Keeping your Amazon business up and running can feel like you’re caught up in a whirlwind of tasks you hadn’t bargained for. Let’s have a look at some of the unexpected issues you could be facing if you give into poor time management practices.
If it’s high time you spruced up your Amazon business, please read on.
Is Your Amazon Business Leaking Time and Money?
Visualize your business as a system, look back at your internal operations, and try to answer truthfully. Are they taking too much of your time? If so, then there must be areas of the business that are jamming your workflow. Use our six indicators below to weed out the vulnerable areas, and make a note of these in preparation for our follow-up post dealing with tried-and-tested workarounds for each of these issues:
1. Response Time Goes Awry
Contact Response Time is a metric applied to customer messages whereby all responses sent out in 24 hours or less (week-ends included) are expressed into a percentage of your total outbound communications. The results are revealed in your Performance section.
You don’t need to dip into ‘Poor’ or ‘Fair’ territory, as Amazon calls it, to know that something’s wrong. When you see a spike in these results, it may be a sign that your customer service department is resting on its laurels.
2. Can’t Sync with Carrier
If you’ve been in the business long enough, you’ve probably developed a close relationship with your carriers. You can tell what time they’re likely to collect, and you can usually prepare beforehand.
When you consistently fail to have your shipments ready for pick-up by the time they arrive, and you always work yourself into a frenzy trying to sort out those final shipments, there’s probably a vulnerability somewhere that your shipping department needs to address.
3. Spike in Late Shipment Rates
Amazon’s recommended LSR is below 4%, and that is a fairly decent figure considering all you need to do is ship and confirm before the expected ship date arrives.
When it rises above this level, it becomes clear that you must have an issue with your supplier, a backlog of unshipped items because of poor vacation setting practices, or that you simply tend to procrastinate.
4. Sales Go Haywire
If you expect to have a steady stream of sales based on year-on-year reports, and the result is disappointing, it could be that your prices are not competitive. This may be due to slow, random or irregular repricing practices.
When you’re caught up in a race against time for a place in the limelight, it can be very easy to overlook flaws in your pricing strategy. Your entire modus operandi may be in need of an upgrade, and that’s something automatic repricers can take care of for you.
5. A-to-Z Claims and Chargebacks Outstanding
As an Amazon seller, the dedicated claim and chargeback review section in Seller Central, under Performance, is the one you need to monitor. Your seller privileges depend on these figures; not to mention the fact that you can be in the right, but still be left out of pocket if you put things off and Amazon reimburses the customer.
The claims themselves can be brought on by listing issues, low quality inventory, poor packaging, bad shipping practices, etc. Allowing these claims to stack up, though, is very clearly an indication that internal customer service procedures need to be revved up.
6. Closed Cases
When Amazon beckons, you follow. It goes without saying that your Case Log is your go-to report whenever something goes wrong, and that you should spare no effort in assisting Amazon with these cases.
If cases are closed by Amazon because you haven’t provided the necessary input in due time, this could be a reflection of poor customer service prioritization.
We hope you never come across any of the six time management mishaps above, but if you have and you’d like to tackle them, please stay tuned for our next posts in the series, which will be dealing with simple solutions to apply in all of these scenarios.
