Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Marketplace Masters, the podcast dedicated to uncovering the strategies that drive success on Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
I am your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we'll dive into how vendors can take a much more proactive approach to tackling chargeback fees from Amazon. Now, just very, very quickly, before we jump in, just a reminder, our virtual Amazon Vendor Summit is happening next week. We have over 450 vendor professionals registered and signed up for this really exclusive event. If you haven't reserved your spot yet, let me encourage you, head to merchantspring.io, go to our upcoming webinar section and make sure to grab your seat so that you have access to all of the recordings as well.
Now, just back to the topic of chargebacks. This is a very challenging topic, particularly around how you can be proactive about it. And to help me really unpack this and navigate through this, I'm super excited to welcome our guest for today, Manuel Kretschmer. Now, let me give him a very quick intro. Manuel is the founder and managing director of Ama-X, a leading Amazon agency that specializes in a sustainable optimization and growth of companies on the Amazon marketplace.
Through Ama-X, located, very interesting, both in Munich and Glasgow in the UK, Manuel and his team have helped over 130 sellers and vendors for more than nine years, reach their full growth potential using their proven foundation and growth system. With over 450 million euros generated in sales on Amazon with his agency and the experience of launching four of his own brands, Manuel regularly gives lectures on exciting topics related to Amazon, e-commerce and entrepreneurship.
Outside his turbulent business life, he exercises several times a week, plays and watches football, travels around the world, reads meaningful books and spend time with his girlfriend and his daughter. All right. Well, Manuel, thank you so much for joining us today and being on the show.
Manuel Kretschmer
Thanks for having me, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here and looking forward to our topics.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Can I just say that Manuel has already had a positive impact on me. I think one of the meetings we've done recently is you were talking and actually walking on one of those walking pads. And I actually bought one after our conversation. There is a way to exercise and work as well. So very exciting.
Manuel Kretschmer
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
But more exciting, chargebacks, or at least from an Amazon vendor point of view. So we're having a particular focus on kind of the European perspective here today. So let me start off with this question then. You know, what are the most common reasons that Amazon vendors in Europe are facing chargebacks? And particularly what do you see as some of the differences from other regions?
Manuel Kretschmer
So I think big issues we're facing here is that we have multiple countries we might be selling in. So let's say we're working with a vendor who is maybe located in Italy or in France. They want to sell in Germany, France, Italy, the UK, maybe even other countries. You have the country-specific rules in regards to strict labelling and packaging rules, but also cross-border complexities, which warehouse you're going to ship to. You have multiple invoicing entities, both for you invoicing Amazon potentially, but also Amazon invoicing you. Let's say you ship to Czech Republic or Poland, you get certain invoices for Czech Republic or Poland. The question is maybe how to centralize this.
Those are, I think, very specific issues here, especially also with the Poland and Czech Republic warehouses that are often mandatory. We have, of course, a couple of solutions there and what we always try to do is zoom out, right, because usually vendors come to us, they have very specific issues, they're running into chargebacks regularly, but it's then very focused in on this one topic. And now this topic might only occur because a lot of things beforehand in the SOPs from the basics. That's also why we when you introduced me saying with our foundation and growth system, we want to make sure everybody's got a good foundation.
And of course, outside of that, I think we have a lot of similar issues. I took a look, again, as well, what our recent case has been, that there's a mismatch in box content, and labelling issues. Sometimes there's too many barcodes on a product where there should only be one. You've got the packaging hierarchy if you’ve got an outer box that you might also be selling because it’s a 10-pack of a certain product.
Sometimes they use the same EAN for this, which then of course confuses Amazon. But I think those are topics that are more generally for everybody who's a vendor worldwide. And now for Europe specifically, I think it's the many countries you can be selling in. Every country has got their own rules, their own regulations. And you've got the EU regulations, which are becoming stricter and stricter. And then each country and of course, after the Brexit, it's become harder also to sell in the UK.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's a really good summary. And what I find interesting about today's session is we're really focusing on the preventative aspect of it. We've done a couple of webinars around how do you recover? How do you get your money back? How do you dispute it? That's a whole kind of discipline in itself. But here we're talking about prevention, right? Prevention is the best cure, I think as the saying goes. So let's start with proactiveness. So when you were talking to your vendor clients, right, what are you encouraging them? Like in terms of, what are the first steps or some of the basics that a vendor should really take to implement a proactive approach? I mean, where does it start?
