#379 – Expert Advice On Amazon Seller Compliance, Black Hat Tactics, & More with Chris McCabe
Ever found yourself tangled in the enigmatic web of Amazon’s seller suspensions? Fear not, for Chris McCabe of eCommerce Chris joins Kevin King, to unravel the mysteries behind Amazon’s enforcement tactics. From Chris’ pivotal transition from an Amazon insider to a rescuer of distressed sellers, we dissect the complexities of policy warnings, suspensions, and the art of the appeal. Prepare to arm yourself with knowledge as we expose the perils that lurk within Amazon’s watchful gaze and the proactive compliance measures needed to safeguard your online empire.
Navigating Amazon’s TOS requires more than just luck—it’s an intricate dance of understanding their team’s dynamics. We discuss the different factors that might leave your business on thin ice and strategize on circumventing language barriers for clearer support. This episode is filled with tricks of the trade, offering a clear path through the maze that could be the difference between thriving and barely surviving on the platform.
As we draw curtains on this enlightening session, brace yourself for a foray into the murky depths of Amazon’s review system and the harrowing odyssey of account suspensions tied to ‘related accounts.’ We also contrast the starkly different treatment of colossal brands versus the smaller sellers and share entrepreneurial wisdom that transcends the Amazon marketplace. Stitched with insights into decision-making and team-building, this episode is a beacon for Amazon business owners intent on weathering the storm in today’s competitive marketplace. Join us for a conversation that’s more than just talk—it’s a roadmap to mastering your trade in the e-commerce age.
In episode 379 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Chris discuss:
- 01:38 – Expert Advice on Amazon Seller Performance
- 04:39 – An Expert’s Help with Kevin’s IRS Woes
- 10:57 – Oversight and Support for Amazon Sellers
- 19:00 – Changes in Seller Evaluation and Trustworthiness
- 23:44 – Policy on Relating Accounts for Suspensions
- 25:08 – Seller Review Abuse and Compliance
- 30:53 – Inconsistent Enforcement and Fake Online Reviews
- 44:13 – Issues With Amazon Review Wipes
- 47:14 – Financial Crimes at US-Based Companies
- 51:32 – Issues With Amazon’s Review System
- 55:55 – Early Involvement in Problem-Solving Importance
- 1:01:36 – Seller Velocity and Speaker Lineup Highlights
- 1:02:53 – Kevin’s Entrepreneurial Insights and Words of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 379 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week, my guest is Chris McCabe from eCommerce Chris and we’re going to be talking about everything that everybody always has a lot of questions about. That’s suspensions, and what do you do when Amazon slaps you on the back for either something you didn’t do or something that you may have done, and you’re trying to solve the problem. Got some great insights in this episode with Chris for you and here in just a month or so, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit virtual edition will be happening February 21st and 22nd. You can go to billiondollarsellersummit.com and get yourself a ticket for that event. You can do it from anywhere in the world. Got an incredible, incredible lineup of speakers Going to be sharing next level stuff. This is not what you hear on podcasts or in other summits. This is like $25,000 a year, mastermind level stuff. That’s cutting edge. So I hope to see you there. In the meantime, enjoy this episode with Mr McCabe. McCabe, how you doing, man. So glad to finally have you on the podcast here. You’ve spoken with Bradley and a few others before, but you and I have never done a podcast together.
Chris:
Hard to believe. It feels like I’ve been AM/PMing for years, but this is our first, I guess.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, for those of you that are listening that don’t know who this guy is, he’s one of the top experts when it comes to actually helping you when you get a problem with Amazon, and he actually used to actually work for the evil empire, right, and then you came to the good guy’s side.
Chris:
That’s right, the evil, the Darth Vader people seller performance. I used to work on that team, so what did you actually?
Kevin King:
do for seller performance. What does that mean? Does that mean that you were just reading these emails, or were you overseeing a team of people and things got escalated up to you?
Chris:
What does that actually mean? I wasn’t overseeing a team. The only time I oversaw work of other people were in training situations, when I had been there a few years and I had been promoted and I was looking at investigations, other seller performance people were doing and saying, yes, do that, no, don’t do that, that kind of thing. It was mostly doing what people would probably guess taking listings down, sending policy warnings, deleting listings that didn’t belong, suspending accounts, of course, reading appeals for reinstatement, deciding if the appeals were acceptable, justifiable for reinstatement, and sending denials, of course, if they weren’t. So as time went on I’d read more escalations. I wasn’t doing that right away. The Jeff emails so-called executive seller relations took me a couple of years to start working on those because back in the day you had to be certified and approved by your boss, and maybe even your boss’s boss, to be able to handle those. It’s not quite the way it’s handled right now so.
Kevin King:
So what years were this that you were at Amazon?
Chris:
So I started in 2006 in the A to Z guarantee claims, which was evaluating who’s right, who’s wrong, buyer or seller. Sometimes Amazon would just pay claims themselves back in those days, trying to establish trust by buyers and sellers in the entire marketplace. And then I moved to seller side in 2007, and I stuck with that for a good five, five and a half years up through 2012.
Kevin King:
So in 2012, what did you switch right into doing? The consulting and the stuff you do now? Or was there something else you did in between starting up the consulting company?
Chris:
Yeah, I took time off as the short answer did a lot of world travel. Conventional wisdom back in those days was kind of take a year off and then decide what you want to do. Or when I did come back to the United States, I looked into working at some startups. I was living in Brooklyn, I was living in New York, so I was looking at different startups. Could I contribute in other parts of e-commerce? One of the reasons we’re called e-commerce Chris is because my original consulting concept was going to be all facets of e-commerce consulting. It just immediately went in the direction of help me with Amazon, help me with Amazon. You worked at Amazon for so long. You helped people with this sort of thing when you worked there, being an advocate for sellers on the other side of the fence. I would say it took three, four months for me to understand that I was going to be more of an Amazon consultant, not an all e-commerce consultant.
