5 Common Amazon Selling Issues and How to Fix Them

Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hi. I really hope that you're well. Today's episode is going to be something a little bit different.

So as you can probably imagine, I deal with lots of issues on Amazon all of the time and I also get asked a lot of questions almost daily.

So whether that's in my Amazon made easy Q and A sessions or whether it's clients contacting me with issues and errors and things they're not sure about, even if you are selling on Amazon, you probably know it is quite a tricky place.

So what I thought I would do today in this episode, and I'd love to know what you think of this, if this is useful for you, is cover off five of the things that I have been asked about or dealt with over the last few weeks. So, five issues to do with selling on Amazon and let you know the advice I gave or the action I took to resolve it.

Because these are all things that are fairly common. They're things that I see come up time and time again. None of these, you know, none of these are things I'm looking at for the first time time.

So I thought that it might help you to know what I would do in, you know, in your situation and how I would go about resolving them.

So the first thing I'm going to talk about is you imagine you are listing your products on Amazon, whether this is your first time or whether these are just new products you're adding to your range. You go to add some products and you get a barcode matching error.

And what you find out is Amazon says, actually you can't use these barcodes because they're being used already and it turns out that someone else has fraudulently used your barcodes.

You might find out in this way or the other way you can find out is when you list your product and Amazon says, oh, actually that is not called whatever the product title you're giving it is actually, you know, that title of this product is something completely different.

But either way you find out that someone else has fraudulently used your barcodes to sell their products on Amazon, this shouldn't be something that should happen. Obviously, Amazon should be paying a bit more due diligence, which reason why it happens I believe is one thing is a long, long time ago.

So when I first started selling on Amazon, so we're talking almost nine years ago now, you could buy barcodes for your products from anywhere.

So you should hopefully know now that if you need to get barcodes, sell your products on Amazon or anywhere else, then you go to gs1.orguk and that is the website for buying barcodes for use in the UK and internationally as well.

But back then when I was selling on Amazon, and by the way, I did get my barcodes from GS1 because I like to follow the rules, but you didn't have to, you could buy barcodes like an Excel spreadsheet of barcodes on ebay. On Amazon. I was told you can buy them on Amazon, but all over the Internet you could buy barcodes.

People would be buying barcodes and then they'd be reselling them to other people.

A lot of that was happening and that has basically meant that if someone else, you could be using a barcode now, you might have purchased it really recently and you wouldn't know and perhaps GS1 wouldn't even know that somebody else was using that barcode 10 years ago, because back then it, it wasn't as regulated. So hopefully that gives you an understanding of how and why it's happened. It also could be that someone has deliberately stolen your barcode.

There's always that as well. So things to know if this happens is that, number one is it's absolutely fixable. It can seem like a massive pain when this happens.

It's something that's happened. I'm dealing with an issue of this right now. It is a bit of a headache. However, there is a way of getting around it.

First thing to say is that even though, even if you feel like, oh, no, someone's used my barcode and they shouldn't have done that, don't go down that route because Amazon, I hate to say this, but they actually don't seem to care about why this has happened. They will help you resolve the issue, but I don't believe they take any action against the seller.

And that might be something you want to look at yourself separately, but for the purpose of this, I'm just going to tell you how to get it fixed on Amazon. So it's actually fairly straightforward.

If you raise a case of Amazon and you can provide your GS1 certificate so you can prove that you own these barcodes and you can show some pictures of your product or the product's packaging that clearly has the barcode printed on the product that is actually all you need. If you raise a case with that, that is the evidence Amazon requires to fix this for you.

Now, we all know it may not be as simple as that because sometimes you get silly answers and sometimes things take a bit longer. But if you have that information, which you will, then you will be able to get this resolved.

So when it happens, it will feel like, you know, it'll feel like a big deal. It's certainly going to hold you back. It might mean you're not listing your products as quickly as you wanted to. It's another hurdle to jump through.

But I promise this is solvable, as is everything else we're going to discuss.

So the second thing I want to talk about is when you go to list your products and maybe you're trying to apply a content or you're trying to set up a store and there's an issue, and the issue is the brand name and the name on the brand registry don't exactly match.

Again, this is quite common and it might be something as small as maybe there's some punctuation, there's a dash or something in one of them that isn't in the other.

