How to Keep your Amazon FBA Account Health in Check

Selling on Amazon is not as easy as you think. Just like every business, there are metrics that you need to maintain. Amazon also has its own policies and metrics that you have to adhere to in order to continue selling on Amazon. Think of it as quality control. As a seller, you have to adhere to a marketplace’s rules and regulations to ensure that you are selling legal and non-dangerous goods to the consumers. The most important is your Amazon account health.

Monitoring your Amazon account health benefits you in two ways. First, it helps avoid product suspension. Second, and most important, it helps prevent account suspension. Imagine losing thousands of dollars worth of inventory and income when your product or account gets suspended. That is why constant monitoring of your Amazon account health is crucial. It is best to monitor your account health weekly or even daily to immediately determine any issues. 

To further help you in monitoring your account health, here are the top 8 metrics that you need to watch out for:

Amazon Account Health Metrics

1. Overall Score – To check your account health, simply log in to your Amazon seller central account then click on Performance Tab > Account Health. Below you will see a sample image of what it looks like.

To prevent suspension, address any account issues that show fair or poor. You need to immediately fix whatever issue it is. There are instances that sellers do not check this and their account gets suspended overnight. 

2. Order Defect Rate – This measures the account’s 60-day over all ability as far as customer satisfaction is concerned. The order defect rate needs to stay below 1%. Factors to consider are negative feedback and claims or chargebacks to your products.

This means that if your claims or chargebacks are low, most likely your customers are happy with their purchases. Moreover, customers will not leave negative feedback if they are happy with your products and services. 

3. Refunds – Refunds are inevitable. They can be as minor as choosing the wrong variant of your product or a defective product. You should have clear policies in providing refunds which should also be visible to your customers. Let them know which circumstances are eligible for refunds. In most cases, just to satisfy the customers, you can offer them a courtesy refund. 

You can also request your customers to update their feedback after you have applied a refund. However, be careful when wording your request. Just let the customers know that you have refunded them and if they would like to reconsider or update your review. NEVE request them to remove the negative review or offer a refund in exchange for a positive review. Most customers will update their score when you have provided good customer service. 

4. Response time – Amazon penalizes accounts that have a response rate of more than 10% in 24 hours. Thus, you have to respond to your messages within 24 hours. This includes weekends and holidays. The best thing to do is to create message templates for generic issues, then just personalize them according to the customer’s concerns. You can even create message templates on Amazon per country. This way, each member of your team can simply choose from them and respond accordingly. 

5. Seller feedback – Ideally, seller feedback should be at 5 stars. Seller feedback is all about your performance as a seller. Check your feedback manager daily. You can do this by going to Performance > Feedback. Post a public reply or send the buyer a message. You can also request the removal of feedback that are about products. Again, this should be part of your daily routine. 

6. Perfect orders – Think of this as quality control. Read through your customers’ reviews and determine the top complaints, if any. If you keep getting returns or requests for refund due to a common defect, it is time to reach out to your supplier. If the issue is with regard to shipping and handling, reach out to Amazon FBA and have them correct this. 

7. Product performance – Check your product listings regularly to see how they are performing. Check your inventory and see which products are running out. Replenish your inventory accordingly so you don’t have to pay for expedited shipping when they run out. Update your listings, too, and make sure your content and keywords are relevant. 

8. Invoice Defect Rate – Effective June 2020, Amazon rolled out a new performance metric. The Invoice Defect Rate measures the invoicing experience for business customers. Based on Amazon’s invoice policy, the defect rate should be below 5%. Thus, sellers should issue an invoice 24 hours or 1 business day from the shipping confirmation. You can sign up for Amazon’s automated invoicing service to handle this or have a virtual assistant check for invoices daily. To check for business accounts needing an invoice, log in to seller central then go to Manage Orders. Click View FBA Orders, then filter the number of days. It is best to go as far as 30 days. Click on the No Invoice Uploaded tab and you will see all the accounts who require an invoice, if any.

Conclusion

Monitoring your Amazon Account Health is crucial to your success as an Amazon seller. If you have a big business, you can create the templates and outsource a virtual assistant to regularly check in and respond to feedback, reviews, and messages from customers. 

If you need help on how to get started, give us a call and we’d be glad to help you out.

“Refuse to attach a negative meaning to the word ‘no.’ View it as feedback. ‘No’ tells you to change your approach, create more value or try again later.”

– Anthony Iannarino, international speaker, expert on B2B sales