What do to when things go wrong on Amazon (re-release)

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to Bring youg Product Idea to Life. So I spend so much of my time dealing with Amazon seller support and all the things that can go wrong for my clients.

So today what I thought I would do is re release this popular episode from a few years ago about what to do if you're experiencing any kinds of issues on Amazon and the best way to go about handling it. Now.

I'm really hoping that as you're listening to this, it isn't something you need now, but definitely go away and save this episode for future because if you're an Amazon seller, chances are you're going to encounter problems at some point point and it's really good to know the best way to handle it. So as I say, I hope this is an episode you're not in need of, but if it is, I really hope it's come to you at the right time.

And if you do face any issues of Amazon you can't resolve, of course you always know where I am. So I'm now going to hand you over to me from a few years ago on this re released episode.

As I say, it's an old episode, but I promise all of it is still very valid and up to date today. So enjoy the episode and I will be back with a brand new one next week.

Foreign Ideas to Life podcast Practical advice and inspiration to help you create and sell your own physical products. Here's your host, Vicki Weinberg. Hi. Welcome to Today's Episode.

This is going to be another of my mini episodes I do from time to time where it's just me and I'm talking about something that I think will be useful for you right now. I do like to drop these in from time to time, depending what's going on.

The kind of things I've been working on with clients and that's really where I get inspiration for things to share with you. So as you know, I love selling on Amazon. I think it's a great marketplace.

But hopefully you also know if you've listened to any previous episodes that it's not all plain sailing. And I like to be really honest about that. So things can go wrong. Things do go wrong and that's what I want to talk about today.

This isn't meant to be a negative episode by any means at all. I just always prefer to be honest and I prefer you to go into anything you do around selling on Amazon with your eyes completely open.

I have plenty of people who contact me because they've had some kind of issue on Amazon and they Just cannot figure out how to fix it and they want some help. So I know this happens, and I know this happens a lot.

I also know plenty of people who've given up selling on Amazon because there's been some sort of hurdle they haven't been able to get over.

And I work with clients every day and we come across, you know, when I say we, I mean I come across issues with listing products and shipping and all kinds of things on a daily basis. So having sold on Amazon for songs, I have. I've got plenty of experience in dealing with this kind of thing.

And today I want to share with you some of my best tips for, first of all, avoiding any issues happening in the first place and then what to do if things do go wrong. So let's start with what can go wrong when it comes to selling on Amazon. The first thing is let's talk about listing issues.

That's a good place to start. So first thing that can happen is you might list a product on Amazon, it doesn't go live, and you're not really sure why.

One of these reasons could be that it's actually a restricted product. Sometimes when you try to create a listing, Amazon will tell you, they'll say, actually, you need approval. You can't list this.

Sometimes they'll let you go ahead and create the listing, get everything set up, and then they'll tell you that. As you can imagine, this is quite frustrating because then to get that listing to go live, you have to jump through quite a lot of heaps.

If you'd obviously known that sooner, you could have gone through the approvals in the first place.

Or maybe you'd even decide, actually, given that I need to sort of go through all these approvals to list my product, maybe I won't even bother with Amazon. Maybe I'll go for somewhere else. That's not strict.

I've talked about restricted products before and these are certain categories where either you need approval to sell on Amazon or actually, in some cases, they're not even taking. In some cases, you can't even list these products on Amazon at the moment.

So for an example, I have a client who sells sustainable razors and at the moment, she can't add them to Amazon. We did actually add them to Amazon. Found out retrospectively that at the moment, Amazon aren't accepting any new applications for razors.

As you can imagine, this was super frustrating because she's gone ahead, set up the listings and then found that out. So that was a complete waste of her time and effort and Obviously, if we'd known that initially, that wouldn't have had to happen.

You can also get issues where you set up your listing and it either doesn't go live or it doesn't allow you to create it because of barcodes. So barcode is quite a common one. Not everyone realizes that.

Now, to sell on Amazon, you need to buy your barcodes from a place called GS1 that's in the UK. And if you don't buy your barcodes from there, perhaps you've bought them from a reseller on ebay or even on Amazon.

I know that sort of years ago I used to see quite a lot of people selling barcodes.

Not so much now, probably because a lot more people are wise to it and realize that you can't sell barcodes that someone else has registered and sold on.

