Are you venturing into an online selling business? If yes, you probably know that Amazon is the place to go.
Since the early 2000s, Amazon houses 9.7 million sellers worldwide, and over 150,000 Amazon sellers have more than $100,000 in annual sales.
While that is very inspiring, Amazon can be a nerve-wracking place for newbie sellers. Succeeding in it is possible but comes with challenges. Going into the intricate maze that is Amazon not only takes courage, but it also needs your ample understanding of its systems and know-how.
But like any other problem, there is a formula to achieve the dreams of thriving on Amazon, and how to handle the most common Amazon Issues. – Seller Candy is here to help you on your journey!
To make it easier for you, we have categorized the common areas you would want to keep your eye on, which are:
- Revenue and Sales Performance
- Listing and Product Management
- Account Health and Compliance
- Customer Service and Order Fulfillment
Now that you are here, let’s dive in and find out how to handel the most common Amazon issues!
Revenue and Sales Performance
Let’s not beat around the bush. Your goal as a business owner is to make profits and ensure that your efforts thrown into the Amazon space equate to positive revenue and sales. Here are the common challenges that you may face when it comes to your revenue and sales performance:
Buy Box Loss
The Amazon Buy Box is a section on the right side of an Amazon product detail page where customers can add a product to their cart with a prominent box that says, “Buy Now.” This Buy Now box on Amazon lets shoppers make instant purchases from the product detail page.
But what would you want in a Buy Box? Only a few sellers can get the chance to get a Buy Box, and once you do, it will drive your sales to a considerable increase. 80% of Amazon sales are done through Buy Box purchases.
Losing the opportunity to be in a Buy Box accounts for many things, such as poor seller rating, uncompetitive pricing, or poor inventory health. You must maintain a good seller rating to keep your Buy Box.
If you ever lose it, do not panic. The first thing that you can do is adjust your pricing. It would be best if you are smart about lowering your price competitively, but not so much to lose profit.
And lastly, being eligible for a Buy Box requires a high inventory rating. Make sure that you have sufficient stock to fulfill your orders.
High Competition / Competition Overload
A frequent worry among sellers is excessive competition in the market. With many online sellers expanding their operations on Amazon, the competition can be tricky.
Nonetheless, employing Amazon seller tools and strategies can enhance your performance as a seller and boost the visibility of your products. By familiarizing yourself with these tools and learning the process, you can effectively enter and thrive in the market.
Such marketing tools can help you optimize how you run your business on Amazon and assist you in crucial decision-making situations.
To know more about these tools, Seller Candy has talked about them in detail here.
Pricing Wars
Given the prevalent excessive competition in the Amazon marketplace, it is natural for Amazon sellers to engage in price wars. This phenomenon is widespread among sellers vying for their products featured in the Amazon Buy Box.
Many inexperienced sellers attempt to win by undercutting their competitors and offering lower prices than the existing ones. However, resorting to such tactics would result in settling for reduced profits and lowering the profit margin.
Lack of / Negative Product Reviews and Amazon Feedback
Another thing to look out for is your Amazon feedback and product reviews. Reviews are a crucial part of success on Amazon. It drives up search visibility and motivates conversion. So, your goal is to convert all your sales into reviews.
You may request a review manually or automate your requests through a third-party tool. However, you should care about more than just the number of reviews coming in but also the average rating of these reviews.
You would want your customers to give you a 4–5-star rating. For that to happen, many factors must be considered, such as accurate product listing, high product quality, good customer service, etc.
Your feedback on Amazon also constitutes accomplishing these in minimum to achieve good account health:
- Order defect rate of less than 1%
- Negative feedback less than 6%
- Customer response time is less than 24 hours
- A return rate of less than 3%
Product Ranking and Visibility
A top-notch product may not guarantee good performance unless your Amazon listing and product detail page are optimized. The key to better rankings lies in Amazon keyword ranking and SEO. Utilize tools like Google Trends or Sonar Tool to identify high-ranking keywords and incorporate them into your product description.
To sustain high product rankings, you must maintain an active Amazon advertising strategy, practice inventory forecasting, and promptly address any listing errors.
