Amazon’s advice to third party sellers during the COVID-19 crisis? Cancel orders and deactivate listings!

[whohit]Amazon’s advice to third party sellers during the COVID-19 crisis? Cancel orders and deactivate listings![/whohit]As we presented in our two prior articles published on 26.March and 27.March, during the continued global pandemic coronavirus crisis, Amazon failed to offer it’s third party sellers any help or support which would lesser the negative impact on their accounts.

Instead, the company announced yesterday, how they are now requiring sellers in Europe to accept returns for orders placed after 15th February months beyond the regular 30 days period.

Today, Amazon made another announcement in which they are claiming to “have taken steps to proactively mitigate the impact of this event on the health of your Amazon seller account by relaxing our policies for shipping-related Performance metrics.”

While one would expect this to be followed with measures such as increasing the Order Defect Rate, Cancellation Rate, Late Shipment Rate targets, Estimated Delivery Dates, temporarily making changes to the A-Z guarantee, introducing account-wide increased Handling Time or discontinuing account suspensions, Amazon then continued with their usual advice for sellers to simply cancel orders or deactivate listings.

In short, Amazon made no measures to help sellers protect their Amazon businesses during difficult times.

They may consider steps such as cancellation of orders with Late Shipment Rate defects, followed by apology to buyers when reviewing appeals of sellers whose accounts get hit with suspensions due to failing to adhere to the performance targets.

Here you can review the full announcement: