Seller's Guide: Contacting Amazon Buyers

With net sales totaling in the billions and a worldwide customer base of millions, it’s no surprise that Amazon is considered one of the largest and most valuable eCommerce companies in the world.

What is surprising is the fact that approximately 2 billion products, which amount to roughly 40 percent of the total number of products that Amazon moves, are sold by more than 2 million third-party sellers. Now, take a minute to let that sink in. 2 billion products—yes, that’s right, billion with a “b”—are sold by average people like us, taking advantage of the Amazon marketplace.

However, if you want to sell on the Amazon marketplace, you need to play by its rules. Engaging in prohibited seller activities and actions can result in the cancellation of listings, suspension from use of tools and reports, and/or the removal of selling privileges.

Amazon prohibits direct emails between buyers and sellers. In fact, sellers do not even receive actual email addresses for buyers, ensuring that they can only communicate through Amazon. Why does Amazon route all emails between buyers and sellers through the messaging system? In an official announcement posted on its forums, Amazon claims that it hopes to achieve the following objectives:

Increase the security of buyer-to-seller communication.
Resolve disputes faster and better by ensuring Amazon.com employees reviewing the dispute have access to all buyer-seller communications.
Reduce the number of A-Z claims filed by encouraging and verifying pre-claim buyer/seller communication; and
Eliminate unnecessary contacts during claims investigations.

But as one author observed, the policy was probably also implemented as a way to prevent sellers from secretly diverting transactions to another website or sales process, thus bypassing Amazon’s fees. Of course, this particular practice is still strictly prohibited, but offenders now have to accomplish the act through means other than a direct email. Regardless of Amazon’s intentions, however, the fact remains that direct emails between buyers and sellers are prohibited.

Fortunately, Amazon's Buyer-Seller Messaging Service does an excellent job working behind the scenes to facilitate individual buyer-seller communications.

What is the Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging Service?

According to Amazon, the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service (formerly called the Communication Manager) is a system that facilitates email communication between buyers and sellers in the Amazon marketplace. To achieve its goals, the system automatically hides the real email addresses of buyers and sellers and assigns them an Amazon email alias. The email alias will be unique for each buyer-seller relationship, so users can treat the email alias in the same way as they would a real email address.

Benefits

Feedback Solicitation

After a customer makes a purchase, he or she has 90 days from the date of order to leave comments, feedback, and ratings. In fact, Amazon encourages this practice, judging from the fact that the company itself occasionally sends buyers an email, soliciting such feedback. For example, a few days after making a purchase, the buyer may receive an email from Amazon informing the buyer that the order has been fulfilled and requesting feedback regarding the experience.

However, Amazon does not request feedback for every order. As a third-party seller, you can request seller feedback manually through Buyer-Seller Messaging or use a tool such as FeedbackFive to automatically send customized feedback requests to buyers. Seller feedback is important for your overall seller reputation, instilling buyer trust, and even your eligibility for special Amazon programs such as Seller-Fulfilled Prime.

Building strong seller feedback will not only make your brand stronger and more trustworthy, it will also help you rank better on the Amazon marketplace. Unlike product reviews that only directly affect the particular listing on which they’re left, having a good number of positive seller feedbacks will support Buy Box ownership across all your products.

Improved Dispute Arbitration

One of the primary reasons why Amazon strictly enforces the use of the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service is to improve dispute arbitration. The reasoning behind this actually makes a lot of sense. As Amazon puts it, “[b]y maintaining a record of contacts between buyers and sellers, we can arbitrate disputes faster by ensuring that the Amazon.com Dispute Resolution Team has access to all buyer-seller communications when reviewing A-to-z claims/chargebacks.”

Just ask anyone in retail and they’ll probably be able to share at least one or two horror stories involving challenging customers. There will always be extremely demanding and unruly people. That’s just how human nature works. So, if you sell enough products, chances are that you’ll eventually get your own retail horror story. Although it’s important to avoid as many of these disputes as possible in the first place, having the added level of protection provided by Amazon’s improved dispute resolution process is definitely a plus for the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service.

It's important to respond to buyer emails quickly when issues arise in order to provide a positive customer service experience. Addressing problems right away helps sellers avoid disputes that reach the Amazon level. FeedbackFive alerts help buyers manage negative feedback without delay.

