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're diving into a crucial topic for vendors. Amazon deductions and chargebacks and exploring strategies to boost profitability. First, a word from our sponsors. So today's live episode is brought to you by MerchantSpring, the leading analytics platform for Amazon vendors and their agencies.
Now, determining profitability as a vendor can be challenging. The MerchantSpring's new vendor profitability module simplifies the process. It integrates your cost of goods, rebates, chargebacks, and advertising costs, allowing you to quickly assess profitability at both the vendor code and ASIN levels from both a sell-in and sell-out perspective. The early release program starts this week and is open to a limited number of participants. Head over to merchantspring.io or visit bit.ly/vendor_pl to register your interest.
Now, let's get back to the topic of today, recovering revenue lost to various vendor deductions, such as shortage claims, price claims, co-op discrepancies, and like really tackling one of the toughest deductions to recover as chargebacks as well. Now, to help me navigate this, I have re-invited, he's a regular guest on our podcast, I've re-invited James to work us through that. So let me introduce him before we get into it.
James is an Amazon vendor expert and Founder and Managing Director of Wake Commerce, a London-based Amazon agency specializing in vendor central. James worked with scaling businesses and helping them succeed on Amazon by improving profitability and navigating the platform's complexities.
James founded Wake in 2015, bringing his deep passion for data, branding and online retail strategy since then, Wake has helped leading consumer brands to build profitable relationships with Amazon and scale their business on the world's largest marketplace. James, it is so good to have you back on the show again today.
James Wakefield
Thank you, Paul, especially during your world tour. I know it's a busy one for you, so thank you for making the time.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm doing a little bit of traveling. In fact, I'm attending Unboxed today in Austin. So if anyone, any of our listeners is in Austin today, feel free to hit me up and we'll grab a drink or a coffee. I'd love to chat. Now, today we're talking about- On Friday. On Friday, yes. Down in the southern part of the UK in Brighton. Should be a great gathering too.
James, today we're talking about vendor profitability. Obviously, a very big topic for most vendors, particularly because there are so many levers. We talk about deductions all the time. We throw this term around a lot. But we all mean different things when it comes to deduction. So what I wanted to maybe start with is let's paint a top-line picture here. When we're talking about deductions or terminology, what are the different types and how do you look at the world of Amazon vendor profitability when it comes to all the things that will erode your profit from that bottom line?
James Wakefield
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing before we even get started is just to declare that Amazon is a particularly complex e-commerce channel and Vendor Central in particular seems to be very complex. It comes with these very specific processes, terminology, nuances that a lot seem to have been invented kind of in isolation without necessarily any kind of forethought or rationale behind them.
And that's where we tend to see a lot of vendors get unstuck because often they've kind of fallen into the channel. It's maybe not being something that they had planned to become significant in their business. And then over time maybe over a period of several years, it's very suddenly become a very important strategic channel just because of the amount of revenue it's driving. But along with that comes having to deal with this sort of multiplicity of challenges in many different areas, ranging from merchandising to reporting, let alone all the operational challenges actually getting stock into Amazon on time. So, yeah, today we're going to look very specifically at that operational aspect and kind of the consequences when that goes wrong.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, fantastic. So let's get into that in terms of deductive. I think you've got a couple of supporting exhibits. I'm just going to bring them up, or at least make them visible so we can put a bit of flesh on the bones. So yeah, let's talk deductions. It's not as simple as just getting Amazon to ship your product. There is a lot of things that go on.
James Wakefield
Yeah, exactly. Yeah the first thing that I want to start with really is just a reminder that Amazon most probably is your brand's biggest growth opportunity and this often gets lost into that in that day-to-day management Why? Because it's a supremely complex channel. It's pretty stressful.
As I've said, Vendor Central in particular is probably one of the most, if not the most complex e-commerce channel. And that's sad in a way, because when something is complicated, it's painful. But that really overshadows the fact that this is actually where the action is. If you take a minute to think about your own shopping habits on Amazon, then you can start to understand the size of the opportunity.
