A group of sellers have been driven crazy by giving up sales just to keep their accounts

The platform and sellers should have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. However, in recent years, more and more sellers have begun to express dissatisfaction with Amazon's increasingly tightening policies.

The first thing to be affected is the huge pressure that Amazon's OTDR policy has put on sellers.

'Beyond my control'

Recently, a seller named Neil posted a long message on the Amazon forum, strongly protesting against Amazon.

According to Neil, he was recently driven crazy by the OTDR rating mechanism. "As a seller on Amazon for many years, I have always worked diligently and tried hard to find ways to meet consumers' expectations, including producing, packaging and delivering products on time, but Amazon's OTDR rating mechanism has really hit us hard."

Neil believes that the main purpose of Amazon setting up OTDR is to punish sellers, because most of the time sellers have no way to control whether the package can be delivered on time.

Especially during this year's holiday season, although Neil strictly supervised and checked the delivery progress of each order, there were still a few orders that were delayed due to weather and other reasons. To be on the safe side, Neil also specially extended the time for his store to process orders and upgraded to a faster shipping option at his own expense.

However, judging from the results, this did not bring any positive feedback to Neil's store. Not only were there still orders delayed due to airline delivery issues, but Neil also extended the order processing time, causing many consumers to give up ordering from his store. After all, many people could not accept waiting so many days to receive the goods.

This was a compromise Neil made to protect the health of his account, but he found that it was far from enough. One morning, after logging into the backend, Neil found that his account had received a warning that his account might be at risk of being disabled due to a low OTDR score.

Neil said that this model is very unreasonable for sellers. Why should sellers be responsible for delays caused by airlines? Moreover, during the holiday season, the entire logistics system is under tremendous pressure. Sellers, consumers and Amazon all know that delays are inevitable.

At the end of the post, Neil sincerely pleaded with Amazon to consider adjusting this policy. If something is beyond the control of the seller, then the seller obviously should not be held responsible for it.

Soon, Neil's post resonated with many sellers.

One seller responded: “Every time I ship, Amazon recommends that I use the $8 expedited logistics option, which, plus miscellaneous fees, will cost more than a dozen dollars in total, but this order is only $10.5 in total. If I choose a cheaper logistics option, the OTDR score of my account cannot be protected. This puts sellers in a dilemma.”

As the post became more and more popular, Neil soon attracted the attention of Amazon officials. An official customer service representative replied: "Thank you for telling us about your problem. We understand your helplessness when you find that you cannot control the OTDR score. Regarding this issue, you can provide more specific information so that our dedicated team can provide better assistance."

Obviously, buyers have already scored this reply with their feet.

In addition to OTDR scores, many sellers are also deeply touched by Amazon's "forced recommendation" for sellers to use more expensive shipping options.

“Amazon ‘recommended’ me to choose a more expensive shipping option”

Recently, due to the impact of the holiday season, many sellers have found that there are more and more order delays.

One seller said that when he was preparing to ship, Amazon told him that he needed to purchase a faster delivery option to ensure that the order was delivered on time, but he had never encountered this situation before.

After that, the seller tried to enable SSA (Shipping Settings Automation Tool), but it didn’t help. One day, the seller received 3 orders. Normally, he would ship the next day, but in order to deliver on time, he decided to ship the same day, but still received a prompt from Amazon suggesting to buy a more expensive and faster logistics option.

Judging from the feedback received from many sellers, it seems that the Ground Advantage option is no longer recommended by Amazon , but other logistics options are too expensive and sellers simply cannot afford it.

One seller did some calculations: If a consumer places an order for $10, it would cost about $4 to use the cheapest Ground Advantage USPS, and after adding the product cost, he would still have a profit of about $1. But now Amazon recommends that we purchase a faster logistics service (about $9-10), so not only will we not make any profit on this order, but we will also lose a lot. And I can't raise the price to $20, because then the consumer will order from someone else.

Faced with this dilemma, many sellers fell into deep thought.

Some sellers speculated whether Amazon had secretly tampered with the backend system , forcing sellers to choose more expensive logistics options by showing that Ground Advantage would experience delays.

Another seller believes that Amazon's practice not only harms the interests of sellers, but also may not benefit itself much, because if sellers choose to raise prices to make up for the cost increase, many consumers will definitely give up placing orders and turn to lower-priced platforms such as Temu.

"This is not alarmist. If Amazon continues to put more pressure on sellers, the cost will eventually be transferred to consumers. If consumers do not buy into this, Amazon will have to face the consequences of user loss," the seller concluded.

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OTDR