#399 – Amazon Compliance, Black Hat Tactics, & Survival Strategies with Lesley Hensell and Joe Zalta
Ever wondered how to truly safeguard your Amazon business? Join us as we sit down with Joe and Lesley from Riverbend Consulting, whose unique journey from diverse professional roots to becoming the go-to problem-solvers for Amazon sellers will leave you inspired. From Joe’s own Amazon account suspension woes to Lesley’s rapid resolution skills, learn how their expertise can protect your online business from ASIN suspensions and unauthorized selling alerts.
Navigating Amazon’s seller support can feel like a difficult task, but Joe and Lesley are here to share their wisdom. Discover the hidden inefficiencies within Amazon’s siloed teams and the secret vocabulary and strategies that can help you get dedicated assistance. Whether it’s understanding why the Costa Rica office is a game-changer or how to time your calls for optimal results, this episode offers practical advice to help you deal with Amazon’s often frustrating support system.
But that’s not all—we’ll also uncover the darker side of Amazon selling, from click farms and listing manipulations to inventory issues linked to unsuitable inventory. Joe and Lesley provide crucial tips on protecting yourself from these malicious practices, maintaining account health, and ensuring compliance with Amazon’s stringent policies. Plus, get a sneak preview of our next episode. Don’t miss this episode packed with expert advice and actionable strategies to help you thrive in the Amazon marketplace.
In episode 399 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin, Lesley, and Joe discuss:
- 00:00 – Solving Amazon Seller Issues With Riverbend
- 07:08 – Effective Customer Service Process
- 10:37 – Challenges With Amazon Seller Support
- 16:14 – Amazon Seller Support Knowledge On Seller Central
- 24:49 – Amazon Seller Dirty Tricks and Issues
- 27:39 – Unsuitable Inventory Issue
- 30:41 – Amazon Seller Account Health and Advice
- 31:58 – Amazon Wholesale Account Manipulation
- 41:19 – Contact Information and Funny Stories
- 44:00 – Kevin King’s Words Of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 399 of the AM/PM Podcast. My guests this week is Joe and Lesley from Riverbend Consulting. We’ve all gotten that email in the middle of the night maybe it’s on a Sunday morning at 7 am that says this ASIN has been suspended, or we just removed 100 reviews, or there’s some other issue. You’re not authorized to sell this item and you’re like what do I do? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode, and Lesley’s going to give you some great advice on some of the things you can do. Which department, who should you be talking to? What do you need to say? And a lot of really other cool stuff. So enjoy this episode. Lots of actionable stuff. Get ready to take some notes, because Lesley and Joe are laying it all on the line and letting you know the way it works and how to save your ass when a problem occurs selling on Amazon.
Kevin King:
Look what we got. We got a double feature for you on this episode of the AM/PM Podcast. I’ve got Miss Lesley Hensel and Joel Zolta from Riverbend. How are you, ladies and gentlemen, doing?
Lesley:
Doing just great, Kevin, and so excited to be here. I always love talking to you because you ask the best questions.
Kevin King:
Thank you, I appreciate that. How are you doing, Joe?
Joe:
Doing great, doing great. Happy to be here. I’m excited to see what type of stuff you’re going to throw at us. I’ve heard crazy things about you, Kev. Now we’ll find out the real deal. What do you got?
Kevin King:
Let’s do it. Right now you guys have Riverbend Consulting, which we’ll get into some of that, but you basically there’s several aspects of Riverbend, but one of the ones that people know the most is you help people when they get into trouble. You do other things too, but you help people when they get into trouble and you help them solve problems and take out, help them alleviate some of their frustrations when it comes to dealing with Amazon. But before that, what were you guys doing? Alleviate some of their frustrations when it comes to dealing with Amazon? But before that, what were you guys doing? Were you selling on Amazon, or were you working corporate somewhere, or were you in a legal profession, or what were you doing before this whole Amazon game of helping other sellers started?
Lesley:
We both have very different backgrounds. So I come from a very corporate background. I did the old school, get an MBA thing. I actually worked as a reporter, then I worked as a marketing consultant, then as a business consultant, worked for accounting firms as a consultant. So, when I say old school consulting, that is about as old school as it gets and then started out on my own with my own consulting gig for many years. But along the way I redesigned someone’s manufacturing line and wrote business plans for the SBA. So you name it. It’s just a little bit of everything, yeah.
Kevin King:
And what about you, Joe?
Joe:
So my background really. As long as I can remember, I started working very young. I started working around 18, 19 years old, so I was always into buying and selling product one way or another. I was in the manufacturing and wholesale space for 10 years in apparel until about six and a half, seven years ago. When I met Lesley, you asked if we were selling. So we were and are we were selling. At the time she was a seller and I was a seller my beauty account on Amazon about seven years ago. So I’ve been selling close to nine years. I think Lesley’s been selling like 11 or 10 or 11 or 12 years even.
