This post is by Chris McCabe, owner and founder of ecommerceChris, LLC, an Amazon seller account consultancy.
As a former Amazonian, I am amazed that sellers of their own private label brands face as many listing attacks as they do.
The attacks themselves are no surprise. They’ve been going on for years, given a highly competitive marketplace where some sellers compete by trying to cheat. What unnerves me is the many kinds of abuse these brands see without a reliable means to report it, and how easy it is to attack another seller without consequences.
Nowadays, hundreds of third-party service providers exist for the sole purpose of helping a seller attack their competitors. Aside from a few targeted lawsuits and intermittent seller account suspensions, Amazon hasn’t slowed black hats down.
Amazon sellers need to understand the nature of these attacks and how to report them properly.
View Top Amazon Seller ToolsWhen black hats attack, what can Amazon do to help you?
Amazon’s enforcement teams only appear to be able to identify obvious attempts to conduct abuse, like unauthorized detail page edits or insertion of back end keywords intended to trigger the policy violation bots.
If you get a notification from Amazon that you have a listing which violates their policies, and you are sure that this was due to competitor sabotage, then:
- Download a Category Listing Report for any content changes that you didn’t make. If you don’t have this report, contact Seller Support to get it added to your Inventory Reports
- Call the Catalog team through Seller Support. This may help you to determine what happened. Was it a technical problem, a glitch, or something more sinister?
- If the Catalog team can’t explain what happened, it may just mean they don’t know where to look or don’t understand what they’re seeing. Sometimes they can tell that something that should not have been changed was altered by Amazon staff, and they can’t or won’t try to explain it. So they focus on proposing solutions instead. You may need to call more than once to get a proper answer.
- You can also try creating a ticket via Brand Registry. These tickets can be routed to the appropriate team on occasion, but rarely do you find the right actions taken in a timely manner (often nothing happens at all, other than standardized copy and paste responses with no useful information).
- If you have one, your Strategic Account Manager can help you with filing Strategic Account Services Core tickets to report abuse and route the complaint internally to the appropriate team. For product review abuse, it goes to PRA (Product Review Abuse). If the issue is related to your listing or branded content, they send it to MPA (Marketplace Policy Abuse).
- A lot of sellers report brand, listing or reviews abuse via email queues ([email protected]), which Amazon encourages them to do. Rarely do they hear anything back other than a boilerplate message saying Amazon has investigated and taken “appropriate action”. This doesn’t actually mean that any action was taken. It just means that they may have looked into it and done something as a result, but don’t count on it.
What happens when sellers report abuse, using those steps?
It’s best to think of Seller Support tickets or emails to the open queues as a starting point, not the finish line. You may see a lack of action even when they DO reply to you. Amazon loves to say that they cannot disclose the specific steps they took to resolve the report, but is that simply an excuse not to do anything at all? Most sellers who hire my company have already tried low-level approaches like this and got absolutely nowhere.
Brand Registry showed a recent uptick in deleting some fake negative reviews, and occasionally, they help sellers resolve obviously bogus IP complaints against their brands.
I don’t believe that Amazon plans to offer transparency into their process anytime soon, that’s the bad news. The good news is that Brand Registry showed a recent uptick in deleting some fake negative reviews, and occasionally, they help sellers resolve obviously bogus IP complaints against their brands. These teams still act mostly on obvious, easy cases that require almost no time to review, but at least that’s a start. We used to see no action on any case sent to abuse teams.
Black hat sellers have become savvy after years of gaming the system and from paying for services that know how Amazon’s system works, and what to exploit. Some abuses continue unabated because fraudsters constantly observe and adapt, to stay current on what they can manipulate.
Abuse tactics we are seeing now are not the same ones being used a year or two ago. And Amazon is usually behind the times. I’ve spoken to Amazonians that have left the company recently, and they all described how inundated with cases those teams are, to the point that crucial details are missed in the chaos. This often results in poor decision making.
In fairness to Amazon, if they close one gap, fraudster sellers or service providers find new loopholes. Amazon also sees that sellers misidentify abuse when they have actually committed listing policy violations themselves. On top of that, sellers will report bad reviews that were not from a competitor, but they instinctively blame competitors anyway. Make sure you don’t fall into this, and always give Amazon accurate reports that can be used to take action.
What more can you do on your own, or with help?
Brands are usually perplexed when they receive an ASIN takedown notice, telling them that their top selling product was suspended for violating detail page rules. The seller may be aghast at these actions, because they didn’t enter the violating terms in their backend keywords and didn’t change their images to a totally different product.
When this happens to you, what should you do first? Depending on the situation, consider the following:
- Are there specific fake negative reviews within a short space of time? Those can be reported to PRA (Product Review Abuse) teams. Make sure you show evidence of a pattern.
- Do you know who your main competitors are? Have you seen them buy from you before? See if you can find a trail of evidence, then lay that out for abuse prevention teams to follow.
- Are your competitors active in a popular mastermind or social media group? Amazon has gradually become aware of certain groups known for black hat behavior. If the seller is active in one of these groups, you may be able to use that. Report the group, or the competitor, or both, if you have found a connection.
- Were product images changed, bullets edited, or illicit terms added to your keywords? This could indicate “internal team abuse”. Amazon needs to know if someone on their staff took action against you. Flag the abuse to show you’re under attack, and appeal for ASIN reinstatement while also showing the MPA (Marketplace Policy Abuse) team what changed on your listing.
- Bogus IP complaints are everywhere. Do you have all of your rights ownership documentation ready to submit and open cases via Brand Registry and Seller Support? If Brand Registry ignores you or copies and pastes you to death, complain to marketplace VPs that infringement teams aren’t doing their jobs properly. They won’t be shocked! Poor investigations are part of Amazon’s “new normal”, sadly.
We know this is a lot to take in. As a growing brand struggling to keep up with increasing sales, murky template messages from Amazon don’t help at all. They create a difficult environment for you to communicate with their teams. Unfortunately, it’s up to you to push them to solve the problem.
Brand abuse on Amazon: the steps we recommend
The first thing we usually ask a seller is to identify who is doing the abuse. That may or may not be possible, but it gives you an avenue to track a competitor’s behavior against you over time. If you can only report what actions you saw were taken against you, then yes, go with what you’ve got. But if you can nail down date and time stamps of their attacks and harvest additional information such as the service they used, that will help Amazon justify spending time on your case.
Secondly, since listings can be changed via a flat file or feed, maintain a paper trail of changes within a Seller Support case or Brand Registry ticket. If you can’t narrow down which seller is attacking you, then give Amazon enough crumbs to follow the trail back to your attacker. Pushing Amazon to help you based on a combination of their own internal info and your supplemental evidence is the only way you’ll get this fixed.
Thirdly, show Amazon teams your open, unresolved cases. If they complain that you haven’t sent reports to the right queue, show them your initial submissions in Seller Central. If you have a SAM (Strategic Account Manager), show them the last time you updated your listing batch ID and ask them to find out where your unauthorized listing changes originated. If you get ignored, quickly escalate to a manager or VP for an actual investigation, and real action.
