Paul Sonneveld
Welcome to Marketplace Masters. I am Paul Sonneveld, and today we are going to be running a money audit. What is leaking out of your Amazon account right now? Well, nobody's looking. Here is the uncomfortable part. You don't need a messy inherited account to be actually losing money. Some of the largest or biggest leaks actually sit in accounts that the same capable team has run for years, where everybody assumes things are clean. Chargebacks, fee errors, unclaimed reimbursements, wasted ad spend. Together, they add up to this real number. Most brands have never seen this.
My guest today is Stephan Putter, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Leadsphere. Now, for those of you who may look familiar, because Stephan joined me earlier this year for a session on running hybrid, 1P and 3P accounts. Today, he's back to talk about the other half of what Leadsphere does, which is recovery. His team audits Amazon accounts for a living, and they put a hard number on the leak before they recommend anything. And they know how differently that leak behaves on the vendor side, as well as the seller side. Now, a little bit about Stephan. Stephan co-founded Leadsphere eight years ago and leads its global e-commerce strategy and commercial negotiations. That includes its partnership with Amazon across both 1P and 3P with MercadoLibre. Covering more than ten categories. Stephan, it is fantastic to have you once again here on Marketplace Masters. Welcome.
Stephan Putter
Thank you, Paul. It's great to be back. Really appreciate the invitation to come back on the podcast and looking forward to our conversation today.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. And by the way, for our audience, I just noticed that I should have cleaned up a little bit more. Just put the audience out of misery. In case you're wondering what that yellow thing is in the background, my money is on it being a deflated volleyball that belongs to my kids. So just for those of you for whom that will be a distraction, there's your answer. So we can focus on the topic at hand. All right, Stephan, let's start with the top here. The bit that I like most about the intro that I did was I talked about this hard number, right? Across the accounts that you've audited, what is the number? What is the share of revenue that is typically leaking? And what's the range from the cleanest account you've seen all the way to the worst?
Stephan Putter
So I really like this question, Paul, and it's never the same answer, but in our experience, it's never zero, right? But it's also rarely some sort of catastrophic number in any single bucket. Most of the heavy leaks come from a combination of factors. And the cleanest accounts we see are in these low single digits as a share of revenue. The worst are well into double digits and the higher double digits. And the spread comes from where the leak is, not how big the brand is or the operation is. And we normally see this spread come from three different buckets.
The first is on the Amazon side; we see fee mismanagement, unclaimed reimbursements and chargebacks. And we normally fix that with claims and disputes. The second bucket is more focused on operations. So when it comes to logistics, packaging, preparation, and the quote-unquote “inefficient logistics” options that Amazon offers that end up being the most expensive, such as EasyShift. And that's mainly fixed by these internal changes in logistics processes.
And the third bucket is the most self-inflicted, right? It's COGS and pricing that were set once and never revisited. And that's really fixed internally by finance and strategy. But we've seen two million dollar brands bleed more than twenty million dollar brands. That's because one was shipping cartons that were twice the size of the product, and they never really matched both of them.
Paul Sonneveld
So, just to kind of summarise, we're talking chargebacks and disputes; we're talking logistics strategy decisions; and then, kind of commercial COGS and commercial terms that sort of would never revisit it, sort of operating in a set-and-forget landscape. So now I will push you a bit harder, right, because I did ask for a number. So I'd love to sort of say, even this year, like this is not a promise to anyone watching you will get this number, but I'd love to see, right across the clients, 2026, what has been the range for you?
Stephan Putter
It's very varied because we also again we work with 3P with 1P we work with some multinational brands that have a very high level standardized operation. I'd say on the healthy end we're looking between three to four percent that's on the lower end the ones that have these lower sets of leakage on the higher end, we've seen accounts up to twenty percent.
Paul Sonneveld
Wow. And that's a percentage of revenue or COGS? What's the metric you've got in your head there?
Stephan Putter
Mainly based on COGS, right?
Paul Sonneveld
Yup.
