Wednesday 12 July 2017

Sellers’ body AIOVA issues trade notice against Flipkart’s wrong shipping costs error

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After Snapdeal’s incorrect shipping charges and Amazon’s free shipping error, Flipkart is the latest marketplace to charge wrong shipping costs due to a technical glitch.
Seller lobby group All India Online Vendors Association (AIOVA) recently issued a trade advisory notice against Flipkart. The reason? In the month of June 2017, the ecommerce leader calculated wrong shipping costs because of a technical error at their end. The consequence? Financial impact ranging from 20 – 30% of a seller’s GMV, as per AIOVA.
“It has come under AIOVA’s notice that Flipkart has faced a technical glitch for orders in last week of June due to which its systems have recorded wrong weight for shipments. AIOVA has sent this notice out to all its sellers via email, whatsapp and social media. As this weight is used for charging shipping charges from the seller, this is resulting in less and negative payments to sellers. This is not a random occurrence or limited to particular group of sellers. Nor has this happened for the first time. We have checked and verified data of multiple sellers based out of multiple locations and confirmed the glitch,” says AIOVA’s spokesperson in its email to Indian Online Seller.

The details

This technical error affected orders between June 20th 2017 and June 28th 2017. During this period Flipkart miscalculated the packages’ weight and charged more than the actual shipping costs. Due to the glitch in the marketplace’s system, packets weighing 500 grams were incorrectly recorded in higher weight slabs like 15kg or 35 kg randomly. Thus, the forward shipping and reverse shipping fees of affected sellers climbed up.
“A few sellers have already raised this issue with Flipkart at an individual level and Flipkart has confirmed this glitch and has started provisioning a reversal of the charge from today. However, 1 aspect of reversal – excess charged on reverse shipping is still pending for which Flipkart has not taken action,” states AIOVA.

AIOVA request sellers to reconcile order level weight charge

Flipkart admitted that a system upgrade resulted in this error and that they have rectified the issue.
“A recent system upgrade had inadvertently caused a one-off error in the way we calculate shipping costs for sellers. We, however, promptly corrected the issue upon discovery and communicated it to our sellers. The refund procedure has already been completed, ensuring there is no disruption for sellers as a result of this issue. Sellers can login into their account and see the reversals. The exact details specific to each seller is also being communicated by email in the next 48 hours,” said Flipkart.  
In the meanwhile, the vendors’ lobby group has instructed seller to reconcile order level weight charge without any delay because Flipkart allows only 30 days to escalate such issues.
Below are the steps suggested by AIOVA:
  1. Go to Payments > Transactions
  2. Select Order Date 20 – 30 June 2017 and download the report
  3. Check Column BE (chargeable weight slab) and find out orders where you have been charged higher weight
  4. Escalate the same to Seller Support with the Order ID immediately

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