If not, then I can remind you that 90% of UK shoppers buy from Amazon at least once per week, not your DTC website. So, you know, we've got to find a way to make this work. But we also need to caveat that with the fact that Amazon is pretty ruthless. If you're not looking in the right places at the right time, then you're going to miss things. And that's especially true of the topics that we're discussing today.
The ethos of my business, Wake, is very much to cut through that complexity. So we don't use hyperbole, smoke and mirrors, maybe like Amazon does. We're very plain speaking, pragmatic, because that's how our customers need us to work with them to kind of cut through a lot of this noise. So the objective of today's webinar is to hopefully educate around these very complex topics on this kind of complicated e-commerce channel. But first things first, what are we actually talking about here? There's a lot of terms that are thrown around. They mean different things to different people. So I just want to provide some clarity on what we're actually discussing today. And we do need to break those down a bit.
So chargebacks seems to be the most commonly used and understood descriptor. We've obviously got it in the webinar title for that reason. You could also talk about penalties and fines, which actually would be a more accurate description of what chargebacks are. Funnily enough, Amazon doesn't like to call them penalties or fines. They kind of revert to this chargeback thing, but chargebacks don't cover the full picture. It's actually just one small aspect of this whole piece.
Shortages, which we'll come on to, very specific issue, probably the most important and the most misunderstood. So I really want to clarify some things on that today. And then if you're getting into the process of actually disputing these issues, you might talk around recovery, reimbursements.
But I feel that the kind of most appropriate catch-all term for all of these issues is actually deductions. Whatever we're going to discuss today is going to fall into that bucket of some kind of deduction. And this typically happens from an invoice that you raise to Amazon, or there might even be cases where they issue a new invoice to you because of a specific issue or infraction. But either way, this is money that's being deducted from what you're expecting to receive in the course of doing business with Amazon.
But I just need to highlight here and get a bit specific that all vendor accounts have got these co-op and contra cogs agreements whereby Amazon is deducting a percentage typically of every invoice that you raise to them as part of your trade terms, whether that's MDF, damage allowance, AVS, etc. But we're not talking about those. For the purposes of this webinar, we're looking at those additional and unexpected deductions that occur when something goes wrong.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I just want to make a point there, James, because a lot of the rebates and the co-ops and all of those, those are known. So those get locked down as part of your Amazon and your vendor negotiation process. Just to plug, by the way, we're doing a webinar on that next Friday. So put that in your diary. Those are the knowns that you modeled out.
James Wakefield
They're the known knowns. These are maybe the known unknowns that we're going to get into today.
Paul Sonneveld
These are the ones you get stung by, didn't really expect, and all of a sudden evaporate your bottom line profits for sure. Before we go into the details, James, a sense of magnitude. As you said, at the start of this podcast, a lot of focus on chargebacks, chargeback recoveries, a lot of them, but obviously shortages is a big one as well.
To what extent do you feel like those in the industry and me included, do we think we, is there, have you seen people focus on the wrong things? Or let me ask you a different way. So, you know, what is of that list that you were showing and I might just bring it up again. Where do you see kind of the biggest, opportunities or in terms of where people should be spending their time? Is there a misalignment the way the industry talks about it?
James Wakefield
Yeah, definitely. And it's actually really inconsistent depending on who we speak to. Obviously, there's varying degrees of sophistication whenever a vendor account is being managed. It could be a very small team, might be a couple of people who've got access to that account. If it's a multinational account run by a big conglomerate, you might have dozens of people in there.
But certainly what I see is a lack of consistency around what they think they should be looking at at and kind of what they actually should be looking at. And yeah it really depends on the journey that account and those team members have been on prior to speaking with us. But essentially there tends to be a slant towards chargebacks and I'll I'll explain in a minute why that's probably not the best place to be looking. And there's definitely a lack of knowledge around some of these other issue types that can kind of increase in terms of level of complexity. But again, I'll get into the detail on those.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Well, let's jump into chargebacks. I'd love to get a few examples of what there actually are.
