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Chris McCabe on account suspensions and the gaggle of abuses that could lead you to one. We cover predictions for 2019 covering black hat, reviews, sold as new complaints and the future for drop shippers and big brands on Amazon.
- We’ve noticed that item quality investigations and suspensions were different
- More sold as new suspensions were prevalent with a lot of back and for time wasting with Amazon
- Condition complaints and the sold as new is a murky and mis-used term
- Sellers didn’t know how to respond to Amazon on these account suspensions
- ASIN variation misuse suspensions are also not well understood by Sellers
ASIN Variation misuse
- Depends on what category you are in as to how account suspensions manifest
- People using quantity instead of size and colour as variations
- Making child ASINs off of Child ASINs which is a violation
- Reviews is the key – as child listings take on reviews of parent listings
- Reusing ASINs to keep the review count is bad practice and against terms of service
- Variation abuse, even if you’ve been getting away with it for months or years doesn’t mean you will continue to
- Competitors that spot you abusing rules will report you and you could be suspended
- Anti-competitive behaviour is rife now and more account suspensions are happening
- Amazon does not care if you did it on purpose or not – they will suspend you
- Webretailer posted a great article by Leah McHugh – Amazon Listing Variations Use and Abuse: Your Questions Answered
Product Review Abuse
- Been around for a long time but Amazon have put more explanation down for these now in their ToS
- People having language that promotes getting reviews in their ‘feedback messaging’
- No reason for people to be suspended for this these days
- Product review abuse can also happen on inserts in packages – where competitors buy the product and report these inserts to Amazon leading to suspensions
- Leaving feedback people are invited to leave and then slipping that and asking for a review
- Using the ‘general’ tag in messaging to send to customers to override the system
- Buying of reviews in Facebook groups is also a no-no
- Blatantly buying reviews or using fake buyer accounts to pad reviews
- Some are reinstated quickly or not suspended at all – enforcement is inconsistent at best
- Manipulating rank is not allowed but Launch services do still work – so people get confused
- Using click-farms is not allowed, inflating sales through using fake accounts
- It’s not doing Giveaways or using Storefront/Branded URLs that you’re using, it’s the ‘wording’ you’ve used and asked for reviews as well that got you suspended – people skip over this part
Product Rank Manipulation
- Chris has dealt with a number of these this year
- People abusing rank are also abusing review manipulations too
- Most have been suspended for doing both rank and review abuse
- Sellers trying to appeal these are not covering both causes but just one of the abuses which Amazon are not happy with
Vendor Central Abuse
- Off the chart this year as a category of abuse – massive
- Heard AMazon are bringing in a ‘Vendor One’ account with greater restrictions
- It’s been a giant backdoor to manipulating listings
- Amazon will not let Vendor abuse continue
- Some are spending $15k on a Vendor Central account to protect themselves from abuse
- This cannot continue on its current path
- Image Product review management will fall under an Amazon control with limited seller control
- Certain cases where Amazon are doing manual reviews of buyer reviews before they are posted!
- These are Amazon spot-checks as they can’t scale it for ALL reviews to do it manually
- Machine learning might come in to play here
Account Health Services
- Amazon calling you and suspends your account for 17 days
- An ad-hoc experiment thing from Amazon but more regular account suspensions like this this year
- In the 17 days you have 2 chances to respond and try to appeal the suspension
- They give you a Seller Support case to track it through as the phone support service was so complained about that no-one could get through
- Account Health Service reps don’t have a lot of Seller Experience judging by some of the responses that Chris has seen
Amazon Complaints emails
- Cutting and pasting complaints into emails being sent out to Amazon Sellers
- With Amazon you have to hunt for why you’ve been suspended
- Now they are providing some more info in these on what’s happened but still not perfect
- This appeal looks similar to one you’ve sent us before is something that’s coming back from Amazon more so now
- Be careful where you get your account suspensions appeal templates from, Chris sees many duplicates and Amazon investigators must see thousands of these templates
2019 Trends
- Product Reviews: expect more changes and heavy-handed enforcement and Amazon handling the solicitation of reviews
- They will help you do reviews ‘their way’ like the Vine programme with limitations nad control in a way they can measure it
- More money in Amazon’s pocket again – you can’t buy reviews but you CAN buy them off Amazon for £1,000!!
- Manage FBA Inventory:
- Amazon taking returns and selling them back in to inventory causing sold as new complaints
- Joining the FBA Manage Returns Programme where every return goes back to you
- Dropshippers:
- More of a weeding out of this happening on Amazon with no supply-chain verification
- Nothing to do with what you’ve sold – Amazon will want to know where you’re getting things that you’re listing to sell whether you’ve sold it or not
- Black Hatters:
- Amazon still need some of these tactics to keep bringing in a lot of money
- You get the news stories that talk of black hat tactics and some people get terminated as scapegoats but…
- Amazon will turn a blind-eye maybe for revenue coming in…
- Impact of big brands getting hit with some of these black hat tactics might scare these Big Brands off of joining the platform to temper Amazon’s response to black hat sellers
