AMZ Insider Info 2/17/20 with CJ Rosenbaum: Amazon’s new policy giving free replacements to customers who request one, no questions asked, directly from sellers’ inventories, Rise of listing suspensions for intellectual property complaints, VORYS letters becoming more valid.
Rise of listing suspensions for intellectual property complaints.
From Louis Vuitton to Amazon making baseless complaints themselves, sellers need to be very careful for the listings they’re doing and for their supplier information in making sure that they properly vet all the information that they are receiving from their supplier. By doing so, you can easily Google your supplier, the name or the address where they claim to be conducting business. If you can’t find anything on Google about your supplier, that means Amazon also won’t be able to find anything either.
Amazon’s new policy giving out free replacements to any customer who requests one, no questions asked, directly from sellers’ inventories.
The customers then have 30 days to return the product, but we can see for sellers that this could be a situation where you could be down two products and not receive any refund for the original product. So if you have your inventory in FBA, this might be a consideration for you. Heads up, this is coming down the pipeline where your products can be at the mercy of Amazon just sending them out willy-nilly.
A continuing trend that we have seen for a long time now is VORYS letters.
What has changed is the substance within the letters. Last year, the letters were fairly weak and we were able to push back on a lot of the claims that were made by VORYS against a lot of our clients. VORYS took a step back. They’ve started to implement certain measures to make the claims in their letters more valid, and now they can be enforced. So what we’re noticing now is an escalation. One thing you definitely don’t want to do is ignore a letter from VORYS because they will continue to press, and if you ignore them completely and don’t respond, we have seen VORYS file litigation for some of the brands that they represent.