Lesley:
14
Joe:
14 blew me away. So I was a pretty sizable seller at the time. Six, seven years ago, doing a few million dollars was a big deal. Now doing a few million dollars is like nothing. But six, seven years ago we’re doing a few million dollars. My account got suspended. I was up literally for four weeks straight trying to get it resolved, writing appeal after appeal to no avail. And then I got introduced to Lesley. Within two days she had my account up. I said my dear, can you come, fly out and meet me in New York Because we need to talk. So she did. We ended up having an awesome Italian dinner and that’s how Riverbend was kind of born through that conversation of saying, well, if you helped me this much and I needed it, we think that a lot more sellers are going to need this service and the Amazon seller space is going to grow even more. Let’s jump into it. And neither of us really had a ton of experience in running a business like that. I mean, Lesley did have some, a lot more than I did, because I didn’t come from service, but that’s kind of how we got started and the rest is history. So, Lesley, you were.
Kevin King:
So, I guess if Joe reached out to you, you must’ve been doing this either on your own or maybe in conjunction with somebody else for a little while, or you had a little bit of experience before the two of you hooked together. Is that correct?
Lesley:
Yeah, so I had worked at a different company for a few years writing appeals, working on accounts, and then I went out on my own. And I’d been out on my own for more than a year when Joe was referred to me. So, I was just working as a solopreneur with Amazon sellers a lot of whom I would go to some conferences, meet them there and then my name got passed around and Joe was a referral from someone along the way.
Kevin King:
So, when you started doing this then, like I guess that must’ve been like 2014, 2015, somewhere around in that timeframe there wasn’t hardly anybody doing this. There might’ve been a couple of companies. Now it’s like every Tom Dick and Harry is trying to do this and a lot of them are not succeeding very well at it. They don’t have the experience like you guys have. What is it that it takes, do you feel to actually be good at what you do? You see lawyers out there. They’re doing this. They’re actually lawyers by trade. Then you see other people that used to work. They used to be ex-Amazonians, so they’re pitched claim to fame. As I have the inside track and I know exactly how Amazon ticks, neither one of you actually worked at Amazon, I don’t think and so you’re just sellers. So you knew the pain. You had the empathy for the seller side of things, especially Joe, when you went through that issue. You went through that issue. What is it that makes someone like Riverbend so much better or different than everybody else that’s trying to do the same kind of stuff?
Lesley:
So that is a great question. There are a few factors. One is that we’ve been able to scale because we are almost seven years old. We’ve added a lot of personnel and a lot of them are ex-Amazon and not just from one department. So, we have people who worked in catalog, people who worked in lending, people who worked in the FBA program, people from seller performance. So, every problem. Unfortunately, Amazon is very siloed, and you can’t just go to one department and expect them to fix an array of problems. You have to understand that silo. So by having ex-Amazon folks who understand those silos, that is key. And then going to the nerdy consultant part of me we are huge on SOPs and using a ticket-based system. That allows us to service people in a way that they feel better about what’s going on. So, when you’re upset, when you’ve lost your most important ASIN or your account is down, half the battle is having you stay calm and think clearly while we’re going through the appeal process and not get so frustrated. You just want to throw your hands up. You’ve had enough. It’s really hard to keep it together. As a seller, this is your whole business at stake. So, we have a lot of processes in place so that people feel like we are walking with them. That is the goal. So, for example, instead of being like a solopreneur, we have this ticket-based system where someone writes in. Everyone in the company who’s in the ticket system can see oh, we’ve got a pending communication and make sure we answer them quickly, just so that they can keep it together while we work together to solve the issue.
Joe:
I think another big part of it is that I don’t think any other company in the country has this is that there really is a very interesting balance between Lesley and I and our teams. So, like I think Lesley’s team took on her personality a lot and my team took on mine, and it’s a really nice balance because it’s a seller’s you know, my mindset is always from a seller’s perspective and to make sure that we do everything humanly possible, even if it’s not previously in an SOP, let’s say, to try something or to just save someone’s business, whatever we can do, you know, to try to help. And then Lesley and her team have really, over the years, almost seen everything and we just keep adding to that SOP right, or adding to the things that we can do. So over the years it started out 5, 6 years ago of just being like an authentic complaints or counterfeit complaints or, like you know, a late shipment rate, and now literally we have almost 50 different suspension types that we deal with on a daily basis and our team has grown, which I’m super proud of and really humbled almost every day. I can’t believe, looking at the size of team that we have and the quality of people there were over 107 or 108 people in the company now and I don’t think Lesley and I ever really thought that that’s where this company would go. We kind of thought it was like Joe, you take the phones, get some info, sell the guy, pass them to me. Well, now it’s that times our team’s doing it and thank God they work really well together and the overall understanding that we’re trying to help sellers. That’s the blood, that’s our bloodline. We know we want to help sellers.