James Wakefield
Yeah, absolutely. As I've mentioned, chargebacks is the most well-known type of deduction and I think that's probably just because of the variety of chargebacks that come through. They are harder to miss than some of these other deductions. And, you know, why do these happen?
Amazon has got a lot of policies relating to how you need to send stock into them. Most of these are reasonable. Some of these are a bit dubious, but they really come down to one thing, and that is efficiency. Amazon needs you to send stock into them in a timely manner and exactly to their specifications. If you're not doing that, it's going to cause them problems. They don't have the time, capacity or inclination to be resolving issues that you've created prior to sending stock into them. If that was the case, their business model would probably break. So that's the reason why these chargebacks exist.
And if we just go into a bit of the detail around these. So I've created a table here to kind of give us a view on the different criteria for these deductions that we're seeing. Frequency, and this is how often that we're seeing them, not necessarily how often you're seeing them. Obviously, we've got access to a multitude of accounts, but every account is different. In our experience, the frequency of chargebacks is generally high. The financial implication is generally high, particularly if you've got ongoing issues. However, the recovery rate is usually quite low. And the reason for that is because these chargebacks are often applied correctly because of whatever issue or kind of infraction has occurred on Amazon's policies.
So the solution with these is that you need to diagnose these issues, you need to get visibility on them and make the relevant changes. You can do that within your operational dashboard in the reports section of your vendor account. The data is pretty easy to interpret and download. I'm not even going to demonstrate that because it's fairly simple to use, unlike some of these other deductions that we're going to get into.
But if we look at what actually causes these issues, I think everyone knows about these PO, on-time accuracy chargebacks. That basically means you've delivered stock in late. And I know it's easier said than done to meet Amazon shipping windows, particularly when they seem to change them from three days to four days, back to three days, then to five days, kind of one day to the next. But that is kind of the game that you've got to play. And any efficiencies that you can make in terms of how you're getting stock in quicker to Amazon is really important.
Sometimes that means taking a serious look at your 3PL, your logistics partner if you have one. If they can't meet those requirements, then you've got to change. Labelling causes all sorts of issues. You really need to get this right. If you can't, then look at a platform such as QCommerce or a full kind of EDI integration. But make sure everything is set up properly. Don't cut corners and do testing. Otherwise, you're just going to run into more problems.
And then just some others. So prep chargebacks relate to whether any kind of product prep is required for very specific products. So prep bagging is a really common one for any liquid products. This is one where we actually find an opportunity if a product's been incorrectly classified. We had one recently, took a good two months to resolve, but they eventually reclassified several of our clients' liquid products because they were compliant, even though Amazon were claiming they weren't.
And then you've got other things that, in some cases, might be unavoidable, such as shipping own container, oversized carton. Unless you actually change the product configuration, you're going to be constantly hit with those. But some brands will take a view on that. They'll kind of bake these charges into their P&L because it's kind of cheaper and more convenient than actually reconfiguring the products.
So yeah, the summary with this one is that you need to understand these issues, take action and only dispute if you really think any have been raised incorrectly. And my reluctance for chasing these ones is because it's very time-intensive. The recovery rate is low and the dispute window is very tight. So whilst there's a lot of emphasis on chargebacks, it's not actually where the biggest recovery opportunities are in this area.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's I mean, really, really good point there, James, because I think sometimes we get really focused on recoveries in this area. But as you said, Amazon is pretty good at measuring, you know, your compliance to their supply chain standards. And really, that's what they're doing is essentially fining you for non-compliance on those things.
A good little hack, by the way, for our audience, I came across the other day is what you can do is you can log into Vendor Central, go on the left-hand side, go to operational reports, or go to reports, go to operational reports, and then on the top right of the screen, and feel free to hit me up after I can send you a link for some instructions that you can look at all of your chargebacks for the last two years and download them in one file as a CSV.
