Amazon Suspends FBA Shipments For Non-Essential Items In Response To Coronavirus COVID-19
According to Fulfillment by Amazon, the Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has been greatly impacting Amazon customers, sellers, and employees.
Since people are staying in their homes trying to prevent the COVID-19 from spreading any further, online shopping has increased dramatically leaving household items low in quantity or completely out of stock. Due to this dilemma, Amazon has chosen to temporarily prioritize household items such as staples, medical supplies, and other high demand products that have been entering their fulfillment centers in order to quickly obtain, restock, and deliver products to customers as fast as possible.
Amazon says that for any other products than these, they have temporarily disabled FBA shipments and they are taking a similar approach with retail vendors as well. This will be in effect until April 5th 2020. Amazon will communicate when they resume their regular operations. Any shipments created before March 17th 2020 will be received at Fulfillment centers. You can learn more about this on this Help page. It’s also important to note that Selling Partner Support does not presently have any further guidance.
Amazon understands how this change might impact our businesses and says how they most certainly did not take this decision lightly. They are working as hard as they can to increase capacity and are trying to quickly hire 100,000 new full and part-time positions at fulfillment centers across the US. They thank their Amazon customers, sellers, and employees for their understanding and patience as they prioritize the above products in response to COVID-19.
What Actions Could You Take?
- Consider increasing quantities on any pending orders by up to 5% without penalty
- Ensure that you have a back-up means of fulfilling inventory, such as your own warehouse or 3PL to do fulfillment. We advise all clients to create a duplicate SKU for each ASIN, one is used for FBA and one is merchant fulfilled or SFP. This is allowed by Amazon and is a good tactic to ensure sales momentum is not impacted greatly when you run out of stock in FBA. You should also be exploring alternative fulfillment to diversify into other channels such as Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a means of diversifying your sales revenue through multiple channels
- Consider adjusting your prices to maintain a run rate that does not run out of stock, but be careful not to increase prices too drastic or Amazon may suspend your buy box eligibility due to price gouging concerns
- If you have a regular cadence of planned inventory allocations to Amazon, you will want to account for this impact by increasing future shipments as needed
- Many sellers are seeing decreased sales of non-essential product sales recently, so you may find that additional inventory is not needed and this may be good to keep inventory balances in check
If you have questions about selling on Amazon, optimizing your listings and advertising campaigns to peak performance, please contact Prime Guidance for a free account consultation at info@primeguidance.com.
Author | Claudia Yates, Marketing Specialist
- Published in Other
Our Ability to Comment on Product Ratings Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past
To comment or not to comment tis the question but Amazon has… or soon will… remove our ability to comment on Product Ratings (also known as Product Reviews). This past week many Prime Guidance clients received this notice from Amazon.
Dear seller,
You are receiving this email because you recently left a comment on a review.
While reviews and feedback are important to our customers and sellers, the comments feature on customer reviews was rarely used. As a result, we are retiring this feature on December 16, 2020.
We are committed to your continued success and will innovate and develop other opportunities for you to connect with customers.
Thank you.
– Amazon Services
As we all know, product ratings can make or break the success of the product. It is very often the first place a consumer looks when they click into a detail page and if they click deeper into the ratings, they most often look at the one and two star ratings. If they use filters like I do, they will never see an item with less than four stars.
We coach our clients to always read their product’s reviews, both the good and bad ones, but especially the bad ones. The small percentage of shoppers who give a product rating are taking time out of their busy day, knocking on your front door, and using a bullhorn to tell you their experience with your item. Most of us were brought up to say “thank you” when we are given a compliment and it may not be feasible for you to make this comment on every good review received, however, it is critical to do so when you receive a bad rating.
Often, a bad rating is given because of product confusion, a defective item (they happen to even the highest rated item), a delayed FBA shipment, or sometimes due to bad content on your detail page. If the rating is due to the first two reasons, sometimes you just need to simply say:
“We are very sorry to hear about the issue you are having with {product name} and your satisfaction is our highest priority. Please reach out to us through Amazon’s support system so we can make this right”.
It tells that customer and anyone else who reads it that they are important and that they matter. If the customer does reach out you can now fix the situation and if you do, just to their satisfaction there is a very good chance they will change the rating. If you go beyond their satisfaction, they will change the rating and tell 25 of their friends about the experience.
For anyone unaware of the ability comment it is here:
Or from your Brand Dashboard you can click on Manage Reviews in the Customer Review Section:
Thus far, the ability to comment still exists. According to the message, it was supposed to have been removed on December 16th, but I suspect it will happen soon after the holiday season.
We will continue to coach our clients to read their product ratings so they can learn about what people are saying. They may not be able to comment back, but if they can detect a pattern it may be able to be easily addressed. It could be through changes to the detail pages, fixes to the infographics, or additions or even deletion to the A+ Content. It could be through developing an insert that goes in every box or a edit to the instructions. If it was a delayed shipment by FBA Amazon, you may want to even remove the rating. There will always be learnings from the negative ratings, but there will be no way to reach out directly to the customer to fix the situation… or will there be?
Speculating to the reason why Amazon is removing this tool is just that… speculation and it does really matter. Amazon simply states that it is a tool not often used but I have also heard people say that less scrupulous sellers use it to hound consumers who have given their product a bad rating. Either may be true but Amazon goes on to say that will “innovate and develop other opportunities for you to connect with customers”.
2020 has seen more changes in Seller Central than I have seen over the last several years and maybe… just maybe… there will be a better way for us to communicate directly to the consumer to tell them that they are important to us and that we want to fix any negative experience they have with our product.
Those of you who have read my other blogs or have seen me on the Prime Guidance weekly webinar every Thursday know that I often cite the Amazon Leadership Principles, which I have learned during my time as an Amazon employee and these principles became even more important as a hiring Bar Raiser. The email sent by Amazon said they are taking this action because the tool is rarely used, but if there is more to it then they have addressed several of their Leadership Principles, first and foremost, Customer Obsession. After that, assuming they create a better tool for us, it is Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Think Big and Deliver Results. When I begin an engagement with a new client, I tell them three things: