Introduction to Amazon FBA Auditing and Reimbursements

Jun 6, 2023 1:30 PM2:30 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeaways:

Amazon FBA sellers often face fees, overcharges, and lost or damaged inventory. The inventory discrepancy rate ranges from 1-3% of annual revenue, leaving ample opportunity to identify and recover reimbursements. How can you obtain refunds to increase your profit margins?

Traditionally, interference occurs during inbound shipments, when inventory doesn’t reach Amazon’s warehouse or becomes lost or damaged. The platform allows nine months to reconcile missing shipments and 18 months to dispute lost or damaged items. When seeking reimbursements, it’s critical to provide Amazon with the appropriate documentation and designate an executive to conduct auditing. Amazon also charges based on product weight and dimensions, so condensing and shipping your items in bulk reduces fees and raises your bottom line.

In this virtual event, Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson speaks with Yoni Mazor, the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at GETIDA, about how to audit your Amazon FBA statements to receive refunds. Yoni shares helpful programs for Amazon sellers, how to mitigate FBA fulfillment fees, and strategies for recovering lost and damaged inventory. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Valuable resources and programs for Amazon FBA sellers
  • How to identify and reconcile Amazon FBA shipment discrepancies 
  • Critical do’s and don’ts for recovering lost and damaged inventory
  • The impact of FBA fulfillment fees — and how to mitigate them 
  • Taking action to optimize profit margins
  • Three fundamental strategies for boosting refunds
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Event Partners

GETIDA

GETIDA is a refund-recovery and inventory management system intended for third-party Amazon sellers using Amazon Fulfillment Services.

Connect with GETIDA

Guest Speaker

Yoni Mazor

Yoni Mazor LinkedIn

Chief Growth Officer & Co-Founder at GETIDA

Yoni Mazor is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at GETIDA, a fast-growing company providing state-of-the-art reimbursement recovery solutions for Amazon sellers. After operating a $20 million Amazon FBA business, he founded GETIDA. Yoni is also an investor and an advisory board member of Newphotonics and The Ecom Cooperative. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

Event Moderator

Yoni Mazor

Yoni Mazor LinkedIn

Chief Growth Officer & Co-Founder at GETIDA

Yoni Mazor is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at GETIDA, a fast-growing company providing state-of-the-art reimbursement recovery solutions for Amazon sellers. After operating a $20 million Amazon FBA business, he founded GETIDA. Yoni is also an investor and an advisory board member of Newphotonics and The Ecom Cooperative. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

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Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect


BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.

Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.


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Discussion Transcription

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Happy Tuesday everyone I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson and digital strategist with BWG Connect and we are a network of knowledge sharing group. So please stay on top of latest trends challenges whatever is going on in the digital landscape, we want to know and talk about it. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual webinars this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything in the digital space. And we will also do at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to live in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email, we'd love to send you an invite these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion around a certain digital topic and it's always a fantastic time. We spend the majority of our time talking to brands is how we stay on top of latest trends would love to have a conversation with you feel free to send me an email it to think Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know that people want to know about but it's also where we gain our resident experts such as good Tito who's with us today. Anybody that we asked to teach the collective team has come highly recommended from multiple brands within our network. So if you ever needed any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best. And we'd love to provide that information to you. Also note if you have any hiring needs we do partner with the hiring agency now called Hawkeye search formerly BWG Talent that we'd love to put you in contact with as well. A few housekeeping items. We want this to be first and foremost fun, educational, conversational. So drop those questions comments into the chat q&a, feel free to email me if you'd like and we will be sure to get them and we started a few minutes after the hour. So rest assured we will wrap up at least a few minutes before the end of the hour give you ample time to get to your next destination. So with that let's rock and roll and talk about Amazon FBA audited and reimbursements. The team at GETIDA have been awesome friends and then network. So I'm gonna toss it over to Yoni If you'd like to introduce yourself, that'd be great. And then we can dive right in.

 

Yoni Mazor  2:10  

You got us. Thank you so much, Tiffany. Thank you, everybody for your time today and joining us. Hopefully, you'll get a lot of insights and knowledge and value out of this. A little bit about myself. I'm one of the co founders and the chief growth Officer of GETIDA. In short, we're technology company, our mission is to make sure that Amazon third party sellers, we still on FBA, get the maximum FBA reimbursements that the eligible to receive. We're the largest organization in the world focus on this niche. This news is called Amazon FBA ordering and reimbursements, we audit 10s of billions of dollars of transactions every day across our networks for our user base. We have about, you know, over 200 people in our teams and about 11 countries. That's pretty much short and sweet about us. And we just try to just dive right in. Are you wondering me? Maybe we want to run a little poll to see you.

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  2:58  

We're gonna run a little poll, I just put what will now happen real quick here. So let's launch it. The question is what Amazon model currently are you selling?

 

Yoni Mazor  3:09  

So yeah, this for you guys. This poll is really understanding where are you coming from on the Amazon side? Are you basically selling to Amazon and then Amazon retail is it it's the one P business model, or the other option is the three P where you actually go on Amazon Seller Central, and you offer your products out, and you actually sell directly on the platform as a third party Amazon seller. So that's a quick poll that Tiffany has set up for you guys. So we can do a little bit of an icebreaker and see who is you're with us in this virtual room. And as you guys are on the poll, I'm going to share my screen and we'll get diving is that okay?

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  3:42  

We're following the 8020 rule. All right, very good.

