This post is by Chris McCabe, owner and founder of ecommerceChris, LLC, an Amazon seller account consultancy.
Black hat seller behavior continues unabated this year.
We’ve seen spikes of listing hijacks and seller sabotage, mostly via loopholes exploited within Vendor Central. We’ve seen sellers inflating their positive reviews, but no action taken by Amazon’s Product Review Abuse (PRA) teams after they were reported.
There have been overnight spikes in negative reviews for products that had gone months without a single negative, clearly due to malicious targeting. When the impacted sellers report these fake reviews, Amazon’s ability to understand and act is often lacking.
Unauthorized changes are made to private label listings, resulting in chaos and lost sales for legitimate sellers. Competitors with barely any track record have been able to boost their profiles overnight with piles of positive “verified” reviews.
Just how bad is seller abuse on Amazon now? What does Amazon need to do to address the problem? What can sellers do to get Amazon to take effective action?
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How extensive is seller abuse on Amazon?
I’ve read enough about Amazon product review abuse in the past few months to make anyone’s head explode. It’s been reported more or less everywhere in the media.
A bit less understood and cared about publicly (although well-known in seller circles) is that hijacked listings remain a major problem. A new seller suddenly appears on a branded product as if they sell the same item, even if they have no source of those products.
These sellers may manage to change the listing images, title, and even the brand name to suit their purposes, even if the genuine seller is supposedly protected by Brand Registry. It’s commonly known as “VC abuse” in many circles, because Vendor Central is the back door to gain the necessary control over the product detail page. We’ve seen many changes to Vendor Central accounts this month, and we can safely conclude that this is one reason why.
Is this all down to Chinese sellers?
I get asked this all the time. Abuse is coming from some China-based sellers, sure, but the tactics that started in China are also being used by sellers here in the US.
They are helped by China-based black hat service providers, now marketing their software and services to US sellers, who are only too ready to pay for any edge to help them compete.
Sometimes these services provide fake buyer accounts that will buy products from a targeted seller, then claim counterfeit or safety problems, and leave dozens of ugly reviews. The next step in the process is when other fake buyers come along and upvote those negative reviews, giving them extra weight. All this can be had as a pre-packaged black hat service. Destroy your competitors overnight! It’s all there for the right price – a “black hat buffet” of poisonous bites that legitimate sellers fear.
Some sellers have gained access to Amazon’s precious internal data to help them gauge what to sell, in what category, at what price, and how buyers navigate from one product detail page to another. They can also discover what keywords to use and when to make changes. Sometimes, account managers inside Amazon are passing data directly to them. Other times, third-party services act as middle-men.
Unfortunately, once a critical mass of sellers begins operating this way, success on the marketplace comes down to who has the most money to spend on black hat tactics.
It’s up to Amazon, and the legitimate sellers who remain, to track it down.
What does Amazon know, and what are they doing about it?
Amazon knows about these problems. They also know they need to do more about them, and I’m sure they will. But how long will it take?
It’s not evident yet that they know how to position their multiple, overlapping teams to cope with a problem this big and this complex. Communication between different teams at Amazon is not great, but it has improved in recent months out of necessity.
Just as the PRA teams did not exist a few years ago, new teams and initiatives like Project Zero will likely be created to handle the increase in black hat tactics. Word is out, and Amazon teams know what they are up against.
We anticipate tougher action from Amazon (and the FTC) on all policy abusers this year, but not only against sellers exploiting the review system. The crackdown will likely focus on any attacks sellers initiate against their competitors. In many ways, it has already begun.
For instance, several internal Amazon tools that were previously accessible across various teams are now limited to just the main Amazon employees who need them. Account managers who passed internal data to sellers now find themselves with limited access, to maintain the integrity of ALL account managers. It’s not just the few who were “oversharing” who have had their privileges taken away.
