Hi!

I'm a sole trader selling handmade items and indie published books. I'm not VAT registered, nor do I need to be at this point. I'm a UK resident.

We've been selling on Amazon for years, and we used to list on the other EU sites until Brexit.

As I have no intention of registering for VAT in other countries for what would be a few quid in sales a month, I put all other marketplaces on permanent holiday after Brexit, opted out of PAN-EU fulfilment and literally closed down all involvement on all Amazon platforms and programs outside the .co.uk site as soon as Brexit happened. We have never stored stock outside the UK even before Brexit, but we definitely had no involvement with anything outside the UK for years.

The other week, I had an FBA product scheduled for return. My settings are set to auto-return any unfulfillable items to me. When the item didn't arrive, I queried it, and was told it was destroyed. I queried this as my settings say the opposite. They agreed to reimburse me as it was their error - it should have been sent back to me.

They then said they'd done the reimbursement, and it didn't show up on my account, so I queried it.

It transpired that the reason all this happened was that they reimbursed my Amazon.fr account (which has been inactive for years). They said it was because the stock was stored in France.

I asked why my stock was in France when we opted out of PAN-EU years ago, and they haven't replied to that. Apparently, there is more stock of mine in France despite me specifically setting the account to prevent this.

They then said that they cannot return items to me in the UK because of Brexit. I asked how they were able to send them there in the first place when we were always opted out of that and we have no stock at FBA that is aged beyond 270 days, so there should be nothing there from before Brexit , and they started replying in Chinese. I do not speak Chinese and every time I respond, asking then to reply in English, I get another page of auto-generated Chinese characters.

I'm at loss as to how to deal with this. This is a new low in the litany of how comedically poor Seller Support is.

Has anyone had anything similar happen? How would you deal with this?