U-Freight focuses on Fulfilment by Amazon market

By AJOT

Focusing on the logistics requirements of the Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) market is bearing fruit says Simon Wong, the head of Hong Kong-headquartered international logistics provider. the U-Freight Group (UFL).

Mr Wong said: “I recently read that Fulfilment by Amazon delivered over two billion items for its marketplace sellers last year.”

“U-Freight has established fulfilment services, which deliver products to the customers of independent sellers and brand owners in the Amazon Marketplace.

“We offer a service all the way from origin through to delivery, customs-cleared, to the Amazon Fulfilment Centre.”

Amazon reported that 2016 was a record-breaking year in sales worldwide for sellers on Amazon, and Peter Faricy, the company’s VP for Amazon Marketplace claims that the Amazon Marketplace empowers brand owners and retailers of all sizes, many of them small businesses, to reach customers around the world.

Wong adds: “That is something that the U-Freight Group wholeheartedly agrees with and it is why we are now placing so much emphasis on offering fulfilment services to the FBA marketplace.

“As I have said before, of all the operators in this fledgling sector, we feel that we understand e-commerce logistics as well as any. If you are involved in this business, or thinking of getting involved, we are ready to handle this business and welcome your enquiries.

“Online retailers need to find new models and innovative platforms to deal with the logistics challenges they face. That includes ensuring that they engage with their freight forwarder at an early stage of the process to ensure that they truly understand the complex logistical demands of e-commerce.”

U-Freight is offering a range of services, including both standard and express customs clearance at origin in China and at destination in the USA and Europe, air and ocean line haul and direct drop shipments to the FBA warehouse by courier or nominated truck.

U-Freight also operates its own e-commerce fulfilment centre in Shanghai for pick and pack services and a similar delivery centre in Los Angeles that can carry out inventory storage, return services or product rework, along with all necessary customs formalities and record-keeping.

(SOURCE)

How to Decipher Your Amazon Suspension and Write a Compelling Appeal

By Conner Gillivan

Were you recently suspended from selling on the Amazon Marketplace? Or has it happened in the past? Thousands of Amazon sellers are suspended each month and Amazon has an entire team that is dedicated to reading the suspension letters that are submitted.

If you’re familiar with the suspension process, the Amazon Seller Performance team sends you a performance notification that states that your selling permissions have been temporarily suspended because of reason XYZ. The non-descriptive letter encourages you to appeal the suspension by following their Plan of Action guidelines and then you just hope for the best.

At my company we’ve become experts at understanding how the Amazon Marketplace functions. Over the years, I have researched and learned a tremendous amount about the suspension process. Its mysterious characteristics intrigued me to dig deeper and to really understand what Amazon is saying when they send out their suspension letters.

In this article, I will provide practical advice on:

How to decipher why you were suspended.
How to structure your formal appeal letter.
How to escalate your appeal letter to the next level if you aren’t getting a proper response from the Seller Performance team.

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Why Sellers Get Suspended
As I said above, all Amazon suspension letters arrive in a similar template that dryly outlines that fact that your business has been temporarily shut down. In every situation, Amazon has identified a way in which you, as a seller, have failed to comply by the standards and expectations that they hold for their sellers.

The majority of the situations stem from two areas. The first is from a failure to follow one of the Seller Policies that you agree to when you create your seller account. For example: selling inauthentic products or drop shipping from retailers. The second is from one of your seller metrics going above the allowed maximums that Amazon holds all of its sellers to. For example: order defect rate, late shipment rate, refund rate, etc.

Amazon’s main goal as a marketplace is to provide their users with a positive shopping experience. When a seller fails to uphold their expectations, it creates a situation that could lead to a poor customer experience. Amazon will provide you with Performance Notifications and fair warnings that your actions may lead to a suspension, but they can only do it for so long. If you are unable to fix your account quickly, it can lead to you receiving the dreaded Amazon suspension letter.

