others though is that, even when you reopen it, they don’t bother to remeasure and just come back to you with the same (incorrect) measurements as before. I have even tried leaving a whole month ‘fallow’ (as it were) in case they don’t remeasure if it’s been measured in the last month, but they still get them consistently wrong. (I should say that I let everything go down to zero before I sent the new packaging so they can’t be measuring the old ones.)
I have everything now in the 60p bracket barring 4 cards. I’m culling cards at the moment (trying to avoid going over the VAT threshold) so 2 of those 4 I am discontinuing. The other 2 are best sellers so, now I have them down to a more manageable number, I may take it further.
Edited to add: In my experience, they don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between CM and MM, so many of my cards have come back as 1.4centimetres instead of millimetres. The other mistake they seem to make is leaving out a zero after the decimal point.
Seller_Tlta9YZyrkI5V
We’ve had exactly the same thing. Some of our items weigh a gram or two and a milimeter thick. Their tool came back with 50 grams and 4cms thick. I’ve persued it as it’s not our only FNSKU that’s wrong. Someone provided me piccies of the cuboid ‘scan’ and admitted the machine can’t cope with the light weight. The unbelievable thing is though,there was a bright red button for a human to confirm. I can’t believe whoever is doing these scans can’t tell the difference between something that’s as thick as a piece of paper and clicks accept on the 4cms measurement. Then there’s the storage fees, a lot of my items, as they’re measured wrong are coming up with a much bigger volume number. I’ve brought it up with the managing director and have said Amazon could be overcharging quite a lot of sellers but nothing has changed, sadly. You think something like this should be looked at a bit more seriously
Seller_UONeDoaTAlYzW
Yep, 2 products of mine today with measurement out by miles. It’s so frustrating
Seller_zSgC5zKFELg5A
Hello @JR_Wristbands,
Thank you for reaching out to us!
We understand that you have concern about FBA listing as per the above post.
As you have already contacted selling partner support team and they asked you to wait as the case has been transferred to the concern department so we request you to allow the concern team to complete the review. Meanwhile kindly keep an eye on your performance notification for an update.
Regards,
Nehal
Seller_RYxjECXIReRaW
FBA use a “CubiScan” machine to automatically weigh and measure items - the problem is they just plonk the item in and take the readings with no common sense. We sell light weight and very thin items and we regularly get dimensions that are 2-3 times the actual volume, and weights up to 100% too high… they never check items are laying flat, and never weigh more than a single item to get an accurate reading. Although we usually can get them corrected to semi-reasonable values it’s a nightmare to keep track and the worst situation resulted in us being overcharged £5000-6000 in storage fees because they had “re-measured” one product to be 18x thicker than it really is!!
Despite chasing and escalating to get them to re-measure and reassess the fees and refund us the £5000-6000 we’d overpaid they refused to do so… we even went to the Director email level and they refused 