What you can do from that, for those of you who are a little bit Excel-savvy, just run a pivot table so you can actually see where are your biggest chargebacks by type and by ASIN, because a lot of times this is an ASIN-specific issue, particularly when it comes to packaging, obviously, delivery things are not. And then it's really up to you to solve and try and chase down the supply chain issues there. So that's a really good point there.
James, just before we go on, and just a reminder to everyone that this is a live webinar. So we are trying to answer your questions on the spot. And I've got one here from Mark. He just wanted to get a little bit more context, James, on the liquid issue, where you managed to get that resolved. Sounds like there was a bit of a product setup issue where Amazon perhaps was expecting we're assuming a product was a certain liquid and therefore was expecting a certain prep standard. Are you able to elaborate a little bit more on that specific case that you just mentioned there, James?
James Wakefield
Yeah, sure. Liquids is a really interesting one because from Amazon's perspective, anything liquid can obviously cause serious problems if it breaks or leaks in transit, so they do have very specific requirements around liquids. You tend to have products that are either just a bottle of liquid with a cap or a spray bottle. I think one of the big requirements with a spray product is that the spray needs to be separated from the bottle and the bottle needs to be properly secured and then that needs to be contained in a bag.
So very specific prep required for those. In the specific situation that we had, we had a five litre bottle of a cleaning product, Amazon were claiming that this wasn't compliant and lo and behold they were quite stubborn and resistant to change the classification of this product and that's where these issues can get tricky but we were very persistent, we just kept going with the case, it was actually multiple products and eventually they relented and reclassified those products which then prevented any future chargebacks.
There are actually things called e-commerce caps, which I've not come across before. So actual bottle caps that are designed specifically for e-commerce fulfillment and Amazon recognizes those, the certain kind of accreditation and testing you need to go through. You need to do that, show them the documentation and just be pretty relentless with the tickets until they say yes.
Paul Sonneveld
Right. Thanks, James. We're getting a lot of questions coming through, actually, which is great. Won't be able to get through all of them like on the spot here, but we'll try and get to some of them towards the end of this webinar as well. So don't hold back. I'm going to throw one more in here looking for a quick answer because we are short on time, but a very good one from Mylene here. Where could I find the explanation of a chargeback? You know, cap seal, prepping, bagging. Have you come across a good glossary or explanation of the various terms, James?
James Wakefield
Yes, our friend Martin Heubel has got a very good glossary and kind of explanation of different chargebacks on his website. So if you go to consulterce.com, or even just Google something like Amazon Vendor Chargeback Guide, that should come up. And that does go into some great detail around those individual types.
Paul Sonneveld
Perfect. Thanks for your questions, everyone. Please keep them coming. Okay, let's move on to our next topic around shortage claims, which is arguably probably a bigger piece here. So let's maybe just start off with giving us a little bit of context, James, in terms of you know, how often they occur, the commercial impacts, as well as the ability to actually do something about them.
James Wakefield
Yeah, absolutely. So shortage claims we find are commonly misunderstood or worse in some cases, there's just no awareness around what these actually are. So I'll explain this as simply as I can. Shortage claim, the clue is in the title, when Amazon claims stock has been short delivered. And this is based on what you've invoiced them. So in the example in the graphic we've got here, you've raised an invoice for six units, but their system says they've only received three. And in this situation, you can expect to receive a shortage claim for those missing three units. But that's not going to happen until your invoice actually becomes due for payment, typically 60 days after you've raised it, because that's when the system checks the invoice quantity compared to what their system says in terms of the quantity they've received.
So that fairly significant time delay really exacerbates what visibility you have over these issues. And that's why they can snowball quite quickly. Unlike chargebacks, it's just harder to kind of get a view on that system. And there's no two ways around it, really shortage claims are painful. Whatever system Amazon has devised to raise these is not intuitive. It's not user-friendly, it's very difficult to reconcile them, and accountants in particular despise them. And for those reasons perhaps, and some other reasons in our experience, that's why they tend to get ignored. But if there's one thing I want you to take away from this session, it's this is often where the biggest recovery opportunity lies. But before we get into that, let's try and understand what can contribute to these. Unlike with chargebacks where you've got multiple issue types, this is a bit simpler but can be caused by different factors.