But nowadays, if your barcodes that you're using on Amazon don't match what's in your GS1 account, and for most products you will need to have an account with GS1 to get your own barcodes, we can talk about exemptions a bit later. Then you won't be able to create a lifting. Sometimes Amazon won't approve your listing because it's similar to someone else's listing.

Maybe the title is quite similar. And I don't mean by this that you've copied anyone. It just means that maybe the product name is quite similar.

This is completely Amazon's fault when it happens. You know, as long as it is a completely separate product, then obviously you haven't done anything wrong here. But it's still a pain.

You'll still have to fix it. Perhaps there's an issue with the brand. So, for example, you haven't typed your brand name in exactly as you've registered it.

Maybe you're trying to add products using a brand name that already exists. Know some other seller on Amazon's using that brand, or something extremely similar that will also cause you problems.

Perhaps you've put some wording in your listing that you can't use, or perhaps some images that you can't use. I think I've mentioned before that your main image has to be your product. No accessories on a white background, no text.

If your main image doesn't meet that criteria, or perhaps you haven't even added any images at all just yet, your listing won't go live.

So hopefully you can see that even with something relatively simple, such as setting up the listing, there's plenty of things that can and sometimes do go wrong. But I should stress, because I don't want this to be negative episode at all. All of these things can be got around.

You know, I'll talk about a bit later about how you can prevent a lot of these things happening because I promise you that most of these are avoidable. So other issues that come up is reviews. So perhaps you've asked someone to leave you a review and perhaps they shouldn't.

So someone in your family for example, or perhaps you haven't asked, but I don't know, your cousin has gone and reviewed your products on Amazon. Somehow Amazon have work out this person's link to you and therefore they've removed the review and given you a warning.

This is something that happens.

So maybe you're having delivery issues, so either fill FBA orders so they're the ones Amazon fulfills, or maybe for orders you fulfill yourself, maybe you shipped your orders too late, perhaps you're on holiday or it was the weekend and you only post things out Monday to Friday and something came in Friday night for example, and then you've received a warning about that. Perhaps there have been some FBA, other FBA issues. So perhaps your stocks got lost in the warehouse or it's been damaged.

Quite often Amazon will move products between their own warehouses. So perhaps somewhere along that process a few units have got lost or they've got damaged.

And perhaps you've been hit with long term storage fees because your goods aren't selling as quickly as you thought.

Or maybe you need some stock to sell on other marketplaces or I don't know, you're going to do a craft fair or something and you need a bit of stock back. But actually it's really hard to get back.

It can take up to two weeks for Amazon to return your own stock to you and you have to pay for the privilege as well, which can be quite a headache. So these are just some of the things that can and do go wrong for Amazon sellers. Some of these are fairly easy to resolve.

For example, most listing issues, you know, you might need a bit of time and a bit of patience, but ultimately most of them, unless you're trying to list something that you either can't sell on Amazon or something that you can't sell at the moment. So for example, a restricted product where for the short term they're not accepting any new applications to sell, most of them you can overcome.

A lot of the things I've outlined above will only result in a warning. So generally in sort of in order of severity. So list having your listings not be live.

So having inactive listings due to Something being incorrect is the first thing that can happen. The next might be that you get a warning on your account that's usually to do with delivery issues or similar.

And then the sort of the most severe state, something that can happen but hopefully will never happen to you is your account actually getting closed. So I've had a few of these experiences of Amazon in the past.

So first, one thing that happened to me many years ago is I got a warning because my mum left a review on one of my products and I think how they probably work that out is I've probably shipped things to that address in the past. So they knew that that address was, you know, that shipping address was associated with me or I can't work out how else that might have happened.

But they did know that this was a review that shouldn't technically have been left. And I got a warning.

I also got a warning again fairly early on because I was just using Amazon FBA at that time and some of the orders weren't being shipped on time and customers complained.

Now, of course, I shouldn't have got a warning for that because as I've mentioned, these were orders that were shipped by Amazon, so it was actually they were the ones that were at fault. However, I still got a warning, I still got my listings closed down and I still needed to spend half an hour on the phone to resolve it.

And I guess, hopefully that story illustrates for you that selling on Amazon isn't always what you expect, because in that, in that instance, you might say, well, clearly, you know, clearly it wasn't your fault. Clearly you shouldn't have had your account shut down. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that is the case.

