Acquired Prep Savings and Chargeback Reversals for a Health & Personal Care Brand
What We’re Celebrating:
Thanks to our diligent correspondence with an Amazon Supply Chain Manager, GO helped a health and personal care brand save $287K in prep fees and reverse $117K in chargebacks for 5 ASINs in 2023.
Additionally, we received programmed assurance from Amazon, meaning, for a quarter at a time, they cannot issue chargebacks for these 5 products.
Overview:
GO works with a health and personal care client who had 5 ASINs with high concession rates due to packaging leakage. To minimize this, GO recommended the brand apply Gripper Tape to these items before sending them to Amazon warehouses. Despite this effort, our client was still seeing cap seal and bagging fees from Amazon. To reduce prep charges and acquire chargeback reversals for these ASINs, our operations team began consistently contacting a Supply Chain Manager at Amazon, providing documentation and information that proved these charges were unnecessary.
The Challenge:
Amazon continued charging our client for cap seal and bagging prep even though the Gripper Tape they began utilizing would prevent leakage. As of this case study’s publication date, bagging costs 85 cents per unit and cap seal costs 82 cents per unit.
Disputes and prep removal cases are rarely beneficial in scenarios like this, so we had to identify a creative solution and be persistent to mitigate our client’s prep charges.
The Strategy:
Our operations team bypassed disputing and prep removal cases and began directly contacting a Supply Chain Manager at Amazon to escalate prep waivers in the summer of 2022. We reached out to Amazon up to 3 times per week because we had a large amount of information to send to them. This approach required steadfast dedication from our team – the first round of prep waivers for the 5 ASINs was approved in March 2023, meaning it took several months of constant communication for this request to go through. It was all worth it in the end, because we not only achieved cost savings for our client, but by the time we had to resubmit the prep waivers again in September 2023, the process went a lot quicker.
While these prep waivers have been approved, we still see charges fall through the cracks from time to time. To stay on top of this, we review cost updates with our client weekly and reach out to Amazon whenever these one-off fees occur.
The Results:
We helped our client save $287K in prep charges and reverse $117K in chargebacks for these 5 ASINs in 2023. This strategy reduced their total estimated prep fees by 19%. Additionally, we received programmed assurance from Amazon, meaning, for a quarter at a time, they cannot issue chargebacks for these 5 products.
Due to the success of this strategy, we are currently running the same approach for additional ASINs for this client to reduce their prep costs even further.
Need assistance in reducing prep fees?
Our GO operations team can identify the winning combination of strategies to reduce your fulfillment costs. If you want our help implementing a tailored solution for your brand, contact us.