Can you tell me a little bit more about the chargeback process you go through?
For chargebacks, we address from two perspectives: First, we identify, report and address root causes so we try to correct penalties from operational non-compliance. We will work with your team to present our findings, which we make available 24/7 on our operational compliance dashboard while providing coaching, guidance and best practices for addressing those root causes.
Second, we complete automated disputing process within the allotted times (30 days) for the appropriate number of potential disputes (up to 3 times) to ensure we don’t miss any opportunities to collect on recoverable funds. We report your top 3 root causes via our dashboard and go down to the invoice and ASIN level with our dynamic reporting so you can have visibility into your chargeback scenario at any time. Further, we report on performance over time with what has been disputed, won, rejected and pending so your accounting team can monitor.
How do you deal with shortages?
For shortages, we are able to complete disputes from 5+ years ago. Our software can complete up to 5,000 disputes per hour. It typically takes 30-45 days to get the initial approval or rejection. For rejected shortage disputes, we then compile and begin the open-statement process. It’s our understanding that there are less than 1,000 people in the world that have filed an open-statement and we have 10 of them working here.
The manual open-statement collection process takes 3-6 months typically; however, we are identifying millions of dollars that have been essentially written off and we are recovering nearly 80% of these funds over the course of a year. We begin with your oldest shortages and work our way to current day and then complete for the term of our agreement as well. Similar to chargebacks, our goal is to (1) identify and address root causes and (2) collect on the short term opportunity of prior and future shortages.
How do you deal with prevention of chargebacks?
Root cause analysis and guidance is the core purpose and function of our service. The collection of fees is considered a nice short term opportunity but the real value is in addressing root causes while providing increased bandwidth and transparency to your team. Amazon's goal with chargebacks is not to be a fine or revenue center; however, the penalties are supposed to act as a driving force to increase their operational efficiency. Our operational compliance team is the group of foremost expertise in the field – it’s the only thing they do!
