🎅 Holiday Sales Are on the Line: Sellers Are Losing Nearly Two Days a Week to Manual Tasks

ChannelEngine’s new Marketplace Seller Trends Report 2025 shows that while sellers are expanding rapidly, with a third already active on seven or more marketplaces, including Amazon and Walmart, outdated manual processes are stalling growth. On average, 36 percent of the week is lost to tasks such as fixing listings and updating inventory, leaving sellers slower to respond to pricing and visibility challenges.

With 91 percent calling automation business-critical, the findings underline a clear takeaway: sellers that streamline operations will be the ones positioned to win sales, protect margins, and scale successfully across channels this peak season and beyond.

👉 Download the full report​

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🚀 This Week's Amazon Hack: To Multipack or Not to Multipack? That Is the Question

You probably caught my Amazon update in a recent newsletter. I have some bad news. There is more to the story. This actually got my attention because some readers reached out asking about how the FBA fee will work.

I have bad news for you.

Yes, physical multipacks are out, but so are the lower fees. I'm now realizing that Amazon made this change because it's going to be yet another money printer for them.

Basically, they are offering convenience for a fee.

Napkin math:

Physical Option: In this situation, you ship in a pre-packaged 2-pack and pay $10/unit in FBA fees.

Virtual Option: You now pay close to $15 in FBA fees, absolutely crushing your profit margin.

Do you see what Amazon did? It's not cool. And I apologize for not mentioning this before! I actually made the WRONG assumption that Amazon would keep the FBA fees the same. Oh, how wrong I was!

My vote is to send in physical multipack bundles and only do this for items that you have a high level of confidence in. The virtual route is great for testing, but that's about it. If you source from a factory, this is ridiculously easy and extremely efficient, so it should always win when doing a side-by-side comparison.

So, I'm glad you read this issue today because it might save your butt this year!

🔥 Hot Amazon Seller News: Say Hello to Partial Refunds Without Returns!

So, I have some thoughts on this update. At face value, it sounds pretty epic, but like anything Amazon-related, you have to be very careful.

Let me explain...

The real value here is the time you will save not having to deal with annoying returns, especially during Q4.

Let me ask you something. How many dang times has a customer reached out to you asking about something minor? Historically, you could only offer a return or refund them and tell them to keep it.

Now you can offer a partial refund and tell them to keep the item. This is actually from the DTC playbook. Lots of elite brands do this, including Wayfair. Returns cost a ton of money. This is a great tool to combat those costs and just make your customer super happy.

Some concerns...

So, it's not all fairies and unicorns with this update. Expect abuse and loss of customer data. Getting your returns back allows you to dig deeper into trends and gives you the chance to resolve them with your factory. So there's a bit of a trade-off here.

Then there's the Reddit factor. Do you think that people are going to be saints and never lie? Are you crazy? Of course they won't! Expect this update to flood the forums and become a "shopping hack" for customers. Basically, you will need to watch these emails like a hawk and sniff out bad actors. A great task for one of your employees.

Now, this obviously will not be something you will want to use on $100+ products. It's all about balance when it comes to your catalog. Use it WISELY.

Oh, one more thing. Even if the customer decides to keep the item and accept a partial refund, it's still a "return" by Amazon standards. That means that they count towards your return metrics. It's something to keep in mind.

I view this as a surgical tool to protect margins. You use scalpels for very specific surgical situations. The same logic applies here.

Until next time!

Jon Elder

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