Courtesy of NewlyPreneurs the below BKM:

“Inventory Placement Service (IPS)

When you setup your Amazon Seller’s Account, your default shipping setting will be Distributed Inventory Placement. Using this option causes your shipments to often be broken up and racks up the cost of shipping. (Less efficient shipments as we touched on already.)

However, if you go into your settings you can change your shipping settings to Inventory Placement Service. This will allow you to ship all of your products to ONE, maximum TWO warehouses if you are shipping oversized products too. Hallelujah!

What’s the catch?

Amazon obviously charges a fee for this service. For standard sized products, pricing will start at $.30 per unit and go up to $1.30/unit for oversized items. Below is the link to the charges. (Keep in mind that these fees are taken out of your disbursements and are not factored into your shipping charges that are displayed when you print your shipping labels.)

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help-popup.html/ref=ag_200735910_cont_xx?ie=UTF8&itemID=200735910#

In addition to fees, there’s one other catch with IPS. Unfortunately, using IPS means that your inventory will take a lot longer to be received and listed. That’s because IPS makes you ship all of your product to one warehouse and then Amazon breaks up that shipment and sends it to different FBA warehouses all over the country. (Hence, the fees charged.)

Due to this, Nessa and I go back and forth between using IPS or Distributed Inventory Placement. For us, we simply consider if the savings is worth the longer receiving times. Now, if you want to give it a shot…

How do you set this up?

• From your seller’s dashboard, scroll over “settings” in the upper right hand corner.
• A drop down menu will open and you should see “Fulfillment By Amazon” at the very bottom. Click on that.
• There you will see “Inbound Settings.” And under that, “Inventory Placement Option.”
• Click edit on the right hand side and simply select “Inventory Placement Service.”

Now every time you process a shipment, it will all go to the same FBA warehouse! Woohoo!”

• I need to contact them somehow and not all the reviewers have e-mail in their profile’s “About” area.
• Most of the reviewers have their specialization in some area of products, so there is a task to find a reviewer which will be interested in your specific product
• There are reviewers with wish-list, which I decided to not try and use… Some Approach I still need to learn
• Some reviewers leave e-mail at their profile, so sellers can contact them
• Most reviewers expect the product to be given away to review it

Thus, I issued a personalized request similar to the below to these reviewers. I contacted these reviewers: Chandler, A.Sperelli, PTcruiser .Waiting for answers.

Subject:

”

Hi, <reviewer’s name>!

We are new business on Amazon.

We plan to organize a give-away for one our products, which is almost only available for now and sells already for more than 20 days. More than 20 units were bought for 50% OFF, but no natural review appeared so far

 

Our Charter: Our goal is to make our mid-range, cost-effective, quality products related to traveling, tourism and active life-style more reachable/affordable, but still serving the basic needs of active person and making the adventures more safe, optimal, comfortable, and memorable.

 

According to your profile, I assumed you might like to try our product…

”      

Subject: Refund initiated for order 111-8481176-7197000

Message Text:

“Dear pageal.bz@gmail.com,

We have initiated a refund in the amount of $<amoubt> to <customer name> for the following items:

Order <#>

We will adjust your seller account accordingly.

You can view your account at any time by logging in to your seller account and going to your seller account information page.

Thank you for selling on Amazon,
Amazon Services”

The Action I took:

“Hello, dear <customer name>!
Note: This mail is resent as an attempt to provide you means to contact ePGes if you will need. Please, see below.

We are sorry to know you returned “ePGes Wireless IP Camera”.
We hope this happen due to the price-drop that happen recently and not because of quality or any other issue.

In any rate we’ll be glad to know the real reason of this return and if we can assist you in any way.
Thus, you are welcome to contact us at EP Ges or EPGes on Facebook (as mail provision is prohibited by Amazon)
We really care of your opinion.

We hope you actually needed such a product and plan to reorder this item for its current price $19.99, which will not get lower for the remained inventory.
With respect,
ePGes Customer Support and Relationships.

