Azama Brands

Another fee added this year by #AmazonMarketplace. So far, #amazonsellers have had placement fees, low inventory fees, and now we have return fees. Inventory storage surcharges always made sense to me because you don't want to have #amazonFBA be a storage location; the fees drive a particular behavior, which is sending in 3 months or less of inventory at a time. However, the new fees appear to be entirely driven by the new Andy Jassy focus on profitability for shareholders rather than customer obsession, because what they are doing to smaller sellers is forcing sellers to raise prices and reduce selection. If you are lucky enough to be selling standard size products that are eligible, you can use #AWD to avoid the placement charges and low inventory fees, which are not negligible. One of the brands I sell is not; because of this, the salsas I ship from Texas (made in Mexico) usually ship to a local warehouse in Texas at about $130/pallet. This last shipment was almost $540 because I not only had to pay a placement fee for every unit, but I only ship a pallet at a time, and the replenishment FC was in New Jersey. Now I have to raise all of those items at least by $1/unit, potentially more, because of this new fee. Of course, even if you use AWD, you can run into problems. My first shipment for my own brand that is made in China and imported was from LA, and I was hard coded to Maryland, so they expected me to truck my shipments across the country. It would have required knowing someone at Amazon to request I get hard coded to the West Coast to fix this issue; however, I also ship by pallets from a brand I sell in Pennsylvania, so hard coding to the West Coast would make my East Coast supply chain prohibitively expensive. Even so, I still understood why they were doing it; you want sellers to adopt AWD? Make it financially impossible not to do so. Success! Inventory less than 28 days? Pass on that cost to sellers. Okay, so now I have to stock no less than 28 days and no more than 90 days. Noted. Placement fees too expensive? Break it into 5-6 shipments and pay to ship to the coasts myself - except when I can't because I'm shipping pallets; so, I raise prices. Fine. But now, there are also #amazonreturns fees if you're above the threshold in your category. One of my branded items is currently at 10.98% return rate. It's a flour jar, and contains 4.2 cups. Customers buy it, realize 4.2 cups isn't enough, and return it. It has a 4.8 star rating. I may have to discontinue the product because I simply can't afford to pay $4-5 in a return fee on top of the $6.85 I already lose with every return plus the COGS because customers invariably destroy the packaging and Amazon makes returns easy and reimbursements hard. Dharmesh Mehta - honest, transparent question -- what are #amazonsmallbusinesses supposed to do? This is not #customerobsessed. We are not large vendors; we can't optimize these costs without raising prices.