Stephan Putter
However, it really depends on what bucket we're looking at. Because if we're looking at fee mismanagement or unclaimed reimbursements, it can hit you directly in revenue. If we're looking at outdated COGS or pricing math, that will hit you directly in COGS. So it really depends on the bucket we're looking at.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Either way, even if it's all COGS, that's still a material number. Most of us don't run on phenomenal bottom-line margins. And a lot of this, if you can resolve it, at least shoot flow straight to the bottom line, which can be a material difference. Okay. Well, look, I think I speak to vendors or agencies who manage vendors, which is more typically the case, you know, always run into these sort of like, agencies picking up vendor accounts that are like heavily neglected, right? Which where obviously, we can sort of find some of those leaks.
I think on the flip side, there might be quite a few brand manager, even agencies have been sort of managing the same vendor account for years and years and years. And they'll probably say, look, this show is not for me. The account is clean. You know, it's well run. We've been doing it for years. I don't think you can find much. In your experience, why do you think that might be the wrong assumption? You know, and why? I mean, this might be a bit controversial, but, you know, why are well-run accounts often the leakiest?
Stephan Putter
This is actually one of the most common things we see, right? When we normally come across certain brands that have been operating for a while, and they maybe had steady results, steady growth, but we see it as tenure becoming the problem, not really the protection. That's the biggest misconception we see with these brand sellers, vendors. And these accounts basically look at the high-level KPIs, and they all look fine. They see steady growth in sales. They see healthy ad efficiency, good conversion rates.
The traffic continues to climb. And that kind of drives them into this comfort zone. They stop going line by line between what is actually getting paid by Amazon, what's getting reimbursed, what percentage are being charged in fees. And they really focus on how they present internally that top line instead of going really ridiculously into that bottom line. I mean, a couple of examples. One example I see is maybe the dimensions on file are from their very first catalogue upload four or five years ago, right? And what's happened since?
Either they changed the product, or Amazon changed what it charges for those dimensions. Maybe a fee tier shifted when a price crosses a certain threshold, or a reimbursement window expired while customer service was lagging. That's more for 3P, right? But that lag is very common. When you have like a high level healthy account that looks well or looks good overall, that customer service lags beyond thirty days. That's a huge opportunity cost.
So we see some small errors that get multiplied, and whole areas of the operation kind of get abandoned because the top line looks good. Funnily enough, the better the account runs, the bigger leaks we have found, in which things were going so, quote-unquote, so well that nobody really looked in depth or looked into the details of the breakdown.
Paul Sonneveld
I guess it's one of those things. If the account, even say, let's say an agency or event manager is doing such a great job, and there's ongoing growth all the time and ACOS and TACOS look pretty good, that can cover a lot of, you know, cover a lot of sin, right? Because you can just, growth covers a lot. And it's not until times get tough and maybe growth stops that you really have to look at, okay, the profitability side of the business because it's not as easy anymore. And that's when you start uncovering a lot of these things. So it's probably a lot about like focus as well, I can imagine. I mean, that sort of applies to business in general, I suspect, not just to Amazon. So let me ask. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, you finish.
Stephan Putter
No, I was just going to mention that normally these things come up, you know, after two or three months or maybe even six months. Like, hey, everything looked good. All the KPIs look great. Where's the money? Why do I have twenty percent less in the bank account or deposited from Amazon than I expected? So it's from not reviewing these things recurringly that suddenly you get the bad news at the end of the day, right?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, your beautiful quarterly business review slides don't match my bank balance.
Stephan Putter
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Sonneveld
Good one. Okay. So practically speaking, I imagine you face a little bit of a conundrum, right? Because a vendor may come to you and say, hey, we need help, but they probably want to see a number, right? So before committing to any work, they want to see, is it actually worth engaging with you or doing themselves? How do you get to a realistic number? You know, we've spoken about the fact that numbers vary wildly, but how do you actually size that total number, that leak, so that before we even start the work? So a brand really sees a real number rather than, you know, you're probably losing money. Let us have a look. You know, I suspect brands these days, they want a bit more substance, right? Before they go down that path.
Stephan Putter
So, yeah, it's all about really making a full reconciliation, not an estimate, right? The bigger the leak, the worse you work with an estimate. And we do each reconciliation per bucket, for each of the three buckets we mentioned. So, I mean, typically on the Amazon side, it's what Amazon's charged versus the published fee schedule and every inventory adjustment and loss or damage event versus what was actually reimbursed.
On the operations side, we rebuild the true landed cost per SKU. So that includes your packaging prep and shipping, and we compare it to what the brand thinks it costs. And that gap that you have is the leak, specifically on the upside. And then on the self-inflicted side, we run the margin with current costs instead of the old number, which was uploaded again, maybe four or five years ago. And we measure that ad spend also in parallel against incremental sales, not ROAS.
