Planet Amazon Podcast

Winning Appeals and Protecting Your Brand on Amazon

• Adam Shaffer • Episode 15

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On this episode, Ben Smith from Seller Candy promises a treasure trove of strategies and insights as Ben unveils the less glamorous yet utterly essential aspects of thriving on Amazon. From the art of crafting winning appeals to the daily grind of managing listing issues and seller support tickets, the conversation is a must-listen for any brand aiming to conquer the digital shelves of the world's largest online retailer.

Ben dissects the nuanced approach to handling challenges like Amazon's cryptic notifications or being entangled in the web of feedback and returns. He also shares anecdotes and advice on how to avoid the 'bait and switch' scams, among other issues.

Whether you're contemplating the delegation of time-consuming tasks or conducting a gap analysis to streamline your operations, this episode is your guide to scaling success on Amazon and beyond. Join us for a conversation that's as informative as it is inspiring, and let's chart a course for your most successful year yet.

For more information about Seller Candy, please visit https://sellercandy.com/    

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The Planet Amazon podcast, brought to you by Phelps United, addresses all things Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces. In each episode, we talk with Brands, Agencies, and Sellers about Amazon news, new features, policies, brand policies, logistics, marketing, issues, and challenges, among other topics.

To watch all Planet Amazon Podcast episodes, visit our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Phelps United, visit our website.

Announcement:

Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam Shaffer, where we explore the world of Amazon and other e-commerce Marketplaces. Join us as we delve into the latest strategies and tactics for successful selling on the world's largest online marketplace.

Adam Shaffer:

Hello everybody and welcome to Planet Amazon, where we talk about all things Amazon. Today's gonna be an interesting Podcast session. We have with us today Ben Smith, who's the head of partnerships at seller candy, and he's been working with a company. It's an Amazon agency, and I'll let him tell you more about that, but seller candy is an Amazon agency that helps brands succeed on Amazon, and what's interesting is that you know our company that we work for is also an Amazon agency in a way, and so it.

Adam Shaffer:

This is one where we compete with each other, but we actually augment each other and help each other, and what you'll find is the Amazon community is incredibly large and everybody seems to always want to be helping everybody else, because Nobody is the expert on all things Amazon always and being able to work with others that are dealing with issues that are On a daily basis. You know, it's almost like a badge of honor to be able to share that information with the community and help each other out, and that's something we do with seller candy. So, with that, ben, if you could Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, in any order you want, we'd love to learn a little bit more about you and how awesome seller candy is.

Ben Smith:

That's your thing. First off, adam, thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. And, well said, I think you know that Amazon space is huge, but it's important to always have those connections and learn from everyone out there because, honestly, it's with all the Pace of changes I feel like it's kind of it's it's no one person can stay on top of everything and know all the best Tactics and strategies and things themselves, so it's really important to connect with other people and learn from one another.

Ben Smith:

But anyway, a little background about me. I've been in the Amazon space about six or so years tough to remember when I got started now but I've also, you know, I've worked for two brands that sold on Amazon directly. Then I also worked at an agency prior to seller candy. I've sold myself. I still sell a little bit through KDP. So I'm still it. You know, keep my toes dipped in the water and make sure I know what's going on. Obviously, kdp is a different world, but today I am here on behalf of the seller candy team.

Ben Smith:

I currently had a partnerships for seller candy and, if you, for any of the listeners, aren't familiar with, solar candy, essentially we provide. This is the way we like to describe it, as we provide outcome-driven support for Amazon sellers. So we don't deal with the advertising component. We don't deal with like creative necessarily. We actually chose to pick the thing no one wants to deal with, which is all the other annoying and challenging and sometimes trivial things that come up when you are selling on Amazon. So I'm talking about I'm having problems updating my listing, my flat file is not going through or opening seller support tickets, dealing with account health issues. So the less sexy side, I would say, of kind of the Amazon worlds.

