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Chris McCabe will talk us through the kinds of suspensions he’s seeing hit his desk. Reviews Abuse is still as prevalent as a year ago – will Sellers never learn? Also the data Android phone apps capture and the link to friends and family.
- Still dealing with as many suspended accounts per week for product review abuse as did a year ago
- Why have sellers not figured out that Amazon are getting tougher and more aggressive on this
Against ToS
- People still don’t realise just not asking for 5* or Positive reviews will not avoid a suspension
- None of the Feedback messages sent by Sellers are compliant with ToS
- You cannot filter responses or reduce the likelihood of a bad review
- For this there are no grey areas with Amazon any more
- Low-hanging fruit is that messages are not compliant
Amazon Mobile App – access to phone Contacts
- This is something that Ivelin Demirov posted in his group – screengrab permissions granted with Android app to gain access to contacts and who you’ve called and network connections
- This links to the friends and family connections
- The frequency of touchpoints you have with these people
- Interesting to see the access that Amazon can get to your data via Android
- It was long ago prohibited to ask Friends & Family for reviews as they are more likely to be favourable
Product Review Teams
- PRA people are being kept behind toll-walls
- You are supposed to be able to report abuse to those teams but there has not been much response
- Who are these guys – how do they operate – what is their SOP?
- They are quite wise to competitors reporting each other
- A lot of times they don’t do anything about it
Fake Good Reviews
- Fake good reviews are delivered by a competitor on your listing and then you are reported to Amazon and suspended
- Chris has tried to spot these and look at commonality of the wording (which gives some away)
- Sellers that are eager to get more reviews and take the bait from a review service and it ends up backfiring and they get suspended for working in collusion
- Amazon knows who the dodgy companies are – they can see the patterns in what your account / listing gets – IPs can be linked to black hat services and you are suspended
ASIN and Reviewer Blocks
- The first type is an ASIN block
- This exhibits where a large number of reviews arrive quickly or strange behaviours are exhibited on the ASIN
- Sometimes it’s lifted quickly as a block
- PRA teams are spending a lot of time on manual investigations
- The second type is that the reviewer is blocked
- Might be caused by a high number of reviews or tainted reviews from the same reviewer and this reviewer is then blocked by Amazon
Rebates suspensions
- There have been 3rd Party services that do rebates
- Amazon has these rebate services included in some Action Plans from suspended Sellers
- They are now investigating more
- They are fed up with all the negative reviews and bad press for this
- Amazon are working hard to investigate and you run a risk of suspension if you’re using these
Vendor Central Abuse
- It is common news now that lots of abuse is coming via Vendor Central Abuse and with Listings being changed and categories
- There have been numerous different attacks like this
- Amazon are working to close these down
- Tools access is being changed to limit contributions
New Amazon Tools take time
- Account Health dashboard never updates and this has been complained about by Sellers
- IP complaints still show up there and even after they’ve been resolved
- Takes a long time to build a new tool at Amazon
- Build, test and teach them to investigators to roll out to Sellers does not happen overnight
- Limited engineer resources at Amazon
