10/31/2024
💭 Ever wonder if a 3PL is worth it? Why not just send all your inventory directly to Amazon?
🤮 Ya'll I am sick to my stomach after reading this post today in an Amazon Seller Facebook Group. $500,000 at stake!
📖 I included the full post (long read) so you can appreciate the full gravity of what this person is going through.
🔒 Protect your investment, use a 3PL!
[START POST]
So a follow-up to yesterday's post about getting hard gated in the brand FUNKO: the listings all went inactive at midnight (central time) and are no longer selling.
After being on the phone with Amazon and my distributors all day, I seem to have found out what happened: an internal team at Amazon arbitrarily decided that I was no longer allowed to sell this brand out and out of nowhere restricted me in it. I have been advised by multiple seller support representatives that my best course of action is to liquidate the inventory affected because I will at least get something for it. It is either that or to spend between $75,000 to $100,000 to have my FBA inventory and AWD inventory returned to me (nearly 75,000 units, or over half a million dollars worth of buy cost).
This was not FUNKO's doing (according to the reps at Amazon) and it was entirely an arbitrary decision made by an internal team at Amazon--one that I cannot contact in any way. Supposedly there is nothing I can do but wait to see if I am able to re-apply to sell (and pay nearly $10k per month in storage fees because it is Q4), liquidate the inventory and get basically nothing for it, or spend tens of thousands of dollars to have it returned to me (this would essentially eat up all of the reserve capital that I have an would put me to zero in my account reserves and bank account).
I am asking for your help in getting pushed to an internal team in Amazon that can reverse this decision. I have over 10,000 invoices covering nearly half a million units that show that I purchase my inventory from authorized distributors and I have letters from a number of the owners of these distributors stating that I am allowed to sell the products that they are selling me on Amazon.com and that they are aware I am selling them here.
If I am not able to get this resolved within Amazon, what is my best course of action? Litigation, arbitration, something else? If I had 30-90 days to at least sell off most of my inventory, or the removal fees were waived, I would be less distraught about this decision.
Any help/comments you can provide that can point me in the right direction would be extremely helpful. I have always tried to follow rules of Amazon, have always been an honest seller, and even take great care in packaging collectible products (such as purchasing plastic POP! protectors to minimize damage as much as possible). To be hit with this out of the blue is gut wrenching, and if it is not solved within the next few weeks it will completely wreck a company that I have build from the ground up.