Planet Amazon Podcast

Increase Your Profits: Recovering Lost Revenue on Amazon FBA

August 12, 2024 • Adam Shaffer • Episode 22

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Did you know that overlooking Amazon FBA reimbursements could be costing you up to 3% of your revenue? Join us as we chat with Alex Ryan, co-founder and CTO of Refundify, who shares his expertise on ensuring Amazon sellers recover every penny owed to them due to inventory mistakes. Alex's impressive background in software engineering has enabled him to develop a robust system that helps sellers manage these reimbursements with unprecedented efficiency. We dive into the substantial impact these overlooked funds can have on profit margins and why addressing these discrepancies is crucial in the competitive world of e-commerce.

We'll guide you step-by-step through the labyrinth of Amazon's Seller Central, revealing the secrets to reconciling lost inbound shipments and successfully raising and re-raising cases to secure your reimbursements. Learn how to identify discrepancies, provide the right documentation, and navigate the often frustrating process of dealing with product damages. We also shed light on how Amazon calculates reimbursement amounts and what actions to take when those figures don’t add up in your favor. If you're tired of losing money to inventory errors, this episode is a must-listen.

Finally, discover the transformative power of automating the reimbursement process. We discuss the benefits of API integration, which streamlines data reconciliation, improves accuracy, and saves time. Alex shares common mistakes sellers make, like delaying claims and not providing adequate evidence, and offers valuable tips for selecting a trustworthy third-party reimbursement service. We also touch on Refundify's unique commission-based model and the importance of continuous training to stay ahead of Amazon's ever-evolving policies. Tune in to optimize your Amazon FBA reimbursements and boost your bottom line.

 You can learn more about Refundify here: https://www.refundify.io/  

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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.

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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 and welcome to Planet Amazon. I'm Adam Schafer, and thanks for joining us today. Amazon, I'm Adam Shafer, and thanks for joining us today. Today on the podcast, we have Alex Ryan. Alex is the co-founder and CTO at Refundify. Refundify helps Amazon sellers recover Amazon reimbursements they deserve and are owed, but it's really hard work to be able to figure out what Amazon does owe you and how to actually get it from them. We want to discuss the importance of FBA reimbursements in a world where margin matters. So let's bring out Alex and let's start talking about this awesome, important area of Amazon that I don't think enough people focus on. But if you're not, you're going to probably be bleeding profits. So with that, welcome Alex.

Alex Ryan:

Thanks for joining. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. Adam, Appreciate it. Glad to be here to chat.

Adam Shaffer:

Hey. So before we get into the wonderful world of reimbursements, first I just got to understand a bit more about you, because it's not often we have the co-founder and CTO, so you're more of the technical wizard behind Refundify, right? So tell us a little bit about yourself and about the company.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, yeah, so I'm the co-founder and CTO of Refundify, as you say. So easiest way to become the CTO is found the business right. So I've got a background in software engineering, so I've got experience in developing like SaaS applications. So I worked in kind of a few different industries like hospitality, e-commerce, supply chain, quality control quite recently, and then most recently I've started with Refundify, so entering into the Amazon space. So with Refundify, what we've tried to do is basically what you're saying right Try to raise awareness about the reimbursement opportunities that you have as an FBA seller and build out a solution there to actually help sellers reconcile all of those issues and then go away and actually get them their money back in a fully managed service. So minimal effort on the seller's part and just money comes rolling back in.

Adam Shaffer:

No, that's, I mean, super important, and I don't think enough people think about it until they start trying to figure out where some of the money's going. And also, when you try to reconcile an Amazon statement, good luck, because it's not that easy, and I do think that most sellers on Amazon do lose money I'm going to say bleed but just are losing profits that should be rightfully theirs, because it's really hard to follow. It's like a shell game in a way, and I was hoping first you could just start with explaining what an Amazon reimbursement is and why it is important.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely so. An Amazon reimbursement essentially is when Amazon has made a mistake. They owe a seller some money. So Amazon is shipping like 1.6 million packages a day, right? So that means they're receiving a bunch of inventory in their warehouses, they're storing it, they're picking and packing it and shipping it out. Mistakes are guaranteed, right, and within Amazon's terms of service, they actually promise to reimburse sellers for any lost inventory at retail price. And that's pretty key. They will reimburse at retail price. So it's like making a sale, right.