Adam Shaffer:

And what's interesting is you know so we're a full-service agency, but there's definitely needs for help in different specialties, like getting listings Listed properly or optimized or getting them unsuspendent, if you want to call it that and getting cases put into Amazon and speak the Amazon lingo. But we also buy and sell the inventory, so we're selling on behalf of Brands and and Ben is really more helping them grow their business and and fix a lot of the issues that they might be having, because Fixing issues on Amazon is not always the easiest thing in the world to do. There's no one set rulebook on this. So, you know, tell us about some of the cool things that you guys have been doing for brands With regard to your services.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, 100%. I mean, you hit the nail on the head right like the reason that companies like ours and many others in the space exist is because Amazon has famously been very customer centric and With sellers it's a little bit of a different relationship. Certainly, they've made some changes there and they're you know they're making. They're making an effort, I'd say, to kind of appease to more sellers. However, then they go and add more fees at the same time. So we'll double-edge sword there. But you know we exist because there are a lot of challenges that come up just when you are growing and scaling on Amazon. And obviously PPC is one whole side of the equation which I won't get too much into today. But Essentially, you know, so we're getting.

Ben Smith:

So what, context wise, you know we've helped, I want to say now around 500 or so brands. We've got a team of about 50 or so agents. A lot of them were previously at Amazon seller support. We do try to recruit a lot of them out of that pool. That being said, you know even seller support staff members are so siloed, as you can probably tell if you've gone through any you know issue and open cases with Amazon. So we put them through rigorous training internally and then you kind of hit the nail ahead. We essentially lend them out and you can use them as an extension of your team.

Ben Smith:

But our core services you know we call it seller candy unlimited it's just for that, so it's essentially for a brand can come and plug right into our system.

Ben Smith:

Today they have access to a ticketing portal and essentially anytime they have an issue or something that comes up they don't want to deal with it themselves or it's not, you know, maybe not the best use of their time, which isn't often there's something that's very common is they just drop it into our ticketing portal and then we essentially will take it and take it from there. We were outcome driven, so we'll we'll give them updates every 24 hours on the progress we made. But it's a nice way, for I'd say like a part of my big motivation for joining the seller candy team about two years ago was I've been a seller a bit. I've also, you know, managed clients. I knew that this was a big pain point and I knew that. So when I, when I John told me, our founder John told me about what he is building, is like, oh, I need to join us team, like this is gonna be. This is gonna be a big thing. So that's kind of our core service offering and I'm happy to dive into like any component that there's certainly so.

Adam Shaffer:

so do you? Do you go into the, the partners of the brand's three seller central accounts?

Ben Smith:

I yeah, so normally the so you're working in their accounts right.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, exactly Like normally, when we're working with a brand directly, they're adding sub-users to their account, so they're adding us as sub-users to the account. We also do support some agencies as well and service providers, so we do play on enterprise side, but just cater a little bit more to the brand side, so they are adding us as sub-users. That's how we're essentially having access to do the things that we need to do. So essentially, again, think of us as like an extension of your team, right?

Adam Shaffer:

And can you I know one of the things that you care about is the is the seller central account health, and so how do you define it for us a little bit and then tell us why it's important and what you do to help keep the accounts healthy?

Ben Smith:

Well, account health is everything right. You have I've personally been through a number of suspensions or suspension, you know, plan of action cycles with various brands over the years. They're not fun. But especially, you know, a lot of people either start their journey selling online or start their brand's journey by looking to Amazon first. We get a lot of benefits out of it, right, we get the customer base and everything else. A lot of people want to expand and do successfully off to other platforms, but a lot of people I find end up not making it to that point or just always kind of talking about it.

Ben Smith:

The risk there is obviously Amazon, you know, could shut you down or shut a listing down at any time and there's that kind of harkens back to the account health issue. You always want to know exactly what's going on in your account and where your account kind of stands. It's easy when you have a couple of skews right and you know maybe you've just launched your first two, three, four product variations and maybe they're not even doing a lot of volume. As the volume picks up or as your catalog grows, it's inevitable that you are going to have more and more issues, whether that's a customer that just got like a broken unit and they're complaining. And now you're being told that maybe your listing is that thread of getting taken down or something more serious than that. But obviously you need to have a pulse on what's going on with your account health page. I know, when I was personally still selling or managing brands, like you know, I had a checklist I did every single day and it was I'm checking the listings, I'm checking to see if there's any messages, feedback, and then the next one is account health. Is there anything on there I need to address?

Ben Smith:

Because when you get something on there, you need to move quickly to make sure that you know every minute it is down, you're, first of all, if you've been throwing advertising dollars at something, you're losing your ranking like every single minute, and so you're pretty much all those ad dollars are now getting wasted, and you might now you're, when you get reinstated, let's say, on a listing that's been taken down, you're going to have to fight twice as hard or start all over again to start getting that product ranked again.

