This article was sponsored by GETIDA.
For FBA sellers, Amazon functions as a giant 3PL, handling logistics, fulfillment, and inventory for millions of products daily. When you combine Amazon’s breadth of services with its incredible volume of more than ten billion items delivered per year, some mistakes are inevitably going to occur along the way.
That’s right, Amazon makes mistakes. Sellers take hits from lost inventory, damaged products, incorrect customer refunds, overcharging of fees and much more. Amazon does catch most of these discrepancies, but some still fall through the cracks. A typical seller might be due refunds worth between 1% and 3% of their annual revenue. That amounts to as much as $30,000 for a seller turning over a million a year – a significant sum.
This is where GETIDA comes in. It reviews a seller’s FBA transactions (along with Amazon inventory, shipment, and transaction data) and finds cases where Amazon has not properly reimbursed the seller for its mistakes. Then GETIDA files claims and tracks the process from beginning to end. All of this uses a combination of their own proprietary software and a dedicated team to get the maximum reimbursements possible for sellers.
Let’s take a look under the hood to see how GETIDA can put money back in the pocket of your FBA business.
Where did GETIDA come from?
The word GETIDA is an acronym for “GET Intelligent Data Analytics.” It’s a 40+ person company based in Teaneck, New Jersey, USA, and serves all Amazon marketplaces worldwide.
Like many companies providing services to Amazon sellers, GETIDA’s co-founders Max Borin and Yoni Mazor started as FBA sellers in 2013. They quickly scaled their business from zero to $20 million in annual FBA sales, then became part of a larger group that together did about $100 million in sales annually.
Like many small sellers who rapidly scale, they experienced an overwhelming flood of daily data that was more than they – and their spreadsheets – could handle. There was no way they could check and cross-reference all their FBA transactions to make sure everything was in line.
That’s not a situation they were happy with, so they developed a solution with two key components:
- Technology that is able to collect all of their daily performance and fulfillment data from Amazon, cross-reference different data types, and look for any problems.
- A dedicated team who check through the issues found by the software, gather any additional information needed, and contact Amazon to claim reimbursements.
Through this system’s development, they discovered a 1-3% discrepancy rate and began having success recovering all the different types of FBA reimbursements.
As other sellers discovered what Yoni and Max’s system could do, they offered to pay them if they could help them too. In 2015, GETIDA was launched so that other sellers could benefit from the technology and team that had been built.
Realizing the opportunity in technology and services, Max and Yoni cashed out of their retail business and focused on growing GETIDA into the leading global solution provider in its niche.
How does GETIDA work?
GETIDA is a full-service solution, which means that it does everything required to get from raw data to reimbursements. Each unit that passes through Amazon FBA must be reconciled, which involves cross-referencing multiple reports to find any FBA discrepancies. After filing a claim, there is often a lot of back-and-forth with Amazon before getting to a resolution. It’s time-consuming, painstaking, and easy to make mistakes. To be successful, you also need to keep up with Amazon’s seller support procedures and the frequent changes to policies and terms.
Some sellers will look into hiring a VA to handle the process. One problem with using a VA is that they will need to be trained up to expert level. To do that, you must know how to do the auditing and claims process yourself, and the VA needs the analytical personality and attention to detail to learn those skills. Otherwise, using a VA just becomes a more expensive version of trying to do it yourself. You’ll also have to trust a VA with access to the inner workings of your Amazon seller account.
Others will try to use a service that just analyzes their data and leaves the claims for the seller to file. What they come to discover is that finding reimbursement opportunities is just the start of the process. You need to manually review the claim, file a case with Amazon in the right way and with the right supporting data, then react quickly and accurately to the response – which could be a rejection, a partial claim or a request for further information.
GETIDA uses a combination of software and a dedicated service team to handle the entire reimbursement process from beginning to end, so you don’t have to be involved and can focus on sales. They are an authorized Amazon Service Provider and listed in the Amazon Marketplace Appstore, so they are vetted and continuously monitored by Amazon.
Payment is performance-based, with a 25% fee charged on successful reimbursements only, with no contract or monthly subscription required. In other words, it is free to sign up and GETIDA only gets paid if the seller gets paid.
What makes GETIDA different?
GETIDA is not just software or a tool. It’s a solution that uses software technology and tools along with a dedicated team to create an end-to-end service. Having an account management team is immensely helpful because claims can take anywhere from a few hours to a year to resolve. They can chase claims down, no matter how long it takes.
