How to get your money back for ATS failed deliveries
ATS Failed Delivery Issue
ATS does not deliver many products and unnecessary charges are levied on sellers. The reasons ranging from undeliverable address, customer rejects, attempted delivery and others. Unlike other marketplaces Amazon levies logistic charges even for undelivered products. Sellers have to bear these charges even though many buyers complain of delivery boys never contacting them.
If that is the case then these charges are recoverable. Please read this how to guide in order to recover your money.
Preparing data for potential cases
Amazon will refund most of the ATS money if you raise the cases properly with supporting evidence. For this you require some effort. You need to monitor each return and note down return details. Maintain an excel sheet in the following format
It contains the following
- Date of Return Product received
- Order Number
- Invoice Number
- Uniware Number: This is not required but we use it for our reference.
- Product Amount
- Return Type: We mark it as EasyShip Return or Customer Return
- Name: This is only for Customer Returns
- Refund/Disputes: If you receive a wrong product or do a partial refund mark it in this column. You can add any additional information as well.
- Return Courier Number
- Courier Amount Paid
- Customer Contacted: Mark this column Yes or No. If the customer contacts for non-delivery stating they did not receive the product mark this column Yes. This helps in identifying potential cases. To verify whether customer has sent you a mail, you will have to search each order ID in the messages list by clicking on messages tab.
- Reason for Return: For all EasyShip/ATS return we enter the reason for return. This column is important as it identifies the cases for which we can raise an issue and claim refunds. To get this detail you need to search individual order ID. Click on the tracking details and copy the statement before the product is being returned. In the image below paste the statement “Package arrived at courier facility” to this column.
Also please mark all those orders for which “Estimated Delivery Date”(EDD) had crossed in this column. EDD is available in the order details page. Refer the image below. If an attempt to deliver product was made after EDD the customer has right to reject. If customer rejects after EDD or the product was at hub till the delivery time expires, mark it here. Just type Estimated Delivery Date crossed.
Maintaining this excel sheet will help you in more than one ways.
- You can use it to identify if any product returns are missing. For every refund Amazon drops a mail stating “A refund has been issued for the <order-id>”. Every Saturday we match all the order ID in the mail with the orders in the excel sheet. If Amazon refunds anything additional without returning the product we can easily identify it. The product for which Amazon issues an additional refund will be in your mail but not in the excel sheet.
- If a customer drops a mail and is unhappy with the non-delivery. You could contact them and explain the issue thus building a good buyer seller relation.
- When you are under Audit, you may have to provide return details of each product. The return courier number is helpful there. If you are using Tally it is a good practice to enter this information for each credit note entry.
- All those sellers who are not under runway program can use this excel sheet to refund for return products.
- You can mark the status of orders for which you raised safe-t claim by using the Refund/Dispute column.
Most of the sellers complain that this task involves too much of effort. If we assume that you receive 10-15 parcels as returns it’s hardly half an hour worth of task. More than that we recommend hiring a dedicated person for this job. The amount you save by executing this task will be more than enough to pay their salary.
Identifying potential cases
Now that the excel sheet is ready we need to identify potential cases for getting reimbursement from Amazon. All cases where delivery attempts have been three times and no customer has contacted will not be entertained.
- Package arrived at courier facility: These are cases where the delivery attempt was never made. The return was directly from the hub. Raise a case with seller support by stating that there were no delivery attempts. Amazon refunds all the orders in this case.
- Undelivered/Rejected by you: Create a case if the customer contacts you stating they did not receive the product. Check if the delivery attempt was three times. If it was once or twice you can raise the case on those orders also. Amazon is a bit reluctant to refund in this scenario but if you provide supporting evidence they reimburse the amount.
- EDD crossed: As stated earlier you can raise a case for all products for which EDD was missed and get your reimbursement.
These scenarios work for FBA also. The method used here is not full proof. You can choose to add or delete columns. Please use the comments section below in order to suggest improvements.
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