Amazon deposits unreliable with Seller Central/Marketplace 2.0

Sellers on Amazon have funds automatically disbursed every 2 weeks. Or, they can access their payments through their seller "marketplace" account, and sweep their funds to their bank account more often.

However, since we've "upgraded" to Seller Central/Marketplace 2.0 (a requirement to participate in FBA), our deposits have been irregular.

We typically sweep our account every evening. However, it's been 8 days since a deposit has arrived. We started asking about it, and apparently they are not making the deposit, but adding that amount to the next deposit. It gets debited from our account, as if we received the money, then the next day it shows up as a credit again (as a "miscellaneous adjustment"). By the way, get used to these "miscellaneous adjustments" if you are on FBA - they appear on our account daily, usually as debits, and we rarely know what they are:

(click to enlarge)

This revolving deposit has now been adding up over the past 8 days, but it won't disburse. We actually had to carry a credit card balance this month because we can't count on our Amazon deposits any more. I wonder if we can sue FBA for the interest charges?...

Customers complain about FBA stickers

One of the requirements for FBA is to print up special bar codes for each item you send in. Didn't sound like a big deal to us at the time, however...

First, this requires a special label (not any Avery label will do - it's got to be the "peelable" kind, which cost more).

Second, this is more time-consuming & expensive than you might think.

Third, FBA requires that you cover ALL bar codes on the book. Some books have 3 or 4 bar codes (including on the inside cover), and apparently they don't want the staff at the FBA warehouse to accidentally zap the wrong bar code. So sellers are required to cover every bar code with either a blank label, &/or an FBA bar code.

Not only does this add to the cost of participating in the program (3-4 cents per label adds up, especially if the book takes 3-4 labels), but also, we've received 2 customer complaints so far:


Customers don't know why the labels are there - FBA doesn't explain it to them. I personally think it's a stupid thing to complain about, but, I also totally understand that the customer isn't expected to know the operations of the FBA warehouse. But it's Amazon's job to inform them of their policies, not ours. Apparently, when one customer called Amazon to find out what they are, Amazon told them to mention it in our seller feedback. HUH???

FBA sold same book to 9 different buyers

I'm not even sure how this happened, but FBA made 8 customers angry at us because of their glitch.

We sent in a single copy of a book, which sold within a few days. If you're on Seller Central, you already know that setting the quantity of a title is out of the seller's control. We tell them how many we're sending in, they count and confirm the quantity before activating your inventory . (You may have seen other sellers complain that this process sometimes takes days or weeks). But adjusting the quantity is out of the seller's control.

But for some reason, FBA would not zero out the quantity after the book sold. They kept relisting it! We tried several times to manually close the listing, after realizing that others were trying to buy it. But the "Seller Central" system wouldn't let us.

So after 5 weeks of this nonsense, 8 other buyers also tried to buy the same book! But there was no book - there was only one copy, and it had sold 4 1/2 weeks ago. But the customers didn't know this and don't understand FBA. So we got 5 or 6 angry emails, including one negative feedback, because those buyers thought that we were trying to pull a trick, or that it was our mistake.

This may sound like a silly question, but how the heck can we get a negative feedback for a non-sale of an item we didn't have in stock???