Alex Ryan:

So, yeah, you said bleed kind of bleed profits. So, yeah, you said bleed kind of bleed profits. I think that's actually a pretty good way of saying it, because typically what we see is like a revenue loss of like 1% to 3%, right, which is, you know, 1% to 3 of climb up a bit higher. So if you're on a profit margin of, say, like 30%, which is, I think, a pretty good margin, then if you're losing 3% of your revenue, that can be about 10% of your profit. That's lost. Likewise, if you're on a 20% profit margin, which is, I think, more likely, that's kind of up to 15%. So, kind of in the probably most likely, most sellers are losing between kind of 5% and 15% of their profit. That's just bleeding, just being lost every month. So it really does add up and can be quite painful.

Adam Shaffer:

So I mean, and it's you know, in a world where margin does matter and I think it depends on what type of seller and what kind of product you're selling but once you include advertising costs in your cost of goods, if you're making 20%, 15%, you're probably doing well. So to lose that much margin is difficult, and so this is one of the things you really need to be disciplined about, because there's a window of opportunity to go get your money back, and we'll talk about that in a second. But let's talk about the different kinds of reimbursements. And I know you say Amazon makes a mistake. We never say Amazon makes a mistake, but stuff does happen, but stuff does happen.

Adam Shaffer:

And so the original issue that I used to think about is and we used to try and follow was we ship 100 things up to Amazon FBA and you're waiting, and you're waiting for them to receive it, and then they receive some of it, but not all of it, right? So maybe they receive 50, and then you keep on waiting, but only 50 ever show up. That is one of the issues, right? Like to me, that's like the easy way, yeah yeah, absolutely yeah, it's a really common one.

Alex Ryan:

So it's like a lost inbound shipment, right, happens a lot. So yeah, you ship 100, they check in 50 and you're kind of left wondering, like hang on, where you know half my inventory where it's gone, where's? Like, hang on, where have you know half my inventory where it's gone? Where's it gone? Um, and then the onus is you know, often amazon will automatically reimburse that or try and find the inventory in open cases themselves, but not always right. And then the onus is on the seller, right, you have to go and realize that you're missing inventory, go and reconcile the reports, provide documentation and try and raise that case and get the money back. So, yeah, your lost inbound is is a big one.

Alex Ryan:

Um, another really big one is is just like warehouse issues. So you know, if they're storing your inventory in their warehouses, right, they can break it, they can lose it, they can dispose of it when they shouldn't be, you know, um. So you've got that one. You've got that, yeah, lost inbound warehouse issues and you've got things like, uh, mishandled returns, maybe. Uh, you've got that one.

Alex Ryan:

You've got the yeah, lost inbound warehouse issues and you've got things like, uh, mishandled returns, maybe, uh, you've sold an item. A seller said, hey, I want to return this, and they return an empty box, but amazon's reimbursed them. Right, they know, they know you that money, um, or maybe even incorrect fees. And this one, I think, is like the silent killer. The incorrect fees right, if they've got a measurement wrong on one of your items, they're storing that, charging you more money. They're shipping it and charging you more money if you're a high volume seller, you know a dollar here, a dollar there, that that really starts to add up um so, so I missed that one, so I want to make sure I got that, so I got.

Adam Shaffer:

we talked about amazon damages it or they lose the inbound shipment, but the the fees like so that's they're saying your product weighs more than it does, or it's bigger than it does, so they're charging you more storage. Is that what you're saying?

Alex Ryan:

Exactly. Yeah, they're charging you more and they're charging more for the pick and pack as well. So that kind of really adds up Every sale you make, every item you're storing, you're being charged just fractionally more money than you should be. And in those cases you need to go to Amazon and say hey, please remeasure this, because these measurements don't add up right. Please remeasure this and confirm. And the real painful one about this is actually you only get it's the shortest window for reimbursements. It's just three months. So these issues can go on for a year and you can only get three months of it back. So it's one of those ones you need to move on quite quickly, otherwise you are just losing the money and it cannot be recovered.