 

Yoni Mazor  3:45  

Okay, so welcome back guys. This is the quick slide over the introduction. But yeah, so a little bit more information. I'm gonna get teared up by the way, we ranked 215 and Inc 5000 fastest growing companies in the country. What's the GETIDA How do you say GETIDA does it get tighter? How do you said it doesn't really matter? It's an acronym. It stands for good idea, which is get intelligent did analytics. We'd like to see yourself as the global leader of Amazon FBA, auditing and reimbursements for the simple fact that we operate on a global level. So whether you sell on Amazon, United States, Amazon, Canada, Mexico or EU, we got your back. We are an award winning company. We won the Gold Award from the American Business Award for our dashboard technology. We have a dedicated team of claims specialists who are a big part of them are former Amazon employees who used to work in the reimbursement department. So that brings us a lot of insights on how to do the process properly with maximum impact. We actually track and monitor our recovery rate when we get the refunds. It's over 90%. We take a lot of pride in hosting a lot many cell events such as this one. But if you want to know where we're going next, you can just visit youtube.com forward slash events. And we'd like to make our solutions affordable for all sellers of any size and at any stage because it's free to join GETIDA there's no subscription or licensing fee. It doesn't cost anything to stay we only charge a fee Isn't performance only if we deliver value only there we get rewarded. Plus, we are partnered software and service provider with Amazon on the platform. So we actually partner with Amazon to make sure that we're Terms of Service compliant and perform on the highest level of quality requirements of Amazon. Alright, so we also host two popular podcast shows for Amazon sellers. One of them is called which is hosted by Lisa and Rob. This is a partnership manager. Rob is our chief evangelist, and another show called prime talk, which I host together with Lisa. So we kind of float and give you insights on leading characters and their stories and journeys into the world of eCommerce. We had amazing stories from lawyers who became Amazon sellers, builders, house builders, who became Amazon sellers, doctors, you name it, we have it. It's a beautiful, amazing journey that each one individual has into eCommerce, but what's common to all of them, they face challenges it constantly overcome them. And that's how they found the award and success within this industry. So that's available for you guys on Apple podcast, Spotify, all the works. Alright, so before we dive into the Amazon, FBA, auditing and reimbursement, introduction, and all that material is all the meat of potato, a quick few announcements from the marketplace that I think are very valuable to you. So you can save money and make more profit. So the ones of you who are thinking about selling are starting to sell on Amazon, there's a new program called new seller incentive. But even if you're selling on Amazon, but you want to expand you're selling in the United States, and you want to expand it to UK, or the United Kingdom, or to Germany, or vice versa, maybe you're active in Europe, you want to expand to the US, make sure to sign up to this new seller incentive program, and registered to the Amazon brand registry, because if you do for the first million dollars that you're going to generate in sales, you're gonna get 5% Bonus bonus. So which means you can get $50,000 back in fees from Amazon. Okay, that's kind of first thing you can do. The second thing you can do is that if you are really like I said, planning to open a new brand new account, and in this new brand new account, and this new brand new account, you expect to sell more than $250,000 in your first year, let me know you can reach out later after this event. And we were part of the Amazon agency program where we can connect you and apply for you to to get an Amazon account representative. Typically, this camera has representatives by Amazon, excuse me, they cost about $2,500 per month, that's about 30,000 a year, we can get you for that, we can get you that for free, okay for the first year. So once again, we'll help you save money. But also these Amazon representatives really help you in getting a lot of traction within Amazon to to in a special access to all these special deals and marketing across marketing things that you can do alongside with Amazon to reach your targeting consumer, which is pretty cool. So once again, if you're launching a new account, where to save money here, another way to save money here, but I get also access to more, you know, marketing and sales and marketing opportunities within within Amazon. So hopefully this is helpful for you guys. And here's another amazing way to save money, as it's called the brand referral bonus program. So visit Seller Central sign up to the referral bonus program. Also, by the way, Tiffany when you get a moment, I don't know if you want to share the poll results or see what we have here with our audience today with the profile of the sellers, but yeah, so brand referral bonus program, you sign up to this program. And what's what's gonna happen is Amazon is gonna give you a special URL link. And any traffic they drive from this link outside of Amazon into Amazon, Amazon will give you a 10% bonus. Okay, so and there's no cap, meaning if you you know, drive traffic from Google from, let's say, YouTube, into Amazon with this link, the special link the brand referral program link that you're gonna get, and you generate $1 million in sales without traffic, they're gonna give you $100,000 back his bonus, and there's no cap, you can bring in $100 million, they'll give you $10 million, which is an amazing, powerful thing to do. So make sure you take advantage of that.

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  8:47  

How does it pay for that? Is it a quarterly payout or annual?

 

Yoni Mazor  8:50  

No, they just right away they give you the bonus so they know so typically Amazon charges a selling fees, typically it's 15% Depends on the category. So essentially, you know instead of charging you when they do the transaction, let's say you sell the product for $10 Right? Then you say okay, we charge you a 50% fee, which is 1.5 dollars. Oh well you have this brand full portal bonus program so $1 back you get a credit for a bonus credit so that's just every transaction will have its breakdown and there's no cab which is pretty cool it's Amazon is the one we use this link Amazon's program software will recognize the traffic coming from link converting generating a sale and that sale will have that credit bonus inside locked into it really good question by the way. Thank you Yeah,

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  9:32  

we can go over the results. Yeah, as we left real quick 20% Our one P selling the apple sale and 80% is three P

 

