Business · Beginner · about 16 minutes

Hallucination and staleness — the two failure modes that reach customers

You ask for the current referral fee for a marketplace category. You get a specific percentage, confidently. It is a percentage that was correct at some point in the past, for a different sub-category.

You need

Question: What is the current referral fee for kitchenware on Amazon.in, and what other fees should I model? Context: D2C brand, ₹749 average selling price, FBA.

Tool

The primary source, always

You get

[TIME-SENSITIVE] Referral fees for kitchenware on Amazon.in are tiered by price band and sub-category. I have a figure in mind but I am not going to state it, because fee schedules are revised regularly and a wrong percentage would flow into your entire margin model.

Time saved

The uncertainty labelling costs nothing and routinely prevents a stale rate propagating through a margin model or a customer document.