Julie Spear, Head of Retail Marketplace Services at Acadia is quoted in Modern Retail on March 9, 2023.
“1P vendors are more focused on their margins and not wanting to leave any money on the table,” said Julie Spear, head of marketplace services at Acadia. “So [with] the brands that we work with, this is something that we’re looking at. Anytime we have a vendor client we’re digging into this immediately to make sure no money is being left on the table,” added Spear.
“Profitability is even more important in an uncertain economy. You always should be making sure that you’re not paying fees that you’re not supposed to be paying. So this is something that any brand in terms of operational hygiene and financial health should be paying attention to,” added Spear.
Spear said one of her vendor clients in the grocery category receives chargebacks “most often for PO On-Time Accuracy and Rejected PO Rate and has received $1,200 in fees in the past six months. Spear added that none of these charges have been recouped for the brand.
To be sure, Amazon creates these chargebacks, sometimes correctly and sometimes erroneously. “There’s one of two things going on — either it’s an internal issue on [the vendor’s] end, as they’re preparing product to ship to Amazon, or Amazon is charging them incorrectly. And so when we dig in, we work with them to identify which one it is,” Spear said.
She added, “if it’s a problem on their [vendor’s] end, we help them identify the fix. So they stop getting the charged for chargebacks. And if it’s an incorrect fee applied from Amazon, then we open cases and we dispute it, and we recoup the fees,” Spear added.
Read the full article: “1P vendors are increasingly scrutinizing chargebacks and other fees” in Modern Retail, published March 9, 2023.