Amazon has a blip back in September which they compounded by refunding merchants for uncharged referral fees instead of billing them. In an unusual Amazon fees SNAFU, the marketplace are now double billing affected accounts to reverse the refund and bill for the fees that should have been charged.
The referral fees were originally not charged for three days – the 18th to 20th of September for orders on Amazon Italy, France and Spain.
Glitches do happen and even the mighty Amazon runs into the odd glitch, but somehow they managed to compound the error by billing for the missing fees but processing them as credits instead of debits. It’s hard not to cringe on behalf of whichever Amazon employee got the code wrong and ended up giving money away instead of invoicing it. Now they’ve got to reverse the credits and recharge as debits so sellers will see a double deduction due to the cock up.
Hopefully, at this busy time of year most sellers won’t be too negatively impacted by the double charge which will be affecting this month’s cash flow but you may notice on your next disbursement that there’s a hefty charge with no sales relating to it in this month.
Apology for fees Amazon fees SNAFU
“Due to a system error, Referral Fees were not charged from September 18-20, 2018 for orders placed in Italy, France and Spain.
When we attempted to charge the referral fees, the referral fees were incorrectly processed as a reimbursement. We corrected this error with two transactions. The first transaction deducts the incorrect reimbursement. The second transaction charges for the referral fees that were not originally charged in September.
These charges appear in your seller account, listed in your Payments Summary Report in the “Other” column with the “type” field description equal to “Adjustment”.
Thank you for selling on Amazon. We apologise for any inconvenience this issue might have caused.”
– The Selling on Amazon Team
5 Responses
(sings) …… and a happy new year.
You can be sure that whatever the mistake, Amazon will NEVER lose out.
cant see a small business owner undercharging and running down the street to get the right money only the huge multi billion pound greedy boys do that.
I remember back in the olden days when we had a real brick shop, that we discovered we made a mistake on a transaction.
Something like it was supposed to be £50.00 and we had typed £5.00.
As it was noticed after the customer had left, we charged the extra £45.00 as a customer not present transaction.
We had notified the customer later and they were fine BUT at some point someone told us that what we had done was illegal as the customer had not agreed at the time to charge them the extra.
It makes sense but makes you think about it.
I don’t think the big companies feel shame, or even know what shame is.
I say that but I had an experience yesterday with Ebay.
Long story that had been going on since May.
They told me I could have unlimited listings internationally BUT then discovered there is a limit of 10000 before listing fees start.
We noticed the charges and asked ebay to pay us back as it was their mistake.
They agreed and asked for time to sort it once the listings had stopped.
Several months on they didn’t show signs and eventually I contacted them via message and then phone call again.
No one got back to me and yesterday I tried again.
Got a USA agent this time and they agreed it should be sorted now.
As a gesture of good will they said one month of store fees for free
Now on UK an anchor store is £399 or is it £350 but whatever it is it’s way more than the £120-150 I was owed.
The agent said as long as I was agreeable then it will be done.
Every time I phone Ebay I get a sensible conversation and they appear to bend over backwards to keep me.
Amazon on the other hand, couldn’t care less about me.
Given the minor scale of the error in comparison to Amazon’s turnover, you would of thought they would let this one slide. Yes it’s probably millions of pounds, but it’s all relative to size.
Anyway… I think marketplaces need a new definition of “customer”, because they really don’t seem to understand the current definition very well.