It could be the capitalization of words is slightly different, or it might be that your registered trademark and your brand name aren't an exact match.

For whatever reason, if you want to use Brand Registry, the brand name you put on your products has to be the registered trademarked name, because otherwise there won't be a match.

So in hindsight, if you're listening to this and you haven't yet done any of this on Amazon, do you make sure that the brand name you use on your products is the name that you will be registering with Brand Registry or the name that's with the process of registering with brand Registry, because making sure it matches is really important. But if you're trying to fix it subsequently, it is a bit of a pain for a couple of reasons.

One is that presumably you have gone to GS1 and you've bought barcodes for your products, you've probably got them printed on the packaging.

And once you've listed your products on Amazon using those barcodes and the, I'm going to say incorrect brand name, I'm not saying it means your brand name is wrong, but the, the brand name doesn't match your brand registry. Once you've listed your products with that barcode and that name, Amazon remembers that forever and ever.

So you can't just say, oh, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to Change. I'm going to change that myself. Amazon won't allow you to do that. So the only way around it is to raise a case.

Because if you decide, oh, well, there's two options. One option is to start from scratch.

Let's say you're new on Amazon and you haven't got any sales and you've got some spare barcodes you can use and your barcodes aren't printed on your packaging. There's a lot of ifs here, aren't there?

But if you meet all of these criteria, you could just say, okay, I'm going to scrap this listing and I'm going to start again. I'm going to sign a new barcode to this product and I'm going to list it with the matching brand name. Off I go. That's great.

Often we won't be in that situation. And if you were to discard your original listing and it's got some sales history and reviews against it, you're going to lose them.

So unless you're brand new to Amazon and you've, I don't know, made the typo in your brand name or something, please don't do that.

Instead, contact seller support and raise a case and explain to them why your brand name and brand registry name doesn't match and ask for it to be updated. I'm going to be really honest with you. When you do this, they're going to say no. Probably the first time, maybe the first five times.

But if you are persistent, I can promise you, every single time I've been in this situation with this exact scenario, I've managed to get it resolved by being persistent and going back and saying, you know, this is clearly the same brand, you know, because often you'll find it's something just. It's a tiny bit of wording, isn't that isn't the same. Maybe it's one word, as I say, maybe it's some punctuation. It's going to be similar enough.

And I promise, if you are persistent, and that's the key to a lot of this, actually, if you are persistent, you will get it changed eventually. But just be prepared. It will take a bit of time and it will feel like a bit of a struggle, but it is fixable.

So the next issue I want to talk about, number three, is something which is a little bit niche, but it happens. And that is, let's say you've sent in your stock for fba, but there's been a mistake.

So perhaps you have mislabeled your stock so let's say your product comes in pink and blue and you've sent in the pink one, but it's labeled as blue. Perhaps maybe you're using Amazon barcodes. Or let's say you just accidentally put the wrong thing in the box.

It happens, and it actually has happened to a client of mine really recently. And what they sent was actually something that wasn't even being listed on Amazon at that time and it just got sent in by error.

Amazon opened the box and said, well, what's this? This was not what expected. And there's a couple of things you can do in this situation.

So first of all, if the product is incorrectly labeled or you've sent in the pink one, it should have been the blue. So you've sent in the wrong stock against the wrong asin.

You can contact Amazon and say, oh, I meant to send in this product in blue, I've accidentally sent it in pink. This product in pink is listed on Amazon. Can you relabel it and assign it to that asin? There will be a relabeling cost to you for doing that.

If it's just a case of assigning the stock to a new sku, there isn't. There isn't a. There isn't a charge.

That's if you've just put the wrong thing in the box and you can say, oh, actually I told you I was sending this, but by mistake I sent in this product and you explain to them, then they will be able to reassign that and then there's no cost to you the other things you can do. So let's say you've sent in something and it was completely by error.

Maybe, like my client, it was something you weren't even selling on Amazon at the time. You've really got two options. One is you can get it returned to you. However, remember, you're going to pay for that.

So hopefully you haven't sent in lots and lots. And in that case you probably will be fine to get it sent back to you.

If, however, you've sent in maybe a couple of hundred units and you're now thinking, oh, gosh, it's going to cost me a lot of money to get it sent back, what can I do?

