Amazon launches new order feature! Extra $6 cost per order?

In the past two days, Amazon announced a new feature in the backend - order risk warning, which will effectively help sellers reduce the return rate by about 35%!

This feature is implemented like this. First, Amazon uses big data to analyze hundreds of dimensions of information to screen out potentially high-risk orders, which may be returned due to various reasons, such as delivery problems, wrong addresses, etc. Amazon will then label these high-risk orders with a "Signature Confirmation Service Recommended" label. Sellers can use the signature confirmation service to deliver these orders by clicking this button in Manage Orders. When these orders are delivered to customers, they will be asked to sign in person to confirm delivery. This ensures that as long as the package is signed for, it means it has been delivered to the customer.

If a customer chooses to return a signature confirmation order after delivery because the order was not received or lost, Amazon will initiate a further investigation into the customer's account. If Amazon itself handles the refund of such an order, the seller will receive additional weight in the appeal.

However, this signature confirmation service is not free and an additional fee of approximately US$3 to US$6 will be charged depending on the actual situation of the order.

Receive the goods but claim not to have received them and then return them. This kind of free orders has troubled Amazon sellers for a long time. Amazon's favoritism towards customers has allowed many people to exploit loopholes. There are even detailed video tutorials online that teach everyone how to contact Amazon customer service and pretend that they did not receive the goods so as to avoid returns and refunds and get the products for free.

This service can indeed effectively reduce this situation, and the timing at which Amazon chose to launch this service is very interesting.

There was a large-scale refund without return in the middle of last year, which happened shortly after the end of the Prime Day. At that time, many sellers suffered heavy losses, with dozens or even hundreds of orders for free refunds, but all of them were refunded without return.

There must be a group that deliberately operates this way to sell free products. They take advantage of the peak order time of Prime Day to fish in troubled waters and use the words they have sorted out to induce customer service to refund. Normal customer complaints must also be at a peak during Prime Day, and customer service is easily misled when they are tired of dealing with various customer complaints. This is also why free orders appear in large numbers right after Prime Day. The mastermind behind the scenes is to take advantage of the time when customer service is too busy to handle the orders.

Therefore, Amazon is now offering a “signature confirmation” service, which is intended to provide guarantees for orders placed on subsequent Member Days and protect sellers from being taken advantage of by certain illegal groups.