Alex Ryan:

So that's the 3P window is you have three months to get your claims going. Yeah, so it varies for each of the different claims. So it starts at 18 months is the best one, and that's for kind of like the warehouse issues and mishandled returns. But then it goes down quite rapidly to kind of six or nine months for lost inbound shipping issues, based on if you're an EU or North American seller, and then, yeah, down to three months for the FBA fees. So, yeah, if you're not quick it's gone and Amazon won't accept reimbursement claims.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, if you're not quick it's gone and Amazon won't accept reimbursement claims. You know what I noticed Sometimes and I don't know if this falls into the world of reimbursements, but sometimes when you talk about fees, you're talking about storage fees, but what you know, there's the commission. They get like their fee, like it could be 8%, 10%, 15%, and I've seen things that are, say, 10% categories and they're charging 15% because it's miscategorized or something. Is that something that's part of this or not?

Alex Ryan:

I believe so, yeah, yeah. So if they're miscategorizing your item, yeah, actually a pretty hard one to spot. But yeah, you're right, if they're charging 15% when they should be charging 10%, that ends up being a lot of money. Yeah, so you can look at the correct item categorization and get it recategorized and, yes, claim back that money.

Adam Shaffer:

So how do you guys do it? When we first got into the biz, we were trying to do all this ourselves because we assumed it was mostly the stuff that we ship off to Amazon. So we just we review the stuff every day and we make sure that they receive what we have, and if they don't, we put a claim in. But you can't actually put a claim in right away. You have to wait, like there's there's a timing issue with the claim, right, and I don't exactly know what it is, but I think it's like you have to wait maybe 90 days before you can put the claim in. I'm not sure I can't remember anymore, but then there was all the money we lost in between. So let's say we were pretty good at that. We had no way to figure out what was damaged and what was lost, and they moved products from warehouse A to warehouse B. How do you guys, what's the process Like? How do you do it and how would a normal, regular 3P company be able to do this without some kind of automation?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, it's a challenge, right. So we talked about kind of those kind of main categories, but you're kind of you're circling around it there, right, it's not just those big main four, it's each one of those has a whole bunch of subcategories and each of those subcategories needs to be reconciled and figured out in a different way. Um, so we don't use the seller central anymore and we have automations, but I think if you're doing it within seller central, I believe you need to download like eight plus different reports, right, and pull this data down and then reconcile and find all the mistakes. So there's loads of data you need to pull down and loads of different systems you need in place to actually sort of reconcile the discrepancies within those reports. So it's a real challenge. There's a lot to do there, but I can kind of walk you through one just to give you an idea or feel for it.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, please, please, please.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, so that lost inbound one that you hit on, kind of you ship them 100, they check in 95 or whatever. So to reconcile that within Seller Central, right, you're going to log in, you just navigate to your FBA shipments page. You can filter all of your shipments by the closed status. Then you can download that data and just throw it into your spreadsheet of choice. You just need to create then a filter. There'll be two columns in there, kind of the quantity received and the quantity shipped. And you're looking for a discrepancy there where it says you've shipped more than they've received and that indicates a potential case. So once you've identified that shipment or more likely, if you're a big seller, a number of shipments you go back into Seller Central and actually find that shipment, navigate to your Contents tab and you can just verify the discrepancy there. And then Amazon gives you a little dropdown with basically options, things that you want to do. So you click in that one and you can click on Research, missing Units.

Alex Ryan:

And this is the process now of raising a case with Amazon and saying, hey, something's wrong, right, so they'll immediately just give you some information. They'll say that you need to provide an invoice or a packing slip and this depends on the kind of seller. So if you're like a third party seller, you're going to need to provide invoices. If you're like a brand owner, private label seller or manufacturer, then you can provide like a packing slip. Owner, private label seller or manufacturer, then you can provide like a packing slip. Um, if you're a refundify, we generate those for our clients. So you don't have to provide the documentation, but you need to provide that before amazon will look into the case and then a basic description just saying hey, this is what I've seen discrepancy here and here for this item. Please research the unit, either return it to inventory or reimburse me the difference.

Alex Ryan:

Now, the moment you hit save or submit on that case, what's going to happen next is you're going to get a response from Amazon saying no, nine times out of 10, they're going to immediately reject the case after a short period of time. I guess we both can and can't blame them for this. Right, they're getting a lot of cases, um, but they'd much rather just automatically reject it with a can response and get you to go away. The key here is sellers need to recognize that and re-raise the case. Right, and you're looking at re-raising it like two to three times, but you're saying, by default they, they knock it down most, most times yes, oh, okay, got it.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, I mean so, as a kind of a, we're tied into their apis. Um, as a service provider, we're explicitly told we cannot automate this case raising process. Right, that's against the terms of service, because you know, amazon's just going to be overwhelmed by the number of cases they have coming in, so we have to have agents manually doing it. They want sellers manually doing it within their seller central account. They want to slow down that flow. But even with those kind of controls in there, their first response is still a rejection Nine times out of ten.