Part One: How to Decipher Your Amazon Suspension Letter
The one good thing about Amazon’s templated suspension letter is that it is easy to find the place where they communicate why they are suspending you. Most of the time, the reason for your suspension will appear in the first two sentences of the notification. It reads something like this:

You currently may not sell on Amazon any longer because…[reason]
As you can tell, the difficult part is not necessarily finding where Amazon communicates what you have been suspended for. Rather, the difficult task is understanding what their reason actually means with regards to your seller account. To help you in your efforts, I have provided a list of the 5 most common reasons for suspension and a short explanation of each.

1. Inauthentic product complaints
This means that there has been a complaint about a product that you sold to a customer. It is the most open-ended reason that Amazon provides for suspended accounts and can boil down to a handful of issues that you may have as a seller.

Sellers may receive this reason because:

Someone complained that the product they received was not the same as that described on the Amazon product listing.
Someone complained that they received their order in damaged or used condition when they purchased it as new.
Someone complained that the product they received is counterfeit.
To decipher this particular reason, you should go to the Performance Notifications center in your seller account and look for past warnings from Amazon regarding such possible issues. If you find similar warnings, look further into the order, ASINs, and customer to determine if there could have been an issue with the order.

If you cannot find similar warnings in your dashboard, go to where you manage your Amazon customer emails and search keywords like “used”, “inauthentic”, “counterfeit”, etc. If you find any emails that bring back these keywords, look into what the customer is saying and how you handled the situation. Sometimes customers will immediately complain to Amazon instead of contacting the seller because they don’t understand the difference between the two.

When you go to write your suspension appeal letter, Amazon wants to see that you fully understand where the complaint came from and how you could have handled it better. Diving into your records to find what could have been the issue is a key first step to getting reinstated.

2. Rights owner notice of infringement
This means that there was a complaint directly from the brand owner of a given product that you were selling through your store. In most situations, the rights owner is complaining that you, as the seller, do not have the rights to sell their product through your store because you do not have an authorized reselling relationship with them.

With the growth of the internet and ecommerce, it has become much more difficult to monitor who is selling your products online. Amazon receives a lot of negative feedback from brands because of the number of sellers that are reselling their products without authorization directly from the brand.

In some instances, the seller is blatantly going around the rights owner to sell the product. In other situations, there is a misunderstanding because the seller received rights to sell the product through a distributor, and the distributor did not communicate the seller’s name to the rights owner of the product.

No matter what the situation, Amazon will always request that you submit invoices directly from your supplier and contact information for your supplier. In the case that you do not have invoices, your case to get reinstated will become more difficult.

3. Order defect rate
This means that your Order Defect Rate has most likely gone above the allowed maximum of 1.0% within the past 30 or 90 days. The Order Defect Rate can be found in your seller metrics by navigating to Performance and then clicking on Account Health. On this page, you will find the main metrics that Amazon tracks for all of its sellers.

As defined by Amazon:

An order has a defect if it incurs a negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim that is not denied, or a service credit card chargeback. Your order defect rate is defined as the number of orders with a defect divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. Order defect rate is the key measure of your ability to provide a good customer experience.
Again, it is a key measure to make sure that you are providing a positive customer experience.

The best way to understand your Order Defect Rate is to compile a list of all the negative feedback, A-to-z claims, and credit card chargebacks that you’ve received within those given time frames where your ODR is over 1.0%. Look at how you handled the order and find where you fell short as a seller. That reason is what Amazon wants to hear you explain in your appeal letter.

4. Late shipment rate
This means that your Late Shipment Rate has gone above the maximum allowed level of 4.0%. Each Amazon order has an expected ship date associated with it that is built off of the lead time to ship that you associate with your products. In your account, you have the ability to change the lead time for each product, but it starts as 1-2 days by default. If you do not mark your order as shipped and add a valid tracking number by the end of that assigned lead time, Amazon’s system will mark the order as a late shipment.

Here is an example to better understand:

You have a popular product that you sell on a daily basis.
The lead time associated with this product is 1-2 days.
You sell one of the products on Monday.
Amazon’s expected ship date is going to be Wednesday.
If you do not mark the product as shipped with tracking information before the end of Wednesday, your order will be considered late and it will go against your Late Shipment Rate.