Listing and Product Management
Newbie sellers are likely to encounter several challenges concerning listing and product management. Amazon is strict with how it handles logistics from its sellers. Some challenges to look out for are listing suppression, FBA inventory management, and counterfeit and hijacked listings.
By adhering to the policies set by Amazon, you can effectively tackle the difficulties associated with suppressed listings and develop your business on a path toward prosperity. From our recent blog, you may also learn more about suppressed listings and some tactics to maximize your visibility and sales.
Listing Suppression
Amazon listings become suppressed when they fail to meet Amazon’s standards and guidelines, causing them to be hidden from view. This common problem can severely affect your business by limiting product visibility, eroding customer trust, and ultimately impacting sales performance.
FBA Inventory Management
While Amazon can be accessible to many, it will not be easy to get through its strict adherence to policies and restriction guidelines regarding product listing.
The platform disallows the sale of certain items, which can pose challenges for sellers with limited access to inventory supplies. To avoid inventory-related problems, you should conduct comprehensive product research. Utilizing a product research tool or service can be beneficial in identifying profitable products that yield substantial returns.
Read here to learn more about Amazon inventory management.
Competing with Counterfeit or Hijacked Listings
New or experienced Amazon sellers experience their listings getting hijacked, and the more your product gets traction, the more chance it will happen.
If you are new to this and unaware of this possibility, it is better to be proactive and at least know what to do in these situations:
Trademark your brand. If the law backs you up, you can have more faith in your product going out there. This helps you protect your product or brand from unauthorized use.
Put your logo on your product and packaging. Even if you cannot trademark your brand, putting your logo increases brand identity and recognition, which helps customers familiarize themselves with which of the products they see are initially yours and the ones that are counterfeited.
Account Health and Compliances
So that Amazon makes sure that its sellers are meeting the standards expected by its customers, Amazon implements a strict metric called Account Health Rating (AHR). AHR measures a seller’s account health, categorizing it as good or bad.
Account Health Concerns
If you are new to Amazon selling, some factors that you need to be proactive in taking care of as it directly affects your Account Health Rate are negative feedback, order defect rate, late dispatch rate, and cancellation rate.
Sales Tax Compliance
Charging sales tax to buyers is a compulsory requirement for all merchants. The merchant is responsible for collecting these taxes temporarily and will later submit them to the appropriate local and state taxing authorities on a regular schedule, which can be monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Being an Amazon FBA seller establishes a sales tax nexus in each state where your products are stored for resale. The sales tax nexus represents a significant connection to a form for taxation purposes.
Waste Management Compliance
As an Amazon seller, you hold specific obligations concerning waste management compliance. These duties are geared towards lessening the environmental effects of your operations and guaranteeing the appropriate handling and disposal of waste resulting from your business activities.
In the retailing business, there are many areas where waste management is involved, such as in your products’ packaging, e-waste management, and recycling and disposal of recyclable, non-recyclable, and hazardous materials.
In many countries, Amazon sellers must obtain an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) registration number, especially for e-commerce businesses that sell internationally.
If you’re selling in the european markets, ecosistant will help you fulfill all your recycling obligations or packaging waste compliance, directive on Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) & EPR compliance with their either digital or premium service.
Here’s how you can get started.
Intellectual Property (IP) Infringement
In hindsight, Amazon has no liability for any copyright infringement occurring on its site. But it is responsible for implementing a mechanism for involved parties to be notified and for taking down product listings that are deemed to be infringing.
There can be two sides to the story in this situation; either your copyrighted work is being used or sold by other sellers, or you violated someone else’s intellectual property.
What should you do if your product/brand is being used without your permission? The first thing to do is to file an online report to Amazon. The report contains:
- Your statement
- The description of your copyrighted work
- Evidence backing up your claim
What to do if you violate someone else’s IP? If you were ever reported for a copyright violation, Amazon will notify you with a takedown notice, warning you that your product list is being removed from Amazon. Eventually, you may either contact the complainant and try to reach an agreement with them.
