Archive | Amazon

When a customer returns an item to Amazon, warehouse staff evaluates the item to see if it is OK for resale or not (fulfillable), or they are supposed to. Since we started getting our unfulfillable Amazon returns send back to us, we’ve seen some strange things come back that were supposedly our parts.  Either customers get mixed up and return the wrong item with the wrong label, or people are intentionally returning something different than what they got so they can keep the item.  Probably some of both.

What is troubling though is when the Amazon staff returns things to inventory that are either damaged, missing parts, or the completely wrong thing.

A few months ago we started putting a sticker on all of our parts with our Gmail address so Amazon customers know how to contact us if they have an issue.  We got an email from a customer this morning that seemed really strange.

I only received the yellow part. Missing the brake part of the device

We don’t sell anything yellow and I have no idea what on our parts might be considered the brake part.  So I asked for a picture.

Well the knob looks familiar, but the yellow thing is part of a steering wheel lock.

So it appears that someone ordered that item, and our knob, and returned part of the steering wheel lock and our knob in the same return.  Amazon staff somehow evaluated this combination and found it fit for resale.

As a seller, I find much to be desired with Amazon’s Marketplace for 3rd party sellers.  As a customer, I’ve become more and more cautious about what I buy from Amazon and always try to use a service like Fakespot to vet items.  This one example shows a little bit of all that is wrong with Amazon these days. Clearly, they have chosen quantity over quality, at the expense of customers and sellers.

What I mean is that they have prioritized growth in sales volume, number of sellers, and number of products while making it harder for honest sellers and for customers, and virtually ignoring abusive sellers that do things like massively fabricate reviews and steal other sellers stores and ruin their reputation with cheap knockoff products.

Why would they do this?  Perhaps because they are the 1000 pound gorilla now and they can.  Perhaps because they have been able to deflect criticism thus far and have been taken to task over their failures.  Perhaps because they are making a conscious decision that it would just cost too much to provider better customer service for sellers and to put more effort into cracking down on abuse and fraud.

Last night my wife and I both found the same food for one of our pets, me on Amazon, and she on Chewy.com; same price in both places.  The choice was easy; whenever we can, we will divert our spending to another retailer over Amazon.com.  We still give them a lot of business, but less than we used to.

The last year has been plagued by issues selling our replacement parts on Amazon.com.  First there was some abuse by a single customer who ordered about 100 parts just so she could go through them and pick the few she wanted with the smallest molding defects, and then returned almost all of them.  We stopped selling on Amazon.com for about a month while we worked to tighten down our sales policies to avoid that type of thing in the future, and while Amazon investigated, and possibly banned her from continuing to purchase there.

Then Amazon started suspending some of our listings due to high return rates.  We did some major revamping of our listings, added lots of photos with circles and arrows and writing to make it explicitly clear exactly what the parts were and were not made for.  Amazon made this very difficult as we had to go through multiple support requests for each part, just to be able to get listing changes approved; the entire process took a month and a half.  We also removed the low volume parts that had high return rates figuring people will just have to get them from our website.

Now they’ve once again suspended our listing for our most popular part, the single screw pot handle, that fits most Revere Ware pots from 1968 through the late 2010’s.  On reviewing our return rate we see that, despite all of our new “educational” material, we are still seeing lots of returns, perhaps even more than before.  And the process to get it restored has become that much more complicated.

I am seriously scratching my head on this one.  We have something like a 1% return rate for sales made from our own website. Because people are forced to contact us before they return something, we have a chance to help solve the problem, and often times, these customers just need a little help figuring things out, and we are able to avoid a return, or we can send them a replacement for a defective part.

For sales on Amazon.com some of the return rates approach 25%.  It seems that there is just no way to convince Amazon.com customers not to order items they aren’t sure will work, or to at least ask questions before ordering. Furthermore, almost no-one contacts us to ask for help before returning a part, despite the fact that we’ve added explicit instructions to most of our listings on how to contact us through Amazon.com.  The only real differences between ordering on our site and Amazon.com is the free shipping.  Free shipping, it seems, causes people to act unreasonably, by ordering things they have no real expectation will work, and making no attempt to get help before giving up.

The real shame of all this is that it makes items unavailable for everyone else.  More and more of our parts are now available on our own website only.

I’m not sure of the path forward this time, but I’ve got a few ideas.

• Raise the prices on Amazon.com significantly to discourage casual buyers looking for generic parts and that don’t read the details.
• Start shipping problem items ourselves so that people have to contact us for a return, and we can interact with them.  Not excited about this one; there are a lot of shipments and I already have a day job.
• Somehow get Amazon.com to stop returning parts deemed defective by customers back into inventory.  Seriously, look at this return report.

Does returning items that customers claim are defective back into inventory strike anyone else as odd?  I can’t help but wonder if quite a few of my returns are the same few defective or customer damaged parts getting sold over and over again.

• Start stuffing every part with a detailed troubleshooting guide, and contact information.
• Stop selling on Amazon.com altogether.  I’ve thought about this from time-to-time.  It seems that the majority of time I spend on this business is now related to Amazon.com.  This will probably mean that our sales will drop by about half, but my workload for this business (above and beyond my real day job) will drop by 75% or more.  We ship things to our fulfillment center for our own website sales in boxes, with a cover sheet. We ship things to Amazon.com and every item has to be labeled, and some get an additional insert (to try and help reduce the return rate ha ha).  This is a business of passion much more than profit, so I don’t like the idea of making replacement parts less available to people, but Amazon.com is just not a good partner anymore.

That’s what I’ve come up with so far.  Any Fulfillment by Amazon gurus out there with some other ideas?

We’ve started relisting some of our products on Amazon.com.  As we relist items there, we are adjusting our listings to accommodate the increases in risk and difficulty that selling on Amazon.com has acquired in the last few years.

We want to accommodate customers that prefer prime shipping and not having to buy from a small independent seller they don’t know (it’s ok, we don’t take it personally).  But Amazon.com in their quest to be come everything to buyers, has become somewhat of a snake pit for sellers.  We’ll do our best, but buying our products on Amazon.com might be a little less convenient and a little more expensive.

While Amazon.com has taken over more and more of our overall sales over the last 10 years, it has become a more difficult and frustrating place to sell over that time.

• They now restrict access to any customer information, so we have to ask customers just to send them a replacement or missing piece.
• Under many circumstances, we aren’t allow to even contact our customers
• Their no-questions-asked return policy leads to lots of people who buy the product without reading the information and then return when it doesn’t work which causes constant product de-listing.  We have something like a 10% overall return rate at Amazon.com vs perhaps 1% on our own website.
• Their review system promotes people who buy without reading the information we include on the listings to leave negative reviews like “didn’t fit”.
• Some of our listings have been changed by malicious parties
• We don’t have full control over our listings despite being the product manufacturer and the only ones that sell the products
• Our products can be  hard to find in search results at times, we believe because Amazon wants to push people to use their advertising system, which, from our experience increases costs without increasing sales.

But what really takes the cake is some serious customer abuse we’ve experienced over the last few weeks, that was made possible by some of the above Amazon.com policies.  We’ve reported this to Amazon.com, in the hopes that they will take action, possibly by terminating the customers account. But we’ll still take the hit.

This has made us question selling on Amazon.com at all, which would be a bummer for everyone that likes to take advantage of free Prime shipping.

Our own website will be the only source for Revere Ware replacement parts for the time being.