Amazon appear to have a infrequently regular habit of forgetting to charge their customers. This time an Amazon billing glitch means that selling fees from Amazon France, Italy and Spain weren’t charged for three days in September last year. Now Amazon want their money and are informing merchants that the fees will be added as adjustments.
The impacted dates were the 19th, 20th and 21st of September for some orders. How much you owe will depend on your sales volumes on the three affected EU country sites.
When we see glitches like this, we often wonder why a marketplace doesn’t just put their hands up, admit the Amazon billing glitch, say sorry, and swallow the loss. Coming back to fill for fees from four months ago does seem a little harsh, although Amazon’s relationship with their merchants is a business to business contract and so operates under different rules to contracts with consumers. It may be fair and just that they charge, it just feels a bit harsh.
“Due to a system error, referral fees were not charged between September 19 and September 21, 2018 for some orders placed on the Amazon.it, Amazon.fr and Amazon.es websites. Referral fees that were not charged during this period have been deducted by Amazon Payments from your Selling on Amazon payment account. This charge will appear as an “Adjustment” in the “Other” section of your settlement report: https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/payments/reports/statement/details.
We apologise for any inconvenience this issue might have caused. Below is an invoice for your records. It shows the total fees, any discounts you might have had on sold items, and taxes that were mistakenly not assessed due to this error across all three impacted marketplaces. Marketplaces and fields with a value of €0.00 indicate that the system error had no impact on your sales there.”
– Amazon Services Europe
3 Responses
We had one of these with small amounts, but you could see how a large retailer could owe thousands and thousands of pounds causing panic 3-4 months on.
What about Ebay’s billing glitch?
Loads of anchor shop sellers were charged listing fees on their “free” shop items last week,
No apology from Ebay, no means even of checking the bill, just a certainty that the figure showing on the account balance is way too high.
Promise of it being sorted out in the next invoice.
Really?