However, I did have my listings closed and I did have to spend half an hour getting it resolved on the phone to someone and then I did have to wait 48 hours or whatever it was to go live and I did lose sales for those days and I didn't get compensated. And unfortunately, that is just the way things are. So I just wanted to. To share that with you so you.

Like I say so, you're just going into this with your eyes completely open because sometimes what happens on Amazon makes no sense at all.

And another recent issue I've had with this is for a client of mine, is a pricing issue where we've added their products and we've added it at the rrp. So the price, they sell it on their website and everywhere else. And Amazon said actually that price is too low. Too low, based on what?

I don't know, they're the only people selling that product on Amazon. So we decided to put the price up slightly, you know, only buy one pound, thinking, okay, a pound isn't much.

Okay, There's a bit discrepancy against their website and Amazon, but okay, if it gets listing live. So we put the price up by pounds and was told that the price is now too high to be sold. So that, that again, makes no sense.

And we've spent weeks going backwards and forth with support trying to get that fixed. I'm certain that we will because I'm always certain that will happen. But as you can see, it's just a bit of a headache, to be honest.

So let's talk now. I've given you all the sort of the bad part of this episode, you know, the doom and gloom.

But let's talk about how you can prevent things going wrong in the first place as much as possible. Because as I say, some of this makes no sense. Sometimes things will go wrong and it won't be anything to do with you and it won't be your fault.

But there are definitely things we can, you can do to mitigate some of this. So the first thing, before you add your product to Amazon, do a little bit of research about what's needed up front.

First of all, check it's something that can be listed if it's going to require approval. Check what you need in order to list. So for example, do you need safety data sheets? Do you need a manufacturer's invoice?

What do you need to get through that approval? You can find all of this out on, on Amazon's web page. I'll link to that page over in the Show Notes.

I also have a checklist that might be helpful for you which explains all the things you need to have in order to list your product.

And I'll link to that as well because I think that'll be a really good resource just so you can go ahead and check that you've got everything you need.

And that even comes down to things like, you know, registering your barcodes, having, having the images, because if you don't have all of that, it really isn't worth you going in and attempting to set up your listing. It's much better to have everything in one go because without that, that it's not going to go live anyway.

And if you have a professional selling account, you might be paying for an account, but you know, but you don't. With.

If you have a professional selling account, you might be in a situation where you're paying a monthly fee for this account, but you can't actually make any sales because your listings aren't active. So please wait until you have everything needed to set up your listing before going ahead.

And as I say, I will put the link in the show notes to my free checklist that outlines everything you need to get that done. Okay, so we've covered how to get your listing set up with hopefully as less hassle as possible when it comes to shipping.

So if you know you won't ship out orders immediately, let's say you're doing your own fulfillment or even if you're using a fulfillment center but they don't work weekends, for example, or you won't be shipping orders on the weekend, you can actually edit your listing. So you can edit your individual listing as a handling time. So you could add a two days handling time, for example.

So if a listing comes in on a, let's say late Friday night, the earliest a customer would expect it to be dispatched is late Sunday night. And then Amazon sort of calculates based on the delivery terms you've set. Usually you set three to five days when that product's likely to arrive.

What happens if you don't set up a handling time and you get an order on a Friday afternoon or Friday night which you then don't post till Mondays? You actually get penalised for that because it shows as orders delivered late.

And if you have enough of those and you get a warning, get any more of those and you know you are at risk of your account being deactivated. So that's just a really tiny thing that you can do to just save yourself any headaches down the like down the road.

The other thing is if you are going away at any point, so let's say you do your own fulfilment but you're going to be going on holiday or you can have a really busy week and you can't post things out, you can actually do one of two things.

Either you can set all of your stock to zero so that your listings have been active while you're away, or you can go onto your account settings and tick the holiday box to let Amazon know that you're away. And that basically means they won't be showing your listing to anybody while you're away, but you won't lose your rankings or anything. You won't.

Nothing like that is affected, but it just means that Amazon won't be sending orders through to you that you're unable to fulfill. To avoid storage issues, particularly long term storage issues, my best advice here is don't send in hundreds of of units if you can help it.

So if you're working with any kind of fulfillment center, then it might be best to have your stock held there and drip it in. If not, if you've got any space at home so you, I don't know, a garage, a spare bedroom, anything at all.

