We were obliged to adopt self ship rather than easy ship because of the following:

1. Amazon changed its rules of cancelling orders if seller was late in shipping beyond the designated date from 5 days to 1 day. Since we are shipping all our orders from Europe it was common to be late in shipping by 1 day more than anticipated due to shipping or clearance issues. While Amazon were cancelling any order that is delayed by one day and charge us heavy percentage of cancellation charges

2. While in Easy ship we didn’t have any means to contact buyers except for Amazon e-mail which most buyers don’t use or read. In many cases we need to contact buyers to notify them of any customization or problems in delivery or return. at the same time in case we want to inform the buyer for example that we can only ship the black and not blue color while we cannot communicate with him or her, then we risk higher percentage of cancellations, return and claims.

3. Allowing buyers freedom to buy expensive items on COD that we have to specially procure based on buyers orders while we cannot communicate with buyer to confirm its orders and then allowing buyers to refuse delivery resulting that we have big stock of unsold items and charged delivery charges for no reason.

4. While in Easy Ship we had no say or way to communicate with buyers regarding their return requests. Some buyers are abusive (buying branded expensive items that they use for days and then instigating return for fake reasons). The same tactics are commonly used by competitors posing as buyers and then return with complaints such as receiving fake items. In all such cases we had just to accept returns and are compensated only 40% of the item cost in Safe-T claims (if we are lucky enough to be granted the claims).

At the same time its seems there are huge disadvantages for using Self ship that we came to realize only in hard learning experience as Amazon don’t follow their or abide by its policies that they apply only to FBA or FBM shipments and not applied in same terms when using Self Ship:

1 We have to chase Amazon to refund cancellation charges whenever buyers request to cancel orders before shipping. While in Easy ship such refund of cancellation charges was automatic.

2 It seems that Amazon undeclared policy for Self Ship is to immediately grant A-Z claims without allowing sellers the chance to reply.

3. It also seems that one of the factors to have the win box visibility is to have your items on FBA or FBM, adopting Self Ship will result in reduced visibility that combined with unjustified exceeding 1% defect rate due to granting A-Z claims unjustly to buyers resulted on Amazon putting our winning box at zero percentage and sales volume dropped to about 20% its normal level.

I think that Amazon should treat Self Ship option sellers fairly and know that there are many experienced sellers who are more than capable to do their own customer service and satisfy customers needs better than Amazon own customer service or preprogrammed AI.

Otherwise, Amazon needs to allow some minor changes to their Easy ship program as per the following:

1. revert the cancellation period in case of shipping delay to 5 days rather than 1 day.
2. allow sellers access to buyers mobile numbers as most buyers do not read their Amazon e-mail messages.
3. allow sellers to accept or reject COD orders.