QUESTION: My store sells textbooks on Amazon. I’m worried that our performance summary rating on Amazon is going to suffer because we’re getting quite a few order cancellations from students buying textbooks for the Spring semester.
I believe Amazon’s threshold for refunds is 5 percent. Today we’ve had 100 Amazon Marketplace orders but five cancellations before the books shipped. We’re not getting any reasons for the cancellations, just e-mails asking to cancel.
I think this is a double-edged sword — we’re apt to get negative feedback for some unknown reason, and we’re worried about our account being suspended by Amazon Alliance for an excessive refund rate.
Do you think I should call Amazon¹s customer service number to try to explain the situation so they don’t kick us off? If so, what number should we call?
ANSWER: Your performance summary provides statistics on your sales, refunds, customer feedback, and A-to-Z Guarantee claims.
I remember when Amazon began compiling this data in 2003, there was a big hubbub because they e-mailed the first few monthly tallies to the sellers, even sellers with good records. Many sellers felt compelled to contest each and every ding on their records. Amazon quit mailing the monthly statistics, and I assume nowadays you only hear about them when you’re in hot water.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be too concerned about one day of excessive refunds. I doubt your refund rate is out of line compared to other sellers who do heavy volume in textbook selling. I’m sure Amazon sees a spike in refunds across the board this time of the year thanks to the back-to-school rush.
I always get a lot of cancellations without explanations from students this time of year too. As we know, most students are notorious tightwads and don’t select “Expedited” shipping. So my hunch is that when they receive the e-mail confirmation from Amazon and notice that delivery may take weeks, they freak out because they’re desperate to receive the book quickly. Of course these were the same folks who ignored the opportunity minutes earlier of upgrading their shipping to ensure delivery within a few days.
And I’m sure a good number of the cancellations are from students who realize they’ve bought the wrong edition. It’s frustrating, but it’s better to get an immediate cancellation than a returned textbook several weeks after the big bookselling season.
My understanding is sellers get a warning if the refund average gets to be unacceptable. Personally I wouldn’t waste the energy explaining the refunds until it got to that point, if it does. Then I’m fairly sure a human at Amazon would take into account the situation with textbooks.
If you want to contact someone at Amazon, my best advice would be to call the seller support line and ask to speak with a supervisor: 1-877-251-0696
Here’s Amazon’s tip sheet for improving your performance summary, but it’s all common sense for anyone who’s been selling for longer than one afternoon:
It would be nice if Amazon Pro-Merchants had account representatives so that we could talk to a human occasionally about issues like this. I’m curious if other sellers have gotten into hot water about refunds or other things related to the performance summary, and how they resolved it. Comments, anyone?
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3 Comments
We had a problem on Amazon with books we had marked as “SOLD” not being taken off the Amazon database. We received several orders in a short time period for sold books which pushed our refund rate up, and we contacted Amazon regarding the situation. They said the review was conducted by computer, and that they would take our explanation into consideration if it ever reached a higher level of concern. We got the impression that sellers don’t get “kicked off” until after review by people(and probably additional contact with opportunity for explanation by the seller ) rather than computers.
Great timing! I’ve been selling quite a bit lately with a return rate of 3 percent. I have another return because another buyer didn’t read the description.
She thought the book was “just like her sister’s” because “the cover looked the same.” Anyway, it was an expensive book (for me anyway) which will probably push my return rate to 4 percent. I’m glad to see that Amazon won’t have a heart attack over it.
When it comes to issue of refunds, I try to make it a “customer return” rather then some of the other reasons. Because, I hope, Amazon doesn’t consider a customer return as bad an indicator to Seller Quality. Whether this is true or not… don’t know. But, it makes sense that a customer return, which typically is just because a customer has change their mind, is better than “no inventory”, or “not as described”, or any of the other warning signals that a Seller either has some kind of problem or is trying to get away with something.