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah. Glad you're mentioning this because whenever somebody comes to us, like I said before, they are so focused on this specific issues they're having, or the multiple issues, and they're searching for help, they're looking for tools, they're looking for agency partners, and they just then ask us, oh, can you please solve this issue? Now, at the start, when we're new to this whole topic, we just try to solve it, right? going in circles, we solved it next week, same issue happened again. So then we started to realize we have to really start at the basics. So what we wanna do is zoom out completely, start with like basic things like, you know, taking a mirror board or, you know, some form of whiteboard where you can start visualizing the whole process.
So taking into account your own, you know, your own people, your own teams, is it logistics? Is there one person that's really in charge? You've got content management, You just want to make sure you have this all visualized and mapped step by step. And what we want to do is SOP everything. So that's what we're all about is SOP everything because everything has already happened to somebody else or to yourself. And that means it shouldn't be a surprise anymore. If something happens two or three times in a row, it can be SOP.
So what we want to do is we want to visualize it. For example, it starts with your terms and conditions with Amazon. So I think there's already a lot of things where you can take preemptive measures through that, having the right agreements with Amazon. For example, we have here a PICS agreement that could be negotiated with Amazon, where you reduce the amount of warehouses you ship to. Because every warehouse has got their own individual rules, although it should all be the same. But if you're a vendor, you probably noticed this already, that there are certain issues that occur with certain warehouses.
Once you ship a cross-border to Poland and Czech Republic, it's even stricter. You've got a very small delivery window. So, yeah, back to the basics. Things that might sound very obvious. there is a very great vendor manual within Vendor Central. Now, you know, I've been to many clients also personally to go to the warehouse, have a workshop with logistics, and only to realize that some people have read certain parts of the vendor manual, but it's huge, right? So study this, take this, and put it also on your visual board to make sure that you understand every single step, every single process.
And it starts with the agreements, like a PICS agreement, also make sure that you negotiate that there will be no returns, that this is Amazon's responsibility. And we also got the program with WePay and Collect, where Amazon picks up the pallets or boxes with their own carrier, meaning once it's in their hands, it's their responsibility. I know it doesn't always work, so they will still try to invoice you for certain chargebacks. But it's a very good step. Now, that's just the first step, right? Many more steps to come. I'm happy to also just continue here.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I mean, I guess let me just summarize. I think one of the critical points that you are making is, don't get straight into all, you know, the detail or, you know, tell the guy at the loading dock to say, you need to do this. You need to do this. You need to do this. Like actually. Trying to simplify things for you by having the right strategy and agreements in place with Amazon in the first place.
I mean, picks obviously fewer warehouses we pay or get Amazon to pick things up put more in, put more of that risk, I guess, in Amazon's hand in terms of things that can go wrong. So it really starts with that. I mean, before we even get down to kind of shipping products and fulfilling order, what about things like product setup? I mean, to what extent is having your catalogue correct, like what do you see when you look at your client base there? And what are the issues you tend to sort of fix and how do you go about them? Sorry, that's three questions, but yeah.
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah, that's very good. Very, very valid questions. So the product setup is again a massive next step, right? So I think you summarize it quite well. I think an in-between step, which I would say is always there should be one person leading the whole Amazon process and project. Because what we know is you've got your own warehouse, there are certain people in charge there. They get the order, they get a list of what they should pack and print the labels on it. That's one part. Somebody should coordinate the whole thing to really understand the whole process, visualize it from start to finish.
Now, once you have negotiated everything correctly with Amazon and everybody has read all the parts of the vendor manual and put in the information and really understood it, because it's different from how you usually doing business. Amazon is a huge machine, and no matter how big you are, Amazon will always be bigger. So you can't make your own rules here.
Now, the second step then will be a correct product setup. And this is actually one of the biggest challenges that we always see when a vendor comes to us. We haven't worked with them before. We've covered the first couple of things, and then we look at the product. Product information, how you manage this, especially if you have a huge catalogue, if you have multiple countries, to really make sure every single detail is correct. You know, all the regulation requirements like the new GPSR and everything is perfect.