Ben Smith:

So you know, I mean you want to move swiftly. However, that being said, you certainly want to be careful when it comes to anything like that, where it's like a listing that's been taken down and needs a plan of action. Amazon, you know, famously will give you kind of the notice of death at a certain point on many of these types of issues of hey, we might not reply to future requests to reinstate, reinstate your account or reinstate your listing, and so you know you should always thoughtfully submit those plans of action or those appeals. You just want to do it quickly, but make sure it's thorough and addresses all the important things.

Ben Smith:

And that's where of course it does help to have someone on your team, or whether it's seller candy or someone else, someone in-house, whether it's another agency, consultancy, doesn't matter, but someone who's been through that process before or just spend a lot of time yourself, you know, learning about how to properly do that.

Adam Shaffer:

So there's the product part of account health where you could have some issue with the product that people are complaining about. But then there's the speed like everything's on the clock. Like you know, I used to watch the account health. If we didn't ship things by a certain time, we were going to get danged on the account health. You had to have, you know, almost a perfect score. I mean, are you seeing that too? Yeah, I mean 100%.

Ben Smith:

Especially, you know, I mean, if you're yeah, so just to that point too, right, if you're doing a lot of FBM fulfillment or if you're in seller fulfilled prime, I mean, yeah, you got to be on the ball right, like I personally have supported on a couple of accounts doing seller fulfilled prime and you are, you've got to constantly be shipping. I know they've changed some of their policies, even since I was more involved with that. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you get too many of those order defect rate, you know all those things yeah, that's going to come back to my check.

Adam Shaffer:

So is that true? I mean, that's the hamster wheel we're on always is that we do offer seller fulfilled prime to our customers. You know we try to get as much up to FBA as possible, but we do do FBM and seller fulfilled prime, and that clock just doesn't stop. And you got to make sure that. You know we have cruising over the weekend making sure that we're always shipping because you can't miss the. And it's the same for the delivery guys. I mean the people that deliver the goods are also on the clock. Everything at Amazon is a metric and everybody's got the clock on them. They have the defect rate and if you go below a certain level, they're going to either give you less business, show you less often and then potentially cut you off, and so you just don't want that. So that's pretty cool that you guys help your customers with that. We do too, and it's pretty important. Have you had any accounts that you were able to get back on that were cut off?

Ben Smith:

Yeah, tons. I mean we, you know we do get. So I'd say kind of just to give some context to like. So I think in 2022, we had maybe something like 15,000 tickets submitted to our system roughly. I don't know the exact number was, but out of that I know that the number one most common category we were getting tickets submitted to us for was help with something related to a listing Could be hey, we want to update the listing suppression, but a listing specific issue.

Ben Smith:

The second most common category is account health and in that you know, obviously you have a myriad of different account health issues, but we certainly do get a lot of people that come to us or have been clients for a while and either have a listing that gets taken down or some other kind of major issue like that and account. So account health is a big category for us. We will do everything from doing the research to figure out what exactly happened, writing that plan of action or that appeal, submitting it, following up on it, getting on phone with seller support, all that kind of stuff. So that is something that our team will assist with and obviously every situation is a little bit different, but yeah, it's absolutely something we do.

Adam Shaffer:

Can you explain the importance of the write up, like if it's not written the way Amazon likes it to be written? I know that's hard to explain, but if you can do your best to say there's a certain way to go about writing a case to Amazon, you know. So tell us more about that.

Ben Smith:

Yeah Well, so I would just say, and when it comes to like anything with appeals or plans of action, generally speaking you need to address, first of all, address the issue overall, what you think caused the issue. Sometimes Amazon, famously, you know, sometimes they've gotten, in some cases they've gotten better at it, but famously they're vague in many ways They'll tell you oh, we have deactivated your account because, or deactivated a product because of this broad term and this, and here it is in the terms of service. They might not always drill down and tell you exactly what caused that. So, for example, you might have to go through and identify, let's say, the two or three or four orders, maybe that we're not shipped on time and therefore cause this takedown, just example. So, but generally speaking, you got to address what happens. You got to then address essentially how you have rectified it, so how you have actually gone in, maybe reached out. Hey, we reached out to the four customers after identifying these were the four issues, or four orders that had issues. So this is what we're doing to actually solve this. And then what you're going to do or put in place for kind of that long term hey, this won't happen again, kind of thing.