Kevin King:
You said that you’re Joe. Both of you referred to as my team and my team. So, Joe are you like, you’re on the sales side and the front end, and Lesley, you’re on the back end, You’re the problem solver. Joe is the calmer to calm them down and says, don’t worry. Or what’s the dividing of responsibilities there as partners?
Lesley:
So, Joe oversees the sales team. He’s working with those guys which, being in sales in any Amazon business and you know this, Kevin, it is not simple. It’s not like you’re saying. Here’s this obvious solution that we’re offering, buy it from us. Our sales process is very consultative. People call us to see if we can even do the work. So, he’s working with the sales team and then he does a lot of the really boring stuff like financing and accounting and stuff that no one in their right mind would want to do, at least not me and then I oversee the service team. So, I’m over all of the consultants, along with several really awesome leaders and managers and the people doing the day-to-day work.
Kevin King:
So why has it gotten to the point A lot of sellers wonder. Why can’t I just freaking deal with Amazon and get an answer? Why do I have to hire a Riverbend or one of the other people that’s out there? Why this is stupid. I mean, don’t they want my money? Don’t they know I’m a good person and I didn’t do anything wrong? Why is this process so convoluted where there has to be this whole ecosystem of people, of businesses surrounding, just to help you sell on Amazon? Shouldn’t Amazon be doing that as part of their support? So how has this evolved and why is there a need for this?
Lesley:
Our business shouldn’t exist, Kevin. It really shouldn’t If Amazon treated sellers. You know how they recently changed their jargon and now they call it seller partner support, and it used just to be seller support. They’re trying to make it feel like you’re their partner. If they actually treated sellers like partners, we would not have a business because we wouldn’t be needed. You could actually call a person at Amazon and get a correct answer, unfortunately. So there’s like a positive and negative Amazon’s whole setup, the way that they grow. Number one, like we talked about, they’re very siloed. Number two they want to be very entrepreneurial internally. So, because they want to be entrepreneurial, these tiny teams own all of these issues and they do not socialize information across groups. So because of that, when you go in with a specific problem, it goes to a seller support person who may not even understand the problem, or someone seller support person who may not even understand the problem, or someone in seller performance who may not even understand the suspension, and that’s why you go round and round and round. Also, if you don’t use their jargon and their keywords, their language, they don’t know how to respond, because frontline support is all people who’ve been trained to SOPs. They have not been trained to think. So, if you’re using a seller’s language, language that the three of us might have in a normal conversation about our seller account, they won’t get it. You have to use their magic Amazon vocabulary for them to even understand what your issue is.
Kevin King:
Because they’re sitting in India and you’re explaining my ASIN’s down because of this and my backend end keywords, or I don’t have this in my back-end keywords and my whatever, whatever else. You know, my image stack is. Image number two is okay and I don’t have this and that, and they’re just like trying to type this really fast in SOP and they’re not finding any of those words and something like that. I just they just become so big and unwieldy, partly because of the way that they’re set up, that you need people like you guys. Now, do you have some secret back door where you know these SOPs and you know what the words are to say, or is it like trial and error and then, as soon as you all figure out, ah, that works, ah, that was the magic word. Put that in our document, our 50-process document. Next time, make sure you say that word, or how does that process work?
Lesley:
So, we do understand the vocabulary, in large part because we have a lot of ex-Amazon people, so they know that the word is to say please refresh the ASIN Whatever that magic term is that they use inside of Amazon. They know what the terms are. But you’re right, because we have so many people throwing so many appeals at clients who then submit to Amazon every single day, we do learn really quickly what works and what doesn’t, and so we have to develop strategies, especially the more complex appeal types. And I have a quick fact that’ll blow your mind, Kevin. You might already know this, but most sellers don’t. People who work at Amazon and seller performance and seller support have never been inside or seen Seller Central.
Kevin King:
Never.
Lesley:
No, they don’t have access to an account. They don’t have dummy account. So, like we have dummy accounts that our employees can look in or like, for example, for training purposes, they might use my seller account to train someone on something so they can see interfaces Inside of Amazon. A long time ago, like 12, 14 years ago, they actually encouraged people who worked in those departments to be sellers so they could learn how to sell. They don’t do that anymore. So even higher-level people most of them have never been inside Seller Central. They don’t know how it works. That’s why they can’t have the conversation with you.
Kevin King:
Wow, I figured they at least had a basic spend an hour like let me show you the highlights of Seller Central so you can understand.
Joe:
Going back to actually what you said before, I just want to throw one more thing in there. Not only is it from a seller performance perspective, but we also deal a lot with brand registry, and that’s also where me and my personal selling account deal with a lot, because I deal with global brands. I try to get a brand registry, or I’m a license holder of some of these brands. Can you imagine speaking in that type of language, saying I’m a license holder of this licensor from this global brand? I have a royalty rate of X and my? This is why you think someone overseas has any clue what you’re talking about Zero. So that’s why I find that brand registry support is probably one of the worst supports I’ve ever seen. I mean, people just go round and round and round. It’s, it’s, it’s endless. So yeah, we’ve been taking a lot of that.