I think sending in all of your stock to Amazon, even if right now that's the only place you intend to sell, I think could potentially be a bad move. I'm speaking from experience.

I did this initially as well and then I decided to do a few baby shows and all of my stock was tied up in Amazon and I needed it back and it was going to take ages to get it back. And in the end what I had to do was place an order as if I was a customer to get the stock delivered to me.

So I had to buy it back essentially and then pay the Amazon fees as the seller. And it just wasn't a good situation. And now I always make sure I have stock of my own products in my house as well as in the fulfillment center.

I can get hold of it really quickly, but obviously I didn't know back then and I probably wasted hundreds of pounds in storage fees and in shipping fees just to get stock to myself. I also used to fill fulfill all of my shopify orders via Amazon as well. And yeah, sort of margin wise it just didn't make much sense.

So if you don't have to send hundreds of units into Amazon for fba, please don't really, you know, I really recommend that in terms of FBA and sort of any issues that might arise from delivery or storage of your items, there's not loads you can do here. Really sorry to say that I think things are getting a little bit better. I, I personally I get a lot less damaged stock than I used to.

The main thing I think you can do is make sure that your, that your product is packaged well to kind of mitigate any damage that might be caused. I think I've shared the story before about how my first product, the packaging was a bit flimsy and I was getting loads of damaged boxes.

So the contents were fine, but because the boxes weren't holding up very well, they were getting crumpled and the corners were getting dented and in a few cases they got ripped and, and that just didn't look great. And it meant I couldn't sell them as new even though they were new because the packaging was damaged.

So if you can get some really sturdy packaging, I Think that always helps. Also make sure when you set up your account, any returns or stranded inventory get returned to you if you want it.

So an example I just gave, if my products had damaged boxes, Amazon wouldn't sell them as new. So I had them returned to me. And yes, it was a cost to me. However, I then went on to sell them and them as open box. I sold them on ebay as open box.

I sold them for less money. And I explained in the description that the packaging was damaged but the contents were fine and so I was still able to sell those on.

The alternative is if you leave them with Amazon, they might sell them on as a, I think this called Amazon warehouse, or they might destroy them if they decide they can't or won't sell them.

So if you're able to have them sent back to you and then use them for something else, whether you're selling them on or whether you can donate them somewhere, I think that's always a really good option. So now, final thing I want to cover is what to do when things do go wrong, because sometimes they will.

You know, you can do all the research in the world, you can mitigate the risk as much as possible, but sometimes things go wrong and you just don't expect it. I'm going to assume here that you've done nothing wrong yourself. I'm going to assume that what's happened to you is really bad luck.

You're not trying to sort of infringe anyone's copyright or do anything you shouldn't. And it's just something really unfortunate that's happened to you.

And with that in mind, I like to believe that it will all be okay in the end, which might sound really lame, but I, I think that's worth remembering because if you.

Well, first of all, because if you know you've done something wrong, so if you know, you set to say you brought your barcodes somewhere dodgy rather than going through the real channels and Amazon aren't expecting, aren't accepting them, you know what you've done wrong and that can easily be rectified.

So if you believe that the error is something you know, done something you've done, and I'm assuming again it's completely intent, unintentional, then you can fix that.

If you haven't done anything wrong, which is what we're going to assume, and something really unfortunate has just happened, Amazon have, I don't know, they're not accepting your listing because you've put a word in the. That's not a Very good example. Okay, that's to say Amazon aren't accepting your listing and you really don't know why.

Maybe they think it's very similar to another product and it isn't. You know, this stuff happens.

You just need to be positive, first of all, which I know is hard, Be persistent and just, you know, keep, keep on with it. Amazon seller support is very frustrating.

Often I get a reply and I think, I'm not even sure they read what I said because, you know, you get a reply and it sounds like a robot's Reddit. Maybe it, maybe it's a robot, I don't know.

It certainly sounds like somebody hasn't actually read the question and then you go back and then somebody different replies to you and then they don't look at the original email so they don't know what you ask in the first place. There can be a lot of back and forth. It takes time and it's wearing and you need to be patient.

So if you can avoid this, if you can get on a call, when you log a new case of Amazon seller support, you get the option of email or phone call.

I always now ask for a call unless I'm contacting Amazon on behalf of a client because then I can't, because then I wouldn't have the information to verify their account.

