Part 1: Selling on Amazon

Amazon sellers have to meet high standards and set metrics to maintain and grow a successful Amazon business. Your dispatch times, numbers of returns, refunds and any other issues you may encounter with your sales are all monitored and assessed.

What are Amazon’s Customer Metrics?

Amazon’s Customer Metrics are designed to ensure that third party sellers are offering the same level of service to shoppers as when they buy from Amazon directly. As well as offering excellent customer service to meet Amazon’s Customer Metric requirements, you will also need to focus on keeping your products priced competitively and managing stock levels to ensure that your products appear higher in search results and are eligible to win the Buy Box.

If you fail to meet these performance thresholds you account may be temporarily suspended or your selling privileges can be permanently removed.

Perfect Order Percentage (POP)

Your POP is the percentage of your orders that are accepted, processed, fulfilled and dispatched without any problems. Any negative feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claims, Chargebacks, cancellations, late dispatches, refunds and buyer-initiated messages will be taken into account and count against your POP.

Amazon requires you to keep your Perfect Order Percentage above 97%.

Order defect rate (ODR)

This is the proportion of your orders that receive negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim or a credit card chargeback. You need to keep this below 1%, if you don’t it will affect your eligibility to win the Buy Box.

Pre-fulfilment cancellation rate

Pre-fulfilment cancellation rate is the number of orders that you cancel before you’ve dispatched the items - this should be kept below 2.5%.

Late dispatch rate

The amount of orders that have a dispatch confirmation after the expected dispatch date should be below 4%. If dispatch confirmation is late then there’s a higher chance that customers will contact you or leave negative feedback.

Refund rate

The number of orders that you have to refund for any reason, as a percentage.

Meeting Amazon’s Customer Metric requirements

There are a number of different things you need to do to meet Amazon’s Customer Metrics, including:

• Have clear and accurate product descriptions and details - give customers realistic expectation of what they are buying.
  
• Maintain your stock levels, and update listings when you’re out of stock to avoid cancelling orders.
  
• Update Amazon when you dispatch your items and upload tracking details - this can prevent sellers from getting in touch to ask about their delivery and prove when you dispatched the item.
  
• Send out orders on time so that you meet the expected dispatch date.
  
• Package your items securely to avoid negative feedback and refunds which affect your POP and ODR.
  

Learn more about Amazon Customer Metrics here.   

How Zenstores can help Amazon sellers

As an Amazon seller, you need to manage your stock levels, fulfil and dispatch items quickly and offer excellent customer service to avoid negative feedback, refunds and A-to-z Guarantee claims. Meeting the Customer Metric requirements seems fairly straightforward but can be time consuming and difficult to balance.

With Zenstores you’ll be able to speed up your shipping process, making it more efficient and reliable. Once you’ve linked your Amazon account and your couriers, such as Royal Mail, MyHermes or DPD, all your orders will be imported and ready for you to print labels in bulk. You’ll be able to print large numbers of shipping labels with just a few clicks in minutes, which will help you to get your Amazon orders dispatched on time.

After creating and printing shipping labels in Zenstores, you can automatically mark the orders as dispatched in Amazon and upload tracking details. This will save you time, instead of manually updating each of your Amazon orders it can be done for a number of orders at the same time - it’ll also ensure that you don’t forget to add tracking details to Amazon.

Zenstores is able to speed up your shipping process and improve your order management. With all your orders in one place you’ll be able to search and find them quickly, print labels and dispatch orders in bulk, and update Amazon with dispatch details and tracking information. The time you save by using Zenstores will enable you to offer even better customer service, and spend more time improving and growing your Amazon business.