Ben Smith:

That being said, just one thing I will call out. You know I'm certainly not advocating for sellers to always admit fault. I think there's definitely and depending who you talk to you have talked to a lot of other people in the space that this is all they do is a legal like plans of action and appeals and that kind of thing. And there is certainly an argument, for there are times where you need should kind of take it to the next level and get maybe a legal team or something like that involved and not admit fault offered. You got to remember to pick your battles.

Ben Smith:

I would say, more often than not it's better to you're going to get your. You're fighting against Amazon. It's going to be better, if you want to get your listing or counter reinstated, to essentially admit to something or just tell them what they want to hear essentially. And I know that's not always the best advice and I know sometimes, but sometimes you might feel that you did not necessarily do anything wrong. I certainly worked with a couple clients like that, but that is going to be the fastest way to kind of move forward. So that is one call that I just wanted to make.

Adam Shaffer:

I always worried about getting the lawyers involved was like Amazon shuts down from that. I don't know what your experience is with that.

Ben Smith:

Well, I've talked. To be honest, I haven't ever personally brought in any kind of legal counsel or anything like that. I just haven't worked on an account where that was necessary. I've talked to a couple other people in the space you know that have legal teams and I've had. They've told me straight up, like you shouldn't always admit fault, like even though you know most, a lot of times like you're in an instance where maybe you didn't do anything wrong, like I mean, a lot of times it's a hey, a seller complaint. Like let's be real, a seller gets something. They're maybe upset or and want to return it for free. So they just said this thing, and maybe you have three or four of those if you're doing high volume.

Ben Smith:

Next thing, you know your account's been shut down. You didn't violate terms of service necessary. Maybe these sellers were just saying that thing. You know you can't control or start. The customers can't necessarily control that. If you want to get it resolved the fastest, it's probably going to be easier for you to say what Amazon wants to hear, which is hey, yeah, you know we take ownership, blah, blah, blah. Here's what we're doing to rectify the issue. That being said, I've heard instances where people will go and fight the good fight and, you know, go against Amazon. I just haven't personally gone through that.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, and I'm sorry I interrupted you. We're about to recap on the point.

Ben Smith:

I was just going to say. I mean, it's really just at a very high level. It's addressing what happened, like hey, here's what happens. Then addressing kind of what in here's maybe any supporting evidence of like oh yeah, again I'm going to use that, the same example, like here are the four orders we identified that were shipped out late, giving off, and that that caused a negative customer experience, blah, blah. Here's what we've done to rectify that. You know, we've messaged all four of these people and offer them a refund or something like that, or we've offered to reship the item.

Ben Smith:

What happened, obviously specific to the incident, and then, essentially, what's our plan to make sure that this won't happen again. And really laying that out like hey, we've implemented this new quality quality plan at our warehouse we have. You know, that's where you're going to need to spend some time and really address how you're going to prevent it. And that's again why it's important to go through it, and thoroughly, and as thoroughly as possible the first time, because there's a good chance you might submit that whole thing. It gets kicked back and you might have to then tweak it for the second submission. But you don't want to go and you know I've seen a couple clients who had not been on Amazon as long and didn't have this. I know there's one guy I talked to maybe six months ago. He had an account suspension and he replied to the suspension, which was by email at that point, and just said, like, how do I like, how do I submit an appeal, or something? Well, amazon had counted that as his first submission of an appeal.

Ben Smith:

You know, and it's of course that's an extreme, extreme, you know issue. But you know my point is like be careful when you're to start this process. You want to try to really be effective with every submission you make.

Adam Shaffer:

Cool, and tell me that number again how many tickets did you guys do in 2022? I mean, it sounded pretty extraordinary.

Ben Smith:

I want to say it was like it was around the 15,000 mark Wow. And the clocks on all those too, so part of your account.

Adam Shaffer:

Health is responding right. You got 24 hours or something to respond to every one of these things and try to satisfy the customers. So with seller candy, are you guys? Do you guys try to take ownership of the store ratings for your partners? Or, you know like, are you trying to make sure that if somebody puts a review in on your store not the product but the store are you trying to solve that and rectify that?