Adam Shaffer:

And then how long do you wait to get the money back?

Alex Ryan:

So it varies. So if you get kind of from starting a case going through that process of re-raising, it say no, no, really you owe me this money. You can look maybe around two weeks you know it varies from case to case and about two weeks before you're going to get it kind of approved and everything's okay. But the actual money coming back into your account it goes directly from Amazon and it's just in your normal disbursement schedule. So if you're paid out every two weeks you'll come out in your next payment schedule into your bank account.

Adam Shaffer:

So you mentioned before they pay you the retail, and I've had this happen several times. I'd say maybe 30% of the time the money that we get isn't to us what the retail is. So say, we pay $100, sometimes they'll reimburse us $75. So the cost is even higher than it's not even the price we were selling it for. So have you seen that and how do you deal with that?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, we have seen that. So it can be the fees. They'll take out the fees. Right, they've still, like, uh, stored this item. So they say, so you'll lose fees from it, um, but sometimes, yeah, they do just reimburse too low. So the way amazon um determines the price for the reimbursement is they look at your, your sale price, um and it's not just your sale price today, it's also kind of your historical price and then also look at the price for similar items as well, and they'll come up with a price that they think is fair to reimburse. Now, it can be a challenge, but you can fight that. So if you get something back and you go, no, this is far too low, you can actually re-raise the case of Amazon and say actually no, no, this isn't fair, this isn't a good estimation of the value. I think it should be this, and here is my evidence those cases can be a real challenge. They can take a long time and they're not always successful, but it's definitely worth doing if it's kind of a large margin that you're looking at.

Adam Shaffer:

So you can get that money back. I mean, that's huge, because we've been like, oh my God, how could this be? And it was what you said, like, oh, they look back and the average was this but some seller was on there for a while and they were selling it below cost and you know. So that that happens. I see that. So we talked about the easy one. I call it the easy one, which is the. We ship a hundred. There's only 50. We do our reconciliation and it's kind of straightforward. But how in the world do you guys see and understand when they damage your products or it's being lost in transfer or something like that? So how do you guys actually manage all that information and how do you get to that information?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, so kind of, because we're tied into the APIs, we can automate downloading a whole bunch of reports and then we also tied into a bunch of APIs as well. So we've got we download about eight reports, I think, and then we also download a bunch of data through the API. We built like an automated system then just reconciles all of that data together, looking at various different data sources and bringing it together to actually find those cases. Looking at various different data sources and bringing it together to actually find those cases. Um, now, if it's a seller doing that within seller central, it is completely doable. It's just a lot more manual. You don't have to request the report creation within a period, within a window of data to download.

Alex Ryan:

Um, then you're putting it down, throwing it into various spreadsheets. Um, a real hard one is the mishandled returns. That one's a real challenge to reconcile, to be honest. Um, because it takes I think it's three reports from Seller Central. You then need to reconcile against each other, so that can be a real bugger. But yeah, essentially it's just pulling data from lots of different places, bringing it together and finding the discrepancies throughout it.

Adam Shaffer:

So the data is there. It's just buried in a bunch of different reports that you have to pull all together.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah.

Adam Shaffer:

And if you have I don't know thousands and thousands of transactions in a month, it could be really time consuming. Yeah, maybe inaccurate, and because you have APIs, you're able to pull this data together, all together and organize it in a way that you can see what's going on.

Alex Ryan:

And then do you guys actually go out and you put the case in to go get the money back with Amazon? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we have this kind of automated system. The API access is all through Amazon. So it's through the Amazon selling partner marketplace, app marketplace, so sellers authorized through Amazon, and we get basically access through Amazon. They kind of gate it. So once we download that, we then our system kind of reconciles the data, identifies the cases and we then raise that to our agents.

