Joseph Sirosh, VP  of Transaction Risk Management Services at Amazon, is responsible for all aspects of trust and safety on the site. He manages the five teams responsible for this area: Buyer Fraud Prevention, ID Theft and Merchant Fraud, Feedback, A-Z Guarantee and Merchant Performance Management with the single goal of protecting all Amazon customers: sellers, buyers and shareholders. 

• Buyer Fraud: Goal is fraud-free orders but realize that it can never be 100. If there’s fraud (transaction tagged by the merchant bank as fraud), Amazon will eat the costs.
• Feedback: Feedback builds trust, drives sales. It’s impossible to technically determine if feedback is legitimate or not. About 3% of US feedback is negative.
• A-Z alleviates bad experiences. The team arbitrates buyer disputes, manages all processes to review A-Z claims and disputes, and assesses responsibility. Very important to be courteous and proactive with every A-Z claim at all times. Use good language. Often it’s best to just issue a refund and take the return — faster and ultimately more profitable.
• Seller comments that a large part of undeliverable addresses are part due to poor address information from Amazon. Going to look into this.
• SIVA (Seller Identify Verification & Authentication) vets new sellers to ensure they are who they say they are.
• Marketplace Performance Management is focused on the Order Defect Rate (ODR). All orders with a claim, service chargeback or negative feedback (for orders in past 90 days lagged by 30 days) are compared to all orders fulfilled by the seller.
• Statistics show that about 95% of sellers fall into the 0-5% ODR bracket with 90% of those at 1% or less. Over 90% of orders are fulfilled by sellers with ODR of less then 5%.
• The challenge is always how do you set this threshold to set a high bar for seller quality.
• Break down ODRs by category, slice the data in many different ways. Seller Dashboard, for media sellers, will be enhanced in August to match stats now available in Seller Central.
• Four steps when performance slips: (1) Loss of Featured Merchant status, (2) automated warning emails, (3) Suspension of payment disbursements and/or listings and finally (4) account block.
• Sellers are notified at each step via email and must take immediate action: (1) Improve your performance ASAP, (2) immediately fix any shipping and delivery challenges, (3) clean up your listings and inventory and (4) take care of the customer.

Seller Q&A

• What is Amazon doing about competitors tying up products in their carts to eliminate competitive listings? Should not be possible, will look at it.
• Can Amazon allow create a separate email address to specifically receive warnings? Everyone gets thousands of emails, very easy to overlook. Yes, that’s a good suggestion — no real resolution though.
• What if feedback is based on the product not being legitimate? Sellers can respond to negative feedback.

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