Yoni Mazor  9:41  

beautiful so the ones selling three P this will be tremendously good value the ones that you there won't be thinking about getting it to three P This will also be very valuable for you as you do so because you're gonna be geared up for maximum impact in terms of margins really profit right you're gonna make sure that you get all these bonuses and he said well as money that's that's worth a lot. Okay. Now we talked about how we can get this links to drive traffic from outside of Amazon into Amazon. So in addition to that, if you want, you guys can go visit, getida.com/yt, which is YouTube. And you'll learn how to it's an e book about how to drive traffic from YouTube into Amazon or any other website that you want. The the, the craftsmanship and selling online is really driving traffic, if you're able to drive traffic, anywhere you want, you're gonna make a fortune. So and So understand is this book really focuses just on the YouTube end, because it's a very powerful medium. So this is available for you for free of charge, you can take advantage of that. So once you get to drive traffic from YouTube, and you stack it up with this link, you get 10% Bonus back, I think that's a nice stacking, you know, value out for you guys to set you up towards maximum impact and success. And the ones of you who are Anam Amazon already, and I assume you sell your own brand. This is a this is a courtesy of our friends from it's one of the largest advertising agencies on the Amazon platform. So this is kind of tips for Prime Day How to gear up and shore up your advertising spend, right. And before, you know the few days before Prime Day, this is during Prime Day. And this is the leadout I know when once you kind of get out of Prime Day, you can take a snapshot of this or with Tiffany and the team will share the slides with you so you can really kind of do the breakdown. So I think it's valuable for you guys to get the maximum impact on Friday, which is typically at the middle of July, which is about you know, probably 3040 days away. So I think it's important for you guys to adjust your bidding and adspend correctly and that and and get the maximum impact. So hopefully this is helpful as well. And that's it. So it's been announced for Prime Day. Now it's typically mid July we know that they you know they tend to do as late as possible. They don't know they're They're masters of suspense and drama. But it's typically mid July traditionally for an empath for the past six, seven years since they started. I think they did something brilliant and genius for the online eCommerce retail industry. They created a culture event where it stimulates consumers to shopping on during the summer, which was arid, you know, there was no it was dry. You know, you have a queue for Christmas, all that stuff. But summer people take vacation gets kids go to Canvas kind of dry. So they credit some extravaganza that stimulates integrates all these deals and values, all of a sudden, it's becoming part of the culture, which is great, I think for brands and retailers. So kudos to Amazon on that. And that of course now everybody's jumping for the ride and Walmart's doing, you know Podesta of target, which is all good. It's all good for the retail industry. So that's that. Okay guys, now we're going to touch the overview of Amazon FBA, auditing and reimbursements. This is a quick overview of the time frames allowed for each type of issue. So when you sell on Amazon, when you sell an FBA, there's gonna be issues with your inventory. So the first type of issue is called Amazon FBA inbound shipments, when you ship products into Amazon, let's say you ship the 1000 units to Amazon instead of receiving 1000 units only received 990. So 10 units are missing, you need to reconcile the shipments, you only have nine months in the in the United States to reconcile it. If you sell in the UK or EU, you have six months, so you have less time. You have about 18 months to reconcile any units that get lost or damaged or has issues with refunds. Or if you remove your inventory from FBA, you have about 18 months to kind of take care of that. So just to explain this concept a bit more. So once your units, your inventory units are inside Amazon's fulfillment centers, inside the centers, all of a sudden they get lost, they get damaged. Also, between the centers, I was on my shift your products from Minnesota were Tiffany's to New Jersey, where I am to Kentucky and maybe somebody hopefully is from that Kentucky here, maybe not. But you know how Amazon spreads the inventory across the country. So they have one or two day shipping semis get lost or damaged from the fulfillment centers, to the consumers, consumers back to Amazon with all the refunds and returns fulfillment centers back to the seller, when we do removal. So you got 18 months to look back. So once you get everything you did in the past 18 months, you can look back and see if any units get lost or damaged or have an issue so you can get a refund reimbursement. That's what we're talking about here. Right. And, in this specific case, when Amazon overcharges you with fees, you have about three months to get a refund. We're going to touch more about that very soon. So this is a quick overview of the main things. There's many other things we'll touch on later on, to look into. But I want to I don't want to overwhelm you, I want to give you the basics and the fundamentals. So after this event, you'll be able to you and your team will be able to take action and make money. That's kind of the main agenda here. So with that in mind, let's dive into the first scenario. The first issue or first type of discrepancy. They have a mushroom is reconciliation. So all you got to do is go visit Amazon Seller Central. Go to inventory, go to Manage FBA shipments and you scroll down the shipments large so this is how the shipments look when you sell on Amazon and you keep scrolling until you see something like this boom needs attention what happened you know this FBA shipment you ship 216 units Amazon only received 10 Actually they receive zero units right and the status of the shipment is closed so fully received but nothing actually got received. So all you got to do is click on this blue area here will take you to this module this page. You you'll be able to see the product information. And you'll see the units expected 216 discrepancies minus 216 status research. Also, there's a drop down menu, what I recommend you guys to do is if you know you really ship these 216 units, and they're missing, so you choose this option research missing units, that's the first thing you do, then what's gonna happen is Amazon might ask you for documentation, the first type is pod. The second one is PLP. And what does that mean? Let's take a look here. This is pod proof of delivery to be you know, to make sure this all in English, but it's Amazon English, so Amazonian, so I'm going to translate it to simple English, which means a proof of delivery is a stamped BOL, it's a bill of lading with a stamp that says, I got delivered, so Amazon might ask you for that. So it can start the investigation. Or they might ask you for a PLP proof of purchase, which is typically two options. First option, it's an invoice, right. But if you're a private label seller, meaning you own your own brand, and you have brand registry, you don't have to disclose, or you don't have to provide an invoice and disclose your suppliers. Instead, you can just give them a packing slip. Okay, which is very simple, you get a packing slip. And then once you have the documentation, you will be able to investigate. And for example, these 216 units if they're the missing pay and reimbursement for these missing units, and the nice thing guys is that they're going to pay you the retail value, they're going to pay the cost value. So let's say your cost per these 206 units is $2 a unit. So your cost here is like 436 $32, they're not going to pay you that they're going to pay you the retail value. So if you're expecting to sell these two 216 units for let's say, $4,000, you're gonna get $4,000 back. So you get your costs back and all the profit, which is basically converting a double negative to double positive, you're getting your your your your cost of inventory, and turning a nice profit, which is pretty cool. Alright, so now regarding a pod on PLP, I want to take you through a quick demo through our platform. So once again, to log in to sign up to get data, it's free, so you get free access to all of this. And we'll I'll take you on a quick tour show understand how powerful and innovative it is when it comes to visibility and via inbound document. Handling. Okay, so when you log into GitHub, you're gonna have a red box here in this area. And you'll see this red box will always give you an idea of how much potential recovery you have on your account. So this specific account has $3.7 million worth of refunds and reimbursements, which is pretty material, right. And you're over here, you'll see that from the beginning of the year, we found 2133 claims, we success rate was about 85%. We're going back $136,000, which is cool. And this gives you this is the dashboard area, which gives you a real time visibility of the recovery process. If we work for you, if we don't work for you, it's fine, you'll see this value anyways, we could do your own work. But if we work for you, you'll see all this work being done here, which is cool. But then if you click here on this area called inbound shipments, you'll see we have another module that's focused solely on the shipments. Remember how we showed you how to go into Amazon find all the shipments. Instead of doing that you can just log into eBay, inbound shipments here and they get to the platform that will show you each human ID that has an issue and the value of it sort of right away find out the missing units and the potential values you can work from top to bottom and value. Right. And on the bottom here, you'll see that there's an error that tells you what is the total value of all the shipments. So for this specific account, the total value of all these units missing or missing in all these shipments is 1.9 million. Right. So over here, you'll see that Amazon's asking for 444 shipments, they're asking for PLP proof of purchase. Now you need to go back and give provide 444 PDF documents, that's a lot of work. So you can do that. Or if you want, we have this tool here we have a patent on it. It's called dock master. Okay, it's a packing slip tool where you can just click on the read and log into it, you put your you're gonna set up a four digit PIN. So you can log into the platform, and it will show you all the shipments and these these packing slips, you can be able to log in, and you'll see right away all the information that you need to already be there, all you got to do is click on Create packing slip. And we'll create a beautiful professional packing slip the way Amazon wants to see it. So these 444 documents you need to create instead of taking you hours upon hours or days or weeks, or never which most sellers don't do because they don't have the capacity, you just log into the platform 40 444 documents, which will take you probably 10 to 15 minutes to create because it's a few clicks away. In addition to all that if you don't even want to create these documents, you can just

