Steven Pope

If your shipping costs are going to raise by, let's say only five to $10 for your product, if you actually create and have it be a extra large item, I would really encourage you to because it will save you so much money down the line,

for returns in general now there is a caveat here if you are somebody who sees all of this and you're freaking out wondering every single return you now have to pay for both the product that's damaged all of that well there is something else for fbm sellers and that would be the fact of safety claims so

If you haven't ever done or don't know what a safety claim is, safety claims essentially is a program that allows you, once you have an order from a return in your possession, to basically say, hey, this is the status and how I received this order and this product back from the customer.

If you receive any form of product that is damaged in any way, the product package is opened, it is not new and you cannot sell it as new on Amazon, you can file a safety claim on that return.

You can also do this if you ever receive a product back that you don't believe was the initial product you shipped or anything in between.

And so if you haven't already done this before, I really encourage you to get into the process of safety claims, because this will also be how you recoup some of the money

for that return label that is now going to be automated as per Amazon.

Now, the good part being is that for customers, obviously they get a return faster, but for you as the seller, you also get more bandwidth to be able to file these safety claims on nearly any single FBM order where you feel that it wasn't justified that the product be returned either in the condition it was, or in the sense that the end consumer doesn't pay that return coverage.

so absolutely go check out your safety claims and really really encourage every single seller to look at your box dimensions look at how large your product is if your product is just on the verge of being extra large it might be more profitable for you right now to just eat that extra shipping cost on all orders versus going ahead and saying hey uh we're gonna take twenty percent or ten percent of our returns and have to pay out of pocket for receiving that item again so

Big changes for large and bulky products and just expensive products in general.

So this is a big thing that I really would pay attention to if you have not already.

Amazon just rolled out a brand new metric that might be indicating where their focus is going to be shifting for 2026.

This is something that I didn't actually expect and I actually kind of enjoy.

And that would be the Amazon rolled out their brand store quality rating.

So what is this exactly?

Essentially, the way that works is that Amazon is measuring you on two different things.

They are going to be measuring your brand store dwell time and then your brand store sales.

But not only that, they are giving you as well a peer group dwell time and a peer group sales to base yourself off of to understand how well you are actually optimized for exactly whatever it is that Amazon is looking at here.

Now, a couple of questions I had immediately when I was looking at this is,

What is Amazon basing this off of, right?