Because if you ask for a call, it does need to be you, the account owner that they speak to, because they'll ask some information to prove that you are you.

However, if you can get somebody on the phone, it is always the most efficient way of dealing with your query because you can basically keep them on the phone until you're satisfied with the answer. Often, if you get a good support agent on the phone, they'll talk you through what you need to do in real time.

You know, they'll go through it with you. That's really helpful.

They'll always follow it up with a message as well, so they'll always confirm what they've said to you verbally in writing, which again is really helpful. If you're not happy with the support you're getting, you can say, actually, I don't think you're helping. Can you?

You put me through to someone else and you can get the call escalated. I really do think that speaking to someone is the way to go.

And yeah, you might think, oh, actually I haven't really got the time for a phone call, but I promise you, one 20 minute phone call is going to do so much better than, you know, the hours potentially you can send you know, getting an email from Amazon, logging in, replying, waiting for them to come back. You know, that can take time. That can. Can take days, weeks even. So always get someone on the phone if you can.

Amazon will always tell you what's needed. They might not always tell you all of it.

Sometimes I've been in situations where I've been told, or supply this and you supply it and then they say, oh, and you need that, okay, which is frustrating. But they will tell you. I don't think they're ever trying to trip you up. And I do, as I say, think most things can get resolved.

The one caveat I would say here is if your account actually gets shut down. So I guess what I'm doing mainly talking about here is issues of listing and maybe warnings on your account and things like that.

If your account actually gets shut down, you need to appeal to have it reinstated. You can do this yourself if you're not comfortable doing it yourself. There are specialists online that help with that sort of thing.

Or you can go in lots of selling on Amazon forums, on Seller Central, on the external site. There's actually a really good forum and people give.

There's lots of advice people give, templates and things for what to do if your account actually does get shut down. I'll be honest, I don't specialise in this area. I hope that I never have to deal with this either for my account or any of my clients.

It does sound like a bit of a headache, but it's my understanding that if your account actually gets shut down, there's usually something you can do prior to that. So this really is the last case and the worst case. But, you know, be persistent and keep at it is something I like to say.

And I guess the other thing probably worth covering is at what point do you just give up? Because I do know quite of clients who come to me because they spent months trying to resolve something.

I think if you're in that situation and you can, it might be worth contacting a specialist if they can help you.

I've been able to fix lots of issues for clients where they've had something, a listing that's not live, for example, and it's, you know, it's been dragging on what seems like forever and we've had a quick call and we've managed to sort of get it fixed in a day or two. So if you. If you're able to do that, I think it's worth it. If not, it kind of. It kind of depends how committed you are. To selling on Amazon.

If it's something that you know you really want to do, whatever the reasons are, you think it's a great marketplace for your product, you think there's lots of potential. I would keep at it as long as you've got the time and the energy to dedicate to that.

If Amazon was a marketplace you're just toying with, maybe you're doing really well somewhere else. I guess it is worth weighing up whether you need the headache and whether the return that you're going to get is going to be worth.

You know, it's going to be worth it.

And I guess I should finish by saying I still believe that Amazon's a great marketplace and I still believe there's lots of opportunity and hopefully nothing will ever go wrong for you. You. But if it does, you know where I am.

And hopefully also this has given you a little bit of reassurance that, and this is something I tell all my clients, I think all problems that you have are fixable when it comes to selling on Amazon.

That is maybe not about everything, but with selling on Amazon, I do think everything is fixable and I do think that it is just a case often of persevering and hoping you get through to the right person. And it's amazing. You can spend weeks going backwards and forwards and then you get through to the right support agent and invite minutes.

Everything's fixed. That does happen. I really hope you found this episode interesting. I hope it's opened your eyes a little bit.

I really hope I haven't scared you because that certainly wasn't my intention. I just, you know, the main thing I want to get across is that things do go wrong. They can go wrong, but they can be overcome as well.

So I really hope that helps. So have a lovely rest of your day and I'll speak to you very soon. Hi. Thank you so much for listening.

As always, I would absolutely love to know what you thought of this episode. Please do remember to rate and view the show and also, most importantly, subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes.

And as a reminder, I release a new episode every single Friday. So take care and look forward to speaking to you again then.

Share Episode

Shownotes

Transcripts

Follow

Links

Chapters

Video

More from YouTube