 

you can just we have an option to opt into Dockmaster Pro, which is free that we have basically you opt into it. Right? I do. Yes, I confirm and I opt in and what's going to happen is I will do the document creation handling for you. So it's going to be completely hands off, we're going to find all the missing units and all the missing shipments and all the documents that are needed, we're going to basically set them up for you and submit it to them. And we'll be hands off so you can really focus on sales and marketing and branding, which is what you do on the platform while we kind of dig into the past and take care of the whole, you know, agony of reconciling everything. So that's kind of the quick tour on the dashboard itself. And the platform that Tiffany had a question.

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  20:02  

Yeah. So if you are the brand owner, yeah, brand registry, and it's asking for proof of purchase, by no way, shape or form, you have to provide any factory information that's on a packing slip will suffice. But it's great. Yeah.

 

Yoni Mazor  20:17  

So Amazon selling you just want to, you know, on the packing slip is a pretty much a calculus of what they consider a packing slip is a declaration of ownership, saying, Hey, this is my company, right? This is my company information. This is where shift from, this is what I shipped and all the amount of units right the FN SKU, the seller SKU was right. And then you put your name on the sign on it, that's all they need. It's a declaration of ownership. So you own it, you shipped it, that's all they want to know, they, they that's all they want to know. So they can cross the I's and T's and then start investigating, they need all that for them just investigate, then they say, Oh, we found the missing unit unit. Okay, great. Now you can sell and make money, no harm done, it's all good. But of course, if they can't find it, it's missing. They're gonna give you the reimbursement and the refund the compensation for your loss basically. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, so now, we're so that kind of concludes the first type of issue, which is the FBA, inbound shipment reconciliation, now we're gonna get a bit more color sophisticated. And we're going to reconcile any units that got lost or damaged in the past 18 months on your account. Okay. So what you need to do is you got to go to amazon seller central, you go to Reports section, in the reports section, you choose fulfillment. And in this area, you're going to choose this area we're going to fall in, we're going to focus on this inventory ledger report. Excuse me. And when you download the report, and you customize the date range, you want to download the past 18 months, once again, Amazon is allowing you to go back 18 months to find all these units that got lost or damaged. So you open that file, and in that file, what's gonna happen you have, you're gonna have two types of columns, you're gonna have one column, which will have you ever many columns, but to two types of them, one of them is going to have a transaction ID trade, the other one will have fn SKU. So what you need to do is, this is a copy paste game, you're going to look down all the you're going to the report will have all the transactions the past 18 months, right, and you're gonna filter down on the transaction, the ones that have a transaction ID, you're gonna copy, paste it in. And we'll tell you, if a unit got damaged, and you have eligibility to open a case, I will tell you do so you will click and open a case and Amazon will provide you with the reimbursement. And if it doesn't, we'll tell you you're not eligible. So copy paste that in. That's how you reconcile the past 18 months on the damaged side. On the last side, same thing, but instead of transaction ID you want the FN SKU fn SKU is the fulfillment network SKU serial kit unit, you have a column there you copy paste it in. And of course, your eligible will tell you to continue. If you're not, they'll tell you not not to reconcile the past 18 months on the loss and damage unit. So once again, you gotta go grab the data, the data set, open it, and then kind of copy paste it in. It's labor, I'm not gonna lie, it's labor, you know, 18 months, if you're doing substantial volume is gonna be a lot of labor. Once again, there are solutions or solution providers out there that can help you with all of this, it happens to be the GETIDA one of them. Right. And if you ever need help, we're happy to help you. But you know, we can do it. And also you can scan this one a little more, and you really get to the area where they have the reports, you can just scan this QR code. Okay, so some before I continue any questions, Tiffany thoughts ideas? Yeah, I just

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:20  

it is the labor is intense. This in my previous job as a director of eCommerce for home and selling on amazon seller central for almost 10 years, to be able to try to fight all of those cases and the project management, I'm trying to keep them straight. was a big endeavor for my team.