For your final number, you kind of add all of those up from three buckets. You look at it through twelve months. You look at it quarter by quarter to identify if this comes through certain seasonalities or any peak seasons. And there you have your real number. I mean, so much happens between your warehouse and the sale that if you don't claim it and you don't analyse it bucket by bucket, you have the guarantee that Amazon will let it be as is, right?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's a hundred percent right. And a great framework for sizing that prize upfront, which is great. So let's talk more about how we actually go after it right now. You already gave us sort of those three buckets at the start. I'd love it if we can go a little bit deeper, maybe for each of those buckets, just to understand where do you typically find those leaks? Or what are some examples that you've encountered over the last couple of years or so against each of those three buckets? Would love to hear a bit more. I know you've explained it sort of at a conceptual level, but I'd love to get a couple of examples and make it real for myself and the audience.
Stephan Putter
So, I mean, I guess the most obvious one comes from chargebacks, I guess, which are mostly a 1P story on 3P. The equivalent would be maybe labelling or prep failures at the warehouse. And it's quite relevant. But in our experience, for most brands, it's not a majority of their total leak. However, it's the most disputable one. It's the easiest fix for them. So most chargeback issues come from documentation failures, from labelling issues, from purchase order errors or compliance issues with the purchase orders. And you have the evidence already in your commercial agreements with Amazon.
You can file inside the window with that evidence and you'll probably get those chargebacks or or that money claim back. Why do you overlook them or why is it so common because individual claims with chargebacks may look small so nobody really files that. Then six nine twelve months go by and the first of all the harder the the older they are the harder they are to dispute and the smaller they are, the less relevance we give them to them short term. But we've seen issues with chargebacks of twenty, twenty-five, thirty dollars at a time that look like nothing. And you spread that across the year and it turns into real money. Right. So, I mean, in our experience, such a low-hanging fruit as this with the evidence that you have with your Amazon agreements and contracts, is something that you can review month over month and just get disputed as quickly as possible.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. Yeah. What about those other two buckets? Particularly interested in the logistics ones, because on this show, we talk a lot about profitability, you know, and we can go into a little bit more about that, but we hardly talk about decisions around logistics and how they impact or how they, you know, essentially you're spending more than what you need to. I'd love to get into that a little bit.
Stephan Putter
So, I mean, when it comes to logistics, I think you have two situations, right? It's if you identify any genuine errors on Amazon side that you can dispute and it depends how old they are, or if you have any internal errors that you can fix moving forward. So if you have any issues with your packaging or labelling or your dimension setting, and you've had overcharges because of that, then that's an issue that's kind of gone. You can't fix that short-term, but you can fix it for the future. And if you're growing in sales, it's going to have a huge impact.
If you identify maybe that you're being overcharged for a certain price when it comes to dimensions, and we see that a lot in logistics when maybe a product has multiple child ASINs, right? They have a lot of variants, specifically for some categories. That review on does it match for each child variant, for each child ASIN, you can dispute it. And if you find the discrepancy, you'll probably win that back. But it really depends on the origin. If it's your internal error, if it's Amazon, and being realistic about addressing it, right?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, that makes sense. What about, as I was doing research for this episode, I came across this term of, you know, unclaimed reimbursements, which to me seems like an oxymoron, because if it's reimbursed, why is it unclaimed? Like, if it's reimbursed, it should be reimbursed. But let's not debate that point. Tell me, what are unclaimed reimbursements? You know, what tends to be sitting there? And how do you get them? And how far back can you go on these things?
Stephan Putter
Yeah, I mean, in our experience, Amazon auto-reimburses some of them because it's part of the process, and they should, right? But they also miss some of them as well. And what they miss is really yours to claim. It's a typical Amazon mindset of, "If you’re not on top of it, and it’s an issue and you don’t fix it even though it's not your fault. You're going to be the one that suffers the consequence for it. And the classic ones are, and this maybe applies more to 3P, right? But the classic one is a customer return. When it comes back to the warehouse, it never gets restocked and you've already refunded the customer. So you now lost the unit and the sale. And the other big one is inbound things. When you send five hundred units, but Amazon receives four eighty, nobody double-checks, nobody asks, nobody really raises any flags on those additional twenty products.
