Need Help with Wrong Measurements and Capacity Overcharge
I have a capacity overage of 152 cubic feet and an overcharge for $1500. But the products are tiny baby clothes that aren't more than 1cm in height folded neatly in poly bags. Amazon measured these clothes when they arrived at FBA (verified by the seller support people) and they were smaller than the remeasurement. I had these remeasured because I was incurring an overcharge for capacity overage for 37 cubic feet over capacity and since the clothes were showing as measuring larger than they really are, like someone bunched up the clothes in the middle of the bag and then measured the bag and the hump of no longer folded clothes in the center, when I asked them to remeasure they somehow grew even larger.
When Amazon "remeasured" them somehow they grew to 5cm high in thickness and now I am taking up 2.5 times the "space" I am supposed to at 152 cubic ft over, because each baby shirt is now the size of a 2 x 12 x 9 inch box. Which is outrageous and causing an outrageous fee - that is not only Unfair and Unethical, but the size they remeasured is flat out Untrue.
If I were to have these removed and sent back to me, it would cost even more than the overage fee, like nearly $3000! I spent my savings to start this clothing business and I don't have very much inventory as it is, I am trying to request a capacity increase to 260 cubic feet (which was originally 300 cubic ft and was dropped to 100) and have the clothing remeasured again, and they have denied me on the capacity request and haven't answered the re-remeasurement request. I tried to appeal, I am getting no where. It's not like it's thousands of capacity cubic feet like other sellers, I am not being treated equally even though I am equally invested, rather I am being stolen from.
I got on the phone with seller support and had to re explain the issue a total of SIX times because for some reason, every time I explained the issue, I was placed on hold and then promptly hung up on. What is going on??? I am beyond frustrated and exhausted from this and I need some help!
Need Help with Wrong Measurements and Capacity Overcharge
I have a capacity overage of 152 cubic feet and an overcharge for $1500. But the products are tiny baby clothes that aren't more than 1cm in height folded neatly in poly bags. Amazon measured these clothes when they arrived at FBA (verified by the seller support people) and they were smaller than the remeasurement. I had these remeasured because I was incurring an overcharge for capacity overage for 37 cubic feet over capacity and since the clothes were showing as measuring larger than they really are, like someone bunched up the clothes in the middle of the bag and then measured the bag and the hump of no longer folded clothes in the center, when I asked them to remeasure they somehow grew even larger.
When Amazon "remeasured" them somehow they grew to 5cm high in thickness and now I am taking up 2.5 times the "space" I am supposed to at 152 cubic ft over, because each baby shirt is now the size of a 2 x 12 x 9 inch box. Which is outrageous and causing an outrageous fee - that is not only Unfair and Unethical, but the size they remeasured is flat out Untrue.
If I were to have these removed and sent back to me, it would cost even more than the overage fee, like nearly $3000! I spent my savings to start this clothing business and I don't have very much inventory as it is, I am trying to request a capacity increase to 260 cubic feet (which was originally 300 cubic ft and was dropped to 100) and have the clothing remeasured again, and they have denied me on the capacity request and haven't answered the re-remeasurement request. I tried to appeal, I am getting no where. It's not like it's thousands of capacity cubic feet like other sellers, I am not being treated equally even though I am equally invested, rather I am being stolen from.
I got on the phone with seller support and had to re explain the issue a total of SIX times because for some reason, every time I explained the issue, I was placed on hold and then promptly hung up on. What is going on??? I am beyond frustrated and exhausted from this and I need some help!
61 replies
Seller_pJ9rbYGBUET1m
I got over charged $8,284 on Nov bill and have been fighting to sort it out for over 2 months.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
If you think the problem is your overage fees wait until you see your fulfillment fees.... those measurements push you into large standard size which get billed based on volumetric weight you so you're likely paying closer to $7-8 for fulfillment instead of what should probably be about $3.5-$4 per unit.
Expect a minimum 10% return rate which means for 1/10 units that $8 is nonrefundable + $2.5 return processing fee. So your total return expense is $10.5 per return or an average of $1.5 per unit. You'll be lucky if half that inventory is returned salable.
Wait until you see what one year of storage is.... when we started it was $1 a unit to give it 1 year to sell... now its closer to $4.
Apparel on Amazon is a disaster right now... between the returns, fulfillment fees and the insane storage fees all profitability is gone and it's way too easy to go negative.