Another suggestion, and this is actually what we went ahead and did, is that product might not have been on Amazon, but now the stock's there, if there's. Unless there's a good reason not to, you could have a go at selling it.

So you could create a new listing for that product and then Say to Amazon, this is the ASIN for that stock that I sent in by mistake. Can you allocate it and see if you can sell any of them? I actually think that's the way. That's possibly the way to go.

It obviously depends on situations. You need that stock somewhere else. But that is absolutely possible and it's really viable as a solution.

Speaking of stock, I now want to move on to the fourth thing that I've been dealing with the last couple of weeks, which is excess inventory.

So you may know that if you've had stock on Amazon for a while, after 90 days, the cost of storage goes up and then it keeps going up after that and you start paying excess inventory fees. So let's say you like a client of mine. In that situation where you're holding too much inventory, what do you do?

First of all, and I know this is easy for me to say, the power of hindsight is try not to send too much stocking initially. It is much better to drip your stock into Amazon in small batches if that's viable for you. But let's say you're not in that situation.

You've got hundreds, let's say tens or hundreds of units of stock they haven't sold as quickly as you expected. What do you do? I think you've got a couple of options here. Number one is you can use this stock to fulfill orders for that product on your website.

If you're selling this product on Amazon and on your website, if any website orders come in, you can use the stock in Amazon to fulfill them. And there's an easy way that you can do that. So that will clear down some of it.

Another thing you could do is you could actually take this product off your website temporarily, so the only place people can buy it is Amazon, because then that again, not forces them, but drive them towards Amazon for that product. And that would actually work out slightly cheaper in terms of their fulfillment.

Another option is, and this is actually a little bit sneaky, but you could order a couple of items yourself as if you were a customer, so you could place an order for five of them, whatever, just to get that inventory down a little bit. None of these are ideal solutions, I should say.

Another thing you could do is put that item on sale or some at some sort of discount for a limited time, and maybe drive a bit of traffic to it by whether it's your email list or some other way or Amazon advertising.

I think the main thing is you don't want to pay for Amazon to return the stock to you because it's expensive, depending how many you've got, and you can look into the cost and how much it will be. But having Amazon send stock back to you is expensive.

So you need to weigh the cost of having the stock returned against the cost of storage and think about is there a way that you can feasibly start to sell these through? None of these are ideal solutions, as I've said, but I think the main thing is it being creative about clearing out some of your excess stock.

So hopefully that's given you a couple of ideas and then the final thing I want to speak to you about. This was something that was asked about in my Q and A call just this week.

My Amazon Made Easy Members was incorrect shipping settings where someone was saying, I'm really confused because I'm seeing what customers are paying for shipping and this doesn't look right. So you probably know you can update your shipping settings.

So your shipping settings are setting in the top right hand corner and this is if you're fulfilling orders yourself and have a look, you can basically set the cost of delivery by the weight of the item or by individual item. Something actually that you may not be aware of is you can set up different shipping prices for different products.

So you can set up different shipping plans with different prices, different dispatch times, different handling times to match all of your products. So if you find that, you know, if you've got one price for all of your products yet they fluctuate a lot in weight perhaps or size.

So maybe for some of them, you know, the shipping cost is fine, but for others, actually you're paying quite a lot for shipping because it's costing you more than what you're charging the customer.

Do know you can set up multiple shipping plans as well and use new templates, but your shipping templates are definitely something to go and have a look at. Also, if you find that Amazon is saying to you, oh, you're not meeting your delivery targets, go and have a look at your shipping settings.

You might have something in there where you've said you can dispatch everything the same day, who knows what you know what your settings are, but go and have a look because often there's something you can tweak that will make sure that you are then meeting those requirements again. So I hope you found this episode interesting, useful, trying to keep it quite short. I know it's quite different from the episodes I usually do.

If you're not on Amazon already, maybe you are bored by this or maybe hopefully you've taken something from it, and at least maybe some things to try and avoid, if nothing else. So I really hope that this was useful. I hope you enjoyed it. I would love to know.

As always, you can email me vikkiikkiweinberg.com and I will be back next week with another Amazon episode and on this coming Friday and every Friday with another great interview for you. So speak to you soon.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.