When appealing a Late Shipment Rate suspension, you want to look into each order that went late, determine how it happened, and create a plan to adjust your operations to make sure that it does not happen again. Most of the time, it is better increasing your lead times or adjusting your fulfillment operations.

5. Cancellation rate
This means that your pre-fulfillment Cancellation Rate went above the maximum level of 2.5%. As defined by Amazon:

[This] metric measures your in-stock rate for seller-fulfilled items sold on Amazon.
When you sell a product from your store that you do not have in stock, you have to cancel the order and notify the customer. Amazon does not like it when this happens because it creates a poor customer experience. Cancelling orders is held against you and can lead to a suspension if you go above Amazon’s threshold.

When appealing a Cancellation Rate suspension, you want to compile a list of all the orders that you had to cancel within the given time frame that your cancellation rate went above 2.5%.

Next, you want to look into each order and understand why you were cancelling so many orders. The biggest reason that sellers go over 2.5% is that their inventory management is very poor, and they are selling a lot of items that are not in stock at the time that a customer makes a purchase.

If you can explain how you are improving your inventory management practices, you should be able to create a good case for unsuspension to Amazon.

Part Two: How to Structure and Write your Amazon Suspension Appeal Letter
Now that you know why you were suspended from selling on Amazon, it’s time to outline your appeal letter so that it meets Amazon’s expectations and clearly explains how you are going to make this situation right.

In every suspension appeal, Amazon wants to see three things:

Acknowledgement of where you messed up and a clear understanding of what exact actions led to your suspension.
Action steps that you’ve already taken in the time that you were suspended and that you are submitting your suspension appeal.
Action steps that you will take in the near future if you are to be reinstated.
If you can successfully communicate those three details in an organized fashion, you have an amazing chance of being unsuspended. When you don’t address these three areas that Amazon wants to see, your chances of being reinstated go significantly down.

Below is an example format that you may use to organize your suspension letter to focus on these three areas.

1. Introduction
State who you are, the name of your seller account, and the reason that you were suspended. Write a paragraph about your situation and what you’ve learned from the process of being suspended.

2. The Main Issues that Lead to Your Suspension
State the main reason that you were suspended from being an Amazon seller. Explain how you determined this to be the main issue and what actions led to this happening on your account. Take responsibility for your actions and express that you messed up.

If there is more than one issue that you identified, be sure to add a bullet point for it as well.

3. The Action Steps You Have Taken Since Being Suspended
State the action steps that you have taken since being suspended to address the main issues that you outlined above. Go into the detail of what you and your team have done, to show how you understand what the issue was and how you are making changes so that it won’t happen again.

Make it as easy as possible to read. State the main issue and then add bullet points underneath it so that it matches fluently with the top section. There is a team that reads hundreds of these each day. They need an organized document that they can read efficiently.

4. The Action Steps You Will Take When Unsuspended
State the action steps that you and your team will take once reinstated. Focus on how you will change your operations to ensure that this issue does not happen again.

5. Summary
Provide an overall summary of the action steps that you have taken and will take to ensure this problem does not happen again with your seller account.

Call to Action: write a clear sentence asking for your seller account to be reinstated.

The structure of your appeal letter is almost as important as the content within it. It is important that you make your appeal letter focused on the three main areas that I outlined above and that it is easy for someone to identify those core areas upon reading through.

If the Amazon employee reading your appeal letter has to search for the three core areas of content that they are looking for, there is a better chance that they will reject your appeal letter and ask for more information.

Bonus: How to Escalate Your Appeal Letter Past Seller Performance
Amazon is a massive company and despite their rigid organization, they do make mistakes when handling seller suspensions and appeal submissions.

I’ve witnessed sellers who have submitted their appeal letters and never received a response. I’ve seen sellers submit multiple responses and be advised each time that Amazon needs more information regarding their suspension issue. And in the worst cases, I’ve seen sellers reinstated based on the appeal letter they submitted, then immediately suspended again by the Seller Performance team.

