13-year Amazon seller decides to rebel

A 13-year Amazon seller’s autobiography

"Amazon is constantly squeezing the living space of small and medium-sized sellers like us," said seller Mark.

According to Mark himself, he has been working at Amazon for 13 years. He has adopted a small and beautiful boutique model and has not tried to expand the scale of his business. However, his profit margin has always been good.

But in the past two years, Mark has found it increasingly difficult to do business. It is not because of anything else, but because of the ever-increasing Amazon fees and the unreasonable terms of FBA.

Mark bluntly stated that Amazon's approach is like trying to "dissuade" small and medium-sized sellers who cannot contribute much commission.

In response to this situation, Mark has decided to "fight back." According to Mark, he plans to "take action" on Amazon's FBA business, and said that he will give up FBA and switch to FBM.

As we all know, Amazon FBA is almost indispensable for sellers. In addition to helping sellers significantly improve delivery efficiency, it can also effectively increase product exposure and transaction rate. This is why most Amazon sellers choose the FBA model.

Mark now claims that he wants to give up FBA, which is considered by many to be a very "rebellious" behavior.

"Over the years, inventory loss has been commonplace, but the costs are still rising. What makes me most angry is that every time I ask Amazon to send my inventory back, most of the goods I receive are severely damaged, because Amazon does not treat the packages sent back to sellers as seriously as they do the packages sent to consumers," Mark complained.

If sellers do not use FBA, their operating costs can be significantly reduced, but their sales and profits will also decline to a certain extent. However, Mark said he does not regret this decision.

Many sellers expressed their opinions on Mark's choice.

“I agree with your idea. If more FBA sellers join in, it will have a significant impact on Amazon. At that time, Amazon may reconsider its attitude towards sellers.”

“It’s a brave move, but switching from FBA to FBM may not improve your situation and may even make it worse.”

“If you really start doing FBM, then it is very likely that your sales will be cut in half, and your profits may be even uglier, and should be much lower than they are now.”

Although many sellers are not optimistic about the FBM model, it does not prevent some sellers from considering switching from the FBA model.

Going against the trend, a group of sellers are considering switching from FBA to FBM

Combined with the situation of some cross-border e-commerce sellers, Mark’s choice is not an isolated case. Similar to Mark, seller Xiao Wang is also considering switching to FBM due to cost issues.

According to Xiao Wang, he mainly deals with large products and has always adopted the FBA model. However, due to rising costs and other reasons in recent years, profits have declined a lot and he really can't bear it anymore.

After some research, Xiao Wang found that many competitors actually adopted the FBM model, which gave him the idea of ​​switching to FBM so that he could ship goods through overseas warehouses in the future.

On the other hand, the low operating efficiency of Amazon warehouses is also one of the reasons why many sellers choose to switch to FBM.

During the peak sales season last year, many sellers reported that Amazon FBA had seriously affected their sales.

According to one of the sellers: " After the goods were delivered, they were always in the delivered status and it took more than half a month to receive them. After receiving them, they were in transit and it took more than a month to receive them. The front desk estimated that the delivery time would be at least 15 days later than normal. " This directly led to a large number of consumers choosing to cancel their orders.

In the eyes of many sellers, Amazon charged extra fees during the peak season, but as a result, efficiency became even lower, which is a typical case of taking money but not doing anything.

Affected by this, many sellers choose to switch to FBM. One seller said frankly that he would no longer ship goods to FBA and would use FBM to ship all orders. Another seller also said that he would switch to FBM because it is cheaper, he can control his own inventory, and it will not be reserved for weeks or months.

However, some industry insiders believe that the choice between FBA and FBM depends on what products the seller is making. Sellers should not blindly follow the trend or change their business model on impulse, as they will have to bear the consequences in the end.

New changes, FBA claim eligibility application deadline updated

Recently, Amazon US released an announcement, announcing the update of its FBA logistics compensation policy and adjusting the qualification period for submitting claims.

Amazon said that according to the latest policy, the submission period for some claims has been shortened, but it still provides sellers with enough time to submit and handle outstanding issues. Currently, all manual claims must be submitted within the following deadlines:

1. For merchandise lost or damaged at a fulfillment center, sellers must submit a fulfillment center operations claim within 60 days of reporting the loss or damage.

2. FBA customer return claims can be submitted between 45 and 105 days after the customer refund or exchange, and cannot be submitted before 45 days at the earliest to ensure that the customer has enough time to return the product to Amazon for processing

3. Removal claims for items lost in transit must be submitted between 15 and 75 days after the shipment date , and cannot be submitted earlier than 15 days to ensure that the goods can be returned to the seller.

4. All other removal claims must be made within 60 days of the goods being returned to the seller .

This adjustment means that the deadline for buyers to file claims has been shortened again. In the future, sellers will need to pay more attention to the logistics and inventory management of goods, ensure that reimbursement applications are submitted within the specified time, and try to avoid potential losses due to time limit issues.

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FBA