Amazon will change how it notifies sellers of buyer cancellation requests, it announced Monday. It will no longer send notifications through the messaging system, and sellers commenting on the change said it spells trouble ahead.
The change will go into effect on April 27, 2022.
Amazon explained the reasoning behind the change as follows: “We received feedback from many of you that you would like to have a better process to cancel orders without having to search for buyer cancelation requests in the Buyer-Seller messaging tool. You shared that it can be easy to miss seeing cancelation requests because they get lost among multiple buyer-seller messages, which if left unattended can result in product returns and refunds.”
Instead, cancellation requests will appear in a banner on the Manage orders page and will be displayed in order reports. In its instructions, Amazon stated: “Cancelation requests can be seen in order reports. You will have to enable the Buyer-Requested Cancel field for visibility”
One seller reacted to the news by asking for confirmation that they would no longer get an active notification when a buyer requests a cancellation and that instead, sellers would have to check reports before shipping.
Another seller said, “Instead of just screwing over all of us that use those notifications to cancel orders why not just ad this notification as we for those who “may” want it instead of adding it and taking away the notification I am sure most of us use.”
“This is going to cause problems for us,” wrote another seller. “We rely on email notifications to know which orders to cancel. We will not be able to know which orders to cancel if we do not receive email notifications.”
You can read the full announcement on Amazon Seller Central.
Edited 3/1/2022 for clarity.
