Ladies and Gents,

November is upon us. Wow. So in eComm terms. Black friday/Cyber Monday is like next week when taking lead times into account. Amazon is up to shenanigans again after posting crazy profits (upwards of $42 Billion from sellers alone, no big deal).

This week in Amazon Stupidity

We get it. Congress passed the INFORM Act is a silly attempt to make consumers safer. Meanwhile all it did was add red tape to eCommerce (conversation for another time). So I get this scary email from Amazon for my Canadian marketplace.

Behold, since I'm being verified in Brazil, they can't verify me in Canada? Seriously guys? Your Q3 earnings show a wild profit, and you can't handle two simultaneous verifications?

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A reason to prefer USPS to FedEx and UPS

Think to when you're buying shipping for an order and have an option like $6.87 for UPS Ground, or $7.20 for USPS Ground Advantage (formerly first class mail), what goes thorough my head?

Before buying shipping on packages I always think to myself, do I really want to take a chance that UPS/FedEx will rip me off on some BS surcharge? USPS doesn't have that, almost at all.

Let me show you what I mean. This is from my UPS invoice.

So like what's a container allowance? Why wasn't I notified of that before shipping the item? Why was I blindsided into losing money on the sale (I specifically have margins that factor in $8 for shipping).

Oh and that doesn't include peak surcharges that started this week, don't let those catch you off guard.

I mean heck, you combine the above with this shipping change I think thrice before shipping with UPS/FedEx!

You read that right. “For example, if the length of a package is 11.1 inches, that package will be deemed to have a length of 12 inches.”

QuickBooks is integrating with your Seller Central numbers

So I received an email in August that Intuit is looking for sellers to beta test this integration with. Now let's step into the business owner's shows for a second.

At the end of every year we know the QuickBooks Online (QBO) gross revenue is around half of what Amazon sales were (and are reflected on your 1099K) just because of what Amazon fees come right off the top of your account.

So there I am at Accelerate in September this year grilling the intuit team about how this integration works. I then ask them "if I pay for PPC through credit card [which if you're not, please open a AMEX Gold and charge it for PPC for 4x return] how does your integration count PPC? Because on Amazon PPC spend reflects, and on your credit card charge your PPC spend is categorized as such, so do they cancel each other out?"

While your eyes might have glossed over that, for those of you who know, you know what I'm referring to.

The response from the intuit team was a deer in headlights. Come on people. Instead of putting uninformed sales reps on the floor, how about working with sellers to make sure you know how your product is supposed to function.

I'm sure we all have that "friend" that knows exactly what to click to get how to get free returns, without paying return shipping.

Now every purchase on a marketplace (virtually) is open for return until January 31. So all those Q4 sales aren't actually yours until February 1, 2026.

Vanessa is more than an expert in the field, she's a friend. I went right up against one of her posts this week.

The most frightening part of her post going into this feature's announcement is:

I added the bolding above. But yeah. Amazon's been trying to trap sellers into providing Prime-like delivery speeds cross country for the orders they ship themselves. This is just another one of those ploys.

When Amazon assigns things to sellers, that's not a good thing. I replied to her:

Welp, there's another week in the life. See you next!