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Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

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Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#51

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

jasonjayr wrote: post #47
throwaway150 wrote: post #27

*smh* Every time I hear a story like this (and there's one like every month) I wonder how we ended up here. The internet was meant to be this place where anyone could set up a website, run a business, and reach customers directly. Instead it has turned into a collection of walled gardens, where your existence and livelihood depend on the whims of an opaque algorithm. Luckily in my country Amazon does not have the lev…

We ended up here because certain people realised that there is oppertunity in exploiting the window of time between "I trust that you are selling this in good faith" and "This is a scam and I will drag your name, and any of your associates in mud". The internet enabled people to just 'make up names', and keep exploiting this. So rather than investing time and effort into investigating, we just built faceless tools to…

> Even if you try selling direct, your payment processor takes on this role, with varying degrees of trigger-sensitivity.

I agree but I hate payment processors sometimes as well and they feel very rent seeking in nature (akin to amazon) to me as well, I definitely wonder if stablecoins with good on/offramps or proper VISA support might actually help the end citizen but I am a bit worried because Stablecoin's on crypto and most crypto's really scummy so I also don't want to give things like this way too much attention.

Time will tell perhaps

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#52

Post by binarysolo »

IChooseY0u wrote: post #3

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

Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible.

Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#53

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

nikkwong wrote: post #33
kelnos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like if you've made a good-faith effort to start the arbitration process they require you to do, and they ignore you, that is grounds for a lawsuit. And I doubt a judge would look favorably upon Amazon in that case.

You're totally right. At the time I didn't have much money for a lawyer, but perhaps I should look into it again now.

Good luck for the lawsuit. I read your story and I read some other horror stories in here as well.

How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)

One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#54

Post by TMWNN »

binarysolo wrote: post #52
IChooseY0u wrote: post #3

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

Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible. Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just w…

>We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees

You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.

That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#56

Post by hacky_engineer »

binarysolo wrote: post #41

> The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :) First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead…

I would love to hear all your thoughts. Send me an email?

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#57

Post by hacky_engineer »

ejo4041 wrote: post #26

Amazon Seller for 10 years here. I haven't had my account shutdown, but some tips that could help. At the top, your brand is listed as "Generic", this is because you do not have a brand registered. The way to have a brand registered with Amazon is to first get a Trademark for your brand. This will also help you fight against counterfeiters on Amazon that could try to sell their own version under your listing. In that…

Thanks! Yeah, I'll go through Brand registry. I'm guessing I need to get my account reinstated first somehow though.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#58

Post by Closi »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #43
Closi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> 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 t…

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

> Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.

Yes it's bad, although I want to emphasise that I have changed the details significantly here - it was something like this, but this was not the infraction because I don't want the company to be identifiable by anyone. I’m also not sure if my example is an actual policy violation - but it was in a similar vein.

To be honest, the surprising thing wasn’t the ban on a policy violation (because they had violated a policy), it was how automated the internals of Amazon were and how slow it was to overturn.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#59

Post by paulcole »

hacky_engineer wrote: post #57
ejo4041 wrote: post #26

Amazon Seller for 10 years here. I haven't had my account shutdown, but some tips that could help. At the top, your brand is listed as "Generic", this is because you do not have a brand registered. The way to have a brand registered with Amazon is to first get a Trademark for your brand. This will also help you fight against counterfeiters on Amazon that could try to sell their own version under your listing. In that…

Thanks! Yeah, I'll go through Brand registry. I'm guessing I need to get my account reinstated first somehow though.

There's a bunch of services that charge to help you with the reinstatement process because they know what keywords to use to help you navigate the Amazon system.

I think they're worth reaching out to (I don't have one that I personally recommend as I've been out of that industry for too long). Because if things haven't changed recently then there's no "penalty" for waiting and the mistake most sellers make is rushing to put through a crappy response and they just make things worse.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#60

Post by hacky_engineer »

rorylaitila wrote: post #32

Don't use other companies brand names in your product titles. Regardless of what other people get away with. Regardless of what is in the Amazon fine print. Don't use trademark logos in your product images. Make your own brand name. Make it "compatible with" in the product description.

Yeah, this would be safer, but is anyone going to find the product if it's listed as "MyBrand attachment sleeve for location sensor and TV remote control." instead of "Attachment sleeve for Airtag and Samsung Frame Remote Control?" I kind of doubt it..
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