Amazon gives US sellers a way to purchase and print shipping labels using Amazon Buy Shipping in Seller Central, and this month it launched a new policy to offer some protection for those who use the service.
In a letter sent on May 10th, Amazon explained that if sellers ship orders on time using Buy Shipping and receive feedback from the buyer “solely related to delayed or not received packages,” they could request to have the impact of the feedback reviewed within 90 days. (Obviously these are non-FBA orders.)
“While the feedback itself won’t be removed,” Amazon stated, “if the request is approved, the impact of the feedback will be removed from your feedback rating and, in turn, your Order Defect Rate (ODR).”
In those cases, Amazon will put a line through the feedback with the following statement highlighting the seller was not at fault: “The fulfillment issues associated with this order were not due to the seller.”
“Finally, some good news,” one reader told us when sharing the news with EcommerceBytes.
“We’re happy to see this happen,” a seller wrote on the Amazon discussion boards. “We’ve been submitting reports to Seller Performance to have these orders removed from our metrics, and this makes it that much easier to clean things up.”
Some sellers didn’t think the policy went far enough, and one seller said, “This needs to work for Anyone regardless of whom they buy shipping labels from.” Many sellers use third-party shipping services for a variety of reasons (including being able to import orders from all of their selling venues into one dashboard).
