Follow-up to the invoice incident, a deduction bug appeared in Amazon’s official service!

Do you remember the invoice incident that caused a lot of confusion for sellers some time ago? A large number of orders on the European site showed "missing invoices" and sellers didn't know what to do for a while.

We have analyzed the reasons in detail in previous articles (click here for details), so I will just briefly introduce them here. Amazon announced a new policy at the beginning of the year, requiring European sellers to provide invoices for every B2B order.

The lack of invoices this time is because Amazon has extended the original B2B order requirements to ordinary 2C orders. So the solution is also very simple, upload the invoice according to the requirements or use Amazon's own VAT calculation service - VCS.

Manual uploading is still a rather tedious task, after all, you have to do it for each order yourself, so after this incident, many sellers still choose to use VCS services.

However, after further investigation, we heard different opinions from several of our sellers who were already using the VCS computing service - this VCS service has some very serious flaws!

VCS flaws

VCS is a service that automatically calculates VAT and can also automatically generate VAT invoices and provide them to buyers.

However, its drawback is that it cannot distinguish between self-delivery orders and FBA orders. If you choose to enable the VCS service, the system will automatically calculate the value-added tax for all orders.

This means that even self-delivery orders that do not meet the conditions for collecting VAT (distance sales) will be calculated and deducted.

▲Students and teacher Alice reported the bug

Everyone should be able to see the irrationality of this. For self-delivery orders that do not reach remote sales and are shipped outside the EU, VAT does not need to be paid (the tax number is still required).

However, once VCS is turned on, it will be identified as self-delivery from the EU, and taxes will be automatically calculated and withheld.

If the VCS service is turned off, the seller will have to upload invoices manually for each order, which will increase the workload. Now the seller and his tax agent have reported this BUG to Amazon, but have not received an official response yet.

So can VCS still be used?

As mentioned above, manually uploading invoices is a very complicated task. VCS can indeed save sellers a lot of time.

So it is definitely necessary to use it, but the extra cost caused by full tax declaration is completely an unnecessary disaster for self-delivery sellers. Amazon also needs to explain and correct this.

▲VCS settings page cannot be selected

This BUG is actually very easy to solve. Sellers can choose whether to enable VCS globally or only use VCS for FBA orders.

In fact, such changes are also very consistent with the actual usage scenarios of sellers. FBA orders are numerous and complex, and VCS automated calculations save a lot of time; and a small number of self-delivery orders can upload invoices by themselves, which will not take up too much time for sellers.

As for where the extra money caused by the bug went, everyone knows it well. This is another operation that is very consistent with Amazon's style. If the seller doesn't tell me, I will just keep it for myself . The same situation occurred with the bug that caused the advertising budget to overflow at the beginning of the year.

At that time, a large number of sellers found that they spent more than ten times the budget on advertising, but Amazon had an ambiguous attitude towards this and did not want to refund the money. It claimed that the budgets set by sellers were daily budgets, and advertising campaigns would run according to the monthly budget (daily budget * 30), so overflow was normal.

Until the matter became more and more serious and the sellers' opposition became more and more intense, Amazon was forced to jump out and say that this was a global technical bug and promised to refund the excess fees to the sellers.

The change in the official attitude is due to the large-scale protests and complaints from sellers, so we sellers must speak out, oppose and protest against Amazon’s unequal treatment! Only in this way can the official pay attention to their mistakes and give us sellers justice!

Sellers on the European site must open a case with the official to explain this BUG. If you have already opened VCS and incurred losses, you must file a claim! Only when our team grows, can we get back the profits that originally belonged to us!

Teacher Alice and we will also contact the relevant senior executives of Amazon to report this issue. If there is a loss or sellers who want to jointly ask the official to modify VCS, please scan the QR code below to contact me to report the situation!