Amazon is surveying sellers about their experience using its solutions to help them handle returns through its FBA fulfillment service. The survey highlights how many solutions it offers – 10, plus a dashboard for visibility.
Amazon sent sellers an invitation to take the survey, writing, “We are working to make our FBA returns solutions better for sellers. Your feedback helps us prioritize what matters most to you.”
It then asked sellers which of the FBA returns solutions they currently used; asked them to rate their satisfaction with each solution; and asked them how likely they were to recommend each one, describing them as follows:
Partial Refunds:
Enables you to offer a partial refund to buyers without requiring the physical return of items.
FBA Returnless Resolutions:
Allows you to refund buyers while letting them keep the product. This saves you fees associated with high return rates, customer returns processing, storage, and removals.
Returned Item Evaluation:
Amazon’s grading process for customer returns to determine if a customer return is sellable as new or unsellable as new. All FBA returns go through this process by default. (Enabled by default)
Damaged Inventory Ownership:
Allows you to opt out of Amazon’s damage-fault ownership evaluation process. When enabled, Amazon will take ownership of your Amazon-fault damaged inventory to sell or remove through Amazon Resale (previously Amazon Warehouse), Liquidations, or other recovery channels.
Refurbishment:
Repairs packaging by re-taping, re-gluing, and re-boxing items. For apparel and shoes, it includes steaming and stain removal.
Grade and Resell:
Allows you to make money from unsellable customer returns. Amazon completes a second customer returns evaluation process to assign used condition grades and enables you to sell the items as used on Amazon.com. You maintain control over pricing and recovery options.
Liquidations:
Allows you to sell excess and returned inventory to liquidators through wholesale channels. (Enabled by default)
Removals:
Lets you request the return of your inventory to you or a designated recipient with options for automatic, bulk, or individual removal requests.
Disposals:
Amazon removes your inventory from fulfillment centers rather than returning it to you.
Donations:
Automatically evaluates eligible product disposals for donations to select US nonprofits when you request disposal of unwanted FBA inventory.
Returns & Recovery: Insights and Opportunities:
Seller Central dashboard that allows you to monitor customer returns and recovery performance data.
Amazon also asked survey recipients which third-party returns management or recommerce platforms they used and how likely they were to recommend them to other sellers. It also asked sellers to compare the third-party returns solutions with Amazon’s FBA returns offerings with regard to the following areas:
- Value recovery from returns
- Cost/fees
- Ease of use
- Speed of processing
- Transparency in returns processing
- Customer support quality
If you’re an Amazon seller who uses FBA, feel free to share your thoughts on the returns solutions available through Amazon and third-party vendors.
