As a Chinese seller, if our account application information is not that of an American, there will be no tax issues involved.
From the information we have collected recently, sellers who have recently encountered account problems usually start with emails like this:
“Hello,
We reviewed your account and determined that you may no longer sell on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca. Your listings have been removed from our site. This decision is due in part because we were unable to verify information related to your seller account, including information related to your selling history and listings.
Please ship any open orders. If you have any funds in your account, they will be available after any amounts paid for A-to-z claims or chargebacks on your orders have been deducted. This usually takes about 90 days, but funds may be held longer. You can see your balance and settlement information in the Payments section of Seller Central. If you have questions about those, please write to [email protected].
To sell on Amazon again, please send us a plan that explains how you will address this problem. For help creating your plan, search for "Appeal the Removal of Selling Privileges" in Seller Central Help.
When you are ready to send us your plan, click the Appeal button next to this message on the Performance Notifications page in Seller Central
(https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/customer-experience/perf-notifications.html).
We look forward to hearing from you.”
Unlike the common Amazon freeze notices we receive, Amazon did not mention any specific content in this notice. The only clue that can provide sellers with an appeal is probably the first line, which says, “This decision is due in part because we were unable to verify information related to your seller account, including information related to your selling history and listings.” Amazon cannot confirm the registration information of the seller’s account, including sales history and listing status.
At this time, many sellers began to wonder, the account has been established, and they have been selling products for a while, so why are they receiving such emails now? We cannot verify the motive and reason for Amazon to send such an email. It may be that the robot captured the information submitted by the seller when registering the account, and the authenticity of the information is questionable; it may be that the seller has recently modified certain content, resulting in Amazon temporarily unable to obtain the seller's account information; it may also be that there is a problem with the listing, causing Amazon to doubt the sales of the seller's listing. However, these speculations are of no help to our appeal. Such broad content is not conducive to our appeal of our own account. Therefore, the first step in the appeal should be to organize your account information and write a comprehensive appeal letter. However, due to the lack of specific information, it is impossible to form an organized plan in the POA. Yes, so the purpose of the first appeal letter is to obtain further instructions from Amazon.
After completing the previous email and sending it to Amazon, we can hold on to the good hope that Amazon will directly approve it. However, in Amazon’s new reply, it is more likely that the following message will appear:
“-- Length of time you have been in business
-- Sources of your Amazon inventory, include invoices from the past 6 months
-- Storage location of inventory
-- Addresses of any retail locations
-- Link to business website
-- Links to other websites that you actively sell on
-- Tracking information for recently shipped orders if applicable, found on the Manage Orders page in Seller Central
(https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/orders-v2/list)
--Tax ID or Dun and Bradstreet (DUNS) Number”
Although the account was not successfully restored, with these instructions, the content of the appeal can be more targeted. You can provide the corresponding information in full accordance with the requirements given by Amazon. Among these information, sellers need to pay attention to the following:
1. Product Invoice
2. Tax ID
Needless to say, product invoices. Starting from the beginning of this year, in addition to "VAT invoice, covering inventory from previous period", Amazon has added one more item for product invoices: "Invoicing time is earlier than freezing notification time".
What I want to talk about here is TaxID. For sellers on the US site, tax-related content may be quite unfamiliar. After all, in the previous operation process, sellers did not need to operate tax-related content themselves. Moreover, as a Chinese seller, if our account application information is not that of an American, there will be no tax issues involved.
However, some sellers may still remember that there was a period of time in 2017 when they needed to provide a domestic tax number when registering an Amazon account. Therefore, when filing an appeal, there are three possible ways to handle the appeal for this TaxID. We can use a domestic tax number and make corresponding explanations, or we can provide nothing and directly say that we are an overseas seller without a US tax number, or we can entrust a specialized accounting firm and seek help from experts. However, there is no consensus on which approach will lead to a successful appeal. Just like we always tell our consulting clients, when filing an appeal, we hold out the best hopes, make our greatest efforts, and hope to have a bit of luck and successfully appeal and get the account back, but we cannot guarantee a 100% success rate in appeals.
Sellers who are familiar with Amazon know that any appeal involving re-checking of account information is troublesome, cumbersome, and time-consuming, and the results may not necessarily meet the seller’s expectations. We sincerely hope that every seller whose account is affected can file a successful appeal. We also hope that Amazon will take fewer major actions like this in the future.