It’s impossible to fully understand what is going on at Amazon as they are reviewing hundreds of seller suspension letters each month. The good news is that you can escalate your situation to the next level in the case that something wonky occurs.

Here’s the secret… email Jeff Bezos. That’s right… email the CEO and founder of Amazon explaining your situation with a copy of your appeal letter attached to the email.

Anyone can send Jeff Bezos an email by emailing Jeff@Amazon.com. We return to a theme that has been present throughout this entire article: Amazon’s number one priority is creating a positive customer experience. If customers don’t feel that they are being treated correctly, they can email Jeff and he will take care of it. The same goes for Amazon sellers.

I’ve seen this method work and I’m sure that it has helped hundreds of Amazon sellers circumnavigate the odd situations that sometimes occur when communicating with the Seller Performance team with suspension appeals. If your email is convincing enough and your appeal letter clearly addresses the three main points that I outlined above, “Jeff” will forward the email along to Seller Performance and urge them to make the situation right.

Conclusion
I hope that this article helps you navigate the muddy waters of Amazon seller suspensions.

(SOURCE)

Essentials of Sales Tax for Amazon FBA Sellers

Nobody every started selling on Amazon because they were looking forward to dealing with sales tax. But the fact is sales tax is a part of life for nearly every product seller. 

I get it. Getting your sales tax in order can be time-consuming and sometimes even intimidating. So I’ve summarized the five essentials of sales tax to demystify the process.

Let’s dig in:

Detect where you have sales tax nexus

Forty-five states and D.C. all have a sales tax. Since sales tax is governed at the state, not federal, level, that means there are forty-six different sets of varying sales tax laws. But the one thing they all states have in common is that they require sellers who have “sales tax nexus” in their state to collect sales tax from buyers located in that state.

Nexus is just a fancy way of saying a “significant connection” to a state. Each state’s law talks about nexus a little differently, but these common factors usually create nexus:

• A location – a store, office, warehouse or other physical space
• Personnel – an employee, contractor, salesperson, installer or other person working on behalf of your business
• An affiliate – someone who sends sales to your website in exchange for a small cut of the profits from that sale
• A drop shipping relationship – in some cases, having a 3rd party distributor ship products to your clients creates sales tax nexus
• Attendance at a tradeshow or craft fair – depending on the state, selling products temporarily in a state can create sales tax nexus
• Inventory – storing inventory in a state generally creates sales tax nexus in a state

That final nexus-creating activity is what trips up many Amazon FBA sellers. Because storing inventory in a state creates sales tax nexus in a state, FBAers may find themselves with sales tax nexus in many of the states where Amazon has fulfillment centers. To determine if your inventory is stored in a state you can do one of two things:

1. Pull your “Inventory Event Detail” report from Amazon Seller Central
2. Check your Amazon badges on the TaxJar dashboard. If you don’t have a TaxJar account, you can try a 30-day free trial

Once you’ve determined where you have nexus, your next step is to…

Register for a sales tax permit

Before you begin collecting sales tax from customers, register your business with the state.

Don’t skip this! Most states consider it unlawful to collect sales tax from buyers without a valid permit, even unknowingly. (They’re afraid you’re going to keep the money in your pocket if you’re not registered!)

When it comes to sales tax, we recommend starting with your home state and branching out from there to your other nexus states. You can find out more in our free guide on “When to Register for a Sales Tax Permit.”

You can find step-by-step guides to registering for a sales tax permit in ever state here.

Collect sales tax from your buyers

Once you’re registered, your next step is to make sure you’re collecting sales tax from buyers in your nexus states on all of your shopping carts and platforms.

Example: You live in Iowa but have nexus in South Carolina and Tennessee because you have items stored in the Amazon fulfillment centers there. You’d need to make sure to collect sales tax from buyers in Iowa, Tennessee and South Carolina on all of the platforms on which you sell, not just Amazon.

You can find guides here on setting up sales tax on the most common eCommerce platforms.

Report how much sales tax you collected

When you registered for your sales tax permit, the state told you how often they wanted you to file a sales tax return. (This is usually either monthly, quarterly or annually.)

