What would you like to see from Amazon Support? #EUCatalyst

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Chris Poad, Director Merchant Services at Amazon had an interesting discussion with Scot Wingo at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst today, where they discussed account support.

Chris said “We dont operate an account management structure like eBay do” going on to explain that whilst currently there are seller support options for retailers using Amazon, they are considering how to expand support in the future.

Currently there are Amazon outreach teams tasked with recruiting new sellers to the site. In the future however the pool of new sellers will decrease and Amazon are already considering how to support these sellers in the future.

One option could be to strategically redeploy the current sales team to spot opportunities for retailers and work with them for a short period of time. These wouldn’t be permanent account managers, but would actively help Amazon sellers as and when opportunities arose.

Another option would be for named contacts within Amazon support, however that would limit account managers to being available for a much smaller group of top sellers.

One of the challenges Amazon want to get right is not to assign sellers an account manager only to take them away at a later date. That’s worse than not having an account manager in the first place.

What do you think of Amazon’s current support levels? Would you value an account manager focusing on a specific part of your business for a short period of time and do you think a permanent named contact would increase your sales on Amazon?

8 Responses

  1. I would welcome an account manager as when ever I have had a problem with Amazon, you can only speak to their basic support team. If you want to speak to the seller performance team, this can only be done through emails and they have yet to reply to me in under 48 hours.

  2. Amazon basic support is in my opinion excellent much better than eBay. But heaven forbid you have a serious problem which cannot be dealt with by basic support then you are in trouble. As said above seller performance can only be contacted by email. There is no continuity in communication, sometimes no reply and often replies that don’t address the message sent. It’s like communicating with a brick wall.

  3. I’ve had a Pro Amazon seller account for a few months. A few weeks ago I tried to actually list something but nothing I posted has ever shown up. The only difference I see from when I list compared to their video tutorial is that there is no S&H charge shown. Instead of Amazon’s category default I just have a dash. Asked support if they could tell me what the problem is. Still have no answer. They can’t even tell me if it is a problem with my settings or a bug on their side.

    So far I’m not impressed.

  4. Amazon email support can be touch and go at times. Similar to ebay in respect of getting through to someone who can understand what you are saying/asking/reporting and their acting accordingly.

    I can’t tell you how many times I have made reports and get a cut and paste reply not relevant to the query or offering a solution. Only to try again later and have the issue resolved very quickly.

    It would be great to have a named person to go directly to on Amazon, but you just have to hope they’re not of the cut and paste brigade.

  5. We find having pro merchant support at ebay where we get through to someone in Ireland most of the time very good compared to the dark days of trying to explain a technical problem to someone with a basic grasp of language.

    Amazon however suffers from the problems ebay had in the past, support staff who don’t know the system and an inconsistent approach to most things. Emails are answered with a cut and paste approach which is shockingly bad at not actually addressing the question asked.

    As an Amazon customer they are great to deal with.
    As an Amazon merchant they are quite often shocking to deal with, we have quite a few reasonably serious issues still outstanding on our account which nobody has an answer to and nobody seems to care, there is nobody higher up than the support staff to speak to with a complex issue or one that the support staff cannot address.

    As for seller performance teams, both ebay and Amazon are as bad as each other, if you have to deal with these teams you can bet that it is a critical issue to your business and a 3 day wait for a reply that doesnt answer your question simply is not good enough!

  6. I would like amazon to ban those bits of software that automatically decrease prices to 1p lower than the current lowest. It just makes people chase sales. The annoying seller is zoverstocks (music Magpie from the TV Adverts) who would sooner lose money than lose a sale.

    Though amazon customer support is far better than ebays customer non-support.

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