Sunday

New problem with FBA reported - once item is sold, the seller's description is GONE

This is a complaint we've heard from several FBA sellers:

A customer will order a used item (i.e., a book in good used condition, with some wear/tear), but will have forgotten the description of the book. When it arrives, and the customer sees the wear/tear, they get upset.

The problem is, when ordering a used book from a regular seller, you have lots of places to reference the condition of the book you ordered: your "order history" page, your email confirmation, etc. But with FBA orders, there is no place the customer can find the original condition/description of the book.

Let me repeat that: there is no place the customer can find the seller's original condition/description of the book. Not in the order history. Not in the email confirmation. Not even by contacting Amazon.

So, today we decided to hit two birds with one stone - we wanted to see if the Amazon rep could look up the condition of the seller's original description of an FBA book we ordered, and while we were at it, we wanted to measure the response time of the "click-to-call" feature.

Bottom line is this: the click-to-call actually called our phone in less than 5 seconds, but we were on hold for 6 minutes before somebody actually picked up, and another 19 minutes before they found an answer to our question. And, the answer was a resounding NO - there is no way for them to look up the seller's original description.

No wonder customers are getting confused - this particular problem affected us recently (read our other post here).