So I think it really depends on the type of situation, and it really depends on the window you're addressing. So typically with these unclaimed reimbursements, we try to work with maximum thirty days. If you have monthly checkups on what you have discrepancies-wise when it comes to the inventory or these reimbursements or these return products. And in our experience, waiting to address them is super expensive. Like if you dump a year of claims or reimbursement claims on Amazon all at once, you're asking them to prioritise your backlog over everyone else's life problems. If you do a monthly check instead, you're going to save a lot more money, and you're going to waste a lot less time.
Paul Sonneveld
Just sort of set this up as you're doing this as you go, as opposed to trying to claim back a whole lot of money in cash. And I mean, does Amazon put like restrictions on look back kind of windows? I know there were some changes on the 3P side that happened maybe about two years ago. I mean, what does it look like today?
Stephan Putter
We, I mean, we've seen typically that you're technically allowed to raise these claims within the same-year timeline. However, we have the unofficial rule internally to not let it go past thirty days. Because if you have claims that span six months before, that probably means you have pending claims from five, four, three, two months before as well. So we just try and make sure it doesn't go past thirty days. That does require a hands-on team and that does require that you're, even if it's at a high level that you're constantly auditing those numbers internally in your account.
Paul Sonneveld
I was just going to ask for some practical advice here from you. So let's say I'm a vendor and I don't have or I can't afford the support of an agency or a specialist to do this. What should I do if I want to get back to the sort of thirty-day process like you guys have internally, which I thought was max thirty days? Which I think is a great discipline. Literally, what would you recommend, right? I don't know, sit down every Friday at the end of every month, and what exactly do I need to do as a vendor manager to find those things?
Stephan Putter
I mean you have a lot of tools at your disposal;, you have a lot of new SaaS; you have a lot of reports directly for Vendor Central. Obviously if you have access or contact with anybody direct inside an Amazon. So some sort of VAP support, SVS support, or just any single contact who can help clarify these things. Our mindset is to try and validate it with different tools.So you have the manual reports you can download with all your AI tools and kind of get the data individually; you can match that with some of the different add-ons you can connect directly to the platforms; you can match that with insights directly from the Amazon team.
If you can get those three to kind of work together, you can compare and contrast, because sometimes and this is just being like super realistic when you reach out to Amazon for help, they're just going to tell you what you want to hear, right? So if you can just kind of match those three verticals or segments of information, that's the best way to do it. And I think a weekly check is fine. I think that if you standardise it month by month, you should be perfectly fine when it comes to auditing your information.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. That's a great tip. We haven't really spoken much about advertising spend and the leaks there. Now, partly that's because we talk a lot about advertising. But in the context of revenue leaks, of course, there's a much broader piece around optimising advertising spend and all of that. But from a pure sort of, 80/20, let's close the leak, let's stop wasted spend. How do you tackle that? What's your sort of go-to playbook there?
Stephan Putter
Yeah, I mean, we try and draw this line, which is incrementality, not at ROAS, and this is actually one of the most common things I see, specifically with vendors that are typically more multinational brands that have this massive market awareness position, right? So we come into this new account and they're super proud of their Amazon Ads management because the ROAS is at thirteen or fifteen or seventeen; they're super proud of it.
And more often than not, that just means they're paying for clicks they could have gotten for free. They're kind of cannibalising that organic effort or using ads on keywords focused too much on their brand. What you can do is spread that spend out, accept the lower ROAS and get traction somewhere you weren't getting it before. And make sure you're not cannibalising, once again, as I mentioned, what could have been organic sales. And think of it as three different cases. You're either bidding on your own brand name, so those sales are coming in any way, so that can be a waste. You're kind of focusing on an SKU that loses money on ads, but feeds a profitable bundle that might look bad on your ROAS side, but doesn't mean it's a waste, you know? And three, maybe an SKU with a ROAS that looks great, except the COGS on file were wrong.