Alex Ryan:

Our agents are all like ex-Amazon reps. They worked in reimbursements for Amazon. Yeah, we poached them. They know what's going on on the inside and then they actually go into the account and raise the account with Amazon. They know how to structure the message and everything, make sure it's really clear, because we know we've had cases where we look at a seller's account They've recently onboarded with us and we look they've tried to do reimbursements themselves and they've got these big, long, sprawling messages there's no structure to it and they're just getting rejected. Because the agent on the other side can't be bothered with that. I just close, close, close, reject. So we make like a nice concise message raise the case and then just keep following up and tracking that to make sure it's actually actually reimbursed.

Adam Shaffer:

No, and I was just about to ask what are, what are the mistakes, you see? Because, again, we tried it ourselves and then we wound up using a third party, probably nowhere near as good as refunded by. But we didn't know, you then. But but I guess the thing is we, we kind of gave up on this, trying to do it ourselves. What are, what are some of the mistakes that you see, the, the three-piece sellers making?

Alex Ryan:

yeah, yeah. So, um, there's a couple right. One is is waiting too long, that's probably the biggest one, and if you wait too long you go outside that period. You know, like I say, it's three months is the shortest period for those fba fees. Um, if it goes into over three months, the money's lost forever. Um, so one is waiting too long. Um, two would be not providing the evidence that amazon asks for. You know we talked about in those lost inbound shipments. You need to prove that you actually shipped that inventory. Some, some sellers, are just too lazy, they just don't do it and that's why we kind of created that packing slip generation feature. Right, because our sellers don't want to provide the information, they just want us to do it for them. Yeah, so not providing the correct information, amazon won't reimburse the case. And also just not following up. Like I said before, if you're told're told no, I'm sorry, this case isn't eligible.

Adam Shaffer:

No refund. Most people are gonna go. Oh, okay, so no isn't no.

Alex Ryan:

Always no is no isn't no yeah. In this case, no is not no, yeah. It means re-raise, um, raise it up and say no. I really think there's a case here and and we'll typically do that a few times. Occasionally, amazon will give a final word and it will be a no. Really, this is not happening and you go okay, but that's very rare, very rare, and that's only in, yeah, very rare.

Adam Shaffer:

And so when we started looking for companies to help us, it was hard to tell the difference. Like what? What makes one company different or better and your process better? I and that might be an unfair question, so apologies to put you on the spot but just like, like, why? Again, why and I'm not actually trying to sell you service, but what should people be looking at when they're trying to find a third party after they realize that doing it themselves is probably not the way to go?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, which they're gonna. Yeah, so in all honesty, I think if you go with any reputable reimbursement service, we're all doing basically the same things. Like we see the different reimbursement types. You can Google them, you can find them. Now we have our own secret source, but I can't guarantee that the others don't have their own secret sources too. It's just we don't talk about them publicly. But really, what you're probably looking at is the percentage. What are they charging and what other free services are you getting with them? So the industry average is about 25%. That's mostly what you'll find.

Alex Ryan:

One of the things that we saw with our competitors was they'd advertised 25%, but then when we talked to people, larger sellers were able to negotiate down. The issue with it was every seller we talked to would be getting a different rate and no one knew if they were getting a good rate because no one had public rates. So that was one of the things we did. First thing we did, we just published public rates. It's all based on revenue. It goes from 22% down and it just depends on your revenue. And then we're actually a part of, or our company, Refundify has come from Seller Candy I don't know if you're aware of.

Adam Shaffer:

Seller Candy. I know who Seller Candy is, but tell us about Seller Candy.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah. So Seller Candy is essentially like a replacement for uh, stellar support. Everyone hates seller support. So instead of talking to them to get your issues resolved, you talk to seller. Can you say hey, I've got this issue. Seller candy is full of x amazon reps. They then go and fight for you. They go fight seller, seller support for you to get that issue resolved, so you don't have to deal with it. You just say there's a problem here and that's it. They go and deal with it.

Alex Ryan:

So what we've got really is basically a whole bunch. We've got like 70 something employees close to 80 now, I think. Um, most of those are ex-amazon reps. So what we realized we could do is we could pull across services from seller uh, seller candy, integrate them into refundify. So one of the services we brought across was, um, free asin reinstatements. So if one of your asins goes down, you know how much money does that cost a seller, right? Your top asin goes down for two, three weeks and you don't know why, because I'm doesn't tell you that that massively impacts your bottom line. Um, so part of our services will just get up for you for free is that part ofundify?