 

Yoni Mazor  23:41  

Yeah, it's a it's a grunt it's, it's like archaeology gotta always, you know, keep digging in the past to deal with a lot of rubble until you find a piece of gold. Right? That's so true. Okay, so a quick tips on Do or do not do. So do right. So first thing you got to do really honestly a son responsible team member for AP auditing, you'll know you have an address, you know, Tiffany is in charge of VIP ordering in our organization, same way, there's somebody in charge of the pricing, or the advertising, or things that are so intuitive, that we're gonna have somebody that's really you know, so there's one chef in the kitchen, he's in charge of the whole situation of that function. So that's the first step you got to do. And of course, you can show them this content, this right this recording, whatever it is, make sure that the trends keep up with the updates of what's going on so they can really take care of it. And of course, make sure to reconcile everything on time with the timeframe allowed Don't be late Don't miss out. And then when you open a case and maybe didn't get resolved don't open another case for the same issue. Just reply to the same case Amazon might kind of give you a canned response, which will be vague you're not gonna send what they want. So instead of just say off saying oh, let me just open up a new case. Let me get to another case manager on Amazon side right? Or a case representative just in the same case reply say hey, what's going on this and this and that? It's just gonna be right to another support member. Anyways, Amazon keeps on running that. So don't try to trick or get. So as a professional Don't Don't get emotional. So oh, you know, you lost the $10,000 palette, this and that people I see there's a lot of most of all, stay professional you know, and don't don't get, don't take it too personal because they try to help you, you just got to focus on the communication, make it very simple for them to understand what happened, what they should do, and how they should do it for you, instead of like saying, I see like a hole, I woke up in the morning, I went to the pupil, tell him a story. So you don't need all of that, and just a professional. So yeah, so don't open a case prematurely. So if you just, you know, you just ship the pallet. And next day you open a case, it's not gonna help you and he's in a few days, you know, to be in a transportation to to get there and everything. So given the timeframes that it needs to, you know, before he can open up a claim, don't be pushy with Amazon Seller Support, it goes back to the same professional, right? Don't open a case for the same thing issue twice. We're going to discuss that. And don't try to game the system. Stay honest. So unfortunately, we see no, no, we're doing this for about a nine years, which is the summer so he's got suspended on Amazon because they tried to game and trick the system saying, You know what, I'm always going to tell him that I ship 1000 units, but only you're going to ship the nonage units every time, then my pay was my pay twice, three. But then I realized something here that now you know something's not right. So stay honest, don't try to game the system. You know, whatever you ship, that's what you're going to stand for. And if you shipped under, you tell them I shipped under and that's fine. Yo, yo, you know, we're telling the truth, they never get in trouble. But playing games, Amazon will eventually be able to catch that. So stay honest. Okay, quick notes about Amazon, US versus Amazon EU. While the total refund levels are pretty similar, there are key differences between the marketplaces worth mentioning. One is that on the shipping level we touched earlier, you only have six months to reconcile your shipment, if you're selling in the EU, or EU or UK, if you're selling in the United States, for some reason they give you more time ago, nine months. So enjoy the three months of vacation you get so to speak. But also, when you deal with fees. And fees are typically connected to the winning dimensions of your product. So we're going to touch more about that soon. You want to be very attentive to the metric on pillar system. Okay. So if you're selling an EU, Europe, it might be that your products are labeled in centimeters, and grams versus feet or inches. So we put your winter dimensions make sure to be as you know, stay attentive to that. So instead of you know, for one pound is not one one kilo, right, it's a totally different thing. So pay attention, pay attention to that. Alright, so now we're gonna shift gears into a case study of a $5 million seller, I see, you have this beautiful blue area of all the money is coming in. And then unfortunately, all this red area of all the money coming out and you'll see that FBA fees looks very slim, but it's a little bit misleading. Because you see, Amazon fees are very thick. It's because the Amazon fees are 77,000. But the reality is that out of the 77,040 $3,000 on Amazon fees, which are fulfillment fees, the pick and pack fees, so every time you sell a unit on FBA, Amazon will pick a unit from the bin, they're going to package in a box, they're gonna ship it out, they're going to charge you a fee for that. It's based on the weight and dimension of your product. So the larger and heavier they think your product is, the more they're going to charge you. And this case, you'll see that it's the undisputed king champion of fees. Okay, 43,000 divided by 219,000 of revenue, it's almost 20%. So you see, we have a quick pie chart, FBA fee is 19.7. The rest of the FBA fees plus selling fees. This is a 35% of all this all sellers revenue on Amazon fees, which are burning through the margin. If you sell $5 million a year, this is a $5 million case study. That's one point $75 million in annual fees, just you know to amazon before you even calculate the PPC spend the advertising spend, which can add more cost for you guys. So that is for you guys to a recognize that there's another way that you can optimize your margins beyond PPC, there's a lot of content but advertising how to, you know, save on advertising, reduce it, I'm taking you to the other universe where you can reduce and save on your fees on Amazon FBA. Because here's a quick Strategy now that we know that Amazon charges you based on the weight and dimensions of your product, and it's really heavy and fees, when you sell a product you're gonna have to have, you're gonna have to place up a very simple Strategy. So just make it because you can control the production of your product and the packaging of it. So make sure you pack a smaller ladder and smarter. Okay, so let's give a simple example, if you're selling a ball, a sports ball of any kind, you know, you can ship it into Amazon inflated, there's going to be maybe 3040 inch long, they might charge you $15 per unit every time you sell it. But if you're gonna you know shrink the ball out of the air now it's only six inches. So instead of charging you $15 You might charge only $5. So now you're gonna save $10 per unit, you sold 1000 units you saving $10,000 So firstly, we did recognize the fees, right the fee structure which will reveal was very heavy in our case that it was about 20% and realizing hey, now that you know it's wasting the base in the winter dimension, what can I do to reduce the winter dimensions on my individually packed units, do whatever you can and especially If you're borderline, if your product is borderline between one pound, you know, 16 ounces, but you can trim for whatever you could do. So the weight of the packaging by two ounces, you'll be 14 inches, you might be in a different a feet, brackets, you're gonna save a lot of money. So that's the dimensions or the way, whatever you can do to reduce it, it's worth trying and applying, because it's gonna save you a lot on FBA. But it's also gonna save you a lot. In general, when you ship it to FBA. If you're shipping from China, wherever you shipping it from the smaller letter, it is the you know, the more you can condense ship in bulk and save on per unit fees. So now that we set up the Strategy motion to save on fees and improve your margin, you got to keep track of what's going on. Okay, because over time, it could be that Amazon will update the fees that you're paying and will start overcharging me correctly. One example is, by an honest mistake, let's say you selling a purse and the purse, you sold it, then you got a customer return. And when it got returned, the consumer the customer added, they installed the strap, maybe. So now Amazon is gonna put it to a three big machine called cubic scan machine your product, and now that's in the machine that it's gonna add the 3040 inches of the strap that's hanging on the on the on the handbag, and now Amazon's gonna start charging you way more than they're supposed to, that can be an honest mistake. So that's why we have to audit and check every so you have three months to get a refund for that. So that's why you want to do it every three months. Because let's say you do once a year and the whole year they overcharge you 100,000. And in the past 90 days only charge you 30,000 You only gonna be able to recover 30,000 to 70,000 has gone forever. So first thing is awareness. Now you educated a you educate on the Strategy to make sure your products are small and light. But if you did that, you still stay on it, you audit it and you make sure that whenever there's a mistake and Amazon start to overcharge you, you fix it. So going forward, you stop the bleeding. And then of course you go back for the few days, a few weeks that overcharged and get those refunds. Now if this is kind of too overwhelming, once again, you can visit the GETIDA platform, and you can visit this module called pick and pack right away, you're gonna see all the winning dimensions that Amazon thinks your products have. And then if you see any difference, you can just change it manually. And let's say this product here is actually not it's 4.8 pounds, maybe it's not, maybe it's only one pound, you can change it to one pound, click Save. And this will trigger you to to take action. Okay, first of all, if you don't want to ask us to help you just, you know, get the data for free, it's just log in, instead of going to Amazon and trying to find all this data, you have all this data in front of you free of charge, and then you can take your own action. But if you want us to service, you just let us know. And once we have the winning dimensions, we can take action and and fix it for you. So going forward, he stopped the bleeding, we charge a fee for that, and then go into the past and get you those refunds. To compensate you for the overcharges and only for successful all in Ghana, we get rewarded on the recovery if we get your refund. So that's available for you guys also this module. So quick recap and the platform you have the dashboard shows you real time visibility of all the work that we do for you if we do for you when you use us. They are they are shaman, so you can use to really kind of reconcile the shipments. And then you have the pick and pack where you can really hone in and focus on the winning dimension fees on your account and your essence and your products differently. Any questions on this?