But what I really want to focus on here is the packaging hierarchy. So I mentioned this at the start already. You've got your UPC, GTIN or EAN on your product. Now, sometimes there's multiple barcodes on the products. It's really, really important. Just have one barcode, not something else, not the QR code, unless you're in a transparency program with Amazon. One barcode. Then that has to be also in the backend, right? Then you've got the box. So how many units are in a box? Is a box being used for shipment or is it all on a pallet? If it's like larger products, does this box have its own unique identifier? Do you want this bigger box to be a unit that can be sold as well?
Now, there's a lot of things you can take in the backend or you can input there which often is complete chaos. So when we look at new accounts that have not been working with us yet, it’s complete mayhem. And then, you know, that all the sizes, the weights, it might be small things like that, but Amazon, the warehouses are fully automated. You know, if you have never been to an Amazon warehouse, I can highly encourage you doing so, because it's fully automated. The smallest error will result in triggering failure and an actual human then has to take a look there, which will take time and which will be costly and penalized.
So having those packaging hierarchies set, and again, the outer box, one barcode, nothing more. And I've seen there, you know, sometimes three or four barcodes for good reasons, because in some other areas of your business, you need this, right? So it might be helpful there, but it will confuse Amazon and it will result in chargebacks again. So those are, I think, the next steps. And outside of that, all the small details about the product, but that's more the content side, the customer-facing side, which is a whole different topic. But just for logistics and chargebacks, I think this is huge. And it's easily overseen. And also the question, who's responsible again? Who does this correctly?
Paul Sonneveld
So let's say you're encountering, you're looking at the catalogue. And, you know, maybe the images are beautiful and the bullet points are good and the pages have got A-plus content, but then you look at the supply chain information there and it's a mess, right? Inners, outers, current measurements, everything is a disaster. And it just means, trying to, for Amazon to receipt any of this stuff into their warehouse, things literally blow up. Well, probably not literally, but you know what I mean?
How do you go about fixing that? Is it a matter of, man, start again, or is it, hey, I need my AVS, my vendor person to just drop everything and fix this for me, or is it ASIN and by ASIN, you know, just mainly fix it. I mean, what's physically involved in getting this sorted? Cause you know, whenever we get to sort of sorting catalogue issues, people start to get worried, right? Cause it can take a lot of time and sometimes it's near impossible.
Manuel Kretschmer
Exactly. So totally agree. So it's again, it starts with who's responsible. Is it going to be the marketing and content team who is actually just working on SEO, optimized marketing content images, like you said. I think that that little part is often there's nobody who's really responsible. It's not really logistics and the warehouse because they're just fulfilling the orders and the POs.
So then again, that one, person in charge comes in he has to or she has to understand who's going to take care of this. Now this is manual work you can work with you know bulk sheets and excel flat files downloading what you already have so always look at what you have select everything and create a backup. Then go to your PIMS system or your ERP system, wherever you have the correct and real data, and use Excel formulas to cross-reference where there's a mismatch.
And then also, again, implementing an SOP, because you might not even be aware how important it is, or you have not been aware yet how important it's been to have all the box labelling correctly set, and then also can this be sold individually, ordered individually, and it comes for minimum order quantities as well, which is a separate topic we'll dive into in a minute as well.
Somebody has to do it. It's also something that we, for example, as a service partner, we do for our clients to maybe like 80-90% because we need their input how it should be correctly and also then we often notice that they don't follow an SOP. So for some products it's the one way you know for other products it's completely different and so again SOP comes into play and we have to make sure to standardize everything here. And yeah, then it's about implementing and then about uploading.
Now, first step is having the content all correct. Next step is I upload it. Maybe it's not being reflected. So there, of course, an AVS can help if you have one. Again, somebody should take care of this. Fact-checking, double-checking, and then cross-referencing with the chargebacks. Also looking at the chargebacks, I've now done this for this batch of products. Have I seen a difference now? If not, AVS or Amazon Support? You know, with Amazon Support, it can be quite challenging but that's your way to go, to make sure it's actually being reflected in the system. And just having it in your backend doesn't mean that it's actually in the Amazon backend fully reflected. And it's very hard to fact-check that.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the perpetual logging of cases, right, to get things aligned in the system.
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
So you talked a lot about SOPs, processors, doing things consistently. But that sort of raises the question of around accountability, and who's responsible for what? Now, obviously, if you're working with an agency like yourselves, you're paying an external party to do it. So you can put a lot of pressure on them, and you can have, you know, the buck stops with you, right? And you will kind of flex to get it done.