Alex Ryan:

or is that part of Seller Candy? So it's done. It's the Seller Candy agents that will do it, but it's free within your Refundify subscription.

Adam Shaffer:

Oh really. So one of the benefits of Refundify is you have this ASIN reinstatement.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, exactly, and the cool thing about that is because we're commission-based, you might not even be paying us any money if there are no reimbursements to be had, but you still get that service. It's still there, but there's always reimbursements.

Adam Shaffer:

I don't think there's any 3P seller that doesn't have something that's gone missing or damaged or the returns are an issue. It really is. Now just how much is it? And there were a couple of folks that we met back several years ago that would say, hey, we could simulate how much money we would get you back by they do some kind of an audit. Do you guys do that, or have you heard of that? How does that work?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely so. That's actually something we offer. We offer a free audit. So before you kind of sign up and enter your car details, you just go through. The basic onboarding takes about 10 minutes and we'll then kind of download all that data. Our agents will look through and verify it and then we'll just send you a report and basically tells you in all the different categories how much money you're owed, so you can see exactly what we can get back for you. And if you decide to go ahead, you enter your card details, we go raise it and we just charge a commission on it.

Adam Shaffer:

That was the best selling tactic, I think, because when we saw the amount of money we were losing each month, we were shocked and we thought we were catching the majority. And we were not at all. We were catching, like I said, the easy ones, but the hard ones were getting right past us, and it was definitely important and valuable. And again, the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because I don't think that, especially new 3P sellers, but even 3P sellers that have been doing this for a while, some of us are more organized than others, but most of us don't have the bandwidth and the wherewithal to do this. And it's got to be on a daily basis.

Adam Shaffer:

Because you talked about windows, windows open, windows closed. You're out the money, but also the different reporting and the different things you need to look at. And why should you give up any of that profit? I mean, unless you're just printing money somewhere, it's a huge mistake not to be chasing this and working with a partner. I think is really important, because this is something that this would take an army of people to do internally, I think.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, obviously I'm an advocate of the service Refundify, of course, but in reality you can hire a VA to do it for you, right? But that brings in these challenges, like you're saying, how do you know that you're getting it all, unless you can get like an ex-Amazon rep, like we have, and you keep training them, because the policies are changing quite frequently Every couple of months there'll be a change, right? So you've got those costs of like constantly training them. You need, right, um, so you've got those costs of like constantly training them. You need to keep them on staff with their benefits. You need to be running these reimbursements.

Alex Ryan:

We say that we think monthly is best, um, but at least every two months, because of that three-month window for the fees, right, and if you've got a really large account, it could take you up to a week to kind of reconcile and start raising those cases, and then that then has that frustrating effect of like dragging out as Amazon rejects those cases and you have to go and re re-raise them, right? So it's kind of like an indefinite time period that's going to take you to get it all and then still, at the end of the day, you don't know if you've got them all, whereas when you rely on a service because it's commission-based, itbased, it's in the service's interest to find every single dollar, every single cent, because that's how they get paid.

Adam Shaffer:

And when sellers work with Refundify and others, but especially with Refundify how do they know what's going on on a regular basis? Is it that you send them a statement, or is there a portal that they could see what's going on? How does it work?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, so when you kind of go through the onboarding flow and you sign up, you're presented with kind of the report page. We update our reports and basically show you what we've done. So we'll say kind of the cases we've raised, the amounts of money that we've got back. And one thing that we do that most other services don't do is we'll actually tell you how much money Amazon has reimbursed you as well, Because Amazon does do automatic reimbursements. It's just they don't do them all. So we'll actually tell you how much money was reimbursed by Amazon.

Alex Ryan:

And one of our key things as well is we decided very early on never to race Amazon. And this is kind of a hush-hush area of the business, right. But within this industry lots of services will race Amazon, so a discrepancy will appear and they'll try and raise that case as fast as possible. So it counts as their case raised, Whereas if you wait like three, four days a week, Amazon will automatically reimburse that and you don't charge commission on it because Amazon did it right. So we kind of display exactly how much money Amazon reimbursed. So you can see that we're not. We're not being dodgy. You can see the Amazon rate.