Ben Smith:

Yeah, so we do. It's within our scope, right, like, essentially, I like to say anything. Anything besides advertising in the creative is something that our team can tackle Like, and we and we and one of the other cool things I think in this is another argument, I think, why you should just always kind of it totally depends where you are at with your Amazon journey. But because there's so many complexities, because there are nuances and you know the Amazon's I'll say it myself, like I can't keep on top of, like, all of the changes, like they're just announcing new fees every week, you know, and then there's so many things, that being said, like having someone that you pay to stay on top of all of that stuff. That hopefully has, you know, a collective team is a huge benefit, especially as things get more complex.

Ben Smith:

And one of the things that we do internally is we, because we have, you know, 50 plus agents. We have, you know, several hundred client accounts. We do get to see these weird nuanced issues across accounts, and we also listen to our customers too. Like, sometimes our clients will come to us and say, hey, we have this issue every single month on our product, this type of product. Here's what we found it works to get it resolved, and so we will learn and try that ourselves and see if it works out. But those are the kind of things that, having a team, you have that kind of collective knowledge as well, most things are going to fall kind of in the same category of like, hey, everyone deals with these, you know, even if you think yours is a unique problem, most likely probably not. But there are some weird nuanced issues that do crop up right when it's like okay, that's weird. I've never heard of that before. So anyway, sorry, I forgot your question. Can you just ask me?

Adam Shaffer:

No, it was it's. You know, the ratings for stores are quite in the way.

Adam Shaffer:

Oh yeah, the better your rating, the better you show, the more that customers will buy from you, the higher your conversion rate. And obviously the product reviews are really important. So, like we would get you know people that would complain that the UPS guy dropped their product in the mud and so therefore they gave it a shitty review. And I'm like, come on, like so we have to go put a case in and fix the product review, but you don't want to get a one star because the UPS guy dropped it. So usually you can solve that. And then vice versa, on the store side of it, somebody might be complaining about the product and your host selling the product. You're selling other people's brands and your store is getting a bad rating because they didn't like either way that the Nintendo was working or playing. You know. So you know there's this. You know large host, but keeping those ratings as high as humanly possible definitely takes some human intervention. So I just was curious if this is something that you guys, you know, look at.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, two things there. So I mean the short answer is yes, right, like we do. But we look at both seller feedback and we look at product ratings, reviews. What have you Seller feedback? You know? So our service normally we sit as an extension of the team and we're more on the reactive side. We wait for you as a seller, or someone at that with the brand, to tell us, hey, this is what we want done. That being said, like we will do a couple things proactively, and one of those is we're looking for at the reviews to see what comes in Seller feedback.

Ben Smith:

You know so most people listening or watching will probably know this but you can go in from the dropdown and it's pretty easy to hit request removal, which you should do on pretty much all of the critical ones, and oftentimes that'll automatically get that review removed, right, I mean, that's a pretty easy part of the process. If it doesn't which I've seen this happen sometimes it gets rejected. And if I would spend like 30 seconds, if you're a brand owner, just read what the policy is on those, because then you'll know from here on out which things that you can actually then fight and get removed. And seller feedback is still very doable If you have, if it's not auto removed, you can open a case. Normally it's gonna take maybe two, three back and forth and then they'll remove it or strike it through on your account, which is obviously important. So, yeah, that's number one and yes, it's something that the seller candy team does.

Ben Smith:

Product ratings and reviews yeah, we know that every once in a while, people well, maybe more frequently than every once in a while people do get non-compliant reviews, whether it's, you know, maybe you have a hunch it's a competitor leaving a review, whether it's clearly, you know, someone leaves a review and they accidentally wrote it about some other products, clearly not about yours. Or, as you mentioned, adam, like maybe it's about the delivery or something, not again, not related to the product itself. Though there, that is an opportunity where you can fight that and try to get Amazon to review it and strike it through. We do assist with it. I will tell you just and this is me being fully transparent like Amazon is very challenging to get to over-turning those, and oftentimes I find that it is a it's a volume game, even if you've got, let's say, say you're listing as 10,000 reviews and maybe you think 1% of those or 2% of those are non-compliant ones that are one or two stars, even if you go through the process. First of all, you're gonna have to open separate cases for, I think, each one at a time, if I remember correctly. But also a lot of them will just get auto rejected and I'd say it's more of a volume-based game. They're still very strict and they're very sticky issues, but you can fight.

