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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

#61

Post by binarysolo »

hacky_engineer wrote: post #56
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?

My personal email is rot13’ed when you click on my username :)

This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#62

Post by busterarm »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #35
busterarm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the category. My brother runs an Amazon store that nets more than that but his category is one of the strictest on the site and he gets no support.

I mean those programs aren't free for 3rd party sellers, so if he doesn't pay I'm not surprised, but it likely doesn't have much to do with the category.

He would pay. They don't have anything to offer him.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#63

Post by hacky_engineer »

paulcole wrote: post #59
hacky_engineer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks! I'll look around and see if I can find anyone that specializes in this kind of thing.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#64

Post by hacky_engineer »

binarysolo wrote: post #61
hacky_engineer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My personal email is rot13’ed when you click on my username :) This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com

Sent. Thanks!!

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#66

Post by 8note »

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.

its a very common fraud vector: redirect customers off of amazon, then fraud them there, and when the customer comes back to amazon to complain and get a refund, amazon has no idea what they are talking about, but amazon is still on the hook for making it right.

i recently left this area. id describe the business logic of the various policies as written in blood as responses to sophisticated attackers, but also, spaghetti written by pretty short lived PMs. its of course, hard for account managers to do anything, because there's also a history of account managers having colluded with bad actor sellers

fortunately, tons of the investment has been into fixing problems like "overly harsh" "opaque" etc, and just about all the tools needed to refactor the seller policies are in place now. that and tools besides a top level account banhammer

I expect what should have happened and what will happen in the future is that the one listing or feed gets removed, with a warning/issue to fix it, and the account only gets banned after repeated infractions. most things should be making a phone call to the seller already, if amazon trusts them. for something like that, amazon might also think the account was hacked

that said, all the above is only my opinions, not amazon's, and im not there anymore:P

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#67

Post by nikkwong »

paulpauper wrote: post #45
nikkwong wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.

The TOS is worded in such a way that it's almost impossible for them to lose. The best legal minds who are paid 7 figures write these things to be impenetrable. Arbitration is slow, time consuming, likely to not lead to desired outcome. Retain a lawyer just means more money and time down drain, and these companies laugh at legal threats, knowing it it ever got that far they would still win either getting the case dis…

That was basically my sentiment and the sentiment of a few lawyers I consulted for it. I lost so much money in the entire process overall it hurts to think about.

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#68

Post by binarysolo »

TMWNN wrote: post #54
binarysolo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.

We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#69

Post by binarysolo »

Closi wrote: post #19
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

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…

FWIW they got a lot better on this past few years, clearly someone high up finally got the memo.

We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.

Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...

Re: Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

#70

Post by mmooss »

mtlynch wrote: post #24
mmooss wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I used to sell on Amazon, and Walmart Marketplace reached out to me to convince me they could offer me a better seller experience than Amazon. I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon. Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon. Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back fo…

The OP talks about being locked out by Amazon, and the comment I responded to above talks about being overtaken by scams.

Edit: you say it too:

> I hated dealing with Amazon

Yet the comments in this subthread all talk only about costs - they say the costs are the same so why switch to Walmart? Aren't the reasons already given?

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