Avoid Product Safety Complaints
I’ve seen a lot of accounts lately with various types of Safety Complaints, Used Sold as New, Not as Described, etc.
These were primarily for products in Health and Personal Care (HPC), Beauty, and Grocery.
These categories are currently gated on purpose. Amazon allows just about anyone to sell as a 3p seller with little to no barrier to entry.
To protect consumers, these categories are monitored closely and are more likely than others to yield Performance Notifications for buyer complaints.
You can receive these notifications for virtually ANY kind of issue where your product fails to meet buyer expectations.
The biggest failures come from:
- packaging failing Amazon’s requirements (retail, shelf-display packaging is NOT adequate to meet Amazon’s standards) because it needs to be further protected.
- product safety seals don’t stay intact all the way from procurement to delivery
- aged stock results in poor quality. Even if the product is not expired or past the Best By date, poor warehouse conditions and simple aging can result in poor product performance.
- expiration dates are not clearly marked OR the product is outside of the Best By or Expiration Date. Use a tool like checkcosmetic.net or checkfresh.com to check cosmetics or something like aavso.org/jd-calculator to check Julian dates on grocery items. Familiarize yourself with Amazon’s Date standards for shelf life: sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/201003420
Make sure to comb through your inventory thoroughly to weed out any products which may not meet Amazon’s standards. On one account I was reviewing there were many asin’s in the current inventory which were over a year old. Those same asin’s were in the HPC category and this seller had no tracking method to make sure they were watching batch codes for expiry. My recommendation was to remove those items AND institute new processes to monitor all expiration dates, proactively removing any inventory which is aging but isn’t selling.
Of course, keep in mind, your entire inventory may need reviewed. There are many areas of potential concern beyond those mentioned above. These are just some of the most prevalent.
Set up an initial consultation to determine if an external audit of your inventory would be beneficial:
https://feedbackrepair.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?appointmentType=2209930
