Simple Amazon FBA Customer Service | Selling

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Among a myriad of other things, the advantages to selling via Amazon’s own fulfilment channels are that:

You don’t have to store any inventory
People actually buy your things
You don’t have to do any customer service

But – just because you don’t usually have to do any customer service doesn’t mean you’ll completely avoid it with FBA. Actually, if you’re selling a lot of units on a monthly basis, selling via FBA isn’t the hands off ecommerce dream that some people try to sell. You’re going to have to keep logging into Seller Central to make sure your customers – and potential ones – happy.

Amazon has targets and wants all third party sellers to answer any direct seller questions within 24 hours, whether that person has already bought from you or not. For those, you have to respond, obviously. But there are a few different instances that don’t necessarily require you to reply, but it’s in your interest to do so.

Here are a handful of simple ways you can deliver great customer service as an Amazon FBA seller:

1. Answering product questions

Amazon alerts you when a product in your inventory has a question. An example might be if you sell a foreign language DVD and they needed to know whether it has English subtitles. By answering that question, you may be the catalyst for a sale.

You absolutely do not need to answer these questions, but if one person has taken the effort to ask, 10 more didn’t buy because they were unsure about the same detail.

2. Providing tracking information

While Amazon does a great job of emailing customers with everything they need to know about the progression of their order’s journey from their fulfilment centre to their home, they might just want to hear it from the seller. This information is provided when Amazon emails to confirm that an order has been dispatched.

It’s very rare that you’ll have a question about this, but you need to know where to find the tracking number if anyone ever asks. It’s long explaining FBA to every single customer.

3. Processing refunds before they contact Amazon

It’s easy for customers to miss the fact that they have bought something from a third party, rather from Amazon themselves. If they have an issue with a product that you think can be resolved with a refund (partial or full) you have the ability to step in and do this.

This is an important one because it can both avoid bad feedback and also reduce the likelihood that the customer earns a 100% refund (making you effectively lose all the revenue you earned at the point of sale).

Why Do Customer Service When You Don’t Need To?

Delivering great customer service is one of the only ways you’re going to accumulate a lot of positive feedback on Amazon. FBA covers this as Prime customers are probably going to receive their product the day after they order, but the main other way you can achieve this is with direct contact. There’s no need to reach out after every order, but it’s a welcome touch if you’ve already spoken to them. For example, if a customer asks about a specific product detail before they buy. Once it arrives to them, confirm that it was as they hoped. Little things like this are all you need to do to prompt people to leave feedback.

More positive feedback means you’re more likely to earn the Buy Box and earn more sales. Aim to get as much as you can in as many different ways as you can. I’m of the opinion that automated feedback requests are actually bad for the customer experience, but do what you think will work best for your business.