Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#11

Sell on Walmart Marketplace instead. Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.

Don’t worry this guys a hero, and has lots of endorphins. He’ll find a way.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#12

Sell on Walmart Marketplace instead. Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.

I understand the problems described for Amazon, though that doesn't make Walmart good or without the same or different problems and advantages. What is Walmart Marketplace like for sellers? And how is the sales traffic, relatively?

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#14
If it's anything like eBay, just open another account. I've had 2 eBay accounts randomly closed for no stated or discernable reason. I've just opened new accounts. Now I have separate buyer and seller accounts so at least I have an account with history, if/when my seller account gets locked.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#15

I think people would be surprised what is on the internal seller forums. There is really like a huge amount of issues that Amazon fails to help with. Literally everything from onboarding to protecting sellers from refund scams. I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

When you look at a forum like that you have to realize that the actual scammers also post convincing complaints (omitting incriminating details). They likely outnumber the legitimate cases. It's all part of gaming the system.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#16
Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from the inside, etc. etc. Be happy that your financial loss was limited.

edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#18

Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from th…

Surely that's enough money to go to small claims or something?

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#19

I think people would be surprised what is on the internal seller forums. There is really like a huge amount of issues that Amazon fails to help with. Literally everything from onboarding to protecting sellers from refund scams. I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

I used to work for a large Amazon Seller (>$100m per year revenue) who got automatically deactivated with no warning and it took them a week to get re-activated.

We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company - this was not the exact scenario so please treat with a pinch of salt)

They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#20

> Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great. They may have a filter for people who exceed a certain number of flags?

That’s the first thing that jumped out to me. He was flagged multiple times, tweaked the listing and passed. But it may not be a free pass every time. Eventually multiple flags added up to something - a ban. So may not be Samsung per se as anything special just hitting some flag limit.
Post reply on HN