Due to an Amazon outage, the seller was deducted 1.71 million and the store was closed!

Imagine that you suddenly received an IOU for $91,000 ( nearly 590,000 RMB ) and were urged to repay the money as soon as possible. You would receive the same IOU every month thereafter. How would you feel ?

This happened to an Amazon seller not long ago, who called it a " surreal nightmare."

The Amazon seller named Zu Adams revealed on her blog that she was charged $91,000 in FBA storage excess fees by Amazon in early August.

The seller speculated that the error might be caused by the FBA Onsite program he participated in a few years ago . The FBA Onsite program allows sellers to add Amazon's software and logistics systems to their own warehouses. The program provides ordinary sellers with the same advantages as FBA sellers, and does not charge storage fees .

However, Amazon notified participants in August 2020 that it would shut down FBA Onsite in February 2021.

Adams explained in her blog post that she stopped participating in the FBA Onsite program in 2019 and shut it down , and can no longer log in . However, the inventory that was once in the system is still there, with a status of "pending." Adams believes this is where the $91,000 fee came from.

The seller’s blog post shows: “I submitted a case stating that we have no inventory in Amazon warehouses . Because we used to participate in FBA Onsite , all inventory was stored by us, not Amazon, and we were guaranteed at the beginning of the Onsite program that we would not be charged storage fees. Therefore, we should not be charged any storage fees. ”

The seller submitted five cases within a month , but all of them received canned responses that were irrelevant to the seller’s explanation.

Screenshot of Adams' blog post

In early September, the seller received another email from Amazon, showing that the unpaid balance had reached US$181,000 (approximately RMB 1.71 million) and asking the seller when to repay the money.

Screenshot of Adams' blog post

Out of frustration, Adams broke the news in his blog. Three days after publishing the post, the seller received an email from Amazon, in which Amazon said it was a technical failure, that the problem had been resolved, and apologized to the seller.

Screenshot of Adams' blog post

Adams said in a follow -up blog post that while she was grateful the issue had been resolved, the incident had a severe impact on her sales.

"Our store was closed for almost five weeks. We lost all our rankings in a very competitive category. It affected us a lot, " said Adams, who said he received only 33 orders in five days . Normally , he would receive more orders in a day .

Adams believes that as Amazon grows larger, it is understandable that it has to rely on automated systems to manage. However, once a misjudgment occurs, sellers often have no way to solve the problem. She hopes Amazon can re-evaluate this approach.

A minor glitch on Amazon may be like a major earthquake for ordinary sellers, and the losses caused are difficult to make up. We still hope that Amazon can minimize the mistakes caused by technical problems.

Amazon

Seller

Storage Fees