Ben Smith:

And some of the things we'll do is we will go look for as much evidence as we can collect, which is it's tricky. You can't always glean too much. Obviously, if it's very clear, if someone says like, hey, my UPS driver drops into Mod and it's nothing to do with the product, okay, evidence is kind of right there. It's very blank. Or like, hey, this is clearly about another product, they're mentioning this thing, this is not my product, cool.

Ben Smith:

One other step we will do is we will go look at the reviewer's profile and see if this is a consistent pattern. For example, if you see that all they do believe reviews or one-star reviews, even on every other competitor in your category, kind of a clear sign that maybe there's some ulterior motive there or something else. Essentially, you're just trying to get as much information as you possibly can Now. So my point is, yeah, we do help with it. It is kind of a volume game but it is tricky.

Ben Smith:

So, yeah, I mean, if someone else has better solutions, I'd love to hear about it, but I think that Amazon's gonna be really restringing about those and I don't think that's gonna change going forward. The one thing they have introduced, as you probably know, is obviously now they have the ability to contact those critical review, those people that leave critical reviews. I think one is it one, two and three-star or just one and two-star? I can't remember. Off the top of my head now I think it's one and two, yeah, so, and I then reach out with, essentially you know, more or less templated messages, and I would say that is something that you should be doing or have this someone on your team do is Decide them to just go through that periodically and just maybe add that to your weekly checklist of going through, and then I would say, focus the rest of your time on the top of that funnel of getting more reviews. It's always going to be easier to get more reviews than it is to probably get some of those non-compliance.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean the the more better reviews you get. Obviously it's going to help the overall numbers for sure, and so, yeah, what about? What about returns? How do you? How do you do you and how do you work with that? I mean, my favorite story is the, the, the company that was selling Football cleats you know, football shoes on Amazon and there are a couple hundred bucks a pair, and they sold three brand new ones to get three returns, with Used ones returned back to them, and it took them a couple of months to get that sorted out with Amazon. Is this an area that you guys plan?

Ben Smith:

Yeah, the old, the old bait and switch still switcheroo Yep.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean, there was another one. They bought a computer and they took out the video card and they put some junky video card in this under back and it's horrible.

Ben Smith:

I've got a personal story about that, as I, you know, I one of the brands that I've worked with and I was in, in and out of their warehouse all the time. So I sold very expensive electronic parts. I'm talking like, let's just call it, high-end servers or networking switches. It's kind of you know, the pricing is gonna be like $400 and up on these items and we would. We would process the removal orders when they came back to the warehouse and, you know, check what's inside and whatnot. And one of them I was expecting to get a, this one unit that was gonna be like a. It was a $400 item.

Ben Smith:

Open up the box of the removal order, I got a. You know it's a networking switch. It's very like clear what item I should be getting back. The item I got back instead was a set of four Tupperware like plastic containers. I was like what the heck, like how could they make this mistake? So you know, obviously there's there's definitely a case to be made there. So this the long and short of it is like we we do have a Reimbursement piece of our business. So what we will do the reimbursements that's primarily gonna be for the FBA reimbursement side of the equation, just FYI, so not as much on the FBM side we will to help with those kind of things.

Ben Smith:

The one problem with specifically as it relates to removal orders and getting those returns, is they're not coming back to our warehouse. We need to know so we're not the ones opening the box to know, oh, this is the wrong item. You know, but you know. Just to give some some educational stuff here, I mean hundred percent. If you're in a situation like that, yes, you should open a case. Amazon's gonna ask you to pretty much take pictures of all the sides of that removal order the box and the contents, and then the I believe the UPC or the LPN like return label, and then there's the little slip in there. If you send them all those, those are those pictures You're gonna get you should get a reimbursement.

Ben Smith:

I've had some that are rejected and then you just open a new case and it goes through. But hundred percent you should be doing that. It's painstaking, but you know, if you've got it, especially and it might not be worth it. If you've got like a high volume, low price products, I mean to be honest, probably not gonna be worth it. But anything like that, where you're probably in like the $50 plus per per item, hundred percent you should be doing that, or having your 3pL do it or someone else. We can do it in that, in in the sense that if you are one of our clients and you send us, like you know, the pictures and that content, great, we'll go and fight the case for you. We do have some clients that ask us to do that, but you can do it yourself, you know, or with us, but you don't need us to do it.

Adam Shaffer:

You're gonna have to take the pictures yourself anyway. That's definitely the ugly part of the biz. I don't really love that part.