But for those that's sort of an external support mechanism. What about just vendors that do this well or that should do this well. I mean, what does good look like in terms of accountability here? Do you have a preferred way of dividing roles and responsibilities when it comes to product catalogues and some of the other aspects related to this conversation?
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah. I mean, what we try to do as an external partner, you know, we see ourselves as the Amazon captain for our clients. It's not our aim to take on all the heavy lifting for our clients. It's to really make sure that all these SOPs are implemented with our clients and that we only help and do the heavy lifting where it's really necessary and needed. But we're more like the strategic sparring partner as well. Of course, we can't do the negotiations for our clients with Amazon, but what we can do is set good benchmarks.
So it starts with, when it comes to the terms and conditions, understanding what is a good rate, what's a good percentage, what should I actually pay, and what's reasonable. That's the first step. The next step is, I think, a lot of accountability has to be taken by each vendor themselves by creating all the SOPs. Once you've cleared out all the things that you can't control, if you have got the WePay, you've got the Collect, you've got the PICS agreement, you've got reasonable terms negotiated with Amazon Goods, cost prices, so that's all there. There's not that much you can do.
Of course, if you have an AVS, you can, again, escalate things. But this is not what we want to focus on today, because today we want to make sure how each vendor can take the responsibility and implement the processes in-house between the e-commerce manager, the sales manager, the content and marketing team, the logistics team. the advertising team know that this is all a smooth and well-oiled machine. So that's what we try to do, because we want to, in the end, focus on where we can help. Providing good content, we could do. We can do advertising growth strategies. But everything else, we have to make sure that it's properly implemented and solidified within each vendor's account. And that gives the most value as well.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, for sure. I want to sort of take a slight detour to the side here, which is just about chargeback specifically, just out of interest. What are the top, I mean, I know there's lots and lots of chargebacks, right? I sort of looked at them as, as penalties, every time things don't fit neatly into Amazon's automated model and there's an exception routine that Amazon has to do, they just recover the cost plus, plus a bit more, right? Probably across the margin. That's kind of how I look at chargebacks. What are in Europe and sort of the area that you look at a lot, what is floating to like the top five in terms of chargebacks? I'm just curious what you are seeing in terms of trends and repeat offenders and high volume fees.
Manuel Kretschmer
So, I mean, it depends when we start working with somebody. It's often, you know, that the box content doesn't match what Amazon expected because the data input in the product area in the back end is not what's actually being delivered. So that's something that we can tackle them. Now, once that's all smooth, that should almost never happen. I mean, you never can get to 100% correct delivery rates. Amazon might find something. Sometimes mistakes happen. That's just human.
After that, there are some things that are actually very obvious, but still happening. One thing is, you know, only accept POs that you can actually fulfill. That's again, sometimes a communicational error. A PO land,s looks good. You know, Amazon orders a massive volume. You confirm this, go forward that to the logistics, to warehouse. They come back and say, sorry, we actually don't have this unit here. Now you've got it already confirmed. Then you ship less. Then again, there's a mismatch because also the carrier, the truck, expects a different amount, different weight, different size. That whole thing then already causes a lot of issues.
So really make sure to have a solid process of checking very quickly, because you only have a short window, small window, to check and accept this, which is also actually a huge factor which we see, is that there's less units delivered than ordered and confirmed, then it's taking too long. So the acceptance, the window, was maybe missed, and then the delivery window, which is huge, and which is not always the vendor's fault, I have to say as well.
So I think I actually took a look at some of our accounts to identify what are the the chargebacks looking like, what's the most common things, and stuff like no-show and delivered outside of the delivery window, which might sometimes just be a 30-minute window, which the truck driver has to meet. Now, maybe stuck in traffic, whatever could happen. That's why I would encourage, again, to using the WePay Collect, because then it's Amazon's responsibility. I see a lot.
And then, you know, also basic things like, missing a bill of lading in the ASN, the ball number and bill that is also correct, which has to be signed and issued as well. And with the truck driver, if you're delivering it with your own freight forwarder. So those are once the other things are optimized, that's still, you know, happening. And in my eyes can easily be changed if somebody is creating this SOP and in charge of coordinating with the different teams in-house.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. I'm just thinking about some of the ones that we see for our clients in the United States. There is definitely some differences. There is a lot around things like products not being like, for example, if you're shipping liquid in a product, not having the cap properly sealed, things like that seem to come up a lot.
