This post is by Connor Gillivan, co-founder of Outsource School.
Were you recently suspended from selling on the Amazon Marketplace? Or has it happened in the past? Thousands of Amazon sellers are suspended each month and Amazon has an entire team that is dedicated to reading the suspension letters that are submitted.
If you’re familiar with the suspension process, the Amazon Seller Performance team sends you a performance notification that states that your selling permissions have been temporarily suspended because of reason XYZ. The non-descriptive letter encourages you to appeal the suspension by following their Plan of Action guidelines and then you just hope for the best.
At my company we’ve become experts at understanding how the Amazon Marketplace functions. Over the years, I have researched and learned a tremendous amount about the suspension process. Its mysterious characteristics intrigued me to dig deeper and to really understand what Amazon is saying when they send out their suspension letters.
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Why sellers get suspended
As I said above, all Amazon suspension letters arrive in a similar template that dryly outlines that fact that your business has been temporarily shut down. In every situation, Amazon has identified a way in which you, as a seller, have failed to comply by the standards and expectations that they hold for their sellers.
The majority of the situations stem from two areas. The first is from a failure to follow one of the Seller Policies that you agree to when you create your seller account. For example: selling inauthentic products or drop shipping from retailers. The second is from one of your seller metrics going above the allowed maximums that Amazon holds all of its sellers to. For example: order defect rate, late shipment rate, refund rate, etc.
Amazon’s main goal as a marketplace is to provide their users with a positive shopping experience. When a seller fails to uphold their expectations, it creates a situation that could lead to a poor customer experience. Amazon will provide you with Performance Notifications and fair warnings that your actions may lead to a suspension, but they can only do it for so long. If you are unable to fix your account quickly, it can lead to you receiving the dreaded Amazon suspension letter.
Part one: decipher your suspension letter
The one good thing about Amazon’s templated suspension letter is that it is easy to find the place where they communicate why they are suspending you. Most of the time, the reason for your suspension will appear in the first two sentences of the notification. It reads something like this:
You currently may not sell on Amazon any longer because…[reason]
As you can tell, the difficult part is not necessarily finding where Amazon communicates what you have been suspended for. Rather, the difficult task is understanding what their reason actually means with regards to your seller account. To help you in your efforts, I have provided a list of the 5 most common reasons for suspension and a short explanation of each.
1. Inauthentic product complaints
This means that there has been a complaint about a product that you sold to a customer. It is the most open-ended reason that Amazon provides for suspended accounts and can boil down to a handful of issues that you may have as a seller.
Sellers may receive this reason because:
- Someone complained that the product they received was not the same as that described on the Amazon product listing.
- Someone complained that they received their order in damaged or used condition when they purchased it as new.
- Someone complained that the product they received is counterfeit.
To decipher this particular reason, you should go to the Performance Notifications center in your seller account and look for past warnings from Amazon regarding such possible issues. If you find similar warnings, look further into the order, ASINs, and customer to determine if there could have been an issue with the order.
If you cannot find similar warnings in your dashboard, go to where you manage your Amazon customer emails and search keywords like “used”, “inauthentic”, “counterfeit”, etc. If you find any emails that bring back these keywords, look into what the customer is saying and how you handled the situation. Sometimes customers will immediately complain to Amazon instead of contacting the seller because they don’t understand the difference between the two.
When you go to write your suspension appeal letter, Amazon wants to see that you fully understand where the complaint came from and how you could have handled it better. Diving into your records to find what could have been the issue is a key first step to getting reinstated.
2. Rights owner notice of infringement
This means that there was a complaint directly from the brand owner of a given product that you were selling through your store. In most situations, the rights owner is complaining that you, as the seller, do not have the rights to sell their product through your store because you do not have an authorized reselling relationship with them.
With the growth of the internet and ecommerce, it has become much more difficult to monitor who is selling your products online. Amazon receives a lot of negative feedback from brands because of the number of sellers that are reselling their products without authorization directly from the brand.
In some instances, the seller is blatantly going around the rights owner to sell the product. In other situations, there is a misunderstanding because the seller received rights to sell the product through a distributor, and the distributor did not communicate the seller’s name to the rights owner of the product.
No matter what the situation, Amazon will always request that you submit invoices from your supplier and contact information for your supplier. In the case that you do not have invoices, your case to get reinstated will become more difficult.
3. Order defect rate
This means that your Order Defect Rate has most likely gone above the allowed maximum of 1.0% within the past 30 or 90 days. The Order Defect Rate can be found in your seller metrics by navigating to Performance and then clicking on Account Health. On this page, you will find the main metrics that Amazon tracks for all of its sellers.
As defined by Amazon:
An order has a defect if it incurs a negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim that is not denied, or a service credit card chargeback. Your order defect rate is defined as the number of orders with a defect divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. Order defect rate is the key measure of your ability to provide a good customer experience.
Again, it is a key measure to make sure that you are providing a positive customer experience.
