Navigating the Amazon Seller Support Maze with Benjamin Smith

Oleg: Welcome to Navigators. Today we are having Ben from Seller Candy with us. The guys are doing a lot of support to Amazon sellers, tackling all this, uh, fighting with support, I would say. So I think we will learn a lot today and yeah, welcome Ben.

Ben: Yeah, thanks so much, Oleg. I really appreciate you having me on the show today. I'm excited to be here and yeah, I uh, happy to get into anything that you want to because I know that dealing with Seller Support is a bit of a nightmare, and that is what we do all day, day in, day out. So I'm excited for this one.

Oleg: Yeah, awesome. But before we dive in, I would really like to like so you introduce yourself, your story, how you got to e-commerce space and Seller Candy eventually. So like something.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Well, start with kind of the end, uh, first, which is, you know, today I'm currently the Partnerships Manager here at Seller Candy. So, um, I have a really fun rule. I get to, you know, go on podcasts and webinars and also just get to talk to a lot of, uh, sellers and other service providers in the space. Um, for the context for anyone who's watching or listening to this, Seller Candy, we kind of focus on the less fun side of selling on Amazon, which is, you know, not the advertising piece, but all the other annoying things that come with the journey, right? So, so everything from dealing with your listings and getting them fixed in flat files to talking to Seller Support. So our team will help sellers, agencies, aggregators with kind of taking that off of their plate. So if you're watching this and you do need any help there, uh, feel free to reach out, but we'll dig into that later. Um, to rewind though, um, Oleg, I'll kind of give you the backstory, but I got into e-commerce about six years ago now. Um, I originally actually was doing door-to-door sales, and my kind of origin story I like to just say is, you know, I realized that I could only knock so many doors in a day, and I started thinking, huh, only I could do something on the Internet that I could sell, you know, knock the equivalent of thousands or millions of doors a day. And so I started listening to podcasts and kind of got into this whole Amazon World. Um, since then, you know, I've worked at an Amazon agency managing brands. I personally sold on Amazon, and I still sell a little bit on Amazon to this day. I've also sold on Etsy, eBay, you know, all these different platforms. So I've kind of been all over the place, and I've worked at a few companies and managed their Amazon account exclusively. So all of that kind of led me to this role I'm at today. So I'm a little bit less in the trenches now than maybe I have been in the past, you know, now I'm not the one who's personally doing a lot of the flat file uploads and kind of these issues, but I've been there before. I know the struggles that sellers face, and I know the complexities, and Amazon's always changing, right? So we know that it gets more challenging. Um, so that's kind of, yeah, that's the high level in terms of my background. I'm more than happy to dig into any of that if you want me to as well.

Oleg: Yeah, sure, thank you. Uh, yeah, you mentioned all the flat files, all the things, and I remember when I was an Amazon Seller myself, and it was a lot of frustration, actually, for me because, you know, like, I have a technical background, so, you know, computer science, and it's like I can play whatever they have, but the results, it's, it's never predictable. So like, you never know what you get eventually.

Ben: Yeah, and I would think that like what I really want to learn about all this support today, what is the biggest problem nowadays that's going on for...

Oleg: Yeah.

Ben: I mean, you know, um, I want to take a step back for a second just to say too, like, you know, to your point, Oleg, like, like the other thing is just, we know that Amazon is changing constantly too. So, you know, there's always, while it's the same at the, at the base level, you know, like flat files have been around for years, and they haven't changed a ton, right? They're like, there are certain updates, there's, but there's constantly these kind of updates, and if for you as an individual seller, it's becoming increasingly hard for you, or if you have a small team, for example, to stay on top of all of the changes. And so that's one of the things that we've been seeing too, is just that we have more and more sellers that we're engaging with where it's, you know, one part of it is that maybe they are, you know, want to relinquish just any of the issues and kind of this, this headache of dealing with a Seller Central, and they're looking to just get that out of their, their realm. But another part of it is just they're at the point where they can't keep up with all of the things that they need to know to build a successful business or to resolve these problems that keep coming up maybe in their Amazon account. And that's really where I kind of see the value of, you know, having a team that's on your side. Um, you know, whether it's you guys, you know, I know all the work that you guys do as well, but an agency or a solution like Seller Candy because we're paid to stay right at the forefront and know exactly what's happening with Amazon, you know, we see the latest updates, we see the latest rollouts, we see changes across the accounts. And I think that's something that's becoming increasingly hard for the individual, you know, business owner to do themselves. Um, that being said, you know, there is a time and a place for you wanting to do everything yourself. I know that's how I learned all the Amazon stuff is I was the one who went in and did the flat files, I did plans of action and appeals, and I think that's really valuable. Um, I just think that the, you've got to know when it's time to say enough's enough, I've learned enough, and now it's time to give that to someone else. You can either do it better than me, cheaper than me, faster than me, what have you. So, um, yeah, I just want to reiterate that point because I think you, you kind of touched on that, uh, briefly.

Oleg: Um, in terms of your question, though, so most common issues, you know, I talked to quite a few sellers every week, and I always joke that I need an Amazon therapist with me because it's, you know, unless they've been selling for years, a lot of times they'll come to us and, um, say, "Hey, I have this issue. I think it's super unique. I don't think it's ever, you know, they think that it's something that's never been seen before." And more often than not, we see, you know, 95% of the time, because it's Amazon and we're all working with the same system in terms of Seller Central or Vendor Central in the back end, uh, just about everyone is facing the same types of issues, right?

Ben: Um, certainly there are nuances there, and sometimes there are things that maybe you have that are a stickier issue for some reason. Um, but generally speaking, we're seeing more or less everyone kind of sees the same main issues. In terms of what we've actually seen, so when we looked at our data for last year, um, we had, you know, about 15,000 or so tickets, uh, submitted to our system, to our team to actually go and work on. And the interesting thing to see was that, um, out of those tickets, about a third of them, it's roughly 5,000 of them, were directly related to a request about updating a product page or fixing a listing, something related to the actual catalog itself. Um, and so that's the single biggest category of issues that we've seen, and I think that trend will continue. And I'll ask you in a sec too, Oleg, but the, the thing that I've noticed is that, you know, from even when I got started in the Amazon world, uh, you used to be able to go in and let's say you just wanted to update a title or bullet points on a listing, you could click the edit button and add your information, and it would go through, you know, in, in 15 minutes or an hour or 24 hours, sometimes. Uh, while that might still be possible, the majority of times now we're seeing that even for sellers that have brand registry and they're the only seller, they control everything on the listing, we still see that there are more and more frequently they're having issues with either fixing something on the listing, dealing with, you know, maybe an update of some kinds of listing, etc. And so I'd say that's kind of the single biggest category of issues and a trend that just, I, we've noticed in general over the years.

Oleg: Okay.

Ben: And I'm happy to dig into that, you know, any, any which way you want to go.

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