Amazon refund process: They make a mistake, and now I have to monitor
I don’t know what you folks think, but in my world, this is just plain stealing.
Greetings from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
Thank you for contacting us about the order ID: 111-XXX that was refunded to the buyer.
Before anything else, I would just like to extend my sincerest apology for all the inconvenience this has caused you.
Because in this kind of scenario that customer was wrongly refunded, yes, your account should be eligible for reimbursement, but, please understand that we are processing the reimbursement after 45 days starting on the date the order was refunded. Within the said time frame we are also waiting/confirming if the item(s) will be returned back to Amazon’s warehouse. We are applying this policy to ensure that we are not breaking any policy promulgated by Amazon.
Moving forward, I scrutinize further and review the refunded date of those orders to process any possible reimbursement, as a result, however, our system shows that the following orders were refunded less than 45 days. With this regard, rest assured that Amazon will take full responsibility for those refunded orders.
Reimbursements are processed automatically if the item is not returned to the fulfillment center within 45 days. If you are not reimbursed after 45 days, contact us again and we will investigate.
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Amazon has always had a 45 reimbursement policy on FBA returns. If the return never comes back within 45 days, Amazon reimburses the seller. I think ‘stealing’ is a harsh and inaccurate term, since most monetary transactions have some sort of delay. For example, those that are employed with monthly paychecks are being paid 30 days after having performed the work; this is not stealing; it is part of the contract between the employee and employer. Its the same principle here; this 45 day reimbursement policy is part of the contract terms we agreed to when signing up to sell on the platform.
As much I can empathize with this position, as we too have to deal with this, you do have a choice to fulfill yourself and/or stop selling on the platform should you strongly feel this is not acceptable behavior.
We track all refunds/returns; and would do so even if the reimbursement period was shorter to ensure we are reimbursed when appropriate.
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What was the scenario that caused the customer to be wrongly refunded?
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Amazon’s sandbox, Amazon’s rules. We just get to play in it.
That said, like @MAV-DAK I empathize with you. We find monitoring OUR money is a cost of doing business. The larger you become the more you need to manage and the more systems you need to do it. It’s just business. If it is a challenge managing the money owed to you given your size (whatever that may be), image the challenge of managing billions of dollars in transactions with what I think are excessively liberal polices that lend themselves to abuses like this.
All that said, we use MS Excel and the various reports on Seller Central to confirm an FBA refunded item is either returned or we are reimbursed. We built a workbook that compares the FBA refunds to returned items to find orders that were not returned nor reimbursed. If neither a return or reimbursement occurs after 45 days, we open a case. This is part of our weekly process. Once we did this, we found we recovered a considerable amount of money that was leaking every month.