Manuel Kretschmer
But that's also then prior to when we, let's say, because I looked at the accounts that we have already taken care of all those steps. So all the compliance and how is it a product sealed and it doesn't need any additional prep beforehand, some bubble wrap or some, you know, fixing the lid, all those things. Those are again, very much one or two steps earlier. when we're talking about products being compliant, all the PDFs and images uploaded to Amazon as well. That's really also, I would say, first steps of the basics. And then once that's all covered, then still these other things I mentioned might be an issue. And that's why I still am seeing with clients we're working with and where I think it could be easily avoided those but somebody someone somehow internally, it goes wrong or some miscommunication.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that makes sense. So, just to say, I'm seeing some questions flowing guys. So thank you, Richard and Christina for your question. We'll get to them very, very shortly. I'm going to ask, Manuel, just a one or two more and then we'll get to some Q and A at the end. So if there's others that are tuning in and you've got a burning question for Manuel, we've got them here live. This is your chance. So, put them in the comment section and we'll get to it. So, yeah, just a few more from me, Manuel. Tools, software, metrics, monitoring, right? What's your advice in terms of monitoring chargebacks and really being on top of this?
Manuel Kretschmer
Right. So, I mean, there are so many different tools out there. I mean, you know, with MerchantSpring here, we also got a fair amount of data analytics here. I mean, in the end, we don't want it to get there, right? So this whole conversation here is about how to prevent this. And the monitoring only makes sense if everything else is in order. You can, of course, access everything through Vendor Central. You have a better and nicer overview here within the MerchantSpring dashboard. I think it's constantly being worked on to expand the options here as well.
But of course, once you've implemented changes, you want to see metrics change as well. So we don't have any big preferences for this. There's multiple tools out there. I don't actually want to name any names, also competitive space. If you have one you’re happy with and it’s really showing all the data, then use this. And you can also use MerchantSpring. But it will only show how well you're doing things.
So you have to tackle those things beforehand and then track it and make sure it's correct. And then again, who is responsible for escalating this? If there is an issue in a certain area, what's the process again? Because having the data is nice, but if you don't do anything with it, it might be problematic.
Paul Sonneveld
No, for sure. Thank you for all the nice mentions about MerchantSpring. But one of the things I would sort of mention is as we're building their functionality, one of the things I found quite useful is going to the chargeback screen inside Amazon Vendor Central, you can get up to, I mean, Amazon says it's like two years worth of data. It's like slightly less. It's slightly annoying. You can get, I don't know, slightly less.
Get the whole data that you can get. You can just get a raw file. And it's really easy for those of you that are a bit more like Excel inclined, you can just run a pivot table on it and most chargebacks will relate back to a particular PO and an ASIN, right? So you can actually look at like, you know, what are the trends by ASIN? What are your worst offending ASINs?
It's a really good way. I mean, this is not so much about proactive prevention. This is more about, I've got a big problem and how do I sort through this? But yeah, I found the fact that, you know, it sort of comes in a very sort of digestible format. very useful for quickly getting to like the 80, 20 where you should be focusing. So anyway, that's my, that's my tip for the day. This we stumbled on as we were building out our own functionality. Great. We're past the… Sorry, you were going to…
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah, I just wanted to say, so one thing that was also very important, I think, what we see a lot is, you know, the whole MOQ thing.
Paul Sonneveld
Oh, yeah.
Manuel Kretschmer
So, I mean, once all the other things are set correctly, a lot of issues we see, which can also result in not confirming all the POs because it's too small of a quantity. And what you have to understand is that you have to set this per ASIN, per warehouse, right? Because we have to, you know, you can set it in the back end as well.
We found that only in 10 to 20 percent, it will actually be taken into the system by Amazon. We had to open a lot of support cases. And again, per ASIN, per warehouse, because we have set it correctly with some of the warehouses. And then Amazon switched to another warehouse and ordered from there not taking into account the MOQs. And this will help you as well a lot. Probably everybody's familiar and aware of this.
And once you've set it, it might still be that in a couple of months, Amazon just resets it to the original value and you can do this again. So you have to monitor this as well. So basically, keep track of all the POs as well, where everything went smoothly, which ASIN, which warehouse, and then things should be getting much better.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. All right, let's go to some of our audience questions. Let's go to Rita. I know there's a bit of people trying to help each other out in the comments section there, which is great. So Rita, you asked, I think it stands for ships in own carton. I'm not sure I've got that abbreviation right.