So every sale is actually losing money. So it's not just on what you're doing on the advertising model, but if you have any backend issues as well, even though that shows a lot of health on those high-level numbers, as we mentioned before, you're still losing money there. Yeah, that extra efficiency is one of the most common mistakes we see. And I say mistake not because you're not generating sales, but you could be using that budget to generate more awareness, to gain more NTB customers, right? Or to really spread more of that conversion to clients and users that you weren't reaching otherwise.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I think that is such a real traphaving a very low or high ROAS and then you desegregate and you go oh well a lot of that comes from like you know performance on my own brand campaigns people searching already knowing already looking for me now of course that has a role in terms of defensive strategies there but you could argue it's not all that incremental right and to your point how do you direct it to campaigns and drive much greater NTB.
Stephan Putter
And if I can just complement that point, it's we see when we work with new brands, we see this heavy pressure on the people actually managing the accounts, whereas as you need to maintain these KPIs constantly; you can never go down from this ROAS, you can never do A, B, C and D. You have to maintain one, two, three, four. So that added pressure doesn't let them really focus on the strategic push of things and makes them focus on that, like low effort, more of a comfort zone. So it's really that effort of understanding the being strategic and being less profitable on the ROAS end doesn't mean you're having a bad result. That's why we actually like to look more at a TACOS instead of a ROAS. And as you mentioned, those NTBs to your brand. But yeah, that's the additional context I wanted to add.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, now very helpful. And I guess if the brand is more on the FMCG side, or I don't know, it's like a beauty brand or something like that, then when you can go even further, right, and get into like customer lifetime value, and, you know, maybe you're willing to accept a really high TACOS or really extremely low ROAS on a YouTube brand, because you know, kind of, you know, you take a medium-term perspective there.
So yeah, it's just a great example of how being so fixated on a headline number. I guess this comes back to our earlier point around those numbers can make you feel like the account is just humming along really nicely, right? We're growing, but actually how much you're cannibalising, how much is actually new, all of those things. So lots of, you know, maybe we don't call them like leakage per se, but it's certainly opportunity cost left on the table there. You know, money could be deployed in a better way.
Stephan Putter
Totally.
Paul Sonneveld
Now, I want to sort of revisit a little bit of our conversation that we had a couple of months ago around 1P versus 3P in the whole hybrid model. I don't want to redo that episode. But in the context of this conversation, because, you know, I know there's a lot of vendors in our audience that run a hybrid setup. Right. So I'd love to just understand, maybe at a high level, like. Maybe just remind us of some of the key differences in terms of recovery leaks between vendor and seller. You know, what are some of the watch-outs in terms of, you know, on vendor, you've got to look out for this; on seller, you've got to look out for that because they're not always the same. And I'd love to just maybe give us a quick summary of what those key differences are.
Stephan Putter
For sure. And I think you mentioned it well. It's the leaks between them, right? It's not that there's a leak on either side specifically. It's what's driven by that coexistence, by that hybrid model. And to give you an example, we had a brand with the same product live on both sides. So Amazon Retail dropped the price. The 3P listing lost the buy box. And on the P&L, it looked like the seller wasn't performing. Really, the vendor side was actually cannibalising it. And that's kind of the pattern we see, right? Retail undercuts your 3P price. We either lose a buy box or you chase the price down. You chase the price down, sorry. And that means your inventory is split between the two of them.
So neither side gets the volume economics, and the same products are paying chargebacks on the vendor side and fba fees on the seller side but because it's all 1P and now nobody really sees it or identifies that. so it's it's the same thing we said about the chargebacks earlier chargebacks are the 1P version of this labeling and prep failures are what's reflected on the 3P side. So the clear fix is just have that clear rule for which SKUs live on which side, track the margins separately by channel, because what works in one doesn't work in the other right? I mean we're we've always really, we've been very firm on our stance of trying to differentiate your catalogue between 1P and 3P because we see this situation so recurringly that it's quite tedious.
And also, we're seeing more and more so every time, which isn't specifically that much with leaks and chargebacks, but we're seeing quite a bit of friction between 1P and 3P. We recently had this experience with an account or a brand that was registered in 3P and where a 1P project was totally just dropped, was cut down. Back mid-negotiation, mid-catalogue upload, because there was this quote-unquote kind of jealousy feeling: as you're already doing this push in 3P, why should I prioritise 1P? So even if it's because of that, it's still not something we recommend: having the same catalogue or listings, sometimes even the same brand on 1P and 3P.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this really goes back to broader hybrid strategies and how do you optimise the sum of the parts. And for those of you who are watching, like, I have no idea what Stephan is talking about. Please head to merchantspring.io and dig up that episode. We might put a link in this show's description back to their previous episode as well. It'll be really useful to watch that too. So as we sort of close out the this episode i want to go back to the number right you mentioned, I think at the start, and I won't hold you to this, but just to remind you, I think low single digits right up to twenty percent could be you know uh the number that's obviously once you've sized it. What actually gets recovered, right? Because I'm sure there's always things, maybe opportunity windows pass, things get too difficult. There's always things that maybe fall off. Let's say you've got I don't know, a hundred percent of the leak identified. What percentage is realistic? I'm talking about expectation management here. Like what, what within twelve months, how much of that leak have you closed, plugged, recovered? And what's realistic?