We cut half our catalog last year because of the same issue you're dealing with.
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
This is exactly what has happened to us and is completely unfair and unethical!
We even have tiny short sleeved baby onesies measuring at 2-3" high. These are teeny shirts made from thin material. They are not even a centimeter thick. The only way one could be that high is if they wadded it up in a ball, and the only way it could measure in a square is because the measure the rest of the empty polybag and use the height of the wadded shirt to say the bag is now a box!! That's not the way I sent them to Amazon FBA, they were in perfect brand new condition, perfectly folded clothes in poly bags
They need to address the issue and measure clothing more carefully by laying it flat.
If I had known that it was this bad I would have never made the investment.
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
UPDATE: Amazon has agreed to override the 20 per month remeasurement rule and remeasure all of my products with a picture of the product lying flat before placing into the measurement scanning machine. About 200 of them.
They have given me one example of a pictures of my products in the scanner. Obviously it's NOT 1, 2, 3, or 4 inches high, and like some of the measurements were claimed, are also NOT 15.5 inches long or wide. Just like I have been insisting, and now here's the proof.
Not only is my apparel capacity off by more than 2.5 times the reality, but every FBA fee for every mismeasured SKU is more than 2.5 times what it should cost as well... also the aged inventory fee for such a LARGE item is outrageous.
These are baby clothes. The picture here is of a size 2T two piece pajama, for a little 2 year old baby. The fabric is bamboo viscose. It's thin silky material. It lays very flat in it's packaging. It's not a box. Also, you can see from the super crinkled up poly bag the way they have handled my products. These were perfect brand new un-crinkled nice clean smooth bags when they were sent in.
So the little crinkled up corner sticking up on the plastic bag also increases the size of the "box" to the height they didn't flatten completely, ? therefore I shall have to pay royally for every piece under this SKU and it will pretend to take up more than 2.5x the space in my capacity - the carelessness of handling the products in FBA is despicable!!!
I'll keep updating so everyone can see the outcome of this ...situation.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
I just opened 10 cases for our first 10 vacuum sealed units. Wish us luck
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
Here's some more compelling evidence, along with some of the disturbing effects of mis-measuring my baby clothes.
I haven't sent anything into my Apparel section of FBA since August 6, 2023. I sent in all 110 cubic ft and did my best to get a business off the ground.
The clothing was measured on arrival to FBA and immediately they were off by a whopping 47 cubic ft.
So in December when they cut my capacity from 330 cubic ft to 113 cubic ft, I started getting worried but hadn't realized the full impact of the situation.
Now somehow even though I never sent in even one more piece of clothes to FBA, they GREW to 259 cubic ft.
Check out the MASSIVE baby shirts Large Standard fee for aged inventory. So if I happen to sell one of these shirts (currently listed at 19.99) Amazon takes $2.00 for the referral fee, $6.10 for the Large Standard tiny shirt FBA fee, 0.21 storage fee, and a $17.62 storage cost due to aged inventory? Leaving me with -$6.14.
SO I'M PAYING AMAZON TO GIVE AWAY MY CLOTHES FOR FREE?
What GIVES Amazon!! Please fix this! And FYI, to everyone, I am having a hard time moving forward since they took the pictures of the Gigantic Baby Clothes, I haven't gotten anywhere. We're waiting for the next response and the case has been open for two weeks with 4 pages of case correspondence, several phone calls and multiple chat sessions.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
I'm sorry you're going through this but I'm grateful to have someone to commiserate with. I've been pulling my hair out and we've literally been preparing our exit strategy from Amazon apparel after 10 years because it has felt so helpless.
Over the past 2-3 years I've really been getting the feeling that US based 3rd party apparel sellers aren't welcome here anymore. It's all now foreign, merch on demand or vendors. We got rejected for merch on demand btw... even though we have proven success with our designs... /sigh
All that said, the recent commission changes were a glimmer of hope that Amazon may want to continue to protect it's Apparel catalog.
If we keep highlighting this issue and with some help from @Topher_Amazonand the mods hopefully this can get into the right hands.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
Don't forget to factor in ads, returns and your inventory cost as well....
Imagine last year that referral fee would have been $3.40!
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
I empathize with you as well. It's a ridiculous position to be in, that Amazon now is the dictator of the success of our businesses. I have another business on Amazon that I started before the clothing business and have been selling for 5 years here. Things have changed a lot since we started and definitely not for the better.