Manuel Kretschmer
That’s right.
Paul Sonneveld
That's my guess. We are currently facing a lot of chargebacks regarding this. We sell badminton records and Amazon wants us to send them in their own package. It doesn't exist. They just have a plastic bag. I mean, is this an easy situation to solve by ourselves or is it better to contact a third party company to solve this challenge?
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah, this is actually a topic we see often as well. It's I think SIOC stands for Ships In Own Container. Now, Amazon has very specific requirements. I don't know the exact specifics now out of my head, but I think it has to be usually a cardboard box or a bubble wrap, a plastic bag that is sealed and also labeled correctly. I think, again, reverting back to the Amazon manual, going to that section, checking again whether you've done everything correctly, how Amazon wants you to do this. Maybe you identify something, but I would have to look at the actual packaging.
So if I would have an image of how it would look like, I think I could easily see what's going wrong here. And yeah, I think also you have to register this ASIN as well for this program. So, you can’t just sent it amazon has to be aware of what they're receiving again. So if you take a look at this again, register the product for this program, look at the vendor manual. If that's still not working, then getting some external help to maybe identify what's not working out. And it might be in the end, unfortunately, that you have to switch from a plastic bag to a box.
Paul Sonneveld
There's a good, you're talking about external help, which leads me into another question from Sadhbh O’Connor. Uh, would you recommend getting an AVS manager to help reduce chargebacks? What's your experience with AVS here?
Manuel Kretschmer
I mean, I'm getting less and less, a fan of this over the years. I think when we started, on Amazon almost 10 years ago, there was an actual, there were many, many vendor managers. Price was much cheaper. And they were of actual help. They had less clients each. Now, over the years, I think Amazon is now reducing all vendor business, switching more to the seller business. So the thresholds you have to meet to even qualify for one and also the amount you might have to pay is very, very high.
We as an agency or partner, we're always happy if we have another person inside of Amazon who can escalate things where we are facing a wall as well. But I think, again, if once you have all the SOPs defined and all the baseline work done, the foundation is set and there's then still topics, then I think it's great with an AVS, especially, again, if you have a large portfolio. So if we're talking about hundreds or thousands of SKUs and multiply that by multiple marketplaces, then it’s very hard to keep track. They have other options as well for internal audits about product integrity. So if you have one and it's a reasonable price, it's great. But being able to get one has become harder and harder.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you.
Manuel Kretschmer
Actually, there's another thing popped into my head, which I forgot to mention earlier, because I was just saying about multiplying it by all the marketplaces. Actually, one huge thing we are seeing is if we're working with that maybe have multiple entities. So let's say the mother company is in Italy, they've got a German entity, got a UK entity, French entity.
Having one centralized vendor account and having centralized terms and conditions. So what we've seen very often is, we're pushing Germany here, the sell out is fantastic. We're hitting each milestone and then we're looking at the sell in and it's going down and down. Then we go to Italy and we see Italy's sell-out is roughly the same, maybe small growth, but the sell-in is like skyrocketing.
And then the German entity gets pressure by the mother company, hey, why are your numbers not good? And then you're going in circles and fighting each other. And this is actually, this is also very challenging for us. So what we always want to do is having a centralized vendor account and if possible, you know, identical terms and conditions cost prices as well. Everything the same so that it stays separated and Amazon has no incentive of going elsewhere to order.
Paul Sonneveld
No little arbitrage going on by Amazon between different European countries. Check your sourcing and check your manufacturing and see the big differences. Alright, last question. Thank you for hanging in there, Christina. Let's get on to it. Alright, If the box for one SKU contains, for example, 90 pieces per box, that might be too much as an order amount for Amazon.
What would be a good way to avoid that Amazon orders a too small amount? You know, can we just add, say, 10 instead as items per box? Would this lead to problems? You know, if we put in one, we receive very small orders every week, which leads to higher picking costs. So I think the question is really around, how do you trade off that sort of picking efficiency versus working capital versus fulfilling Amazon orders and how do you get to a result that works for you?