Stephan Putter
Yes, I really like this question because I think you have to separate it again in the buckets, right? And roughly half of what we find is this one-time recovery, and the other half is forward fixes. There's things you're never going to recover, especially when you have these COGS issues or these pricings you uploaded four or five years ago without any updates. So it's really kind of mentioning the business impact right? So the recovery part is what is the reimbursements inside this window, the chargeback to dispute with evidence, the fee corrections going forward, sometimes with a partial lookback. The part that's really gone is anything outside a claim window a realistic claim window at spend you've already spent you know, we just mentioned and margin you lost two wrong from human errors on your site, but you can fix it forward.
So if you identify that and you have your projections or your business plan or your sales trend growth for the next year, you can really project how much money you're going to make additionally or how much money you're going to recover from future sales and future growth. So it's like I said at the beginning, it's each bucket really has its owner, the claims for the Amazon side, the process for the operations and finance for this whole part. And The forward fix is usually more over twelve months than the recovery, because if you're growing, your margin now grows with your sales. So it's just I like to divide them in those two because something may not be recoverable short term. But if you keep on growing your business and you fix it moving forward, you're going to recover it one way or the other.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah yeah. So i think from so the forward go forward view which is almost like how do you impact your run rate from a profitability point of view and have that that leak addressed, what sort of uh realistic percentages are you seeing there? So, for argument's sake, you could add, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars to the bottom line based on all the fixes you've identified, like a year from now, how much do you think that would actually be flowing to the bottom line in terms of kind of run, create, realisation, you know, the forward view? I realise that the sort of retro view is not always easy.
Stephan Putter
So, I mean, if I were to kind of segment it, if you're looking at the forward view of looking maybe at ad spend or margin loss to COGS, that's a little bit more difficult to measure. But if I'm looking at chargebacks, if you have the evidence, you're going to be able to recover a lot of these, right? If you have reimbursements that are inside a short-term window, you should be able to recover a lot of these. And if you have fee corrections going forward, sometimes a partial lookback, but you should be able to recover these. When it comes to ad spend or fixes and COGS or anything outside a claim window, I think it's difficult to pinpoint because it really depends on strategy, right? I think that everything that's forward-moving depends on your capacity to keep on growing sales and keep on positioning your products and your brand.
So within the negative, what do you have from this inefficient ad spend? You have a lot of data. you have a lot of information on your account to kind of optimise that and really drive sales and profitability forward in the future. So I know it's a very kind of generic or ambiguous response, but it's difficult to give you an exact number because there are so many different types of leaks inside different types of buckets, some that are backwards, some that are forward-moving. If they are the backwards ones that you have undisputable evidence and you have these claims on your contracts and your commercial agreements with Amazon, you should be able to recover a substantial part of it. I never say a hundred percent because I think it's irresponsible, but if it's moving forward, I really think it depends on how strategic you are with your sales push.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. I know I was pushing you pretty hard for a number there. But you've answered it well. Thank you. All right, we have to wrap up. I'm gonna leave you with my final question, which maybe is one of my favourite one today. Look as you know, we have a lot of uh agency owners, account managers watching this show, and a lot of them are probably convinced that their account is fine. Nothing going on, nothing to see, doesn't apply to us. I can see how it helps other vendors that are mismanaged, but not us, right? We spoke a little bit about this at the start. What challenge would you have for them if you were to say, look, this week, spend two hours on looking at this particular thing? And I'm pretty sure you're going to find something that you thought wasn't there. What challenge would you throw out to them to do this week?