”

Finally it turned out that the customer imagined something else, not what she seen on the pictures and in the description. The return reason went as following:  “Product is not as described on website“. Thus, walking through Inventory Planning tabs (which I reached from main seller central page via Inventory Planning widget) a got to the tab of FBA returns https://sellercentral.amazon.com/fba-return. On the too of the FBA-returns page I got an Exclamation message about having “Automated Unfulfillable Removal Settings” being disabled. So I wen to the proposed link so check what it is all about. It is actually about what FBA should do in case if the returned item will be unfullfillable (will not be able to return to the storage and be sold again). There were  two options proposed to me Dispose or Retun (as on the picture below). I preferred to choose Disposal as I do not have US address to get those items handled.

After the confirmation of my chose I was taken to the page where many other FBA settings may be adjusted

  eventually the returned item treated as sell-able in this specific case and was back on inventory shelves

Although product was actually privately labeled with logo, at main photo it didn’t appear with logo. Reason: I didn’t have good photo-editor for that. But occasionally also today I got improved  image with labeled product on it from a supplier (with which we started to collaborate more). When I was going change the image, I noticed such a situation with my product’s listing: instead of price there was “Available form these sellers”  

I got angry on that, as recently I spent some more money to promote my product with Ad-campaigns. So I did the following:

• I replaced main image with the new one which had my logo on it
• Reordered the pictures so, that all the pictures with logo were appearing first
• Contacted the newly appeared seller with the letter appearing below
• Lowered the price below the new seller’s price

It didn’t take 5 minutes until the new “lazy” seller gone: went off my product’s listing

End of the story.

”

Hello,
I’m an owner of ePGes brand which is selling this specific product: <my product ASIN>
We are sourcing this product directly from our supplier and it is privately labeled for our store (which is yet under construction). Although it may be similar to one of your products – it is not.

You recently added your store as a selling on appropriate ePGes listing.
We request you to remove yourself from this private listing within 24 hours.
In other case, official actions will be taken with Amazon.

Appreciate your understanding
ePGes

“

Then this happened right away to one of my first batches of units. When I started to be short on units to sell it was easy to notice, that it was more subtracted from total than actually sold. I let this to settle one day, but the problem didn’t disappear by itself. So, I opened a case, which was referred and resolved pretty quick. This is how final lettwr went:

”

I have checked and see that 1 unit were misplaced at Amazon warehouse on Nov 13, 2017 in the fC: TEB3. This is the reason the manage inventory shows 3 units only available instead of 4 units. You may check the same from below link: <link>. 

Kindly be advised that we will attempt to locate the unit and add it to your inventory. However, if we cannot locate the missing inventory within 30 days from the date of missing, you will be automatically reimbursed in accordance to the FBA Lost and Damaged Inventory Reimbursement Policy with no further action required from you. 

In this case, I kindly request you to wait on <date> to get the automated reimbursement. Hence, please be advised that according to Amazon’s policy, an automatic reimbursement will be processed to your account after the 30 days’ period from the date of refund, i.e. 

If the reimbursement does not show in your seller account by 30 days from misplaced date. please contact to us again with this reference case Id #<number>. So that we will be able to provide a manual reimbursement.

***Note: I can initiate a manual reimbursement now, but you will get automatic reimbursement within 30 days from the misplaced date , the reimbursement which is initiated manually will be considered as duplicate. This is the reason why we request you to wait 30 days to get the reimbursement. I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

”  

In any rate I was requested to fill that exemption sheet, which doesn’t make sense for something that is not a battery and doesn’t contain batteries. After first submission of the form it was rejected  and I was obliged to mark the check-box at statement: “We have checked the following products wit regards to regulations and confirm that they include batteries with the following details:” And then were my products listed and there was marked they are NOT batteries and do NOT include batteries.

None of my questions in the case that was opened for me were answered. And I was trying to realize what I should do for my other battery-less products to not get delayed. Also I was interested what is the proper way to act to prevent delays my with products that do have batteries and were on their way to FBA centers.  

