Next month Amazon is changing its seller reimbursement policy for FBA inventory lost or damaged in an Amazon warehouse. The current per item reimbursement amount - sales price minus applicable fees - seems pretty reasonable to me. In contrast, the new policy is extremely unfair to Handmade sellers.
Beginning on March 10, when Amazon loses or damages an item they will reimburse sellers “based on the product manufacturing cost of the affected inventory.” Unless we provide supporting documentation, Amazon will “estimate” our manufacturing costs and reimburse us accordingly.
To some extent I understand the new policy when applied to sellers who simply source a finished product from a third party and resell that item on Amazon. As anyone reading this appreciates, the problem is that the process of manufacturing handmade products bears little resemblance to purchasing finished products from third parties. Submitting documentation to Amazon with respect to manufacturing costs is going to be a nightmare for Handmade sellers. More importantly, creating handmade products takes a significant amount of time. Does anyone honestly believe that Amazon will take this time into consideration when determining an item’s manufacturing cost?
So here’s my question - can the appropriate people from the Amazon Handmade Team please act on our behalf in order to have Handmade sellers exempted from the new FBA reimbursement policy? I’m probably just shouting into the void here, but you never know…