Ben Smith:

You guys deal with that a lot.

Adam Shaffer:

Oh yeah, I mean, we're always dealing with it. You know some some products have More issues than others, but when it's, like you said, pretty inexpensive, you know you let it ride. But there's some items that are four or five, six. You know we sell things that are a few thousand dollars and you got to deal with that. This is some professional scammers out there and you got to get it sorted because you just can't take all those hits. It's not a high enough margin game with all the fees that you're paying Amazon. So they'll work with you, but there is definitely a lot of back-and-forth and it's not an overnight solution. So you got to be persistent, you know. And then let's go back to the, the mainstay the listings issues. So, when it comes to listings, what are you actually doing? Are you taking listings and auditing listings and trying to make them better, or are you dealing with listings once there's an issue? How does your listing service work?

Ben Smith:

Yeah, well, I would say just as like a blanket statement, you know and is, I talked to a lot of sellers and most of the time, like, people, people, a lot of times people will come to us when they have Existing issues right, like, and I would always, I always caveat that like or just say you know, business owners, you got a lot of stuff on your plate and whether you've hired anyone or how, or maybe it's just you by yourself, like, don't wait till it's too late, till to come or to get, whether it's us or anyone Like, you should get help and bake it into your team, hopefully sooner rather than later. So it's one thing I just wanted to reiterate there. When it comes to the listings themselves, I mean, essentially we're helping with just about anything related to two listings right Aside from again to create a piece. But you know that could, that could be. Hey, we have these five new products variations coming out here, the UPC's. Here's the bullet points to pictures. Can you guys go upload them and make sure they're properly set up? Cool, we'll deal with that.

Ben Smith:

More often than not, aside from that, it's gonna be dealing with problems on the listings, and I'm talking, like you know, we get a lot of people that have suppressed listings. We are a lot of people that are just trying to push an update through and it's get it. It's very sticky. We've got people, obviously that have. You know, paul. Let's say, a product policy violation, suspected IP complaints those things come through all the time. Obviously, a lot of this stuff is gonna depend on the type of products You're selling, but Generally speaking, you know, it's gotten harder to make these, to make updates, the listings, to deal with things.

Ben Smith:

I mean, when I Adam you probably remember these days, but like even six years ago, when I first started on Amazon, you could hit the edit button on, you know, on your product catalog page and put a tight new title in and Click submit and it was normally gonna go through in 15 minutes and that was that. It was not a Challenging thing, you know. Then they've added brand registry and they've added kind of these other measures that I think, in good, in good faith, are there to protect this hour. However, they've, on the back end, also made a lot more challenging to deal with, really, anything related to listings. I Would say the one thing is, if you're gonna do this yourself, you should probably get very well versed with flat files.

Ben Smith:

Flat files, I would say, are probably how I don't know 80 percent, 90 percent of updates, issue resolution, anything related to catalog is now handled like we have to Push everything through, like a flat file essentially, which, for anyone listening is you know that doesn't, maybe is not familiar with this it's essentially an Excel file where you're telling Amazon all the various fields. I think, and I've always been a strong believer of this you should try to fill in as many fields on there as humanly possible. I do think that Amazon, whether or not they tell us that you know there's certain required fields, there's certain ones that are not required. I do think, for the more you can give them, the better. It's gonna help you show up somehow in search.

Ben Smith:

You know, and I know there's all kinds of filters that Amazon adds in any product search, but that's just one high-level recommendation. Then, if you've got issues, I mean it really is gonna just depend on what the issue is and kind of that'll dictate really what your next steps need to be. But yeah, I'd say we get a lot of requests for just like hey, my listing suppressed, can you guys get it sorted out? Hey, we're trying to make this update. It won't go through. Can you guys help?

Adam Shaffer:

So people, so people are coming to you when they, for the most part, when they already have an issue, they're not coming in to say, hey, we need to load like 50 new asins. Could you make the asins for us?

Ben Smith:

They. They do like if they've got a project. But you know, one of the things like I often will talk about when on webinars or other podcasts is, just like you know, the a lot of times, business owners who might maybe have started their Amazon business whether it's just them or they've got one, two, three person team it's really easy to kind of get lulled into this next stage, after the initial launch, where You're the one still working in your business and doing and in the trenches and doing everything and at a certain point you know there is value to that. Right, like I mean, that's how I learned how to do a lot of things that I've done on Amazon. However, if you are the business owner and you have, your skill set is maybe on sourcing the best products or on Managing your team and expanding to new marketplace. So these there's probably a lot of other things you should be focused on Rather than you know the flat files, the seller support cases, etc. And I see this a lot is just that business owners can get lulled into that stage where it's like they want to be involved in all those pieces, and so I would.