So when it comes time to file, you need to determine how much sales tax you collected from buyers in every state.

I wish your obligation stopped there, but the majority of the states also want you to break down how much sales tax you collected by county, city and other special taxing district. This becomes complex when you sell on multiple channels or have nexus in multiple states.

When my team and I were creating TaxJar, we observed different sellers attempting to report how much sales tax they’d collected. Some sellers used spreadsheets and complex pivot tables, others even wrote it out longhand. We had one customer tell us that they locked the whole team in the office over a weekend every month to handle sales tax!

There’s a better way now. Sales tax automation will compile all the sales tax you’ve collected and create return-ready reports for you to file.

Speaking of filing…

File sales tax

When the due date rolls around, it’s time to file your sales tax returns. You can use the reports I just mentioned to login to the state’s website and file online, or you can let TaxJar AutoFile for you.

However you choose to file, remember these two things:

• File “zero” returns – Be sure to file sales tax on your due date even if you didn’t collect a penny from buyers over the taxable period. Some states will penalize you for failing to check in even if you don’t have anything to report. This penalty can include a monetary fine (Florida’s is $50!) or even revocation of your sales tax license.
• Don’t discount discounts – About half the states will allow you to keep a very small portion of the sales tax you collected if you file on time. Here’s a list of states that offer sales tax filing discounts. Don’t leave money on the table!

And that’s it – you’ve put a lid on sales tax!

Do you have questions or comments? For a much more in-depth guide to sales tax, check out our Sales Tax for Amazon FBA Sellers guide. To discuss sales tax with us, join our Facebook group Sales Tax for eCommerce Sellers. 

TaxJar is a service built to make sales tax compliance simple for eCommerce sellers. Try a 30-day-free trial of TaxJar today and eliminate sales tax compliance headaches from your life!

(SOURCE)

Saturday Tips For Selling On Amazon FBA - Stop Worrying

- Stop worrying! Watch this for some good advice

Q4 Success Group For Amazon Sellers

- Did you make it to Q4? Share your experience in the comments!

Weekend Amazon FBA Sourcing Tips - Business As Usual

- Leave a comment below!

Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me In Regards To FBA

By Chris Wilkey

So I hopped on to the FBA Master Facebook group the other day and saw this post from one of our good friends Chris Anderson (If you click on it, you can see the whole thread and conversation):

After seeing this, I thought to myself

There are a few things like this that I wish someone would have told me when I started selling on Amazon.

And when you look at the majority of the blogs, books, and courses out there, you find that most people dance around these topics because they don’t want to give people bad advice (or something that is against the terms of service of Amazon).

So. Like Chris said above, this is most likely going to a controversial post.

All of the things you are going to read below are tactics I (or people close to me) have used in regards to Amazon FBA. Please use your own judgement when deciding to use any of these tactics for your own FBA business. I am in no way, shape, or form a tax, legal, sumo, or soccer professional.

1. Follow Chris Anderson’s advice and always overprice your items by 30% or more when sending them to an Amazon warehouse.

If you read through his post, you can see his logic. It’s better to be higher and move the prices down instead of being low and not having the chance to raise the price. If you use a repricer like Bqool, it’s a no brainer.

But there is another angle that needs to be taken into consideration and it is actually the reason I overprice my items all of the time. If you have your prices higher during the shipping process, you are hedging a bet that Amazon might actually lose your items. If that happens, sometimes they reimburse based upon a random policy they have. Other times they base it upon the current selling price. Other they base it upon your list price. Either way, it’s an easy and safe way to make a few extra bucks from Amazon if they happen to lose your item (and chose to reimburse on the list price). Take that with Chris Anderson’s reasoning and you should ALWAYS price 30% higher during the shipping process.

2. High sales numbers mean nothing.

Yeah. It’s cool to say you sold over $100k in products last month, but what does that actually mean?!?!

It means you sold a lot of stuff.

The real question will always be: What was your profit margin? 

If it’s 10%, well $100k in sales only made you $10,000. If you sold $20k at a 50% margin you would have made $10,000. See the difference?