The first would be a legitimate situation whereby you haven't actually sent the correct amount of stock into Amazon. In which case there's no point trying to dispute those because they are correct. You should try to update any invoice that you've raised to reflect the correct quantity in advance of that which should avoid a shortage coming up later. But issues that can create these that are maybe not legitimate is perhaps something happening at Amazon's end for whatever reason they're miscounting your stock. That could obviously be human error, but there are factors that are not necessarily their fault. There could be an issue with your catalogue data, on your labels, on the way that you're actually labeling products, i.e. where you're placing those labels. There could be issues with your advanced shipment notification data. You could have a faulty EDI connection.
There's also a multitude of ways that you can send stock into Amazon. If you're sending in single SKU pallets, then you're going to fare better than if you're dealing with mixed SKU cartons. But not using industry-recognized standards or Amazon's recommendations for labelling, packaging, barcoding, this is what's going to create inefficiencies and errors.
And just to remind you, Amazon shipped 4.5 billion units in the US alone last year. So you really need to look at how you're sending your stock in. Is it going to be efficient in terms of how they're handling it? There's lots of programs, schemes that can improve this, like PICS, pallet ordering, GDSN barcoding. I'm not going to go into detail on those, but you need to look at all of those and automation, your labelling. Otherwise, these are probably going to be a consistent scourge on your account.
Paul Sonneveld
James, can you give us I know this is going to be hard, but I'm going to try anyway. Can you give us maybe some benchmarks or some figures? So if I'm a vendor and I've never seriously looked at this, what sort of percentage do you think I could expect to see in terms of shortages from Amazon? And roughly, what is the split between caused by my own supply chain issues.
That is, I'm just not sending the stock that I said I would send to Amazon versus stock being receded into Amazon's warehouse, perhaps not counted properly or sort of what's on Amazon's side of the fence versus what's on our side of the fence. In terms of what's the total size and really what's that share that you can potentially go after? We can talk about that later in terms of how you do that. But size of the prize in terms of what you've seen across your clients. What does it look like?
James Wakefield
Yeah, really good question. Again, there's a huge amount of variance. So we will look at some accounts. And it's often really difficult to predict in advance of doing an audit, how bad is this going to be? Sometimes we'll see an account where there's actually very minimal issues. And then we'll look at another account where it's like, OK, My god, there's lots going on here.
So I've got a few worst case scenarios that I want to show you in this slide. So these are two accounts that we've audited and worked on recently. And if you look at the shortage as a percentage, the percentage of shortages is in the 5% to 10% range. But if you look at that as a monetary value, it's very significant. And you're looking at nearly a million pounds across these two accounts.
This is actually covering a three-year period. So I'm comparing their shipped COGS to the amount that we've detected in shortage claims. And when you're into these kind of numbers, that's more than enough to send an account such as this into a loss. Because this is just an additional charge on top of your trade terms, your cost of goods, your advertising, everything else. So this is quite serious for these businesses. But typically, we might see maybe between 2% to 5% on an account. It's fairly common.
Paul Sonneveld
And James, just to clarify, the chart you're showing there, you mentioned these are your disputed shortages. Do these represent the numbers that you've ordered and you actually believe there is a case to try and recover those, as opposed to the total piece?
James Wakefield
So I've got another graph which will give you a view on what our success rate looks like in terms of recovering these. So this is a summary of the just under 2,000 individual shortage claims that we've disputed so far this year. And the recovery rate has been extremely high, so around 97%. which is a clear indication to me that more often than not, the stock is going in because Amazon's not going to grant or approve a dispute when they can't confirm that that stock was actually sent in.
So by going through this dispute process, we see a very high recovery rates, but there might be circumstances where we work with a client where they're actually not sending a large amount of stock in that hasn't happened yet. So anecdotally, this is telling me that the majority of these issues are due to either miscounting or the issues I mentioned previously around potentially incorrect data on Amazon system or issues with labelling, which is causing problems with scanning, that kind of thing.
