Part of any business, no matter what it is, is providing excellent customer service. Your buyers aren’t faceless numbers, but human people who willingly buy your products because they like what you have to offer. And in return, treating them as such reinforces the notion you’re not aiming to become a person-guzzling corporation, but rather a business owner intent on making things right. Dealing with Amazon support and returns brings with it its own special customer service challenges, and we’re here to explore everything you need to know.
Customer Support: Self-Fulfilled Orders
As an online seller with your own Amazon Seller Central account, you have two choices in how to deliver the goods to a buyer: by yourself, or through Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA). If you choose the former, then you’re also tasked with customer support to ensure your buyers are happy and satisfied.
But what if you come across a customer who bought in an Amazon marketplace where you don’t speak the language? How do you offer stellar customer support to them?
As sophisticated as it may be, using Google Translate probably isn’t your best option. Click on this link to find out what happens to a language when it gets fed through Google Translate and analysed by a native speaker — the results are pretty funny, but they could prove disastrous for your business. While the link we just gave you showed a fairly mild version of what can happen, you don’t want to take any chances when translation requires utmost specifics and exactness. A better option is to use an actual native speaker, or source it out to a high quality third party.
Never Dilly-Dally, Even if You Don’t Have the Right Answer Right Away
One of the worst things you can do to your customers is avoid them, especially in sticky situations. Nobody likes being ignored, and nobody really likes being ignored when they’re trying to get a problem addressed.
This is why you should answer them as soon as anything comes up, giving yourself a maximum window of 24 hours. We know this can be tricky when navigating time zones where the time difference is more than a few hours, but things like email were invented for precisely this very situation. Even if you just shoot them a quick missive that says you’ve received their message and are looking into it, any response is better than letting an issue hang in the air.
Customer Support: Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA)
If you opt to have Amazon fulfil your orders, you’re in luck: they’ll take care of customer support for you, 24 hours of the day, seven days of the week. You never have to worry about a message going unanswered, as Amazon will take care of everything for you, including local language customer support for your foreign buyers.
And if you ever run into a buyer needing to return a product, FBA will do that, too, so you never have to worry about things like local return addresses or figuring out international returns shipping pricing.
Customer Returns: Self-Fulfilled Orders
We can have a tendency to see a return as a sign we failed in some aspect; if we didn’t, the customer should theoretically be happy with their purchase and want to hold onto it forever. But that’s not always the case and sometimes products have to be returned. And if that happens, it’s important to keep these three ideas in mind:
- You may have to charge the customer a restocking fee if the situation calls for it — Amazon’s policies will tell you how to go forward — or offer the customer a partial refund (again, for the latter, Amazon’s policies can guide you in this.)
- If you don’t want to hit your customer with restocking fees, a way to get around it is to pre-emptively work it into the product price. Returns are part of every business, so use a figure of your own that you’ve studied that works for you. Say your returns average 1% of your total income coming in; you’ll want to spread that over the cost of all your products so your buyers can return their products without having to worry about paying more.
- Try and set up a local return address for international orders so your buyers can return the product locally and avoid paying international charges, such as duties or customs. This isn’t an option that will work for everyone but for merchants who have a sales volume and unit price that fits in neatly with this, having a local return address can be easily offset by the cost of absorbing international returns.
Final Thoughts
Shipping and fulfilment are often the most challenging areas of online selling, but with expert tips in tow, you can improve this area of your online business. And for those Amazon sellers looking for other areas to help improve sales and margins, ensuring products are continually and competitively repriced is always a major factor—a repricing solution such as RepricerExpress will offer FBA sellers and other third-party sellers the ability to keep their pricing strategy right for their business and aim for more Buy Boxes and higher profit margins 24/7.