Don’t be fooled by “experts” that post high sales numbers to prove they know what they are talking about. Some might actually have a clue, others might not. Use some common sense before you fall into a trap of “I need to sell X amount this month to be something.”

You don’t.

Now please don’t take the statement the wrong way. High sales numbers are great (and exciting especially as a seller). I just don’t want you to be bamboozled by numbers without context.

3. You don’t need all the fancy tools/training to be a great seller.

Sure you see us write about awesome software like OAXRay or Tactical Arbitrage. You see new books, courses, etc being released every day. Even though these are freaking sweet tools, you don’t actually need them to be a great seller.

You really only need two things:

1. Common Sense
2. Effort

That’s really it. But do realize the following:

You can start a fire with two sticks and a little muscle, but if you watch Naked and Afraid you realize that it is freaking hard. Technology (in the form of a lighter) saves time and makes your life easier.

You can be a great seller without all the cool tools, but you can be an even better seller if you use the tools you actually need (not just what everyone tells you that you need) and leverage the technology.

4. Sometimes it’s ok to play the system.

Yeah. This is going to be the one that people give me shit about. I’m literally sitting here saying it’s ok to game the system….sometimes.

Here me out before you jump to any radical conclusions.

How many times have you seen something like this?

Now some of you would respond to the customer and try to fix the issue even if you know that you would never send something like that into the Amazon warehouse.

If you are like me, I would look up the order number and notice that it has already been returned and the issue has been fixed. I would send the item back to me to examine it and then I would do this:

And I put down that the feedback was “about the product” and that was the reason for the review. And literally within seconds it was removed from my seller account.

So you can say that I worked the system a bit. The feedback could have been seen as feedback on the seller or the product. I decided to say the one that had the better chance of being removed.

Another example:

If you take a look at this post (about getting ungated in shoes, clothing, and luggage), you will notice that I have selected specific answers to get through the process. These answers may or may not be actually valid for your business, but it works the system to get the desired result.

So.

I have to say it like this: Never abuse the system, but in certain situations it is advantageous using it to your advantage. 

I could literally spend all day writing down little tips, tricks, and hacks that I wish I would have known, but it’s time to get back to work.

Peace,

CW

(SOURCE)

- How are we doing fellow FBA sellers? Share a quick comment below!

Do You Qualify To Sell Toys & Games On Amazon During Q4? Read This To Find Out

By Selling Family

Have you received an email from Amazon alerting you to the fact that you MAY or MAY NOT meet the criteria to sell toys on Amazon this Q4? Amazon starts sending this email out to all registered sellers starting in August, and they continue to sell it through the year.

It is a pretty scary read for many sellers, and we often get inundated with panicked sellers in our Facebook Community that are wondering if they will qualify to sell toys or not in the fourth quarter (q4) on Amazon.  I mean, imagine selling in Q4 and NOT being able to sell TOYS.  

The email is intended for sellers who are considering Merchant Fulfilling in Q4 (a strategy that we DO implement in Q4), whether they’ll do so for everything or whether they’ll do it alongside FBA. So if this is something you’re considering, listen up!

Amazon points out that eligibility for selling Toys & Games is determined separately for each country and that if you sell in multiple marketplaces, your accounts will be evaluated for each country.

We do both FBA and Merchant Fulfilling, using Merchant Fulfill mainly to sell items as late in the season as possible (in December, particularly, when it’s too late to ship items into an Amazon warehouse but while sales are still high).

Things get over-the-top crazy and hectic in Q4, particularly from about mid-November on. And Amazon wants to make sure that those who want to Merchant Fulfill Toys - by far the most popular category - have a track record of being a great amazon seller.

This makes sense. Amazon doesn’t want to entrust order fulfillment at the busiest time of year to a flood of sellers who have never successfully sold on its platform.

Imagine the damage to Amazon’s reputation if there were a significant number of products being delivered that were of questionable quality or with damaged packaging - or worse yet, not arriving in time - to stressed-out customers who are trying to find that perfect gift with only days left to do so.

