Peruse Back-Track’s website, and within 2 seconds a glaring number will pop out at you.

“Amazon customer returns equates to $65 billion per year and that number grows 21% each year.”

That’s a whole lot of zeros representing the number of dissatisfied customers there are on a platform that prides itself on putting customers first. And 1/3 of those returns are the result of faulty products which may or may not be the corollary of your involvement as an Amazon seller.

While there certainly are sellers on the marketplace that clearly just want to push product without caring about the ethics or consequences of selling their clients shoddy products, the majority of sellers actually do care. They spend months-upon-months designing, building, and executing a product they are proud of, only to find out later that what their customers ordered is not what they actually received.

This is problematic for a number of reasons.

Bad products lead to bad results

1.    You are more likely to receive poor ratings and reviews

As any Amazon sellers know, reviews mean everything. Social proof is inherently important regarding the potential buyer’s decision to purchase your product or not. Statistics reveal that 91% of 18–34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Furthermore, 93% of consumers say that online reviews influenced their purchasing decisions.

These numbers don’t offer a lot of wiggle room for error and selling subpar products is a surefire way of getting negative reviews which, in turn, lead to a decline in sales as well as ruin brand-reputation.

2.    A high return rate can lead to account suspension

Online ecommerce platforms like Amazon or Walmart implement quality targets to ensure sellers meet standards to protect customer satisfaction. Order defect rate is a common ecommerce quality target and Amazon sets an order defect rate of less than 1 percent, calculated from card chargebacks and 1- or 2-star ratings for its sellers.

The Order Defect Rate (ODR) is a key measure of your ability to deliver a great customer experience. It includes all orders with one or more defects represented as a percentage of total orders during a given 60-day time period. This is measured in 3 ways:

Negative Feedback Rate, represented as a percentage, is the number of orders that have received negative feedback divided by the number of orders in the 60-day allotted period.

A-to-Z Guarantee Claim Rate, represented as a percentage, is the number of orders with a relevant claim divided by the number of orders in a given 60-day time period.

Credit Card Chargeback Rate, represented as a percentage, is the number of orders that have received a credit card chargeback divided by the number of orders in the relevant period.

The acceptable average product return rate for Amazon can vary from category to category. Here is the breakdown of product returns on Amazon and how a high product return rate could influence the success of your brand:

Typically, products with reasonable return rates have less than 10% returns.

Products like books and media: 5-7%

Home, kitchen, and garden, and sports and outdoors: 8-10%

Consumer electronics: 25-35%

Clothing and fine jewelry: up to 40%

3.    Poor quality control can affect the valuation of your business

With many sellers looking for a strong exit once they build their ecommerce store, it’s incredibly important that one ensures their assets and profit margins are desirable to potential buyers or aggregators. With your storefront being one of the most important assets M&As look at, it’s crucial that your account health is high. Buyers look at your account’s history (including reviews, ratings, and ODR) to determine how valuable your listing is.

Furthermore, your profit margins will be lower if you have high return rates and refunds. This will inevitably impact your bottom line and make you less attractive to protentional buyers.

How can inspections alleviate the chance of faulty products getting to your customers?

At Movley, we put a lot of emphasis on the need for proper inspections to be executed.  Without defined quality control strategies put in place, you are significantly more vulnerable to ending up with default products and (unfortunately) the first time you’ll probably hear about a product being substandard is when it gets in your customers’ hands. And by then it’s too late.

Movley is a U.S.-based inspection company that places emphasis on ethics, superior quality control, and a built-in team of experts that help our clients every step of the process. Our system is based on transparency and making sure that our clients feel involved in every way – from formulating appropriate tests to coming up with proper sample sizes to ensuring proper documentation throughout. the process.

You may be thinking to yourself, “Sure, that’s great information, but it’s too late now. I already have a bunch of defective units and don’t know what do with them.”

Enter Back-Track.

Options for salvaging bad Amazon products

Back-Track is a rapidly growing company that helps diminish your losses on defective units. Co-owner, Brandon Dupsky – a seasoned Amazon and Ebay seller himself – is passionate about helping clients who have been wronged regain what they can of shoddy inventory that are almost always the direct result of improper inspection processes.

While their platform is pretty straight-forward, Back-Track is a very unique company that offers the ability to renew, rebuild, and repair your stock so that it can be resold on other platforms, allowing Amazon sellers the ability to regain some profit loss.

How Does it Work?

The process is simple. You ship all of your customer returns from Amazon, eBay, or whatever other platform you are selling on over to Back-Track. Extensive testing is done on the packaging and the product itself to determine if that product can be repaired and salvaged enough to flip the inventory and sell it on other platforms. As a result, the customer is able to reclaim some of his/her lost profits.

• It’s FREE to begin and only takes 5 minutes to setup.
• Ship your customer returns or liquidation stock to Back-Track
  • From Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Website, Customer Direct or your 3PL.
• Our trained techs deeply inspect each package taking photos, grading the condition, and counting accessories.
• You can see the photos, item grade and other tech notes in our secure, real-time online dashboard, allowing you as the seller to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening with your inventory.
• Depending on the state of your units and how you want to proceed, we can repackage, relabel, repair your item or liquidate it (if that’s what you decide to do).
• For final resolution, we can ship back to FBA, ship to a new customer directly, save the parts to use in the future or resell the item in Back-Track’s retail network.

Some facts about retail and why you should choose Back-Track

• 3PL’s are not experts in customer return recovery like Back-Track
• Most customer returns still have 40-80% of their value, deeming them perfect capable of being refurbished and resold.
• Many Amazon sellers feel they have no other option but to destroy their customer returns
• Amazon does not ship customer returns across international borders
• It’s too costly to ship back to the factory
• Amazon will resell your customer returns on your same listing, undercutting your price, winning the Buy Boy and/or tarnishing your brand
• Every hour you “spend” working on your customer returns, is 1 hour less you “invest” in growing your business

Check out the interview between Movley’s McClain Warren & Back-Track’s Brandon Dupsky to fully understand what each company does and both companies work closely together to improve their clients experience and bottom line.