The holiday season has come and gone, and Amazon has a brand new set of requirements for sellers in the year 2016. Let’s have a look!
If you’d like to learn more about the main changes for 2016, then read on.
Now that the holidays are behind us, it’s time for Amazon sellers to review some of the changes the year 2016 has in store. Here’s a list of recent announcements, grouped by type of fulfillment channel, that we hope you’ll find useful:
Merchant Fulfilled
If you missed our latest news roundup, you should know that Amazon set up an extended holiday return policy for orders shipped from November 1, 2015 to the end of last year. It will be accepting returns on qualifying orders until January 31, 2016, and it expects all third-party sellers to do the same. So, unless you have your own return policies in place, be sure to budget for last-minute refund requests.
When it comes to international returns, MFN customers should be offered a domestic return address that belongs to you or a third-party contractor. If you don’t have a local partner or contractor, Amazon offers a list of potential candidates.
An alternative is to reimburse the customer’s international shipping costs for the return. If that’s not acceptable, then you should waive the return and issue a refund regardless, according to Amazon’s recent reminder email.
Fulfilled by Amazon
A. Some of our readers may remember September’s credit offer from Amazon. It consisted of up to $5,000 paid to all FBA sellers who chose to provide box content information for all shipments sent to fulfillment centers.
At that time, Amazon mentioned that filling in box content information will eventually be the norm for all FBA sellers in early 2016. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened just yet. But in preparation for that day, Amazon has launched a range of tools that would simplify the process.
Amazon claims this change should speed up the listing process for incoming products, making them available for sale much quicker. These tools don’t address the issue large-scale sellers have with not being able to know their box content before the items are packed, though.
The nature of certain products and their packaging may make it extremely difficult to anticipate the number of items that can go into a box. Also, units of the same item may need to be shipped to different fulfillment centers.
B. FBA fees, such as Weight Handling and Pick & Pack, will rise for US sellers as of February 18, 2016.
Fees will also change for Oversized items, as can be seen below:
The Storage Fee will also increase for Oversize and Standard-Size items starting March 1, 2016, and the new rate will show up on April’s statements.
To find what you’d need to pay Amazon for individual items that you plan on sending over to a fulfillment center, or have already shipped, use the Revenue Calculator. It also enables you to compare your FBA fees with your MFN fees, which we revealed for you in a previous post. Visit the dedicated Help page (login required) for more information.
All Orders and Fulfillment Channels
The style guide for ‘Home, Garden & Pets’ has been updated. New guidelines and restrictions have been brought forward, so make sure you read this file if you want to comply with Amazon’s listing requirements. The insightful booklet touches on all aspects of the listing, from image guidelines to variation relationships.
That’s all there is to it for now, but stay tuned for next month’s installment in the Amazon News series. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us at sales@SellerEngine.com with questions and feedbackA performance rating on a scale of 1 to … More.
Melanie takes an active interest in all things Amazon. She keeps an eye on the latest developments, and keeps Amazon sellers up to speed.