Kevin King:
There’s always little hacks that people say, like you said, there’s, there’s silos, but usually the usually the first run, at least in America. It’s different maybe for other countries, but if you’re selling in the US, the first round, the first contact is usually somebody in India. Not always, but most of the time it’s somebody in India. And then maybe there used to be I think you, I think Lesley, you said they closed this, but it used to be a division in South Dakota or something like that but now the big word on the street is you don’t want India, you don’t want South Dakota, you don’t want the Philippines, you want Costa Rica. Every you know, call up on a Saturday and you’re probably gonna get Costa Rica. Or call up and act like you don’t speak English and just start saying some random words in Spanish, and just you know, so that they, they transfer you there even if you don’t speak Spanish. Just look it up on ChatGPT, and say hola como, como cerveza or whatever. They’ll transfer you over to Costa Rica, and supposedly that’s the office that has a brain in seller support. Is there any truth to that? Or tell me more about a couple of these little divisions, and where do you want to get to for the best results?
Lesley:
Absolutely true, 100%. Costa Rica not only has frontline seller support, but they have catalog support there, they have Amazon Pay support there so many different departments and they’ve actually took people who were supervisors in that office in North Dakota and sent them to Costa Rica to train those teams. So, and then they moved the support to Costa Rica. So, Amazon has a follow the sun philosophy. A lot of times the best time to try and get Costa Rica is actually early in the morning or in the evening, but not too late. And the reason is because there are two shifts in the India service centers that you would probably not love and the Filipino service centers. So, if you can catch them on that changing shifts, you’re going to get sent a lot of times to Costa Rica. And also, like you said, if anyone in your office speaks Spanish, start out speaking Spanish. You’ll get transferred to Costa Rica. They’re fantastic, their English is wonderful and their culture is more similar to American culture than the other service centers.
Kevin King:
So, some of your team sitting there timing it like okay, it’s 4:57., the shift is at five at midnight or whatever. So, at 4:59, I’m going to call and get into the queue, or is there some of that kind of game of shift sometimes that goes on.
Lesley:
Absolutely. And then, like you said, you know, Hola Espanol, por favor, can help. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.
Kevin King:
What about when I call in and I get the first line of it’s probably India and I just say please transfer me to the catalog department, catalog team, right away. But they won’t do it. They’re like first they go and get some information and you got to go through this whole like rigmarole of, like going in circles for until they’ll transfer you, unless you insist on or say some magic open sesame word that actually gets you there. Tell me about that.
Lesley:
So one thing that you can do if you’re trying to get through to a human being on the phone. It helps, if you’ve already opened a case in Seller Central, that you’ve typed out the information from the case, so that way you can say, hey, I didn’t get a response to this, or I didn’t get a timely response, or they weren’t helpful, because if you haven’t already tried once, they aren’t going to send you to an escalation person. And secondly, you can ask for the captive team or the snowball team. Now some people will tell you the captive team doesn’t exist anymore. They do. So what the captive team does is they own a case until it is resolved. It is assigned to them to personally make sure it is actually worked all the way to the finish, instead of continually handing it off to someone else or saying I’ve reached out to the concerned team and then never getting a response. They’re actually tasked with finishing it. Sometimes internally at Amazon, they’re called the snowball team. If you use the word snowball, they know that you’ve been around. That’s the older term. The idea of snowball is that it’s had so many contacts or it’s been a problem so long, it’s gotten bigger and bigger and they need to fix it before it continues to grow. So if you ask for one of those keywords that can help you get to a human.
Kevin King:
Is it better? You get three options. When you go into sellers, you open a ticket, you can write an email or write a message. You can do a chat online chat or you can do a phone call. What’s?
Joe:
the best one to do. So, I found that when you have open chat, sometimes they’ll work on your issue while you’re on chat with them. I’ve had some pretty good success there, or my team has. It’s really you’re rolling the dice. I mean, it really depends on who you get and how clear your issue is, that you know, and if they feel like they could actually help. But I would say most recently that the chat has been the best.
Kevin King:
What’s the category you get the most issues? Is it supplement people probably. Yeah, supplements in those highly competitive spaces, do you have here we go again. Here’s Johnny calling me up again on Saturday night taking his vitamin C serum. He’s freaking down again and he’s freaking out because he’s losing 100 grand a day or some crazy amount.
Joe:
Some of these guys. They’re not bad guys. Some of them are doing it by the rules, but the words repeat offender definitely come up often with us. We have a lot of repeat offenders.
