Tuesday

What FBA did to one seller's feedback

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's not too awful...

But doesn't Amazon suspend your money if you maintain more than 5% negative feedback?

It's my understanding they give you one month's grace, then freeze your funds. Are ALL of the negatives from FBA???

Anonymous said...

This chart was taken right off the Amazon discussion board for FBA.

Yes, according to this seller, 100% of their negative feedback (in the past 180 days) was from FBA.

After browsing, I discovered this was not the worst case scenario. One seller I saw had feedback drop from 100% to 67%.

And yes, in our experience talking to sellers who have been suspended, they give you one month's grace then freeze your funds. But it's slightly more complicated than that - Amazon Alliance uses algorithms to generate "red flags" (a formula they keep secret).

The seller performance (feedback, rate of refunds, A-Z chargebacks) can by themselves get you flagged and suspended, but there are many other factors that might initiate a red flag, some of which include: having two amazon accounts; having multiple users log into one account; having one user log in at multiple locations; signing up for additional Amazon services, such as FBA or Amazon Honor System; migrating inventory from one account to another; having statistically similar inventory to another sellers; etc, etc. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list.

We saw one woman get suspended because her son came home from college and logged into his Amazon account on her home PC (which made Alliance suspect she was operating multiple accounts).

Now, just to prevent mass panic, please keep in mind that a frozen/suspended account does NOT necessarily mean you've been expelled from Amazon. After a 30, 60, or 90 day review, they may free up your money and let you sell again. And, even if you are permanently expelled as a seller, in most cases you can still keep your buyer account.

This all raises another question which hasn't been asked or posted yet: FBA uses its sole discretion to issue refunds. I wonder if they exceed 5% refunds, if that might freeze an account as well?

Anonymous said...

it appears the sales volume dropped as well, after FBA.

do you know if that's true? any other reasons for this?

perhaps the sales will pick up after the warehouse finishes checking in all the items? how long does that take, anyway?

TONY said...

Warehouse checkin depends on the warehouse.

Usually, for us, it's quick (a few days)

But to be totally honest, we do have one shipment that's been sitting there for 45 days, and still hasn't been checked in...