How to mitigate and address product condition complaints
Hello Everyone,
I wanted to share some guidance on our product condition requirements, and our appeal expectations surrounding violations that occur within this category.
These types of complaints or customer concerns can be driven by several different scenarios ranging from listing details, missing or inaccurate size charts, wrong or incorrect product received. As noted, these are just a few examples of what can occur.
So you are best prepared for situations such as these, I recommend reviewing our policy page on preventing product condition issues. We provide guidance on improving quality of your listing attributes to ensure customers receive exactly what they saw on the listing and in the same condition. This also includes improvement to storage, to help ensure that quality is maintained for the product.
When trying to address these types of issues, you first need to research what exactly occurred and why it may have happened. Typically, when these types of scenarios occur, you should receive some type of communication via manage returns, voice of the customer,feedback or claims. Understanding what exactly occurred will impact required information.
Most situations do require the submission of documentation such as invoices. These are required to validate the condition of the products that were sourced, listed and sold. Most of these scenarios will also require a written explanation on what occurred, including the root cause, and how you will prevent these complaints in the future.
There are also situations where you can dispute these issues. These situations will require communication with the buyer to confirm their misunderstanding of the situation. This can be screenshots of buyer seller communications as an example.
This should serve as a general guidance for these situations. If you encounter a similar situation and need further support, please create your own thread and share related information such as notifications and case ID’s so we offer any necessary guidance.
Emet.
How to mitigate and address product condition complaints
Hello Everyone,
I wanted to share some guidance on our product condition requirements, and our appeal expectations surrounding violations that occur within this category.
These types of complaints or customer concerns can be driven by several different scenarios ranging from listing details, missing or inaccurate size charts, wrong or incorrect product received. As noted, these are just a few examples of what can occur.
So you are best prepared for situations such as these, I recommend reviewing our policy page on preventing product condition issues. We provide guidance on improving quality of your listing attributes to ensure customers receive exactly what they saw on the listing and in the same condition. This also includes improvement to storage, to help ensure that quality is maintained for the product.
When trying to address these types of issues, you first need to research what exactly occurred and why it may have happened. Typically, when these types of scenarios occur, you should receive some type of communication via manage returns, voice of the customer,feedback or claims. Understanding what exactly occurred will impact required information.
Most situations do require the submission of documentation such as invoices. These are required to validate the condition of the products that were sourced, listed and sold. Most of these scenarios will also require a written explanation on what occurred, including the root cause, and how you will prevent these complaints in the future.
There are also situations where you can dispute these issues. These situations will require communication with the buyer to confirm their misunderstanding of the situation. This can be screenshots of buyer seller communications as an example.
This should serve as a general guidance for these situations. If you encounter a similar situation and need further support, please create your own thread and share related information such as notifications and case ID’s so we offer any necessary guidance.
Emet.
5 replies
Seller_2srXkS44rN39i
how about better communication to the buyer that they are purchasing a used product? About 1/3 of my returns boil down to "i didn't know it was used", even though i marked it as used, and described any inperfections (small scratch on back side, no impact on performance)
Seller_TTc5Vo48AaOHg
Just by way of feedback that I hope is helpful. We have never had one of these 'investigations' that was triggered by a valid claim. It is always someone who has made unreasonable and out-of-policy demands for refunds without returns or validation of the complaint. How such buyers can misuse the system to trigger investigations or product condition violations when the product has a long history of successful sales without any similar complaints remains a mystery to me.
Thankfully, we don't get these often and have been able to successfully resolve them so far, but they add yet another layer of extra work, stress, frustration, and demoralization. FWIW
Seller_JFMM74Ov0fqLj
The information provided associated with a "Product Condition Complaint" is so vague (if not useless).
Case in point, we recently received a "Product Condition Complaint" notification on one of our high-volume products (i.e., >4,000 pcs are sold per month). The complaint was "cord is wrong." What is "wrong"? Did the Amazon FBA send the "wrong" product to the customer? If Amazon sent the wrong product to the customer, was it because we sent the wrong product to Amazon FBA? We doubt it was the case because, if it was, we should be receiving tons of complaints by now as this is a high-volume product with very high customer rating (4.6), low NCX and low return rates.
Or did customer not read the product description? Instead of owning the mistake, did the customer just conveniently return the product claiming "cord is wrong"?
How can we seller ever know if the complaint is valid, or if there's really something wrong with our product or the way we described it?
Regarding your statement, "There are also situations where you can dispute these issues. These situations will require communication with the buyer to confirm their misunderstanding of the situation. This can be screenshots of buyer seller communications as an example.", we very rarely receive any communications with the buyers. So it is very difficult to dispute any "complaint" that Amazon received without giving us a chance to communicate with the buyer to discuss the complaint.
Here's my suggestion is: if there is a "Product Condition Complaint", the customer filing the complaint should be required to communicate with the seller first (i.e., describe what is wrong with the product). The communication between the customer and the seller should be transparent with Amazon. Based on the result of the customer-seller communication, Amazon may require sellers to implement changes to the listing or product to prevent valid complaints from happening again.
Amazon should implement the same process when gathering "VOC's". I'm sure may sellers would agree that the current VOC information is useless.
In short, when customers have issues or complaints with a product, have them communicate with the seller first. The result of the customer-seller communication should result in a more meaningful process or product improvement, if needed. This is also an opportunity for buyers to get support from the sellers. So, this will be a is a win-win process for buyers and sellers.
Seller_5jdojXmOsIxZO
We've received a rash of product condition complaints - 6 since 9/1/25 alone - whereas we probably had one, maybe two, in several years prior to this period (we get "used sold as new" in particular). Something's changed within Amazon processes such that we've encountered this spike while on the other hand, further scrutiny of Voice of Customer, FBA Removal Order reports, etc. reveal no such customer supplied commentary directly linked to used/new condition. Instead, we see remarks concerning sizes i.e. too big, too small. We further speculate that - if we assume honest customer who believes he/she received used product - FBA has not thoroughly evaluated returned items such that it determines a returned item "sellable," puts it back into available inventory, then it re-sells to another customer who upon opening his package believes it contains a used item. We do not sell used products as new; we sell new as new! So the issue resides on the buyer and/or Amazon FBA side as far as we're concerned.
