Wednesday

Debunking the latest FBA feedback myth: Folks, FBA will NOT remove your negative feedback

Today (Wednesday, January 28) FBA issued a statement saying that they will consider "striking" FBA sellers who receive negative feedback, under certain circumstances (lots of small print).

Discussion boards were buzzing with gleeful FBA sellers, who failed to read the small print!

FBA was immediately flooded with email requests, and it took only a few hours for FBA to post a new statement, clarifying that NONE of the requests to "strike" feedback actually met their criteria.

Basically, here's the "small print" on their new policy:

-Feedback will never be fully retracted - it will be stricken through
-Feedback striking is not retroactive (nobody's past negative feedback will be erased)

...and, the biggest caveat - no feedback will be removed if the feedback complains about the condition, even when FBA (or the carrier) damaged the item!

This is the cause for 90% of the negative FBA feedback - that the FBA warehouse damages an item!!

So basically, the only time Amazon will remove feedback if:

-FBA sends the wrong item
-If a seller specifically says "this mistake was the fault of the FBA warehouse" (which never, ever happens. Trust me, customers don't understand FBA, and don't care - they just want their book)
-Finally, if somebody says "Amazon sucks" in their feedback... which Amazon already has a policy against! The bottom line is, almost nothing has changed!

This is basically lip service - something to make FBA sellers feel better, and to boost recruitment (too many people have read too many blogs and horror stories like the ones we document here). In actuality, this "new" policy will not make things better for most sellers.

Problem with FBA order - "new" book shows up factory sealed, but with highlighting & underlining

Two weeks ago we ordered a "new" book from an FBA seller, and it arrived factory sealed and on time.

However, today we opened the book, and it had highlighting and notes on EVERY page! How could this happen? Somebody is being extremely disingenuous.

Further, we contacted FBA via email, and they said sometimes this type of damage occurs during shipping. HUH? How does underlining occur during shipping??? (full email below)

Next, we used the "click-to-call" feature, which took 25 minutes - and they offered us a $1.40 refund, or we could return the book for a full refund. (read other post here)

The most disturbing thing was that we wanted to look up the wording of the seller's original description (mainly to see if the item was described as sealed at the "factory", or if they disclosed they were selling remainders or books that were somehow remanufactured). Anyway, the original description cannot be accessed by the buyer. Not even Amazon could tell us over the phone what the original description was.