Guest blog by Dayana Stockdale at Refunds Manager
There are a lot of things that go into calculating your profit margins. Not only the cost of units but also shipping, packaging, and software or assistants you might have to help you run your business. And there’s an often overlooked part of FBA that can really eat into your profit margins if you let it, and that’s Amazon error. Sure, FBA is an incredible opportunity for small business owners, and you understand why you have to pay FBA fees, but that certainly doesn’t mean you want to pay more than what you owe. No one does. That’s why auditing your account is critical.
Commonplace FBA errors that you can get reimbursed for
In this blog over on Refunds Manager, we’ve covered well over a dozen Amazon mistakes that warrant reimbursement, so if you’d like an in-depth review of what reimbursement opportunities might be hiding in your FBA account, I encourage you to check that out.
For now, we’ll detail the three most common mistakes to give you a solid grasp of what’s at stake. Most often, Amazon is doling out reimbursements to sellers for these issues:
- A returned item was never placed back in the seller’s inventory
- Damaged or lost inventory was recognised but the value of it was never reimbursed to the seller
- The customer did not return the item but was already credited for the return so the seller is at a loss.
When you combine those common issues with the other dozen things that can go wrong, it adds up to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands in losses each year depending on your sales volume.
That’s why you have to make sure your inventory, your orders, and your returns are continuously monitored. There are three ways to handle this necessary (but unglamorous) task.
Option 1: Do It Yourself
Certainly, the most difficult and time-consuming way to protect your account against accidental losses is to audit everything yourself.
This requires a very complex weekly or monthly process. You need to run reports in the Inventory Adjustments tab inside of Seller Central, bring these reports into Excel, match up account activity with the right code groups, and make sure nothing is missed. If you do find something amiss, you have to remember to review it at a later date, because you need to give Amazon the appropriate amount of time before requesting a reimbursement.
Sometimes you’ll be verifying hundreds of lines across three different reports, and annotating with your findings.
Can it be done? Absolutely. But you’ll be putting up your own time (or that of your assistants’ or business partners’) with no guarantee that you’ll find anything.
If you don’t create a consistent process, you could potentially waste time while still missing out on reimbursements.
Option 2: Use a Fully Automated Service
The second option for getting reimbursements from FBA is to use a software program that automatically monitors your account and submits claims.
This option will save you a tonne of time and likely get you some money back (since the software is probably a lot more patient than you are when it comes to reconciling orders and returns).
However, Amazon is not a fan of automated claims. Why? It’s simple. Their customer service has to handle too many of them. Many automated services are not discerning enough, meaning that Amazon gets bombarded with too many requests for reimbursement. A program might submit five claims for five errors, whereas as a person would group them together into one polite email. So, alongside each opportunity for reimbursement, you risk upsetting the Amazon support team.
The upside of this option, however, is that you’re not having to invest any of your own time upfront.
Option 3: Use a Concierge Service
The final option is to enlist the help of a skilled service provider, so you can feel confident that you’ll get reimbursements while not having to worry about a software program pinging Amazon for individual errors with no filter whatsoever.
At Refunds Manager, we have a team of account auditors who manually review your account and submit claims. They know how to handle working with Amazon support to get the best results (more money!) by doing things like grouping together similar claims, waiting the right amount of time to let Amazon reimburse you all on their own, and only submitting claims that they’re pretty confident you will win.
Our account auditors do use software. They use it as a backup to make sure nothing was missed, but they never use it to automate any communication with Amazon or to make decisions about which claims are high quality and which are probably a bust.
With our service, you get the best of both worlds:
- No time up front
- Nothing gets missed
- Personal, human touch in all dealings with Amazon
But it gets even better. We don’t require any money up front. Instead, we ask for 25% for any reimbursements—only after you’ve gotten them.
I encourage you to check us out and call us if you have any questions.
However you decide to handle Amazon reimbursement requests, the most important thing is that you do it! Don’t let this task fall so far off your to-do list that it doesn’t get done. You put a lot of effort into building your business, and hey…every dollar counts!
