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…

I'll just shout this out into the dark chasm of nothingness- who even comes to the "handmade" forums anymore? So at the end of February- they reclassified all of our products as just "handmade products" We have nothing else. No subcategories - no distinction of what our products are- not jewelry-not home goods- not clothing- not art- we are just all lumped together as "handmade products". Amazon knows in truth that we were going to suffer a loss of visibility- thus sales. Yet they continued to tell us that nothing was wrong and essentially there was nothing to do but wait. SO NOW- after I spent years of PAYING for ads ON AMAZON- 60k -which grew my organic keyword ranking- and making 100k-200k a year. I am supposed to just shrug my shoulders and say oh well. The ads I am running are GOING NOWHERE because my listings don't have the required data and categorization to place my items properly! I am so fed up with unprofessional acts of this marketplace. I just wish they would hold some accountability and some REAL ACTION to rectify this absolute MESS they have created.

@Seller_FJwyF3iu5qxUY I noticed something very interesting in the right hand menu in search.

My brand is USPTO trademarked. Registered with Amazon brand registry for years and yet I am only considered a seller? Hmmm... Who/What is determining this? Do I need to pay extra to get my brand shown under brands? Why am I only showing under seller?

I got an alert my listings category was updated on March 21st - old value- "handmade products" - New value " ---"

That's right- my new category is nothing. Along with that - I also reviewed my inventory page- all sales rank gone on all listings --- nothing, Went to the live listing view- and down where we used to be able to see our sales rank. Nothing. Its not there anymore. I went on to browse dozens of "handmade listings" and it appears that many handmade listings do not have sales rank anymore. I found several listings right on the front page of handmade that are ranked in the top 10 of various categories- some handmade- some not handmade. Its a mess. So this whole classification must be happening in batches. Hard to tell if they are doing it by categories, listing date, etc. I have however, had a slight spike in sales the past few days. Although, I am running a coupon. So I think it is hard to say what is doing it.