Ben Smith:

I would just say that is like you should start thinking, and now it's kind of the new year, you know here, um 2024 approaching, like that's really good time to do it. But do a little like sit down just a you know Half, half, half a day or even an hour and just kind of plot out like, hey, here's how the last year went, here, the areas I think have the biggest impact and things that really, whether it's like advertising, whether it's getting new products large, and then you can identify kind of like essentially you're doing like a gap analysis of your business, like what are the things that I have and and where, where should I focus my own time, but also what are the things that are sucking my time? I need to get off my plate. You know, that's what I would say. It's like you should do.

Ben Smith:

You should step back from your business because you shouldn't always be the one working in your business you want to be. You started to your Amazon brands and business to work on your business, to grow it, to build it, maybe to sell it, and that does take kind of that reflection moment. So, yeah, we have a lot of people that come just when it's just like I have this immediate issue I need help with or this immediate project and I think that's one thing I would just call out to anyone who might be listening or watching is yeah, think about what you need, because you might be slowing yourself down. That's good advice, man, and and so seller can't seller candy.

Adam Shaffer:

It basically, if we want to recap, is really, you know, seller candy does the, the, the stuff that's not so glamorous, call it the dirty stuff for their brand partners, and you know, these are the things that basic blocking and taping that has to be done on Amazon to be successful, but it's not necessarily the most glamorous. A lot of it is repetitive. A lot of it is a lot of back and forth with Amazon, a lot of it speaking the Amazon lingo and and so when it comes to the nuances of Listings, support, account, health, you really are the biggest problem. You really are there to help your brands. That's like your forte and you do a bunch of other stuff too, but that's like the big killer. But it's you're the extension of, of the team at the at the brand house. Fair enough.

Ben Smith:

Yep 100%.

Adam Shaffer:

So any any final words for the plan and Amazon audience today. I mean, you kind of left us with some good stuff, but any other thoughts and then we'll wrap, yeah.

Ben Smith:

I mean, I guess I would just say like it, you know I'm excited for what the new year brings. I've talked a lot of sellers and agencies and you know all kinds of people that are also excited. There's obviously some new fees and new challenges that are gonna come about in 2024. I'm sure you've heard about them, but I just say you know, if there's anyone out there that does, is either looking to kind of take that next step and maybe build out their team a little bit more, just explore some options, or, if you have a specific issue, feel free to reach out to our team. Just go to our website seller candy comm or sales at seller candy comm. Certainly reach out, but yeah, I don't know.

Ben Smith:

I think, besides that, you know, I think it's I've been saying this on a lot of podcasts and talking to a lot of people it's really just the fundamentals, right. It's like we there's a lot of distractions in the Amazon space now and I think that Really the success is oftentimes the fundamentals have a really good product, you know, have understand the fundamentals of advertising, or find a partner you know to do that, you know, or you know work with someone like you guys, adam, and then really other than that. It's like you got to get someone on your team and have an expert whether it's gonna be you yourself or you're gonna have someone on standby that can support you and these weird things come up or these things are just gonna suck your time, but you, if you're listening to this, probably shouldn't be the one doing seller support cases and flat files anymore. So, yeah, I think that's pretty much it on my side.

Adam Shaffer:

So I mean, and so for all you sellers, slash brands that are out there Listening and and working on the Amazon marketplace or looking to work on the Amazon marketplace, getting a partner, having a partner like a seller candy, like a Phelps United again, everybody's got their niche. You know we try to be full service and buy and sell. You got seller candy that really tries to support more from an agency aspect and as an extension of your team aspect, and they're trying to also keep you out of the doghouse with Amazon. So there's lots of places you can go. You know, reach out to Ben, reach out to myself, but you know you got a great community of Service providers out there that really do support the Amazon ecosystem. So check us out and thanks for listening today.

Announcement:

Thank you for watching another episode of the Planet Amazon podcast, where we talk all things Amazon. If you want to learn about how to accelerate your sales on Amazon, visit Phelps United's website at PhelpsUnitedcom.

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