Customers wouldn’t remember the third-party seller who shipped the item. They would only remember that it came from Amazon.

What You Need To Know In Order To Sell Toys On Amazon In Q4

Understandably, Amazon wants to perform its best when the stakes are highest. So they created some requirements for those who want to play the Q4 game.

However, the email usually results in some confusion among new FBA sellers (actually all FBA sellers) who are not sure whether they’ll be able to sell toys.

Here’s a key takeaway: If you sell FBA and only FBA, you can ignore the email entirely. You’ll be able to sell Toys without a problem, whether you’ve sold your first item yet or not.  Because these guidelines are set in place for Merchant Fulfilling Sellers.

Because Amazon handles fulfillment, it knows the items will have been inspected when they arrived at the warehouse, will be prepped and packaged to its specifications, and will be delivered on time.

If you do want to Merchant Fulfill at all during the Fourth Quarter, then the email is for you.  But don’t worry, it still isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

If you haven’t sold anything on Amazon yet, you still have time to qualify to merchant fulfill toys, though you will need to act soon. If you’re still wondering how to get that first sale, read our Beginners Guide For Starting An Amazon Business.

And while you are at it, sign up for our Amazon Boot Camp and get the basics figured out prior to Q4.  Time is running out, so don’t waste it trying to piece together all you need to know in order to be a successful Amazon seller!

Alright, so here are the two most important bullet points from the email:

• Your first sale on Amazon.com must occur prior to September 19, 2016. The sale does not need to be specific to the Toys & Games store.
• You must process and ship at least 25 orders from September 1, 2016  through 31st October, 2016. The orders do not need to be specific to the Toys & Games store.

This is good news. This criteria is very reachable: You need to have made your first sale by Sept. 19, and then sold 25 items in total by Oct. 31.

Don’t get thrown off by the phrase, “You must process and ship.”You do NOT need to Merchant Fulfill 25 orders during that time frame. Your sales can be 100% FBA or a combination of FBA and Merchant Fulfilled.  

This is the MOST confusing thing about the email!  Many sellers panic thinking they will not be able to sell toys unless they start merchant fulfilling right now.  Not the case!

The point is that you’ve made a minimum number of sales and have proven yourself a trustworthy seller. Again, those sales can be ALL FBA and still grant you entry into Merchant Fulfilling during Q4.

Hint:  If you have already started selling on Amazon FBA, you should have NO PROBLEM qualifying to sell merchant fulfilled toys in Q4.  If you don’t end up meeting the criteria, you can STILL use the FBA program to sell toys in Q4.  So you are good to go my friend!

3 More Qualifiers To Selling Toys & Games On Amazon In Q4

Amazon has three other requirements, and points out that these do NOT refer to orders that use FBA:

• Your pre-fulfillment cancel rate for the period from 1st October through 31st October, 2016 must be no greater than 1.75%.
• Your late shipment rate for the period from 1st October through 31st October, 2016 must be no greater than 4%. 
• Your order defect rate must be no greater than 1% short term as of 1st November, 2016.

In other words, Amazon wants to make sure that if you Merchant Fulfill, you have done so successfully. They want to make sure that sellers ship on time, don’t have a bunch of returns, and that they don’t cancel orders on buyers.  If you have never merchant fulfilled, then you meet these criteria pretty much by default.

If you’re unsure of your status, you can check cancel rate, late shipment rate and order defect rate in the Performance section of your seller account.

Amazon says it will provide final notification about eligibility by Nov. 11 and will start monitoring the performance and listings of sellers approved to sell on Toys & Games starting Nov. 12. Of course, Amazon already monitors seller accounts, so this is nothing to be alarmed about.  This just means you will get an “official” congratulatory email stating that you can in fact sell in the Toys & Games category for fourth quarter on Amazon.

So that’s it! The Fourth Quarter will be here before you know it. If you are ready to knock this Q4 out of the park, make sure to check out our Q4 Profits Training Materials so you are ready to rock and roll when those toys start flying off the shelves!

(SOURCE)

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