The team covers all the back-and-forth messages which are so common in communicating with Amazon during the claims process. A significant portion of the GETIDA team are ex-Amazon employees who used to work in the FBA reimbursement department. They know how to present the issues, manage the cases, and stay compliant every step of the way.
Being an authorized provider also means that GETIDA’s interactions with Amazon are smoother, more trustworthy, and compliant in all areas, including data security, data policy and privacy policy.
GETIDA is also very customizable. A seller can use them as a primary auditor or as a secondary service to double-check the seller’s own work, or even the output of another provider. Even if you are confident that you already have the issue handled, there’s no risk and no cost in getting a second opinion.
Another key advantage offered by GETIDA is real-time visibility. While some providers only offer monthly reporting, GETIDA has an online dashboard that allows sellers in real-time to monitor open cases, each case’s status, and reimbursements recovered during any period. It also keeps track of FBA inventory transactions, refunds, and seller data analytics – and you get monthly reports, too.
Finally, GETIDA uses information from its claims experience as a whole to enhance discovery and reporting of claim types. If one customer has a new kind of discrepancy appear on their account, all GETIDA customer accounts are then scanned for that newly discovered issue. This ensures that all possible claims are audited and discovered, to the benefit of all sellers.
How does GETIDA contribute to the Amazon sellers community?
Beyond the reimbursements, GETIDA has developed a community of Amazon sellers that it stands behind. GETIDA is a strong advocate of seller education and sponsors many Amazon seller events, offering free or discounted tickets to their community. The goal is to fuel sellers’ continued business growth.
GETIDA also offers complimentary assistance to its customers on any aspect of Amazon business, offering the benefits of their own experience and also their partner network, to solve problems and spur growth in the community.
For those who prefer to learn in earbuds, GETIDA has a podcast called Prime Talk, where listeners can share ecommerce success stories and learn more about selling successfully on Amazon.
How do sellers get started with GETIDA?
GETIDA supports Amazon FBA sellers of all sizes and experience levels, from relatively new, side-hustle sellers to eight-figure plus companies.
To get started with a free estimate of what GETIDA can recover, go to the website and click the “Free Signup” button.
There’s four steps to connect to the platform, which takes only 5-10 minutes:
- Enter contact details.
- Provide API credentials to connect to your Amazon data.
- Provide billing information (only used if reimbursements are successfully recovered).
- Create a user in your Amazon seller account with limited permissions.
Once your account is connected, GETIDA’s technology looks back 18 months into the data to find discrepancies in inventory, Amazon FBA payments, damage and loss, and other areas. Then it generates an estimate of the amount that can be recovered. This process can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, depending on the amount of data.
At this point, the seller can decide whether to proceed with the FBA recovery process – all handled by GETIDA and only charged based on the amount recovered – or not. Most sellers do decide to go ahead at this point!
In addition, Web Retailer readers are eligible to get $400 in FBA reimbursements free of charge.
Why should FBA sellers trust GETIDA with their business?
As a member of Amazon’s Service Provider Network and the Amazon Marketplace Appstore, GETIDA is vetted by Amazon and their performance is continuously monitored.
Being an authorized provider means they have a double commitment. The first commitment is to sellers, their performance, and staying compliant with Amazon’s terms of service. The second commitment is to Amazon’s highest performance standards on privacy policy, security, data policy, and other terms and conditions.
GETIDA is also the 2020 winner of the Gold Stevie Award in the SaaS Enablement as a Service category from the American Business Awards.
Finally, GETIDA claims to be the largest organization in the world dedicated to Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursement. They re-analyze billions of dollars of Amazon marketplace transactions every single day to detect every possible reimbursement opportunity within the 18-month claims window.
Get growing with GETIDA
The overwhelming majority of Amazon FBA sellers do not even know that they’re eligible to receive any reimbursements. But once they are aware, they are more likely to recover those refunds, boosting their bottom line and enabling further growth.
GETIDA offers additional money in your pocket at no risk. They provide:
- High visibility of the audit and recovery process.
- The flexibility of being a primary or secondary auditing option.
- A performance-based payment plan.
One of GETIDA’s core goals is to spread awareness that there is money out there – your money – and it’s just waiting to be claimed.
Get $400 of FBA reimbursements free of charge
This article was sponsored by GETIDA.