I was only able to confirm that Hazmat review completed and something will happen wit my product only by opening another case and asking about what is going there. 

Exemption Sheet

I have found that using a Amazon give-away promotion allows you to propose FREE product to public and then ask for their kind and honest review. It’s prohibited on Amazon to make a private discounts to people for reviews. Seth Kniep describes more ways of getting reviews. Before I seen his video I also was asking for a review on my product’s page along statement, that such a low price is a acquaintance deal (the price was as low as 50% of the price I planned finally to sell the product).  Tens of people bought this product, after I also promoted it on low-intention Amazon Ad-campaign. Seth actually stated in one of his videos, that making a campaign without having reviews is not so good idea, as people will not take a chance to buy something they cannot trust is good. But, I assumed, that I’d like to check if 50% discount may attract people and give me an opportunity to gather reviews faster.  Then, few days after I had shipment notification mails, I sent letter to the buyers with request of their review.  Of-course I sent my give-away links to my US-based friends an family, as Amazon give away page had ~1800 giveaways available in that day and was not believing anyone will notice especially my own giveaway. Thus finally I have some purchases/giveways w/o having a single review ahead of that. Now many of the items are already delivered and I’m waiting for reviews to come. Let’s see.

• To be able to set advertising campaigns on your Seller Central’s account you have to switch to a Professional Selling Plan
• After a campaign is created it takes about one hour for it to start working. 
• After one day since the campaign beginning you are able to download campaign’s report and learn search keywords (words used for search) and to analyze those.
• Keywords analysis allows you to adjust product name to have the most frequently searched words at the beginning: for the Ad to pop up in more cases right at the beginning of buyer’s search
• PPC (Pay-Per-Click) bid is the dollar amount a company/seller allots to pay per click advertising. More information is here
• Buy Box is the box on a product detail page where customers can begin the purchasing process by adding items to their shopping carts.

Learning Materials: 

• Seith Kniep – Optimizing PPC Ad Campaigns. Q&A (youtube)  
  

   

“Please provide the following documents and confirm there is a valid credit card on file:

–Utility bill with name and address visible
–Business license, if applicable
–If you have active listings, include copies of invoices, receipts, contracts or delivery orders from your supplier issued in the last 90 days.

You can send files in .pdf, .png, or .gif format. These documents must be authentic and unaltered. You may remove pricing information, but the rest of the document must be visible. Please submit your documents by following this link (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html).”

My answer

“Hi,

3 Days later

Amazon sends same request as before. Sign that my mail was nor received.

After I tried to reply to seller-performance@amazon.com, with request for clarification about where I should upload my documents, I got an immediate reply: “Thank you for writing, however this email alias is not functional. If you want to appeal for any issues, here’s a link to our Contact Us
page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html …”

Then I decided to upload all the documents on my shared drives and to appeal using shareable links to those documents. To appeal, I used an Appeal option at “Performance notifications” page available through the triangular flag at Amazon logo or down the main page of the seller central.

 The Appeal’s text went same as the initial letter describing all the products, their shipment ID and the current status, but with the following intro: “The page you provided http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html is too generic. I uploaded all requested documents at two SHARED DRIVES for you, hope at least one of them will work: <Google Drive Shareable Link>, <Amazon Drive>” 

I sent also same content by e-mail, option for which I succeeded to find at their generic page. Chat was not available at US night and I also didn’t have too much time to hang on chat.

End of this Long Story

Several hours later, at the same day I got a message from Amazon with the subject: “Your Amazon.com selling privileges have been reinstated”. I checked “Performance Notifications” page and seen this: “We’ve received your appeal. Our Seller Performance team will review your appeal, and you should expect a reply by .”

Conclusion

Next time if I get privileges removal, I’ll use “Appeal” option immediately and will use my shared drives for heavy documents (as this allows to just put a link within mail’s/appeal’s text, without a need to attach those).