After-sales on Amazon usually affect the direct user experience, which in turn affects the account’s performance and security. One bad experience with a customer is a sure way to lose ten of them. People who are happy buy more. Keeping customers loyal means they will buy from you again, and keeping customer satisfaction high is a great way to get referrals. So, how should after-sales be handled on Amazon?
Getting in order
A buyer has asked me to send an order to a different address. What do I need to do?
If you haven’t sent the order out yet and the buyer tells you they can’t get it at the address they gave you, you should cancel the order. The buyer can then go back to Amazon and place a new order with the correct address. Amazon’s rules say that sellers can only send packages to the address in their seller account.
If you’ve already sent the order to the address given with the order, it’s up to you to decide how to handle the situation. Here are some ideas that you might want to think about.
Contact the company that sent the package to see if you can get it back. They may be able to stop the shipment in the middle of its journey and send it back to you.
Try to get in touch with the person who lives at the address where the package was sent, or ask the buyer to do so. The person who lives there now might be willing to refuse delivery or send the package back to the buyer.
If the item isn’t returned to you or sent to the buyer, it’s up to you to decide whether or not to give a refund. You can give a partial refund, but your shipping costs will be taken out.
If you’re worried about the cost of a lost shipment, you might want to use package tracking or buy insurance from your shipping company for your next order.
A buyer wants to back out of a deal. What do I need to do?
- Cancellations and returns are both common in most sales situations.
- What you can do will depend on the status of the order.
- You haven’t sent out the package and confirmed it yet.
You can cancel the order in Manage Orders or with Order Cancellation feeds. When you cancel an order, Amazon automatically updates the status of the order in the buyer’s Amazon account and sends the buyer an email.
You’ve sent the order out.
You can tell the buyer that the order is already on its way and ask them to send it back to you so you can give them a refund. When you get the return, you can either give a refund if you had already confirmed the shipment or just cancel the order if you hadn’t yet.
About returns and refunds
What should I do if someone wants to send something back?
All sellers on Amazon are required to take back items. These topics will help you deal with returns:
Once you give the go-ahead for a return, you should wait until you get the item back from the buyer before you give a refund. If you let the buyer keep the item or throw it away, you can give the refund without waiting for the item to be sent back.
You can give the buyer a partial refund if the item is damaged or not in the same condition as when you sent it. If you decide to give a partial refund, you should let the buyer know ahead of time so there are no misunderstandings or A-to-Z Guarantee claims.
Most items must have a return request sent within 30 days of when the order was delivered.
If you correctly described and listed the item, but the buyer doesn’t want it anymore or orders the wrong size or color, you can refund the price of the item but not the shipping costs.
When there were bad reviews,
What should I do if a customer writes a bad review?
Bad reviews on Amazon are always a pain. Especially 1-star ratings can bring down a product’s average rating if it doesn’t already have a lot of good reviews.
Because of this, bad reviews can cause sales to drop sharply. As a seller, you want to avoid this, so you might be wondering, “What should I do about bad reviews?” Can I do anything at all?
You can respond to a customer review in public, which might help keep the reputation of the product (and the seller or vendor) from getting hurt.
If responding to a bad review doesn’t work, you can ask Amazon to remove the review. Removal is the best option for sellers and vendors, but keep in mind that Amazon usually sides with shoppers and will only remove a review if it breaks Amazon’s community guidelines.
Last of all,
The only real way to reduce the chance of a bad review is to offer great customer service and clear, detailed descriptions of your products.
Customers often cancel orders, return items, leave bad reviews, and have other problems after buying something from Amazon. Amazon always puts the customer experience first, so sellers need to do a good job with everything from choosing products to making sure they are shipped on time and getting feedback from customers. The most important thing is to give customers a good shopping experience.