I hope Amazon will take responsibility for their mistakes here and remeasure in a fair way. I think every ASIN with identical designs except for color or pattern should have identical fees and they should be measured correctly.
I do hope that bringing this up publicly will help bring resolve for all of us facing this issue and I will keep highlighting and updating as this goes on.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
My frustration may be peaking now, our vacuum sealed products are being remeasured and somehow amazon is getting that they are over .75 inches in height. They are not!
We've spent months and now significant amount of money on an industrial sized vacuum sealer as per Amazon's suggestion and we are still getting bad measurements.... This is insane.
Time to get lost in the seller support rabbit hole
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
That was my first thought because the nature of vacuum sealing has an unevenness or little pieces of plastic can stick up here and there.
We used to have a business in 3rd party logistics and it was the same story with the dimensional scanners they use that ended that business. If a piece of tape or plastic was hanging off a box a little bit, it automatically counts it as the length of a package. Can't tell you how many times we had to fight that, but it became increasingly stressful...
This has become that business all over again. Amazon insists that their Cubiscan is accurate, which it clearly is Not. They need to measure clothes manually with humans, because of the nature of clothing, it cannot be measured in a laser scanning device without errors. At least humans could lay it flat and measure it's height and since humans have to put it in the machine, I have confidence that humans can use a measuring tape and come up with an accurate measurement.
My last communications from seller support has been the same message copy/pasted multiple times over and it's been days since I've had any other kind of encouraging response:
"Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
My name is Yaadah Yaadah from Escalation Team and I will be glad assisting you today. Due to current experience the case has been escalated to our dedicated team.
I understand that you are concerned with the dimensions related issue for multiple FNSKUs.
I also understand that how important this is for your business.
We would like to inform you that we have reached out to the internal team.
Once we get any information we will update you
We appreciate your understanding and patience during this interim.
Thank you for selling with Amazon,
Yaadah Yaadah
Amazon Resolution Specialist"
What a ridiculous response, they care and understand? HAHA. Okay. Saying that is not helpful when no resolution is made.
The packing slip documents that match the total amount of pieces and styles should have been enough to prove the amount of space the clothing take up. But no, they rely on Cubiscan to make up numbers and steal from sellers.
I hope @Topher_Amazon has some strings to pull for us on this.
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
We will soon be putting ourselves on the waiting list for the strategic account services program... hoping that having an advocate within Amazon might help us
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
Your experience with the 3rd party logistics provider is not encouraging at all....
I'm optimistic to a fault but Amazon is willing to reduce their commissions from 17% to 5% to bring their prices down... It seems that getting accurate measurements and fulfillment fees that could literally bring the average sales price down by $3-6 per product while still protecting seller profitability would be a no-brainer.
I'm convinced that the right people do not know that this is an issue.
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
I wasn't aware there was a waiting list for the account services, hopefully that's a good route to go. I'm not sure though, from what I've read is that they just tell you to advertise and send things to FBA. I did have an account rep when I first started selling on Amazon, and honestly, they told me that the can't help with any seller support issues. Hopefully the strategic account services program is different.
The reduction in commissions is promising... and I am trying to be optimistic too... I agree with you completely, Amazon would see a lot more profit if we could safely drop our prices for customers.
I've seen about 6 remeasurements between Tuesday-Thursday and they were all still off by a lot, and I haven't heard anything from seller support since their last message. I guess it's the weekend now, and they all get to take the weekends off even though these issues don't stop on the weekend. I'll be patiently waiting!
Seller_0qyRtqm32cQSi
so far 10/10 remeasurements are showing INCHES in height on my vacuum sealed packaging which we vacuum sealed specifically to ensure that it couldn't even be inflated to over .75 inches
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
Exactly the same on my end. How fair are they. They are stealing from us. I'm considering cutting my losses and just taking my stuff out. Total disappointment and I'll also be assessing arbitration options.
@Topher_Amazon - They closed my case today with no resolution. As usual, no one can count on Amazon to be honest or handle situations like this fairly. Can you please help me now?
Seller support just deflects everything and denies everything and never does anything positive come out of a request for help.
Here's the message I received today from seller support (and Expected to receive..) and as expected as well, they didn't address anything that I actually wrote to them about and made phone calling and chatting an absent option:
Greetings from Amazon,
Thank you for contacting Amazon Selling Partner Support. My name is Aman. I am a Resolution Specialist and I will be taking care of your case today.