Lesley:
Especially in supplements, because it’s difficult and it’s dirty. So, when I say it’s difficult, you can’t make claims. You can’t make claims about health, you can’t make claims about beauty. So, you may have words that to you seem harmless in a supplement product listing or, like you said, a vitamin C serum. We have had many vitamin C serum clients because Amazon considered the verbiage they use to be a claim, so they take it down and then that is it with the lawyers it’s actually with a team of paralegal type people and so it’s really challenging to get those back up. And then. So, it’s not just difficult, it’s also dirty. So, with supplements there are more black hat attacks than any other category. Sometimes people feel a little more empowered, emboldened, or like it’s necessary for them to cross the line or walk right along it just to survive. It’s a tough place to be.
Kevin King:
So, they just, they just filled in. And these repeat people, they just like, it’s not like, okay, oops, I screwed up. I learned my lesson. I won’t do that again. It’s like that’s just the cost of doing business I got. I got Lesley on speed dial. I know she’ll pick up my phone cause I’m going to pay her some good money and she’ll blow up her phone every hour. Is it done? Is it done? Is it done? Lesley’s still not up.
Lesley:
He is tapped into our phone.
Joe:
Kev, this is getting a little creepy. Not too much.
Lesley:
It is, but some of them also Amazon they’ll change the rules, or they will decide to enforce something they haven’t before. So, all of a sudden there’s some new requirement, like when all of a sudden there’s some new requirement, like when, all of a sudden, you had to use a GMP manufacturer to manufacture your items in certain categories that wasn’t the case before. So, then what happens? Well then, sellers who got caught by surprise for this requirement do really stupid things like fake documents from a GMP certified facility, so they make it look like they were actually using someone good all along. Now is that an okay thing to do? No, but you can see how Amazon created that incentive by saying, all of a sudden, your testing has to show your manufacturing facility is GMP certified and we gave you no warning. So, you’ve got all this stock sitting at the warehouse and you had no warning. So, some of it is that Amazon creates these negative incentive structures that encourage sellers to do the wrong thing. But when you look at the situation with some empathy not saying it’s the right thing to do, but I get why they do it sometimes.
Kevin King:
Where are the problem sellers? Is it mostly Western-based, US and European-based, or is it the Chinese and Russian Eastern European where there’s more issues with problems, or is there really a difference?
Lesley:
Oh, such a question, and it kind of depends on the thing. So, like with supplements, you know they’re manufactured in the US and so that’s where you see all the dirty US sellers having at it with each other. But it kind of depends on what’s going on. So like with the Chinese sellers, a huge trend that we’ve been seeing is that they will sell something in the US that has federal laws or state laws prohibiting a certain type of design, and the US sellers are all complying with it and the Chinese sellers aren’t, and so they can undercut the US sellers by 50% because it’s cheaper to manufacture a product that doesn’t restrict the flow of water or doesn’t comply with certain ingredients requirements or FDA requirements. So that’s like really dirty and ugly. So the manufacturing shenanigans a lot of that out of China. Also, as you know, a lot of Chinese sellers have literally thousands of accounts, so they will be as dirty as they want to be with whatever account, and then that can get shut down and they move to one of their other thousands of accounts. Now, if you’re talking about click farms, where you’re being attacked by someone who is downvoting your good reviews, upvoting your bad reviews, suddenly over the weekend you have 80 new reviews and 75 of them are bad. Those are from Russia a lot of times. Lots of Russian click farms, lots of Eastern European click farms. And then, if you’re going for straight blackmail and extortion, almost all of those cases that I’ve seen are out of Eastern Europe. Now, that could just be the sample size that I’ve seen happens to be Eastern European, but I think a lot of US sellers who want to extort someone they know people in Eastern Europe and that’s how they get that done.
Kevin King:
So, yeah, wherever there’s money, it attracts nefarious characters. Have you ever had like a box show up your house that’s full of dog poop or something on the front door? Does it help somebody get back online? I mean, there’s stories out there of people that have gone in and changed out photos to pretty bad photos.
Joe:
Yeah, that happened this weekend. There was something on LinkedIn floating around.
Lesley:
Oh yes, Someone was called a very naughty name in the title of their listing. It said this seller is a mother. That was the name of the product. How nice. How did they get that?
Kevin King:
Amazon usually will suppress that.
Lesley:
Okay. So, this is one of the dirty tricks and this happens a lot from China, a lot, a lot, a lot from China so, but from the US as well, everywhere. If you have access to a vendor account, then you can trump someone on contributions to their listing, even if they have brand registry. So, a lot of US sellers have a misconception about brand registry. They think brand registry is there to protect them. It is not. Amazon didn’t build it to protect you. They don’t care about protecting you. That was not the purpose at all. It was all about control on Amazon’s side. So, Amazon wouldn’t get sued for IP issues, for intellectual property problems. So, if someone has vendor access, Amazon has this contribution system got to back up contribution system where, if you’ve been a longtime seller, you’ve made contributions to listings over time. That could be text changes, photo changes. Those have been reliable changes. You have brand registry. You kind of get points for these things and that gets your contribution score up. You can make more contributions. But all of those are trumped by vendors. So, if you have access to a Vendor Central account, you can make all the contributions you want to just about everything, unless it’s been completely locked down as a brand. So, it’s really easy for someone with access to Vendor Central to go in and mess with other people’s listings and for some reason I cannot fathom Amazon has not figured out how to stop it or tried to stop it. It’s got to be that they haven’t even tried.