Dealing with Inauthentic Claims
If you are confident that the complaint against you was a mistake, you can respond directly to Amazon to demonstrate the authenticity of your product.
The worst case is that your account gets suspended. If this happens, do not panic. You will need to send your ‘Plan of Action’ to Amazon, explaining why you were selling copyrighted materials, your resolutions, and statements on how to avoid this incident in the future.
To avoid intellectual property violations, be vigilant when creating your listings. Ensure you sell original products and use unique photos and descriptions. These precautions can help protect your account and comply with Amazon’s intellectual property rules.
Customer Service and Order Fulfillment
Shipping and Logistics Issues
Shipping is a massive part of the selling process of any Amazon seller.
If you were to avail yourself of an FBA service, the fulfillment costs of shipments of your products should be carefully considered with your shipping time and costs.
Your inventory and tracking management are also vital for any shipping process. As an Amazon seller, you must keep your eye out for overstocking and restocking items. You must also provide the customers with the details on the whereabouts of your shipments.
Another logistic challenge you should be aware of is stranded and unfulfillable inventories.
Stranded inventories are products that take up storage space in Amazon’s fulfillment centers but are not linked to any active listings on your seller account. Meanwhile, unfulfillable inventory pertains to unsellable products for damage, expiration, spoilage, or falling under restricted item categories.
Customer Service Challenges
Good customer service is a critical aspect of the success of an Amazon business. Effective communication and timely action are needed for any customer interactions.
Responding promptly to your customer’s inquiries goes a long way. It will help you address the issue before the customer escalates it through a complaint or a report. In case a buyer message remains unanswered for 48 hours, the Amazon customer has the option to initiate an A-to-Z Claim, leading to a high possibility of receiving a full refund, sometimes without the need to return the product.
Make it a routine to visit your product listings on Amazon regularly, to monitor and review new customer feedback and reviews.
Some tips to help you provide the best customer service are to set up notifications to get notified of any customer feedback or inquiries, to use the Amazon Seller App on your mobile phone to get notifications on your phones, too and to use third-party tools or services to help you manage customer feedback.
Managing Returns and Refunds
In an online selling business, customer returns and refunds will likely happen no matter how much you prevent it.
For returns of defective, damaged, or materially different items (when a seller misrepresents ‘the condition or details of an item in a way that affects its value or utility’), the seller must refund the original shipping costs and any shipping costs to return the item.
However, if the buyer changes their mind within 30 days and wants to return the item, you only must refund them the item and the original shipping costs; you’re not required to refund the cost of gift wrapping or cover the cost of return shipping.
Once a customer initiates a return for an item, you will receive an email notification informing you about the return request. The email will include the buyer’s stated reason for the return, and Amazon will also indicate if the defense falls outside their returns policy.
Next Steps: Ready To Get Serious About Your Ecommerce Business?
Choosing Amazon as the marketplace to grow business can be a real challenge, especially for newbie sellers. Amazon already has a long-standing buying and selling culture that can be overwhelming for some.
But no mountain is too high to climb. All new and aspiring Amazon sellers can nurture this vast marketplace with the spirit of entrepreneurship by merely keeping an eye on all aspects of research, inventory, customer service, and marketing.
While you can do it all yourself, having the right tools and support is crucial to thrive. With Seller Candy, you can confidently navigate through the most common Amazon issues.
Our expert team is here to guide you every step of the way, ensuring that your business stays on track and grows exponentially.
Say goodbye to challenges, and hello to success with Seller Candy by your side. Get started today and experience the power of seamless selling on Amazon!
About the Author:
Ben Smith is the Head of Partnerships of Seller Candy.
He started working in the e-commerce space in 2016 and has been hooked ever since. In the years since then, he learned the ins and outs of what it takes to build a successful Amazon brand. With his past experience as an Amazon Account Manager and Seller, he became passionate about helping Amazon Sellers and Agencies scale their business and achieve their goals. Today, he leads the Seller Candy Partnerships team and he spends his days chatting with businesses of all sizes to solve their Seller Central woes so they can get back to growing their business.
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