Amazon advertising bug makes you lose money! If you don’t take the initiative, it’s your brother-in-law’s money.

Before the Chinese New Year, we reported an incident in which Amazon’s backend overspent sellers’ advertising budgets. A $15 daily budget could result in actual spending of tens of dollars.

For a detailed description of the incident, please click on the link below to review our report in January.

Something went wrong with the backend ads! Have you been overpaid by Amazon ?

At the end of the incident, Amazon still gave everyone a response, but the content was very ambiguous and did not give a definite answer as to whether compensation would be provided.

They just admitted that the budget exceeded was a system bug, but they cleverly used the concept of "the daily budget set by the seller is actually the average daily consumption of the monthly budget" in the email.

That is to say, although the seller sets a "daily budget of $10", the system's budget running standard will be based on a total budget of $300 for 30 days per month . In this way, if one day has more and another day has less, it is normal that the monthly budget will not exceed $300 at the final settlement.

The reason why this explanation was given in the email is that we are definitely prepared to control the sellers' advertising expenses in the future so that everyone does not exceed the monthly budget during the monthly settlement, which will give us a reason not to compensate everyone.

In the next few days, Amazon began to suppress sellers’ advertising budgets as expected. Most sellers’ spending on that day did not even reach the daily budget limit, and the advertising stopped automatically after running a little bit.

The sellers were supposed to complete the 10 dollars a day, but after 3 dollars, it was shown as an excess and stopped automatically. Amazon tried to embezzle the compensation that the sellers deserved by robbing Peter to pay Paul!

Is it really possible for my brother-in-law to succeed like this?

Before the Chinese New Year last year, Teacher Alice taught everyone in a live broadcast how to ask Amazon to recover the excess budget that was deducted from them in this BUG incident.

The extra budget spent has been compensated by the government!

Let’s take a look at the official reply email first

After filing a case appeal, this student successfully received compensation from Amazon. The $105 collected on January 17 was all returned to the seller’s account in the form of “Over Delivery Credits”!

Obviously, if the seller does not argue with Amazon and insist on safeguarding his legal rights, the matter is likely to be left unresolved, and the fees that are not actively pursued will be embezzled by Amazon on the grounds of "the monthly budget has not been exceeded" as mentioned above.

Although this is not the first time that Amazon has embezzled money, it is impossible for sellers to just let their profits be taken away right under their noses, so go ahead and file a case to appeal for the money!

Now I will briefly tell you the key points when dealing with it.

First of all, you need to preserve the evidence. Even if you didn’t take a screenshot in time, you can fix the date of the advertisement to the day of the incident (January 17 or 18. Sellers who missed this incident can also look back to see if they were overpaid). You can also take a screenshot of the abnormal advertising expenditure.

Then, when writing a complaint letter, be careful to write down the serious consequences of the problem. For example, explain to the customer service that this is a serious violation of the financial law, and the exponentially increased budget has also brought customers a bad shopping experience. Attach your screenshots and information such as the name of the ad group. If the above-mentioned ads have automatically stopped running in advance to "balance" the monthly budget, also attach screenshots.

Amazon is a very cunning company (otherwise how could it have the world's largest market value). This may only cause a small loss to the seller, but with such a large seller base, Amazon's BUG can involve hundreds of millions of dollars. It will naturally not take the initiative to admit its mistakes and refund the money. The seller's indifference may encourage Amazon's culture of not caring about sellers. Therefore, we sellers must not give in to such a small amount of money. We must open a case and send an email to get our losses back!