There are three main reasons to have your Amazon account suspended:
- Not meeting Amazon performance standards
- Violated Amazon’s selling policies
- Selling restricted products
Amazon Account Suspended? What should you do?
The first step is to determine why your selling privileges were removed.
When you receive the suspension notice, it should detail why your selling privileges have been revoked.
You should then evaluate your selling practices:
- Review how you sell
- Check your account health
- Check you haven’t violated any Amazon polices
- Determine how to address the problem.
Create an action plan
The key consideration is that when disputes or A-Z claims arise, Amazon will generally side with the buyer. You need to build an action plan that addresses the issues from Amazon’s customer-centric point of view.
We’ve outlined examples below to help you react.
Example 1 – Not meeting Amazon performance standards
Your Contact Response Time, Pre-fulfilment Cancellation Rate, and On-time Despatch Rate are below Amazon’s minimum standards.
Your action plans needs to outline the following:
- You will have a staff member address customer queries at weekends, and measure your contact response time to ensure you are answering queries on time
- You will put in place Stock control system to lower you pre-fulfilment cancellation rate which had led to your order defect rate being too high
- You will clear each days orders by the end of the day, and prioritize all expedited orders to ensure you are despatching them on time
Example – Amazon state you’ve violated their selling policies
For example if this is due to improper solicitation of feedback or abusive communication to your customer your action plan could be:
- Reviewed all customer communication and identify occurrences of improper communication
- Identify customer service representative who has been reprimanded for their behavior
- All staff are now being retrained on how they should communicate with customers.
Example 3 – Selling restricted products
A customer has complained about a supposedly counterfeit item and asked for a refund. You ask the buyer to return the product. Then the customer complains and you get your Amazon account suspended for selling fraudulent or counterfeit goods.
Therefore your action plan should cover:
- Changing supplier. With this incident you have lost confidence in your current supplier, and you are changing to a well known reputable distributor of goods.
- State in your action plan that you are reviewing with your supplier how a counterfeit product came in to their supply chain
- Inspect all goods on receipt to ensure they are genuine product
- Check all your product descriptions to ensure they meet the standard the buyers accept
Step 4 – Submit your appeal with your plan of action to Amazon
- This can be done in seller central under > Performance Notifications.
- Find the notice you received about the removal of your selling privileges and click the “Appeal” button
- Make sure to follow up this with a phone call.
If you get your Amazon account suspended you can appeal the first decision. Check the forums and get insight from experienced sellers before you lodge your appeal.
Are you having difficulty meeting Amazon’s performance standards?
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