Paul Sonneveld
Very interesting. That's a very high rate. I'm going to throw in a question here from Matthijs from Lemel. Thanks, Matthijs. In terms of, obviously, there's the analysis that you're doing and the recovery rates. In your experience, James, working with all these, across all these cases, I mean, what solutions have the biggest impact on preventing shortage claims? So let me rephrase.
I mean, what can vendors do, even though the issues may exist on Amazon's side, what are the top things that vendors can do to reduce these shortage claims? Because ideally, you want to avoid having to do all this work after the fact. What are the most proactive things that you'd recommend?
James Wakefield
Well, I'm going to merge that with the next question, if that's all right, because Michael said, do you have a good recovery rate with historical shortage claims that are older than one year? So there's two ways that you need to look at this. You need to look behind you and ahead of you.
So when we're completing an audit, we're typically going back three to four years. Amazon actually hides shortage claim data older than nine months. So that's where you're going to face a bit of a challenge if you're trying to do it yourself because we're actually having to download a lot of other reports and reconcile that data manually to get an older figure, which is very time consuming. It's quite challenging. Then what gives us is essentially a pot of money that we can potentially go after over that kind of three to four year period.
We do see Amazon tending to be a bit more resistant on the older disputes, but we're quite persistent. So we just kind of keep going with those until we eventually recover them. So you've got that look back aspect, but that's also going to give you an indication of where these issues are originating from.
So once you can dig into that data, you might be directed to particular ASINs where there's common issues that just keep recurring, you know, shortages keep happening on a particular product. So the audit is very important for revealing and understanding the cause of these historic shortages, and that's going to be the best tool for future prevention. Because once you know where the problems are, you know where to go, you know where to look to make that situation better.
And if that's not a product specific thing, it might be a more general issue with your whole operational setup, the way that you're processing purchase orders, the way that you're creating labels, the way that you're communicating data back to Amazon. You need to find where these issues are and then essentially develop a plan to make that more efficient.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, James. Now, to our audience, I'm conscious we're about six minutes over. I think we're going to try and go for another four minutes or so and finish then. I've got a few more questions here I'm going to quickly throw at you, James, and then we'll talk about maybe some other types of deductions as well that don't get spoken about before as well. I want to make sure we get to that too. Let me throw in one or two more questions very quickly here. Let me start with Benji. What documentation evidence is essential when disputing a shortage? There might be multiple answers here, but what's top of the list for you, James?
James Wakefield
So we're actually finding in the vast, vast majority of cases, we're not supplying any documentation or evidence. We're being very persistent with Amazon. So we're going through a few different stages in some cases with the disputes. We're obviously knowing what kind of language to use, what point to try and escalate these.
Generally, we only see a request for documentation if it's to do with something like a PO on time delivery chargeback. So if Amazon is saying you've delivered something late and you're like, well, no, I haven't. That's where POD can become really useful. But generally, in our experience, we're not using those for shortages, unless it's a very specific situation where some stock has got lost.
But what seems to be happening is that Amazon, when we go through this process, is able to look into other parts of their system, reconcile with the data, and then see that, OK, actually, we did receive that stock. I'm not going to say much more on that, because I don't really what they're looking at at their back end. But in terms of the process that we follow, it's very persistent, sometimes a bit belligerent to make sure that they're looking into this and resolving the cases for us.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, James. And I'm just going to bring up Elias's question as well. I think you've answered because he sort of asked, what evidence do you use to reconcile shortage claims? And I think your answer was actually most cases We let Amazon work through their own systems. He makes the point around PODs seem to be very ineffective. And I think you'd probably agree with that.
As you said before, only use them in certain scenarios, in certain situations. So thank you, Elias, for that question too. James, let's just jump into others. I mean, we've got two minutes left, but I do want to cover, you've got some material on other deductions. Let's talk about some of these other things that don't get talked about a lot or maybe not enough.