Kevin King:
So, what are you seeing right now? What’s the hot thing that everybody’s getting in trouble for, either on purpose or accidentally? What are you like? All right, here we go. Here’s another one of these. What are you seeing a lot of?
Joe:
Les, I think you should talk about what came up a lot at ASD the unsaleable inventory. I think that’s a pretty hot topic. So, Kevin, we deal with a lot of resellers, as you can imagine, not just private labels, both. We deal with a lot of private label sellers. We deal with a lot of wholesale sellers. We deal with a lot of brands themselves, but a big chunk of our business is resellers and they have been having a specific issue that I think Lesley should talk about because it’s a pretty hot topic, Sure.
Lesley:
Yes, it’s called unsuitable inventory and if you are in any Amazon face group, mastermind group, Facebook thing, anything, you have seen people say Amazon took me down for unsuitable inventory. So, there’s actually a reason it’s happening. I want to kind of start there. Last summer so a whole year ago you might remember that there was a lot of stolen inventory issues on Amazon and a lot of it revolved around things like vacuum cleaners and blenders. There were some certain brands that it appeared that large lots of inventory had been stolen and were being fenced on Amazon. So, when that happened Amazon had to bring in law enforcement. It was a big mess. There were a lot of sellers taken down at that time, unfortunately for them, who were unwitting resellers of these stolen goods. They did not know they were purchasing stolen goods. After that, we think Amazon has put a lot of processes into place internally to try and get a handle on this and a lot of it goes back to retail theft. As well as these stolen goods rings Retail theft being y’all know about this where people like go into a CVS and they steal all the razor blades and then they go flip it online. So, Amazon has started taking down sellers for unsuitable inventory which in the past they would either say you’re selling counterfeit or you’re selling inauthentic, unsuitable. What does that mean? It sounds like you’re saying it’s I don’t know dirty or it doesn’t work or whatever. So, what we’ve traced it to after a lot of these cases is people buying from companies that are pitching themselves as wholesalers. Sometimes they are wholesalers, sometimes they’re really not, and a lot of times they have convinced these sellers to pay us and we’re going to ship directly to the FBA warehouse for you. Now, that’s a fine thing to do if you have a long-term relationship with someone. I think all of us have done that. Where you have a long-term relationship, you’ve done test buys, you’ve inspected the inventory, you’re comfortable and then you let that brand or that wholesaler ship directly to FBA for you. But this is like mixed lots. This is like you know, I’ve got 10 shark vacuum cleaners and 25 blenders and 35 headsets and I’m going to ship all those to the FBA warehouse. So, we’re not sure what they’re shipping to the warehouse. We’re not sure if it matches the listing or not, but we think Amazon has seen what the address is that it’s actually coming from. So, whatever that address is that these wholesalers are shipping from. Amazon is picking up on that and they’re blocking that address or they’re flagging that address. And then they’re looking at the inventory when it gets to the warehouse and calling it unsuitable goods.
Joe:
So the problem with unsuitable also is that you’re kind of doubly, you’re two-way screwed. You can’t sell it but you can’t recall it.
Lesley:
Yes, they won’t let you have it back.
Joe:
So, it’s sitting in the middle, it’s no man’s land.
Lesley:
And they’re holding funds permanently on these accounts too, because they’re assuming it’s stolen, so it’s stolen, or it’s stolen adjacent, it’s dirty, somehow it’s a supplier that they believe was fencing inventory in the past and so they don’t trust them, was fencing inventory in the past, and so they don’t trust them. So a really important thing to know about Amazon is, unlike a lot of sellers who are always looking for a great deal, amazon isn’t going to see it as well. They had a couple of bad shipments before and it was stolen goods, but now they’re clean and I’ve seen their documents from their supplier. I believe them now. Oh no, at Amazon it’s like once bitten, you’re done, they’re burned, so they’re not going to accept anything from those.
And some of these are huge wholesalers, Kevin. These are very large companies. A lot of them have been around a long time. They’re not all brand new. But others are people who are trying to get with new sellers and convince them just let me buy it for you, just let me supply it for you, and it’s getting them in trouble.
Kevin King:
Well, a lot of those big sellers too. I think it was Art Naturals, that big nine figure, a hundred plus million dollar seller based in California, three brothers, I think, running it got in some serious trouble a while back but they actually got booted off of Amazon but they didn’t care because they had leveraged themselves. So, the other sellers on the account, they set up other wholesale companies, so they were wholesaling to. You know, Art Naturals is a brand but they were wholesaling to Joe’s Wholesalers and Joe’s Wholesalers was one of the brothers or the sister of one of the brothers, so his name wasn’t on the thing or whatever it was, and they were wholesaling out and then they would authorize them to come on the listing and just be number two. So, when our naturals went down, no big deal, we got listings two, three, four, five in the buy box. We’re good, no matter who they buy from. So, there’s a lot of them that do that kind of stuff as well.