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  33:10  

I wanted to recap the process of if you're shipping down to FBA, and you've put into the specs of the unit, like how much it weighs. And let's say it's a mail order package, it's already ready to go, they receive it, then they're also measuring it. And that is going to override your data that you may be originally inputted

 

Yoni Mazor  33:30  

correct. So what happens is in their fulfillment centers, Amazon, they have a huge machine called a cubic scan machine. And from time to time, they're just gonna throw it into the machine. Because they're there their thought processes that, you know, from time to time, the sizing and weights of the packaging changes, because you have seasonal stuff, stuff more for Christmas stuff and for the product. So they constantly kind of, you know, throw it to the machine. And then if they see a change, which is they need to increase the fees, they will do so because you can try to give the system tell them you know, this is really minimal, and they'll take your word for it. Right. But if some error, then they're going to charge you minimal fees, but then they're gonna throw it to the machine through that see that's actually actually larger, heavier, and then they're gonna start creating a character, you then start charging in the correct fees. So when it's you know, so this is kind of the, you got to think about the scope Amazon has has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of inventory coming into their fulfillment centers from all over the world by millions of sellers. So they have their service software and setup to constantly can handle it. So sometimes it can work not in your favor. If it does, you got to take action. But of course, if you're trying to give them they have ways and measures to correct it.

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  34:42  

And the same thing with returns. If I'm returning something and I did put the purse together Yeah, they're consumers.

 

Yoni Mazor  34:48  

So that's an honest mistake. So some products have this kind of profile where you know, it gets returned and all sudden gets added to something gets added to the winning dimensions that can struggle the seller on favorably that It's where the seller has to be attentive to that. So because Amazon's gonna receive that person, they're gonna still fulfill it. And then that strap adds more into the dimensional weight. And that's a computer, you can't really explain to them. It's the same size. It's just a strap. They don't have that ability. So that's one example. Another example, by the way, Tiffany's, they can be many examples. But another one is that you actually being attacked by a competitor, I sell the same thing as you sell Tiffany, and I want to hurt your margins. So what I do, I take your asin, I listed on my Amazon account, I never offer it, all I do is I change the winning dimensions on the computer side. So Amazon recalculates, and they start overcharging you and killing your margins. While I'm, you know, free and clear. So we've seen that as well. So it can be many reasons, I'm just giving the ones that are a bit more intuitive for people to understand. And I wonder if

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  35:42  

it's more prevalent on retail drop offs, like going and dropping off at a Kohl's versus me shipping back at UPS, like maybe I did put that item together, I just dropped it off. Just have to be aware of because I just found myself as a consumer using the retail drop offs a lot more than I did in the past. See what I had to shift?

