How Amazon Reimbursement Services and Tools Work
What’s keeping you from using Amazon reimbursement services or tools? Choose the right service or tool for filing your FBA refund case by learning how they work, how much they charge, and what you can expect from the process.
In a previous post, we showed you how to file a claim on amazon for your FBA reimbursement. We recommended using Amazon reimbursement services or tools if you have a hard time doing the manual process.
FBA reimbursement providers are great options for Amazon sellers who are dealing with a lot of inventory and don’t want to deal with the cumbersome refund procedure. As it stands, most sellers don’t even know about Amazon’s reimbursement policy. And you have to go through a very tedious process to learn if your Amazon seller account is eligible for a reimbursement.
However, a lot of sellers who could benefit from these services or tools also view them with a skeptical eye. For one, Amazon sellers are fearful that using these tools could threaten the security of their seller accounts. The biggest fear is that these tools could use the seller account to be hacked or accessed by parties with malicious intent.
Also, sellers are concerned about the ramifications of using third party services or tools for filing their reimbursements. They worry that this could get them into trouble with Amazon policies and cause their seller accounts to get suspended or banned.
These fears are quite understandable since sellers do not understand how exactly these tools work. This post aims to shed light on Amazon sellers’ common questions and concerns when it comes to FBA reimbursement services and tools.
What are Amazon reimbursement services or tools?
Amazon reimbursement services and/or tools are third-party providers that help you get money that you’re owed by Amazon due to lost or damaged inventory, FBA charge errors, mistakes in customer returns, and other inventory management-related issues. As an FBA seller, you pay Amazon to take care of managing your inventory and fulfillment processes. So you’re eligible for a refund when something happens to your items and inventory and Amazon is at fault.
These third-party providers can be Amazon agencies or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms that take care of getting your reimbursements in exchange for a certain fee. Some Amazon agencies that offer account management for you, for instance, also provide fba refund processing as part of their services. These agencies use either manual or their own automated system to recover money for you.
Majority of the reimbursement tools, like Seller Repay, operate on a SaaS model. They develop and maintain a software that makes it easy for Amazon sellers to identify and calculate potential reimbursements. Seller Repay, for instance, comes with a dashboard that has several tools for amazon sellers to audit your account for inaccurate FBA fees, customer returns, and lost, missing or destroyed goods.
How do FBA reimbursement services and tools work?
As we’ve noted earlier, the main difference between services and tools is that the former might employ a manual way of doing your reimbursement. The latter, meanwhile, uses technology to automate the tedious aspects such as data retrieval and download or inventory reconciliation. In a sense, using a reimbursement service is similar to getting another person to do the manual tasks for you.
Most FBA reimbursement tools are web-based so you can access them anywhere as long as you’re online. This means you can use desktops, laptops, tablets or mobile phones to start and monitor the reimbursement process.
How the tools work may vary across providers but at Seller Repay, we’ve made sure that you can get started easily with filing your FBA reimbursement claims:
To begin, you would need to create an account and then sync your Amazon seller account inside the Seller Repay dashboard. Our software will automatically scan your account for refund-eligible items
Once the audit is done, our software will notify you if it found potential reimbursement claims that can be filed.
You can start filing the claim with Amazon using templates that we’ve provided for specific cases you’re eligible for. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for results from Amazon’s investigation
Contrary to what a lot of sellers think, legitimate FBA reimbursement tools like Seller Repay do not automatically file your cases for you. Doing this could put you in the crosshairs of Amazon policy so you should be wary if a certain tool promises this.
Also, trustworthy tools will employ high levels of encryption and other security features. This minimizes the risks to your seller account being compromised by data breaches and hackers. Seller Repay, for instance, is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the same platform Amazon uses.
Our software accesses your seller account data exclusively through the Amazon Merchant Web Services Application Program Interface (MWS-API). This means that unlike hiring a VA or an agency, you don’t have to turn over information such as your Amazon seller account credentials to Seller Repay. You have to sync your seller account to the dashboard where it automatically gets encrypted.
How much do these services and tools cost?
The two common pricing models used by both Amazon reimbursement services and tools are:
Subscription-based fee
Commission-based fee structure
For some tools, you have to pay a monthly or annual fee to keep using the service (eg. Refund X-Ray, RefundPad, Helium10’s Refund Genie). Should you decide to use subscription-based tools, prepare to shell out anywhere from $19 to $97 per month that you subscribe.
For some agencies, the reimbursement fee may be built into the retainer or package fees. Since agencies that offer reimbursement service often do things manually, you’ll usually be billed for the number of hours they worked on filing your case with Amazon.
Most FBA reimbursement tools, on the other hand, operate on a commission-based pricing scheme. What this means is that you get charged a certain percentage on any amount that’s successfully reimbursed by Amazon. The percentage varies across tools, but most charge 25 percent in commissions. We at Seller Repay charge one of the lowest fees at 20% commission rate.
The choice to go with subscription or commission-based services or tools depend on you. But an obvious advantage of commission-based tools is that you don’t have to worry about paying anything if it doesn’t prove useful to your business. In fact, the commission-based scheme is even better than pay-as-you-go tools. Since you pay a percentage on successful refunds, you don’t have to pay anything if you file a claim and get denied by Amazon. This goes to say that these tools have an incentive to be really effective at getting you reimbursed. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to make money as a business.
How effective are they?
In general, Amazon seller reimbursement services and tools are fairly effective. Amazon is only happy to take your money if you neglect to file your refund case. So it’s worth it to use these services and tools if you don’t have the time or the patience to diligently follow up your reimbursement claims.
While we can’t speak for other tools, we’ve successfully recovered more than £70,000 in reimbursements for Amazon sellers. One of our long-time customers, for instance, has been able to recover approximately £3,000 every year using the Seller Repay software.
Of course, you should also take other things into consideration should you decide to use these services and tools. For instance, you should check whether they have responsive customer support in case you run into issues with your reimbursements.
Simplifying your FBA refund
FBA reimbursement services and tools provide a solution to the tedious and time-consuming Amazon refund process. The number of providers are steadily increasing so it’s up to you to choose which one best fits your needs and requirements. What’s important is that you get a service or tool that simplifies the task of filing your reimbursement at a price you can afford.
As with any Amazon seller tool, you should learn how these services work so you have the confidence to fully use and maximize the benefits. If you still have questions about reimbursement services and tools, we are always here to help. You can schedule a demo with us if you need to see first-hand how Seller Repay works to get your Amazon reimbursement.
