Glenn is a reader and regular commenter on Tamebay and sometimes he writes for us, sharing his experiences as an ecommerce trader. Today he shares a new experience – Amazon giving a consumer a refund plus a seller funded good will gesture. Have you ever seen this on your Amazon account?
I am a 3rd party seller on Amazon and sell most of my products through (FBA), Fulfilment By Amazon. There are many and varied arguments for and against FBA, but it suits me primarily because I rarely need to communicate direct with customers or process returns and refunds.
However I recently noticed that Amazon had in addition to making a full refund to a customer they had also given that customer a £10 concession from my funds. I have no idea what the customer’s complaint was or why Amazon felt the need to give them a £10 concession. Once I noticed the payment I contacted Customer support and they gave sincere apologies and undertook to a reimburse me the £10.
So if you are a FBA seller keep an eye on your refund transactions for any concession payments.
4 Responses
The customer support assistants are quite trigger happy with paying out money!
We’ve had multiple occasions now where we’ve had a problem (whether it’s customer related or shipping stock to fulfilment centres) where the assistant has profusely apologised on Amazons behalf and disbursed funds into our account!
So yes, it pays to follow up issues by creating tickets.
It’s wonderful!
I have been using FBA primarily for a few years now and only found minimal occasions where Amazon have been over generous to customers. To be honest I am not too fussed
Bryn
I save every amazon fba refund into a folder. About 6-8 weeks after the refund date ( I do it once a month) I check each refund in my sellercentral fba reports. If any don’t match up like you have mentioned I always open a case with amazon. I end up getting back about £40-£50/month. It’s a bit tedious but only takes an hour or 2 once a month.
I wouldn’t rely on amazons “automatic” reimbursement procedures they have in place. 90%+ of the time amazons refunds and reimbursements are always spot on but there are always a few that get missed, so it is still worth me doing this once a month.
yes – amazon will be sensitive on this – there is a risk that giving away other people’s lolly could be interpreted as theft