Adam Shaffer:

That's awesome. I actually never realized. I always thought we had a fight for every dollar, so that's great. I didn't know they automatically did it, but it's like you know, advertising attribution, like you know, you're letting, you're letting Amazon try and solve it first and then you're going after it.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, just just delay by a week. Let them reimburse it automatically. If they don't, then you come in and reimburse it. Yeah, but we try not to do it. We don't do it too early, because it's just costing the seller money that it shouldn't be.

Adam Shaffer:

So this is? This is a tough question, but you know Amazon changes stuff on a regular basis. Are you having to update methodology on a regular basis? Or on the returns reimbursement side, these things are pretty static, I don't know. You tell me.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, it does change. It's not super frequent but it does change. So we have like monthly trainings for our agents. Our team leaders go in and dive into Amazon's documentation and any changes they bring out and they throw them into training materials and then we kind of retrain our agents on it. So yeah, there's kind of continuous training. Any changes we spot with the algorithm that we need to update, we go and make those updates. So yeah, it's kind of a continuous process. Thankfully it's not too fast-mo moving, but it does change, yeah.

Adam Shaffer:

Are there other areas that you guys audit outside of this? Are there other parts of Amazon that you're auditing, like maybe advertising spend and things like that, or is that not part of what Refundify does?

Alex Ryan:

At the moment we're just reimbursements, but we're looking at kind of building some inventory dashboards. We do actually do that inventory dashboards. That's kind of part of the Seller Candy crossover as well. A lot of our clients have that from Seller Candy. So that's just kind of looking at how much inventory you have, you know how much it's costing you and when you need to restock and that kind of thing. So we're actually planning to build that into the Refundify dashboard as kind of a free extra. But it's not there yet. That's something in the pipeline.

Adam Shaffer:

But in the meantime, you're watching the fees, the storage fees. That's part of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that is huge, especially with some of the stuff that they've been saying they are going to be doing with regard to storage fees. And they kind of pulled back from that a bit because it was very hard. I don't know how people were going to manage it, but it was based on how many days of inventory you had and they were going to charge you certain fees for having too little or too much inventory, and I think they kind of chilled on that for a little bit. So we'll see what happens, but that's got to make it more complicated for sure. So what other words of wisdom would you give to the millions of three-piece sellers out there that might not be managing this really important area?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, well, I would say, go and get a free audit right Like, head to refundifyio, sign up. You don't need to enter any credit card details or anything. You can just sign up for the free audit. We'll go in, we'll check your account and we'll tell you how much you're owed. You know, if it comes back. We had one a while back that was like $177,000, which just blew my mind. You know they had no idea $177,000. And they were losing. Bear in mind they were losing over $20,000 per month just by delaying. $20,000 gone can't be recovered. I think it was $26,000, $27,000 each month. So go and get that free audit. Refundifyio. It's not a free audit. It takes 10 minutes. We'll tell you how much you're owed, give you the price breakdown for the commission. It's no win, no fee. So there's really no reason not to do it. And if you don't want to go with the service, fine, but do this because it's affecting your bottom line, right? So you need to figure out some kind of system.

Adam Shaffer:

Well, you're a really cool CTO. I have to say that, and I enjoy talking to you. You definitely it's great to meet somebody that's on the technical side, that's also an entrepreneur, and that's what I think is also great about the Amazon ecosystem is that you meet so many people that are passionate about different parts of the business and sometimes the entire business. But it's great to see a, you know, very technical person also very interested in helping you know sellers in this, in this industry, try to profit. I mean it's it's a tough game, man. I mean it's so competitive, so many moving parts and Amazon is so big that stuff happens every day and we appreciate all the work that you guys do for everybody.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. It's good fun to chat and hopefully educate everyone and help just eke a little bit more out of that store.

Adam Shaffer:

It definitely helped me out a bit, and then again so they can go to refund. Is it refundifyio?

Alex Ryan:

So yeah, refundifyio.

Adam Shaffer:

Don't forget that refundifyio, and could people reach out to you?

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely. You can reach out to me at alexrefundifyio or drop me a message on LinkedIn, anything like that. Happy to help.

Adam Shaffer:

Cool. Well, let's stay connected. I really appreciate you joining and updating everybody on the world of reimbursement Super important everybody. So please take note. And Alex thanks so much and we really appreciate it. We know it's late where you are, so thank you very much.

Alex Ryan:

Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate it. And yeah, thank you everyone.

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