Manuel Kretschmer
Yeah. So that's also a very interesting question. And I think this depends on your marketing strategy because it depends on the sell-through rate, right? If Amazon orders only small quantities. If you then, let's say you have a box now with 10 Amazon orders, one or two boxes, but is this too high of a cost for you? You want it to go to 90. Amazon will then, like once you've changed that, maybe not order anything because they say we can't predict that those 90 units will be sold in a few days or weeks. And so you're putting a cap on Amazon.
So if you support this with good marketing activities and have a predictable sell-through rate, let's say if you sell 90 units per week or per month, it's very likely that Amazon will order this. And then again, it depends on how big those products are if you know small units small products 90 fit in a normal box that's not overweight so I wouldn't go on like heavyweight you know 15 to 20 kilos upwards will result in more issues as well.
So if you can keep it maybe below 15 kilos and still 90 units fit in a box, and you can match this with a sell-through rate by focusing on a good marketing and advertising strategy, then I see no issue. But I think it's very much on the high end. So I don't think we have any vendor we work with that has boxes with 90 units as an MOQ. I think that's a bit too high. Something with like 20 to 30, I think it's easier.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you, Manuel. And thank you, Christina, for your question. Now, Manuel, unfortunately, we're not just over time. We're well over time. I do make a habit of it. I apologise to the audience who needs to get on with their day. Just want to, first of all, thank you, Manuel for coming on today, doing this live, sharing all of your expertise around chargebacks and particularly the proactive aspect of it and your holistic approach.
I think it was really, really refreshing to see that we're not getting straight into like, how you dispatch things from your warehouse and the pick and pack and that last bit of the equation there. So really appreciate that. We had a lot of questions come up today. We didn't get to all of them. But for those, maybe you're still tuning in now or watching this afterwards, if they want to just get in touch, talk some more, or maybe interested in learning how you can support them, what's the best way to get in touch?
Manuel Kretschmer
Well, thanks again for having me. It was a pleasure. It's a shame that we don't have more time, because I think we can keep, maybe we'll do another session at some point, because there's so much more to talk about. Of course, you can reach me through LinkedIn. You can go to our website. It's ama-x.com or send us an email at contact@ama-x.com or just through LinkedIn.
Like I said, you can see us as a captain. We come in. We don't want to push all our services. We want to do an audit to see what's your status quo, where can we be of actual help, and how can we help you improve your internal SOPs and processes, help you with guidelines and concepts as well for the marketing side, for content creation, and then also, of course, for advertising and growth strategies to really increase organic rankings. That's what we're all about. Because Amazon will only be fun if you find a sustainable way to increase your organic rankings. And yeah, we can help with all those topics. If anybody needs help, yeah, let us know and we're going to be there for you.
Paul Sonneveld
Great. So that's contact at ama-x.com. I just put it on there before. So great. Manuel, thank you so much. As you said, we have lots more to talk about, so let's talk about doing a follow-up session later this year. Thank you so much.
Manuel Kretschmer
Thank you.
Paul Sonneveld
Okay, everyone, that's it for today. That is a wrap for this live episode of Marketplace Masters. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for all of our guests who asked questions. Actually, a bit of a shout out to a couple of you who jumped into the comments. So I just want to acknowledge Puru and Israel as well. Thank you for jumping in, answering some of those questions. Apologies if I forgot to mention someone there.
Of course, if you're looking for more vendor insights, two things to do. One, head to our website. We have lots and lots of pre-recorded episodes like this that you can watch on demand. We've been doing this for over two years now, so I'm sure there's a topic that you're looking for.
Also, just a prompter, the Amazon Vendor Summit next week, 26th of February. It's the European edition, so we're going to focus specifically on topics that are relevant for vendors that operate in Europe. So make sure to watch out for that as well. You can find it on our LinkedIn page or on our website at merchantspring.io.
Of course, Manuel mentioned a little bit, we're not trying to plug MerchantSpring too much here because we really want to focus on content. But if you are an Amazon vendor professional or an agency involved with vendors and you're looking for some great analytics and you're wondering why do all these other people use MerchantSpring, get in touch, I'd love to show you what it's all about.
Last but not least, I'm always looking for new topics that add value to you as a professional, that is of interest to you. So if you've got a topic or a particular question that you'd like me to tackle on this episode, please send it to me via LinkedIn. Message is great. And I will go out of my way to try and find the right experts to bring it bring that content to you and answer your question. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care and hope to see you next week at our vendor summit. Take care.