 

Yoni Mazor  36:02  

Yeah, I'm guilty as charged. I just, you know, I just take it and give it to them, whatever they whatever they do. Yeah, if I stole it, or credit, you know, opened it up a little bit. And now Amazon takes it and just puts a shrink wrap on it. But now it's still bigger than dimensions. It is what it is. So I guess there's some sort of ownership onus on ownership on the seller side to, you know, you're allowed to get 90 Day recovery for any overcharges. So just work in the timeframes allowed just in case putting into your SOP your standards or procedures into your policy and in mind, because we started with impact of the fees we saw heavy there. So they're already heavy to begin with. He was about 20%. Imagine they're gonna get heavier, heavier for no good reasons, you need to be aware of that. And don't let that bleed you out. So hopefully, this content is helpful for it to educate you. And now you know what to do. And of course, he gets to

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  36:49  

work on returns. We had a question about that.

 

Yoni Mazor  36:52  

So, so once again, so so they know. So I think there's a flat fee for the restocking. So I think what they're asking is if you know, Return, return process fee and restocking, I think it's flat fare and you in it. So it's not going to affect that. But it will affect the fulfillment fee, but it also affects the storage fees, by the way. So they're going to do more heavy and large and heavier they think it is, the more they're gonna charge you a fee. So there's a recovery opportunity for the former fees and the storage fees. Hopefully that answers the question. So no, on the refund side, or the return side, but yes, on the storage side, which is less common. We see sellers typically kind of sell out on eBay, because it's very expensive to keep stuff on eBay. You don't want it to be your storage unit on Amazon. Absolutely. Excellent. Okay, so shifting gears into another free tool for you guys to consider just visit getida.com/ebook, and you'll get a package of two things. One thing is an e book that will teach you how to read an Amazon income statement, focus on all the money that's coming in, and then send all the money in fees are coming out. The second thing is a p&l profit and loss, sorry, profit and loss template for your business. So you can really put all the costs that you have, and really understand if you're making a profit on Amazon, or other markets that you're selling or losing, right. So it gives you that ability. That's what we used. When we were selling online, we sell on Amazon, we did 10s of millions of dollars of revenue there. But we also sold them on our website we sold on eBay, we sold at Walmart. So we actually use this template and we used to every month reconcile all the p&l, so know exactly how much money we're making, or losing. And each, you know, channel and put anything, any costs under the sun health insurance, parking tickets, because we live in New York City area, everything that we had on the business side, we put there so we had a really hand from tight control on what's going on. Okay, so now we're gonna do a quick recap on three fundamentals here, the refunds booster, one thing is that just you guys know, on an annual basis, we see that the discrepancy rate can range between one to 3% from your revenue. So now everybody here can do their own math. So for example, if you do a million dollars in FBA, you know there's an opportunity for you to recover between 10 to $30,000, one to 3%, if you do 100,000,001, two 3% can be one to 3 million that you need to take action to find discover and reconcile and get a reimbursement. We discuss the timeframes allowed, so do not miss out. And of course, we also touched on the documentation, if you need documentation or proof of purchase packing slip, make sure to reply to Amazon and give it to them so they can really get through the refunds. I see we got a question in here. Does it affect the return freight audit? Can we use this against that? The return for an audit? That's a good question. So so if somebody on the on the I'm going to touch Christine's question for a second, I think if I understand correctly, it could be that if if now your product seems larger and heavier than it actually is, it could be that your carrier is also charging you more right to return it or move it around. So that's a good question. But it's we don't handle that would if so if you have a afraid auditor, ask them tell hey, look what happened to add this product who was this size within Amazon and then the consumers change to that size? Sighs Can you receive the overcharging with fees on that? That's a very good point. So if you can really hone in on the data point that shows the discrepancy and difference, and you give it you order to plug it in. And if dams are so much bigger than me are listed, yeah. So Christine, I will definitely, you know, provide that information and inputting into your freight auditor. So they can take some action on that and see if there's a recovery available for you. Very good point. I didn't think about that. But it's every day you learn, you know, things I'm here to teach. But I learned more than anything. That was pretty cool. Okay, all right. So if you ever wonder why you might need help with eBay auditing or further help have a look, this is more things that we look into. So right now we kind of touched the heart and min stuff. But here, this is additional things that we look into. So if any of this looks kind of unfamiliar, or probably means that you're leaving money behind, and here, there's a quick kind of, you know, a list of pretty much gets you to versus other options that are available in the marketplace. So the first thing is that you know, get to work consider a highly specialized service, we're like a brain surgeon, or we're like a dentist, we really hone in on, on what we do. Other options are, you know, other providers that can do many software for many things, they kind of also do reimbursement, that's kind of more of an add on or, or it's an obsolete feature. It's now their core competency. We have a team of X Amazonians. For members and employees who used to work in Amazon reimbursement departments. And other providers might just have regular standard like virtual assistants. So then No, no real specialty or specialization. We cover more than 30 types of discrepancies via discrepancies. So they just to give you kind of end to end solution on every auditing needs. Other provider might have like limited discrepancies covered, they might cover this when I cover that micro vedana cover this. So for us is like you know, end to end solution. We conduct real time daily audits. So every day that goes by we go to the account we are we check otherwise, others might say yeah, we check in every three months, six months, nine months. And it's slow motion, and you might miss out on availability of some claims. We provide international coverage. Others might say no, we only cover us, but we provide a international coverage. We're available on Amazon partner network. So we're authorized by Amazon, other providers might not be authorized by Amazon. As a general tip, if you're looking for any software for your Amazon account or business, my recommendation, go to the Amazon App Store and see which ones are authorized by Amazon. And start there. If somebody's not authorized, maybe you want to think twice you want to work with the ones that are authorized