Limitations

Email Anonymity

As mentioned before, the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service automatically hides the real email addresses of buyers and sellers and assigns them a unique email alias. This anonymity presumably makes communication between parties more secure by preventing the unauthorized sharing and misuse of personal information. While this admittedly has its advantages for buyers, this creates some downsides for sellers.

On one hand, because sellers are unable to collect the real email addresses of buyers, they won’t be able to reach out to them outside of the Amazon marketplace. This obviously restricts marketing efforts, especially for those who operate on multiple channels, such as company websites and other online marketplaces.

Links Leading Away From Amazon.com

Amazon strictly prohibits any and all attempts to lead, prompt, or encourage Amazon users to leave the Amazon website. These attempts include the inclusion of URLs (including URLs embedded on an image), web addresses, and/or hyperlinks in any seller message or product listings. Like the first limitation, the prohibition of links leading away from the Amazon website can be detrimental to your marketing efforts in a number of ways, such as being unable to leverage your success on the Amazon marketplace to increase traffic to your website.

Contact Response Times

Contact Response Time refers to the percentage of buyer-initiated messages that you can respond to within 24 hours from receipt. Why is this metric important? Well, research has shown that Contact Response Time is directly related to the feedback score. According to Amazon, “messages responded to within 24 hours receive 50% less negative feedback compared to orders with messages responded to after more than 24 hours.”

In other words, your responsiveness to the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service impacts your seller feedback score. In turn, your seller feedback score directly affects your rankings on the Amazon marketplace. The better the seller feedback score, the more likely it is that Amazon will rank you higher for your keywords; the higher your ranking, the more visible you are to potential customers; and the more visible you are, the better your chances of getting a sale. With all that said, it’s reasonable to conclude that your Contact Response Time will directly affect your ability to generate sales.

No Upselling

Perhaps the most serious limitation of the Buyer-Seller Messaging System is the seller’s inability to upsell. Amazon considers almost all communications, whether via phone or email, that are unrelated to either order fulfillment or customer service as inappropriate. Marketing and direct upselling are prohibited on the Buyer-Seller Messaging System.

Guidelines for Use

You’ll need to keep a few best practices in mind if you send a message using the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service. Failure to observe Amazon Communication Guidelines may result in varying penalties. So, take note that your message may not include the following:

Any links that send the buyer to another website or divert the buyer to a different sales process;
Misleading business names, which inaccurately identify the seller or confuse the buyers;
Improper business names, which contain an email suffix like .com, .net, .biz, and the like;
Marketing and promotional messages;
Promotions for additional products; and
Promotions for third-party products.

How to Contact Buyers

There are essentially two ways to contact your customers:

Via Seller Account

Search for the particular transaction whose buyer you want to contact on the Manage Orders page.
Choose the particular buyer you want to contact and click the customer name within the Order Details.
On the Contact Customer form, select your subject line from the drop-down menu.
Type your message into the Message text box. Note that messages to buyers only use plain text; any messages containing hyperlinks or other HTML code will be blocked.
Send your message by clicking the Submit button.
Repeat the process for each feedback request you'd like to send.

Via Third-Party Feedback Software

Create your message to the buyer, making sure to follow all Amazon communication guidelines.
Set your desired timing rules and other parameters, such as which ASINs should receive the message.
Regularly refine and test your messages, which are sent automatically based on your settings.

Note: Before your email gets to the buyer, it will be processed through the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service for recording and email aliasing. This aliasing also occurs when using an automatic communication tool, such as FeedbackFive from eComEngine. Sign up for your free trial today.

FAQ

How many messages can I send?

The maximum number of messages you can send per day depends on your daily order volume. To be specific, the value is computed using the following formula (Daily Order Volume * 5) + 600. For example, if you make an average of 100 sales per day, you’ll be able to send a maximum of 1,100 messages, computed as (100 *5) + 600).

Are my conversations recorded? If so, for how long are the records kept?

Yes, they are. Amazon does this so that it can better arbitrate disputes between the parties. It keeps these records for a period of two years.

Is HTML supported?

Yes, it is. Feel free to code your emails, so that they look their best when they get to the buyer. However, take note that Amazon only allows selected HTML tags to be used. Any tag not present on this list will be stripped, but the element's subtree will be preserved in the output document.

Are attachments supported?

Yes, they are. Buyers and sellers can attach any of the following file types for product instructions, warranty information, or invoices to their messages: