A quick reminder… from today Amazon say that “it is required that all sellers either provide a return address in the country of the Market Place Site or pay the shipping cost of returns. If you are selling, for example, at Amazon.de, you must either provide a return address in Germany or offer buyers the free return shipping”.
Amazon’s reasoning is that Customers who buy from Amazon, expect that they can return products easily. This doesn’t help sellers however who are facing increased cost of returns, although hopefully in the future companies like ZigZag Global will make this less painful.
Instructions to change return address
To update your return address in the Land of selected MarketPlace site, please go as follows:
1. Go to “Settings” to the “About the Seller Account”.
2. On the “About the Seller Account”, go to the “information return” and click right there on “Edit”.
3. Choose. An already registered address as the default return address or enter a new address as the default return address
4. Click on “Submit”.
Instructions to upload pre-paid return labels
To upload a pre-paid return label for the return request, please proceed as follows:
1. Go to “Manage Returns” in the “orders” to.
2. Select “Create I will be a pre-paid return shipping label for this application” option in the “Your Return Address Labels”.
3. Go to “Manage Returns” in the “orders” to.
4. Click on the back end applications that you want to select the checkbox.
5. From the drop-down menu on the page “authorize all returns selected” option above and click “Go”.
6. Load the shipping label up, select the carrier and type, if available, the shipment tracking number.
7. Set the cost of the return label to € 0.00, to ensure that the buyer is not burdened with the cost of return.
Options
Ignore it
This certainly isn’t something that we could suggest that you do, but we know of sellers who are taking this course of action. Simply carry on as you were and send out standard returns information and let buyers pick up the cost of returning goods to you in the UK. Sellers that we know of have taken the decision that if the buyer queries who pays the international return costs they’ll instantly pick up the tab, but if the buyer doesn’t mention it they’ll simply let them pay for the return.
Use FBA
If you put your products into Amazon FBA in the UK, you can simply let Amazon ship the products internationally and just pay the FBA charges.
You may well find that for products which frequently sell abroad Amazon will ship them to an EU FBA warehouse and fulfil European orders from there. However you’ll still pay shipping costs as if the products were fulfilled from the UK.
The downside with using FBA is that you’ll have to either fulfil eBay and website orders from Amazon or hold a larger inventory of stock. Obviously stock in FBA isn’t available in your warehouse to fulfil orders so it’s a balancing act between cost of inventory and costs of shipping internationally and paying for possible returns.