by Amazon because they have a responsibility to you, but also to Amazon, to make sure that their terms of service compliance, data security privacy policy, they need to perform at the highest level, they have, you know, responsibilities. We provide for case management. Others options are just a tool, they kind of give you the data they need to copy paste it in, you have to take the time to actually manage the whole process. There's no case management, we do once again, end to end solution, we find everything we fix everything, all you have to do is really focus on your business. And we take care of all the grunt. And we're performance based only if we're successful on them, we get rewarded, we typically charge a 25% fee from the recovery. So let's say differently, the first 30 days, we get your $100 and reimbursements, we'll charge you a 25% fee, which will be $25. And then the next 30 days we get you $0 How much do you pay? $0. Yeah, there we go. Other options will be like subscription models you pay whether you get money, and if you pay whatever, you know, you keep paying. So that's kind of the quick notion about GETIDA in your specialty service based on an app versus other options in the marketplace. And here's a quick study of the positive impact, positive or I would say financial positive financial impact of getting all the money that you owed with reimbursement. So this is an $18 million seller. So 300,000 units 9000 units got affected with all the issues units got lost, damaged, destroyed, disappeared, dispose, and got overcharged with fees. We got them back $151,000, back and reimbursements and refunds, which increased the bottom line by almost 11%. Because before GETIDA the profit was 1.3 million, we added 151,000. And boom 1.5 million is the new profit margin. Bottom line. So that increased you know the profit margin by almost 11%. That's the first layer of positive impact. Second layer, if you're selling Amazon business, okay, if you're selling your Amazon business, typically whoever's buying it, they're buying your profit, they pay you a multiple for that profit. So if you're able to get $151,000 Extra to to your profit, but you know, for your profit margins, and somebody pays you a 5x for your business, you just added $750,000 for your valuation on the way to boom, just just like that, I've been making one decision, using it to get all the refunds that I'm owed. So that's the second layer, third layer. If you're buying an Amazon business or buying an Amazon native brand, and they fail to get all the refunds, you get the refunds. Right so you go back 18 months you get $151,000 from this account, boom, you have a beautiful gift, and you have a better ROI, return investment. So that's kind of a quick study on the positive impacts of getting all the refunds. If you ever need strategizing for your business on Amazon, sending what's really working what's not, I do recommend I just visited account the really hone in your business make you understand what's working, because if it's working, you're gonna have a long term success. Or if you ever want to sell, you'll be ready to sell a big brand small brand doesn't matter, they'll be able to help you. And what we did also for you guys, so just like that, it's pretty drunk today, but we did prepare $1,000 offer for you guys to try it out. So what we did was we can get you the first $1,000 of FBI reimbursements free of charge, just so we can try it out. So which means no matter what, you know, it's a guarantee you're gonna get $1,000 extra in your pocket and might take us a few days or a few weeks, but we're gonna get you $1,000 After $1,000 If you want to leave us you can leave if you want to stay, you can stay, it's fine by us. All you got to do is use the promo code, BWG1000. Or just visit GETIDA.com/bwg or scan this code, you'll be able to activate the offer. And now I'm getting finally to the q&a or, you know, kind of section here because I do see the mouse or put a question as to which I really wanted to read. So let's go over now, I've noticed each ambition at Amazon incorrectly marks if a unit is expired, when they are not I create cases and usually get these correctly. And have you seen this in other accounts as well? Yeah, so typically, you're talking about products that have expiration date, it could be like cosmetics, to be like snacks and stuff like that. Yeah, if they think it's expired, what's going to happen is they might market is unsellable. And because of that you're gonna have to remove these units, when paid for that are more like goes back to your awareness and then you send it back to them again until May or will like you did you just set up if you know that it's not expired yet. You just open a case a simple case it's not expired look again, and though accepting the watch changed this position from unsellable to sell what you can really start selling it. So there's no reimbursement kind of element here. It's more like handling your products within a VA so you don't strike out for no good reason. Right? You don't want to miss out. Can you share a link for the PowerPoint? Jen is asking yes, I think Tiffany will be sharing right? Yep, we'll be able to share for sure. God. Okay, so a few more words on this slide here. So this is my if you ever need more help information, this is my direct email or just visit getida.com/yoni.info, you'll get access to all my info, including our you to our YouTube channel, Facebook channels and everything like that. Yeah, that kind of concludes the session today. Once again, as a quick recap, we did an introduction to Amazon FBA learning and reimbursements, we gave you some few main fundamentals that you can actually take action yourself. And also hopefully get some money back and refunds will give you some updates on the marketplace in ways to save on fees or getting bonuses back or stacking up on those as well. So you can really have really strong margins, we give a free ebook for how to drive traffic from YouTube a free book about how you know to do with how to read an Amazon income statements, and also a profit and loss template. And then we did a quick case study about the financial positive impacts of MBA reimbursements. So put all together hopefully you're more educated now you're able to extract more value for your own organization with a few quick decisions and actions that you can do. And of course, if you ever need a help you have that $1,000 offer so you can try it out. So that's it. I hope it was fun. I hope it was informative and valuable.

 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  48:10  

Always informative. You always come with a wealth of information. And you have to say oh, it had this information five years ago. Whoa, wow. Very cool. So thank you so much you need for the time all the information like I said we will be handing out the presentation for those that are interested in getting it we will get that over to you. So thank you so much for joining everybody. We definitely encourage follow up conversations with Yoni and GETIDA and we'd love to have a conversation with you. That's how we get the future content ideas for our webinars and detours. So feel free to reach out at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. So with that happy Tuesday, take care Stay safe, and have a lovely week. Bye everybody. Bye

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BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
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