I completely understand the urgency of getting this issue resolved, and I also empathize with the frustration it has caused. Kindly accept my apologies for the delay and for any inconvenience. Rest assured, we are working diligently in order to provide you the best outcome possible.
I understand you are stating that the carrier stated your products do not exceed 110 cubic feet when it was shipped to the US, however we are unable to manually update the dimensions of your listings based on this information or based on the other proofs you have provided. As per Amazon policy, products are measured using FC equipment when your inventory is stored at Amazons fulfillment centers and cannot be manually measured or manually updated.
I would like to inform you that measurements override cannot be performed as the products seems to have deformable/ loose plastic bag packaging which would lead to varying measurements every time the measurement is done.
To avoid variance in dimensions, ensure that the packaging does not have loose/extra packaging by using methods such as tight-fitting or vacuum-sealed polybags, or taped flaps.
Also, Kindly be noted that the capacity limit increase for the requested month has been denied.
Capacity limits are announced monthly. You will receive one capacity limit per sort type for each month. You can view your capacity limits and capacity usage in the Capacity Monitor at the bottom of the FBA dashboard https://sellercentral.amazon.com/fba/dashboard.
Maintaining enough inventory to cover between 30-60 days of your expected sales is a good guideline to help you reduce excess and improve sell-through. You can request additional capacity through the Capacity Manager for the upcoming month, at a reservation price that you select. If granted, you will have early access to that capacity, up to one month in advance. To learn more about the Capacity Manager, please visit the help page: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GM6SJGQDA625AUCJ
Please note: If you are currently seeing an estimated overage fee on the capacity monitor, you need to take action to reduce your on-hand inventory to be within your allotted limits. You will be charged an inventory storage overage fee if you exceed your capacity limit at any point in the month.
I recognize that this is not the result that you were hoping for, but I want you to know that I did my best to provide you with the correct information based on our current policies. I appreciate your understanding in this matter. At this point, I will be resolving this case as no further action that can be taken at this time.
To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
Were you satisfied with the support provided?
Yes
No
Thank you for selling with Amazon,
Aman A.
Amazon Resolution Specialist
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
@Topher_Amazon Even Amazon Seller Support recognizes this fact so isn't it common sense that measuring this way is Not Accurate?
Quote from seller supports message:
Therefore they wont be helping with fair fees? How is this okay? This needs to be fixed immediately, it's unethical.
It was already measured on arrival before they mishandled it. Then they remeasured after mishandling to try to get thousands in fees. It's obviously intentional thievery at this point.
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
Amazon ruined my products. We did a test buy to find out the way they have been handled and why remeasuring resulted in the "growth" of baby clothes and we found out why! They also REFUSE to remeasure properly and INSIST that they get to keep their mismeasurements and charge me for their mistakes.
Because Amazon's employees literally mangled our clothing bags by mishandling them with the utmost disregard and disrespect of my investment that I pay to have at the fulfillment centers. I want a reimbursement for the made up measurements and I want the large standards fixed into small standards.
Amazon DAMAGED my products and their packaging, and at this point, they can pay for all of the clothes and reimburse me for the damage of all of it.
I am not accepting these insane fees for the mismeasurements and mishandling of my products. I did NOT Send them in looking like this, I sent in brand new beautifully folded clothes in perfect poly bags.
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
Unfortunately @Topher_Amazon said he would help but has completely ignored this post since originally saying he'd help. And no other mods have stepped in.
I have continued this fight almost daily and they are currently putting me through an endless loop of "you have -213 remeasurements remaining for this month so we are closing the case without fixing our mistakes". Odd considering since there hasn't been a single remeasurement in March...
Are they helping you with your remeasurements? Any success?
Seller_LaR0wzinE1rAd
That's good you got them to show you pictures. They only showed me pictures the one time and since I haven't gotten anywhere with this.
If the laser in the cubiscan machine was so accurate, it would not take the highest height and apply it to the entire product, it would calculate the actual space it takes. Amazon needs to change the way they measure clothes because it's downright unfair. We already pay them for FBA services, why do we need to make our products "amazon proof" if Amazon wants the business... shouldn't they value our businesses that makes them money?
I do have an idea for "amazon proofing" future products though, instead of plastic bags, they could placed in card stock envelopes or something similar. What do you think about that?
