If Amazon has removed your selling privileges for any reason (such as order issues, customer service complaints, UPC/ASIN matching issues, or reported policy violations), they may be eligible for reinstatement through an appeal. So what should we do after the sales rights are stopped?
Steps to Appeal an Amazon Seller Suspension
1: Determine why you were suspended by Amazon
View all notifications in your Amazon Seller Central account under Performance > Performance Notifications. They should also email you the notification details, but this can help you understand if your suspension is due to performance issues or potential violations of the Amazon Selling Policies and Agreement.
2: Evaluate Your Amazon Sales
In Amazon Seller Central, review your customer metrics and identify those that are not meeting Amazon’s performance goals. Evaluate your selling practices and review your inventory for items that violate their policies. Even if you have reported filtered violations in the past, this does not mean that Amazon has immediately identified all possible violations. Amazon (or any business) doesn't give you policies to follow and for you to just ignore them every time you report a violation and expect them to be ignored... they want you to be familiar with the policies and work to prevent any violations from requiring a more detailed review of your listing.
Amazon Seller Performance Goals
All Amazon sellers should strive to achieve and maintain customer service levels that meet the following seller performance goals:
Order defect rate: <1%
Fulfillment cancellation rate: <2.5%
Late shipment rate: <4%
Amazon selling accounts are commonly suspended or blocked for:
The problem of not meeting the indicators... Your Amazon customer indicators cannot meet the targets.
Violations of Amazon’s selling policies for your product segment, specifically:
Multiple Accounts: Set up a second Amazon account in the same language Amazon sales store environment to have two Amazon listing identities. This person can sometimes plague sellers when it comes time to sell...especially if they have multiple people selling from different accounts on the same home. For example, if your spouse or child also accesses Amazon from the same home IP, but you sell from two different accounts it might be flagged as a dual account with Amazon.
Amazon prohibits operating and maintaining multiple seller accounts.
Amazon will monitor the IP addresses of closed accounts.
Violation of the Amazon Price Parity clause of Amazon policies and agreements. You should refer to your agreement for details. The basics of this clause states that merchants must maintain a price balance between products sold through other sales channels (your own website, ebay, etc.) and those you list on Amazon. This includes accounting for shipping costs, refunds, and discounts. This doesn’t mean you can’t set different prices for different channels, especially since your Amazon fees are different than eBay, etc… but if you’re selling on multiple channels, you want to avoid having them significantly different.
Marketing directly to your Amazon customers in violation of Amazon policies and agreements. The basic requirement that Amazon requires is that sellers do not use Amazon information to contact or market to customers with the intent of getting them to make additional or alternative purchases outside of Amazon (such as directly on your own website). You can certainly use your name and logo and URL in your emails and on invoices for items sent by your wholesale dropship resellers, but they want to make sure you're not listing a few items at a steep discount and then going direct to communicating why they should shop on your site. For example, your invoices, emails, or email signatures can reference your domain name, but don’t outright tell them to “Stop shopping at my Amazon store because my site has much better merchandise!!”
Violation of Amazon's prohibited content or restricted items policies. This is often a section that can cause problems for new sellers, especially if you are new to the supplier and their products. For most product categories this isn’t really an issue, but for health items and adult products potential violations are more common. Inventory Source has already filtered out any known issues reported by other sellers, but as new items are added or policies change, you want to be aware of this so you can better use the InventorySource.com account tools and filters to mitigate any potential issues.
3: Draft an Amazon action plan and appeal letter
In the steps detailed in your plan, you will take the actions you will take to correct the issues Amazon identified in the suspension notice or that you identified in Step 2. Providing a precise action plan that covers the issue increases the likelihood of having your Amazon selling privileges reinstated.
What's included:
Learn more about what's causing the problem. If the Amazon suspension is the result of multiple warnings, be sure to specifically address the most recent warning, and let them know about any violations you missed in the past, which you always remove that day (and filter them out so they don't come back)
How to fix the issue that caused the suspension.
What steps will be taken to avoid the problem moving forward.
Best Amazon Blocked Solutions:
Be as specific as possible. A broad message like "I'll be more careful" might indicate that you don't really understand the issue or haven't taken the necessary steps.
Quantify everything possible. Don't say "a lot," "several," "a few," "occasionally," etc. Use numbers and time frames whenever possible.
Please reference the specific policy that gave rise to the issue to demonstrate that you understand and are taking action to comply with it. If they’re having issues, you can even show that you’ve excluded specific parts of your catalog by category or brand, or that you’ve reduced other items after seeing that they’re having the same policy issues. Likewise, Amazon won’t tell you that every item in their alerts is a problem…you’ll want to filter those and report them to your InventorySource.com support to make sure it’s set up for you as needed, but you’ll also want to show that you’ve filtered others because you know more about the policy or how to look for other issues in the catalog before listing.
Amazon expects that if you have failed to comply with the policies in the past, you will need to invest in some way (time, money, people) to comply in the future. Perhaps you haven’t been using the filters in your Inventory Source account to control your listings, so let them know now (even if you’ve used it before) to use an inventory management system with built-in controls and automatic updates, and a fully managed support team behind it.
Your plan must address the specific problem Amazon is asking…. “Sorry” and “Will try harder” don’t work.
Submitting an appeal, even following these best practices, does not guarantee resettlement. They have weird secrets about how to do an audit or evaluation, but as long as you do a little home work and prepare your response, and you don't just ask for your questions back the same day or the next day, you will be able to get your questions answered by showing that you have thought about the problem and your approach.
4: Send your appeal to Amazon
Based on your Amazon Plan of Action, please send your reinstatement request to Amazon Seller Performance. Use the Appeal button in the Performance > Performance Notification screen or send an email to [email protected]
Additional Information
You can find more information on your Amazon Seller Central page under Appeals for Suspended or Blocked Accounts.
Note: You do not need to mention our name in your appeal. Feel free to simply say that you have “implemented a new IT system for inventory control,” or “added a new team of employees dedicated to automated inventory control and supply chain management for your catalog.” They just need to know that you have added the tools (even if you have access to an InventorySource.com account and tools…if you haven’t used certain filters before, then these are definitely new “tools and features” to control your inventory) or have a team member (we are your staff as we can support you with questions about the tools and filters in your account) to help prevent these issues from happening.
