23 Feb AtoZ Guarantee: What is Amazon’s complaints service like?

• As with all things Amazon, customer satisfaction is the priority, which is why they place so much emphasis on complaint handling.
• This «A to Z» coverage offers extra security to the end consumer when faced with a faulty, delayed or incorrect order.

Surely at some point, you’ve bought something online and when it arrived, it either wasn’t what you expected, it took longer than expected to arrive or it was in poor condition. It’s a more common problem than you might think and often the most tedious thing to do is to go through the complaint process.

This involves contacting the seller, usually by email, waiting several days, having to repack the order, taking it to a logistics centre and waiting for a refund or a new unit to be sent to you. This is the case when you receive a delivery, but whenever your order doesn’t even arrive, the feeling is even worse, as often the price refund doesn’t compensate for the inconvenience or the time wasted.

For all these reasons, Amazon offers coverage for Sellers who don’t operate under its logistics. This is known as the «A-to-Z Guarantee».

If you want to know everything you need to know about this service, whether you’re buying or selling, read on. At Nozama Solutions, we offer you more than 10 years of experience working with Amazon.

What is the A-to-Z guarantee?

It’s a service that protects you as a customer when you buy products on Amazon. It covers the timely delivery and condition of your items, as well as problems with returns.

This guarantee applies to products sold and managed by a marketplace or third-party seller, i.e. not including products under the Prime label or where Amazon is the seller.

In these cases, when you have a problem with the condition of your order or with the delivery, you should contact the seller directly. Then, depending on their response, the next step is to go to Amazon and make use of this extra guarantee.

You can make use of it if the following main conditions apply:

• If you’ve contacted the seller and waited two business days for them to respond.
• You haven’t received your package and three days have passed since the latest estimated delivery date, or the tracking shows that it has been delivered when this is not the case.
• The item you received is damaged, defective, or not as described on the details page.
• You returned an item, but you haven’t received the relevant refund.

To start the process you simply need to contact Amazon, either by phone or online. There are also certain cases where the Seattle company acts «ex officio» if they see that you’ve tried to contact the seller but to no avail.

What can you do as a seller?

The most important thing to be aware of as a seller with complaints is that they can ruin your defective order ratio, because if it goes above 1%, Amazon will start penalising you.

To deal with any complaints you receive, you should access the «Reply to Amazon» section from Seller Central. Once there you can handle them, for example by providing a replacement product if it’s defective.

In the event that you haven’t proceeded to resolve the complaint for any justifiable reason, you must provide any evidence that proves that you are right. For example, if the customer is claiming that the order hasn’t been delivered, at Nozama we can provide proof of delivery from the transport company, with the signature and ID of the person collecting the package.

Once you provide all the documentation, the status of the claim can be:

• Granted, financed by Amazon: In this case, they agree with the customer but assume that you as the seller have done everything right and therefore they pay for the refund of the product. This can occur, for example, when the customer claims not to have received the product but you enclose the signed delivery order.
• Granted, financed by the seller: Here the customer is considered to be right, so you will have to pay the price to them.
• Under review: Amazon is deliberating.
• Closed, order refunded: Once you pay the refund to the buyer, the claim is closed.
• Closed, complaint withdrawn or denied: Either the customer withdraws it or Amazon, after studying the complaint, decides not to accept it and agree with you.

It’s worth nothing that neither the latter claims nor those that end up being paid by Amazon end up forming part of the ratio of defective orders. In spite of this, you should be very cautious in your handling of the complaints you receive.