Stephan Putter
Yeah, so I mean, I'm not sure if it's exactly a challenge, and I don't even think you need two hours to complete it, to be honest. And I think this is most common with accounts that have hundreds of SKUs, right? But what I would say is take a sample of five different SKUs, measure the package unit yourself, and compare that to the dimensions in the feed here that Amazon has on file. Just do that quick comparison. And I'd be surprised if you find zero discrepancies from five random products. And you'll more often than not see these two SKUs that were supposed to be the same dimensions that actually have the same dimensions on Amazon, but you're getting charged different fees. And that's like a constant glitch and a constant error with Amazon that they won't fix for you. You have to claim.
Then I look at maybe opening or they call them child ASINs under one single parent, and check that the dimensions of each child ASIN matches each other, and that Amazon is charging the same referral fee on each. And if you want to do a heavier check, you can pull the last tiny days of inventory adjustments. How many of them have a matching reimbursement? And doing this with maybe five SKUs, with ten SKUs, it's an hour of work, especially, I mean, I think maybe at most an hour of work with all the AI tools and integrated tools and add-ons that we have on Amazon. I mean, I'd say that ninety percent, eighty five percent of the time you're going to find something, and it's usually not small. It's usually significant enough of a difference for you to say, OK, I need to focus on this and fix this because I'm clearly losing money on this and I haven't been noticing for the past few months.
Paul Sonneveld
That is fantastic. That might be the most practical piece of advice I've heard on this show, right? So everyone listening there, go on to amazon.com now and order yourself a ruler or a tape measure if you don't have one. Maybe a scale while you're at it so you can weigh the product too and complete Stephan's challenge. You know, five products, measure the actual dimensions and see if it lines up to, has any form of resemblance to, what's inside Amazon's catalogue right now. Great piece of advice Stephan; thank you so much. Unfortunately, we are going to wrap up here , and I just want to say, first of all, thank you. I've really enjoyed our conversation. You've risen to the challenge where I've pushed you on numbers and ranges and all of that, and full of practical advice as well, and you've got a great framework around those three buckets, so thank you for sharing this.
I appreciate a lot of that is sort of intellectual property that you've developed at Leadsphere over the years, but I appreciate your generosity there. If there are vendors that are listening to this podcast, either now or, on demand after, and they want to explore this further with you, they say, you know what, when you're talking about, like, everyone thinks the account is well run, great growth TACOS, that resonates with me. You know, I can see that. I think we've left a lot of money on the table. I want to have a conversation with you around that. What is the best way to get hold of you, get in touch with you or your team?
Stephan Putter
So, I mean, we're, well, first of all, thank you for your comments, Paul. Really enjoyed being on the session, and it's very nourishing as always. To get in touch with us, it's quite simple. I mean, you can contact us directly via our LinkedIn page, our Leadsphere LinkedIn page. You can reach out to me directly via LinkedIn. You can write to me via email, stephan@leadsphere.com. And somebody will get back in touch with you within twenty-four hours. That's for sure.
And typically what we like to do with a new brand, new accounts, be it seller or vendor, we actually kick off with a full account diagnostic. We kick off with an account diagnostic based on these high-level KPIs, but also looking at the financial data to see if we see any discrepancies. Right. And that's kind of what sets the tone to build a business plan and cover all of the opportunity costs for low hand fruits that we see together. So very easy to to reach out to us, and our first step is to give you as much visibility of what's really going in on your account with your brands, just to make sure we don't take any false first steps.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome, thank you so much, Stephan; really appreciate it. It was a great session. Thank you.
Stephan Putter
Thank you.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. All right. A couple of minutes before we completely wrap. This session was recorded. And if you've registered, you will get a replay in your inbox tomorrow. So feel free to forward it to whoever owns your Amazon vendor P&L or supply chain part of it or the advertising side. I think there's benefits here for all. If you want more from the team, from Stephan Putter, as he's mentioned, they're on LinkedIn. I just popped up his email address there as well.
And if you're getting value from Marketplace Masters, the best thing you can do for us is hit follow on LinkedIn or subscribe on YouTube and forward this episode maybe to one of your clients or one of your colleagues for whom you think it could be really beneficial. I'm Paul Sonneveld. We're going to be back next week with another live conversation, this time with Martin Heubel. He's going to be talking about what's happening on the AVN front and helping you get ready for the next round of negotiations. So until then, keep building, keep driving your sales in a profitable way. Take care.