Where they were
Bramblewood asked for an audit because their accountant could not reconcile Amazon’s numbers with theirs. They were right to be suspicious. Eighteen months of lost and damaged inventory had never been claimed, and a dimension error on their largest product had been overcharging them fulfilment fees since 2023.
That was the easy money. The harder problem was underneath it: the 12kg bag of dry food, their highest revenue product, had a return rate of 9.4% against a category norm of about 3%. Every return on a 12kg item costs twice, once in the refund and once in the disposal, because Amazon will not restock a damaged food bag.
What we did
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01
Claim what was owed
We ran an 18 month reconciliation of inventory adjustments, lost inbound units, and fee overcharges, then filed the cases. $9,400 came back over about eleven weeks. We also corrected the product dimensions, which cut the ongoing fulfilment fee on that ASIN by $0.74 a unit.
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02
Read the returns before changing anything
We pulled every return comment on the 12kg bag for a year. Just over half of them said some version of the same thing: the bag had split in transit. The packaging was designed for a pallet in a pet shop, not for a conveyor and a delivery van.
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03
Fix the box, then the listing
Bramblewood moved to a heavier gauge bag with a reinforced base and added an outer carton for the FBA channel. The return rate fell from 9.4% to 7.3% within two months. We then added a packaging shot to the image stack, which set the expectation on the page and pulled it down again to just under 6% over the next quarter.
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04
Build the subscription range properly
Subscribe & Save had been switched on across everything at a flat 5%. We restructured it around the products people actually re-order, moved the discount to the tiers that reward larger baskets, and stopped subsidising the accessory range that nobody buys twice.
Where they are now
The reimbursements were the headline, but the margin came from the packaging. A 7 point improvement in gross margin on the subscription range is worth more every quarter than the $9,400 was once.
Bramblewood now runs a returns review every month. It takes about an hour and it has caught two more problems since, both of them small, both caught before they got expensive.
I expected a spreadsheet of things we were doing wrong. What I got was somebody reading a year of customer complaints and working out that our bag was too thin.
Figures come from the client’s Seller Central and advertising accounts over the period described. Past results are specific to that brand, that catalogue, and that category.