James Wakefield
Yeah, sure. We don't need to spend too much time on these. They're either going to be important or not on your account. But the other deductions that we see, so price claims, that they're actually another type of shortage claim. And this is where Amazon are claiming that the amount that you've invoiced them differs from the agreed price for very specific products. So when we do see these, the financial impact tends to be quite low. When there's a clear issue when they've got it wrong the recovery rate and ease of recovery is is generally pretty good but typically not a massive issue on the accounts that we manage.
Another potentially significant one is co-op but in terms of Co-Op discrepancies so if you imagine any account might have anywhere between five to several dozen trade term agreements. And because they are often a Contra COGS agreement, that means Amazon is deducting an amount, typically a percentage from every invoice you raise to them in order to fund that agreement.
Now, there's often situations where the co-op agreements are not being applied correctly, but in terms of getting into the detail of these, identifying these issues, this is without doubt the most complicated because you've got to have all your agreements in one system and then all your individual line item transactions in another and then you've basically got to go through everything to try and identify those discrepancies. So we do that. It's very time consuming.
We often find there's potentially one, maybe all the way up to four or 5% being incorrectly charged in terms of co-op agreements. And then returns is very account specific, but we've definitely been involved in situations where Amazon has just returned a shed load of stock in totally unacceptable, unsaleable condition which is in a breach of, you know, one of their agreements, in which case we need to go after those and dispute those. But they tend to be, yeah, situation specific.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, James. That's a really great round out of this topic. Definitely, there's a lot here we can go a lot, lot deeper. So when we see each other on Friday in Brighton, let's talk about how we go pretty deep into some of these. In fact, if any of you tuning in live today, if you want a specific session on a follow-up session on any of these topics where we go in a lot more depth, just let us know in the comments. James and I will schedule an appropriate follow-up session there as well.
So James, thanks so much for volunteering all of your knowledge, your time again today. For those that are listening in, maybe they want to get in touch with you, talk about this more. I know you do a lot of audits for your vendor clients. What is the best way for them to get in touch with you?
James Wakefield
Yeah, sure. So we do have a dedicated team for this kind of activity. When I decided several years ago to really double down on the vendor central space, I realized that we needed very much to have capability and skills around these deductions and kind of thin ops issues. So we do have a dedicated team for that who are former Amazon We charge a competitive flat fee for any recovery that we're doing. But yeah, if anyone wants a free audit to kind of understand whether this is actually an issue on your account, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or my email is james@wakecommerce.co.uk.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. So great to have you again, James, I look forward to catch up in person on Friday. And until next time.
James Wakefield
Thank you, Paul. Looking forward to Friday.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone. That is it for today's episode. I do want to go back to, there was one question here from Elias around, are we hosting some other webinars on trade terms and deductions? I just want to, for those of you very familiar with this, but I do want to just draw your attention to our upcoming webinars. You find them on our website. You'll notice over the next few months, we're doing a lot of webinars focused on profitability.
So we've got probably starting at the bottom here, one coming up with Sarah on the 6th of November, more focused on the net PPM. As you can see, we've just done the one with James. Keep an eye out for next Friday, where I'll be talking to Oliver around getting ready for Amazon's annual vendor negotiation. I think we'll get into a lot of those deductions there as well. And then before Christmas, we'll get into unlocking Amazon vendor profit margins with Michelle as well.
Lots of activities there coming up, so make sure to register for those. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Just a reminder, if you are at Unboxed today here in Austin, come and say hello. I'd love to catch up with you. If you're interested in participating in the early release program for the Amazon Vendor P&L with MerchantSpring, look at their website or go to https://bit.ly/vendor_pl to register your interest.
And last but not least, if you are interested in additional topics, more nuanced topics when it comes to Amazon vendor, please, please drop me a note. I'd love to know. I will do my best to find the right experts and speakers and bring those episodes to you. Thanks so much for tuning in and until next time, take care. Bye bye.