Lesley:
Absolutely. And then, if Amazon links those accounts, they’ll take the next one down. But if someone did a great job at being sneaky, then there’s still the third one that’s alive, right, they just keep going.
Kevin King:
Yeah, it’s a whole cat and mouse pop a thing. What’s that game where you pop a whack-a-mole game? There’s been very few companies, though, that have ever been permanently suspended on Amazon. You hear stories in the media oh, we just kicked off 658 Chinese sellers or whatever the number was a couple years ago.
Joe:
A few years ago, MPOW was like doing a few hundred million and they got taken down. They were the electronic accessories company. Remember those guys?
Kevin King:
Yeah, but the vast majority of them are back up either under the same name or under a different name now, so it’s very rare that someone is permanently banned off of Amazon. If they are, they find another way under a different name or different company and they’re back.
Joe:
Amazon sellers are relentless Kev. They are relentless man. We’re born fighters.
Kevin King:
Are you seeing anything lately with reviews being removed and the review manipulation, or is that kind of we’ve gone through that phase and that’s not as big an issue anymore? Are you still seeing a lot of that kind of stuff where people are getting accused of it? Either they really didn’t do it or they did do it and they’re just not admitting to it.
Lesley:
So that call I got this last Saturday night at 10 o’clock. That was a large seller who got a 72 hour notice from Amazon saying explain this review manipulation and show us how you’ll never do it again or your account is gone. So, they are still enforcing on review manipulation and I think they will continue to be somewhat aggressive on that as long as the FTC is going after them.
Kevin King:
What are some things that sellers need to be doing right now that would save them that? You’re seeing a lot of them are doing that. If they just did these three things I mean, I think you addressed some of this in your book as well but if they do these three, they do these things. Let’s say three things they can avoid a lot of problems. What are some just general advice that you could, you would give to sellers?
Lesley:
Oh gosh. So, my favorite and easiest one is you have to actually keep your invoices and make sure that they would pass with Amazon. So, you’d be shocked at how many even very large sellers and brands don’t file their invoices. Keep their invoices, have it where their people on their team can see the invoices if they need them for Amazon, or the invoices aren’t in the right format, they don’t have any proof of payment. Invoices are everything y’all, because if Amazon accuses you of counterfeit, condition inauthentic, they want to see invoices. So that’s really big number one. And if you have any product that needs testing, same thing All your testing documents. It all needs to be like in a Google Drive or something where people on your team can find it. So that is ginormous thing, number one. Number two is be careful who you choose to work with. So, we all want to use VAs, because if you use a VA, it means you’re scaling your business. If you use some kind of an agency or a service provider, it means you’re scaling and growing, Because, as a business owner, the people who would listen to your podcast and listen to you, Kevin, they want to be like you. They want to develop new products, launch new things make great deals. They need to spend their time doing that and have VAs or service providers. But you’ve got to do your due diligence on these folks so that they don’t forge documents and send them in and get your account shut down or they don’t handle customer service messages the wrong way or ask for reviews the wrong way. So actually, you were kind enough to mention my book. It’s called the Amazon Incubator Grow your business or hatch a new one, and it’s available, of course, on Amazon and in there I lay out kind of a checklist for how to hire a service provider or VA and not get yourself into big fat trouble. And then, quickie thing number three don’t ignore ASIN notifications, warnings and suspensions. Amazon don’t just say, hey, I’m not going to sell that product again, so I’m not going to give them my invoices or appeal, because if those build up over time, bad things can happen. You can lose your account; they can suspend it or gate you out of brands and brand owners. They can even gate you out of your own brand, and there’s nothing worse in the world than being a private label seller who just got gated out of your own brand because you didn’t respond to an ASIN notification. So don’t ignore that seller performance dashboard and fail to answer those.
Kevin King:
And any last-minute advice there, Joe.
