Amazon Sellers’ News 10/25/19 with CJ Rosenbaum: Inside info. from Amazon’s Staff in India: Selling Partner Support Teams
Inside info. from Amazon’s staff in India:
What I want to talk to you about in this video, are Amazon’s selling partner support teams, SPS.
Selling partner’s support. These are the teams that work with Amazon vendors. The team’s jobs were to handle vendors claiming shortages of inventory that were delivered, where an Amazon vendor sent Amazon 1,000 units and Amazon only logged in 900, or where an Amazon vendor sent their goods to Amazon, and Amazon shortchanged the payments to the Amazon vendor.
For those of you who don’t know or those of you who don’t have Amazon vendor accounts, Amazon takes discounts based upon how quickly they pay their bills. But what will often happen is Amazon will pay after the deadline and still take the discount as if they’d paid earlier.
The perspective from this SPS team member was clearly in Amazon’s favor, and what he tries to do every single day of the week, is poke holes and Amazon vendor’s requests for full payment. Even the verbiage used by this young man was clearly something that demonstrated that he was against Amazon vendors and perceived Amazon vendors who are doing nothing but asking to be paid as absolutely negative. He said that there was absolutely zero effort for Amazon to confirm the number of units that came in from its warehouses, that he did not look at the data from the size, from the weight, the number of units that were logged in from Amazon. They didn’t check with their own warehouse people at all, their own internal systems, and they put the entire burden on the Amazon vendors to show how much they shipped in.
To me, it seemed ludicrous since we learned a lot about Amazon vendors and the logging in of inventory from our arbitrations against Amazon on behalf of vendors, but this is how the SPS team worked in India. The takeaway is if you’re an Amazon vendor, you need to maintain great documents, and if you can, great photographs to document exactly how much inventory you’re selling to Amazon and how it’s being delivered. To use Amazon’s approved couriers, make sure your labeling is dead-on, and always be prepared to fight Amazon for your money. The last takeaway is that if you are an Amazon vendor, you should never ever allow Amazon to owe you so much money that you cannot survive a late payment or nonpayment.
