Selling Your Stuff on Amazon Part 12 - Advice for newbies in first two posts

soolin

OK, so what exactly are Amazon doing at the moment? I just had this message when I logged in:

Charge When Ship Announcement

Soon all sellers will start using Charge When Ship to process orders and keep buyers informed about dispatches. Sign up now or Learn more before you sign up.

Charge When Ship Overview

Charge When Ship is an easy way to process orders and keep buyers informed about their delivery, providing the best customer experience possible. Here's how it works:

1. When you dispatch an order, you confirm the dispatch and provide delivery information.
2. We display the delivery information you provide to us in the buyer's Amazon account, and we also send the buyer an e-mail notification with all of the delivery information.
3. The buyer is charged after you confirm to Amazon the dispatch of the order (rather than when the buyer places the order), and the payment will be recorded in your Amazon Seller Account. As long as you confirm to Amazon that the order was properly dispatched, you will be paid in accordance with the Marketplace Participation Agreement. Of course, just as now, there may be circumstances where payment may later need to be refunded, for example when the buyer does not receive the order, or it is not as described.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200343120

Only works if you have tracking, hmm. So a two tier system then. Buyers can (I assume) choose to pay on order and not get an official tracking number, or pay only when seller despatches goods and confirms tracking. This is obviously aimed at sellers of high end goods like electricals etc but what if it spreads to books as normal.

What really irritates me though is the fact that if you order from Amazon direct they take your money and then wait days to ship anyway.

soolin

Panic over. I just tried the system and you can fulfil the 'item shipped' equirements without using a tracked service.

The discussion on seller central is mainly baaout when buyer actually pays and whether Amazon are holding money and what will happen to pendings. At the moment of course a pending isn't notified to us until Amazon actually get payment, in future might it be possible to place an order, get the seller to ship and only then will Amazon discover that card hasn't gone through and item goes pending? Or, as people suspect, Amazon will collect the money as usual, hold onto it (interest bearing account?) and only release it to us after item has been despatched.

pinkgem

i have just logged in to amazon and seen this announcement and wondered the same thing.

this bit interested me "If you are unable to dispatch an order, you can cancel it instead of confirming dispatch; the buyer will not be charged and you won't have to issue a refund."

does that mean that no purchase will have been made? can the buyer still leave feedback?

soolin

I bet they can still leave feedback..even (as I had recently) when I list against the correct catalogue entry and someone changes it so it looks as though I sold the wrong book.

pinkgem

on another note, i am being blackmailed by an amazon buyer. help!

about a week ago i checked my emails to find that i had sold an item for £2.99 instead of £22.99! the £2.99 plus postage and less fees barely even covered the cost of postage. I decided to refund the buyer immediately (at approx 9am, for a purchase made at 3am the same day) and apologise profusely because I chose not to send the item and suffer the huge loss.

It has taken the buyer a week to email me, at 1am this morning:

"I am very disappointed by the action you have taken. Yes mistakes happen, however, a token discount may have in, a small way, gone a little towards appeasing the customer, but it appears in your business the customer comes a very very poor second. As long as you maintain your profit margins to hell with what your customers have to put up with.
As you may well have gathered I am totally unimpressed by the 'Oh I made a mistake - TOUGH!' line you have adopted. Yes you have to be commended for your speed of cancellation and notification, but I feel that would be more to your advantage, rather than mine.
I am contemplating reflecting my feelings in the feedback I leave.

Regards"

I admitted I made a mistake, and I'm pretty sure the buyer knew it was a mis-price and took advantage of this. He also probably knew the order would be cancelled.

I am happy to offer the buyer a very good discount if he would still like to purchase the item, but I am not at all happy about the way he has spoken to me and I feel like I am being blackmailed. I am a business, I do not give items away for free. We're all human, we make mistakes. I didn't just refund and say nothing, I put a message with the refund apologising for the error and also sent a longer email apologising.

When an online retailer has sold something at the wrong price, 99% of the time the orders are cancelled and the customer is either not charged or is refunded.

I am considering phoning Amazon and asking if they will remove any feedback he leaves because I am being blackmailed in to offering a discount which I am not required to do so.

Had he just told me he was disappointed and wondered if I would offer a discount then I would have been more than happy to do so.

I know that I am the one in the wrong because I entered £2.99 instead of £22.99 (actually I blame my laptop keyboard as it doesn't always register double presses of a number or letter!) and I appreciate that the buyer is unhappy because they are not getting the bargain they hoped for, but being rude/sarcastic and blackmailing people is not the way to go about things.

pinkgem

soolin wrote: »

I bet they can still leave feedback..even (as I had recently) when I list against the correct catalogue entry and someone changes it so it looks as though I sold the wrong book.

i remember you talking about that. yes you're probably right about the feedback

pinkgem

and a 3rd subject for this morning

I am thinking of becoming a pro merchant seller, I have just realised that I have sold 50 items in the past 30 days (92 in the past 90 days) I have been selling on Amazon marketplace for 7 years now (and before that on amazon auctions) but I have not been confident about selling the required amount of items, until now.

Am I right in thinking that as a pro merchant seller I can add more items to Amazons inventory? I have more items similar to what I am selling at the moment, but I cannot currently list them as they are not listed on Amazon.

If I can list more of my items then I am pretty confident of being able to continue selling the required amount of items to make the pro merchant subscription worthwhile.

The items have tags on with barcodes on, is it this barcode that I would enter to list the items?

How many items do you need to sell to cover the cost of the pro merchant fee? I think I have seen 30 mentioned on here, but maybe 40 mentioned on Amazon, can anyone confirm?

pinkgem

well i have spoken to amazon and they said they probably won't be able to remove the feedback if he leaves bad feedback, but they told me that i did the right thing by refunding the buyer straight away and apologising and that mistakes do happen. They told me to email seller support with the email from the buyer and when i reply to the buyer to apologise again but say i did the right thing and remind him that sellers can leave bad feedback for buyers too!

helsbells

soolin wrote: »

Surely a quick run to the 'chemist' would be in order. I am old enough to remember when telling a boss I needed to go to Boots urgently got me out of work for a good 15 minutes on the basis they wouldn't dare ask what I needed to buy!

Oh that takes me back:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
When I was very young/irresponsible and in a very boring job I rang in "sick" many a day after a night out with "womens troubles" and it always garnered the same response - terrified that I might expand on just exactly what that might entail. Sorry to be off topic but it really did make me smile. Sexism wasn't all bad:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

tirlittan

So, how good a ranking is 189,878? Don't understand these. There's a book that can't be bought from amazon atm and USA sellers are selling way over the RRP. Always suspicious about the USA sellers though, do they ever make any sales? Just wondering what to price mine at.

Thanks.