Joe:
I mean unrelated to more of the account health stuff that Lesley gave, because I agree with all those things like 100. Lesley’s been kind of telling me those things over the years and it’s definitely helped a ton. I used to actually write the appeals myself, took up all my time, was never able to. Once I started to use Riverbend kind of simultaneously as I was scaling my company, I stopped writing appeals and then I was able to source and grow and scale, so that Lesley is dead on, I think. The other part that I deal with a lot, and I just have more conversations. We don’t really offer this as a service, but Lesley and I are always in the Amazon space talking to sellers and people and friends. I’ve been talking a lot lately about all the fees the storage fees, the return processing fees, the storage utilization fees, now the low inventory stock fee, peak storage fees during Q4. The long-term thing really hurt a lot of sellers that sell seasonal products because when you used to sell, let’s say, a product in Q4, you’d be able to kind of leave it at FBA and then you’d be able to sell it the following year because the long-term storage fee wouldn’t kick in until 12 months or beyond, right? SSo,365 plus. Now they moved it to six months, so 180 days. So, we’ve been doing a ton of cost analysis and checking what makes more sense to recall it, to dispose it to dispose or to liquidate, or to leave it at FBA. And almost nine out of 10 times the answer is to recall. Especially when you’re doing high variation listings where you have tons and tons of SKUs, that gets very pricey, not only from recalling it from Amazon, which is could be anywhere between like 70, 90, 20 per unit, but then if you’re recalling it to a 3PL facility, then you’re having to pay the in, the out and the storage until you’re ready to send it back. So those prices can range all in from somewhere between on the low end, if you have a really good relationship, $3 all the way up to about $5 or $6 per unit. So managing your inventory and not overstocking in peak season which is hard, because why you want to send your inventory in for Q4? Because that’s when it sells, and you’re kind of stuck in the middle because if you don’t send it in, you know, by October 26, as they said last year, well, they can’t guarantee that it’s going to be available AFN for Q4. So, I’m not saying I have the best advice. I’m just saying be all over it, monitor it as closely as you can so your profits for the year don’t get eaten up by these ridiculous fees. Lesley said it earlier and you said it very well too they’re not your partner. They’re running their own profitable company and you’re just trying to use them to generate some revenue and some profits for yourself. But they’re not worried about you. It’s been more evident to me now than ever. And now, six, seven, eight years later, I’ve scaled a pretty sizable business, but I’ll tell you the fees are scarier than ever. I mean, if you overlook one thing, it could wipe out major, major profit. So, I just urge all sellers know your numbers, run reports, don’t just be enamored by those charts that just keep going up and show you the sales. It’s so much fun, the orange boxes. I’m doing so much business. Gross means nothing net is what it is important, that’s all I have to say.
Kevin King:
Awesome, Joe. Well, lastly, Joe, I really appreciate your time coming on today and sharing. We could go for like four more hours and tell the whole stories here, but how would people reach out to you if they want to know more about Riverbend or if they’re in a bind and need some help at 10 o’clock? What’s your home cell phone number?
Joe:
Don’t give that up, Lex. I stopped giving my number out a long time ago.
Kevin King:
Is there anybody listening? That’s listening to this on Saturday afternoon. I know who to call now. How do they do that?
Lesley:
Okay,-so I have to tell the funniest call I ever got was actually during my kid’s peewee football game many years ago, and it was one of the biggest sellers on Amazon who said I got your number from a friend and there’s all this crowd noise behind me and they’re like screaming in the phone telling me that their account was shut down. So, it happens. But you can find us at riverbendconsulting.com. The most exciting thing about our website is we have human beings who answer our phones, so you can click to call and there are guys there who will answer and talk to you about your problems, or even say like we can’t help you, but we know who can, because it’s not something we work on. We love to be that resource for people in the industry. And then you can find both of us on LinkedIn and other socials if you want to connect with us. It’s a great way to send questions. I love getting people’s questions, like through LinkedIn and Facebook and all those awesome places.
Kevin King:
And they can get your book Again. What was the name to search for on Amazon?
Lesley:
The Amazon Incubator. Yeah, and so that’s for you newer sellers, as well as anyone who’s new to developing a brand, or if you’re an established brand, new to trying to push it out on Amazon. It’s a step-by-step blueprint of how to get started, the safe and healthy way to build a long-term income stream.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, thanks again. I appreciate you guys coming on. This has been fun.
Joe:
Kevin, it’s been awesome. Thank you, Great stuff.
Kevin King:
Joe and Lesley have a lot more stories. I’m sure that we could share some more war stories, some more pretty fascinating stuff. I’ve spoken with Lesley at some events and there’s been some really cool stuff that she shared with me that they see. They see a lot of crazy stuff and when there’s this much money at stake, it’s going to attract all kinds of characters and they have seen quite a bit. So thanks, Lesley and Joe, for coming on and sharing some of that. Hopefully it’s given you guys some good insight, and Lesley was sharing some tips there on how to handle things yourself. So good stuff. We’ll be back again next week with another killer episode. We’ll be talking about something very, very important cash flow and numbers and something that’s affecting everybody right now and actually something where a lot of people actually may go out of business. So that’s going to be next week here on the AM PM podcast, so don’t miss that. Also, I’ve got some words of wisdom before we head out here. If you really want to learn, it’s better to read about successful people than to do self-help books. Look for the patterns. Look for the patterns in successful people like Joe and like Lesley and read about them. Read Lesley’s book and look for the pattern. Self-help books are really not the way to go. That’s my words of wisdom for you this week. See you again soon.
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