Kevin King:
And what year was this 20th?
Chris:
So 2012,. The rest of 2012 and 2013,. I wasn’t really working on much of anything. I was traveling. 2014 is when I started consulting and 2015 is when I created the e-commerce Chris LLC.
Kevin King:
So I’ve always think it’s actually. I got into some IRS trouble about 20, some odd years ago, where I didn’t actually. I was growing a company and it’s about 25 years ago now, I guess. Oh wow, growing a company and instead of, as you take money out of the employee’s paycheck, you’re supposed to give that to the IRS and you match that. I wasn’t doing that. I was actually using that to cash flow and the IRS sees that as stealing and basically it is because they’re following a return and getting a refund and I haven’t paid it yet, but I was cash flow. It’s like I always like I’ll catch it up, I’ll catch it up, I’ll catch it up. I was just robbing Peter to pay Paul and the house of cards came crashing down on me and I had to actually go to somebody and they call it with the IRS a registered agent and that’s someone. Oftentimes those people actually used to work on the other side at the IRS and they were going after people to collecting money. Then they retire, get tired of the working for the government or whatever, and they flipped to the other side and they’re not now. I know how the inner workings work. I know exactly what to do Now. Let me help you. And so I found a guy like this and I think I owed like I don’t know 200, it was like it was about 80 grand or something originally, 60 or 80 grand originally, but with penalties and interest and all the stuff, it was over 200,000 bucks.
Chris:
Oh, it’s a good chunk of change.
Kevin King:
I went to this. It was a chunk of change. I went to this guy and said what do I do? And he’s like look, how long has it been since they contacted you? I said, well, I had an offer and compromise and I did this and it’s been like seven years. And he said, holy cow, it’s been seven years. He said you didn’t hear this from me, but somehow you fell in through the system. You need to just lay low, just lay low. Don’t open a big bank account, don’t go buy a house, don’t do anything, just lay low. And there’s a rule. He knew all the internal rules. I think it was at 10 years. Actually, maybe it’d been eight or nine. It was cause I only had to wait like a year and then he fell out some form, sent it over to them and the whole thing got dismissed. I never had to pay a dime of it. The entire thing. It’s on my record so I can talk freely about it now, like they can’t come knocking on my door if someone’s listening to this and say we want that.
Kevin King:
But he knew how to do it and I think that’s something that’s important to note here. With Ecom, chris versus a lot of these other people is like, yeah, things might have been a little bit different back. You know, that was eight years ago, 10 years ago, that you worked there a little over, but still the same principles, a lot of the same foundations are still the same. And the fact that you were there on the other side going after people and now you’re helping people, you understand it better than, like the other 100 companies and consultants that are trying to do this, I believe. Do you think there’s a lot of credibility or validity to that?
Chris:
Yeah, I mean we all my whole team have had to stay current. Obviously we’re not using antiquated knowledge to approach some of these strategies, but the core themes and Amazon’s view of the marketplace hasn’t changed that much. When you talk about enforcement, when you talk about suspensions, what’s justifiable, what’s not? The communication is something that’s changed a little bit. I would have kind of passed out on my feet if I saw messages going out in those days that read like today’s messages, because I would not want to be associated with communication that is that opaque and gray and murky and just so non-communicative messaging. I think so it wasn’t that way back when you were there.
Kevin King:
It wasn’t these very vague like figure out, you did something wrong. You figure out and you tell us what you did wrong. We’re not gonna tell you. It wasn’t that way back when you were there.
Chris:
Well, all I can say is I thought it was bad back then.
Kevin King:
Okay.
Chris:
Never knowing that we would inhabit this universe we’re in now, which is just. There’s no point sending this message. This message says nothing. You can read through the lines, you can read the tea leaves a little bit and figure out if it’s a yes or a no, because if they tell you you’re reinstated, well I mean you don’t need much information after that. If they don’t mention the word reinstatement, I guess you can figure out you’ve been rejected. But whoever’s signing off on today’s messaging I assume it’s deliberate that they wanted as vague as possible. They hate having any outsiders, any sellers, quote themselves back to themselves for hey, this doesn’t make sense or hey, what are you trying to say? They don’t have any interest in that conversation. What do you think that is? Is it because of account health?
Kevin King:
Is it so big and just such a? They’re dealing with 2 million, what’s it? 2 million active sellers in the US or something like that. It’s just so unwieldy that they have to do it that way. Or is it deliberate that they do it that way?
Chris:
I think it’s deliberate. I think they know that they don’t have training capabilities. They don’t want to spend a lot of time, invest a lot of capital on quality training of seller, performance team investigators and others as well, to the extent they would have to to make those people meaningful communicators. And they know that they’re making work for themselves by communicating poorly. And then you have to call in and then you have to open a case. They had to create a whole team account health services as a buffer between sellers and my former teams. Right, account health services didn’t used to exist. They didn’t create that team just because there’s an account health dashboard now. That didn’t exist before. I mean, that’s part of the reason. But imagine creating this whole team just because the messaging that’s written down in a performance notification doesn’t tell you anything and doesn’t. I mean, not only does it not help you, it doesn’t clarify anything, it’s mud, clear as mud. It makes more work for you. Of course the sellers tell you every day it makes more work for them, but it makes more work for Amazon.
Chris:
You would expect them to care for selfish reasons. Hey, we’re making X number of hours of work per employee per week because our messaging is so generic jargon useless. But they know it is right. It’s not like it’s a mystery to them Us, anybody who participates in the marketplace can look at a message like that and read it and say this doesn’t say anything. So they’re aware of it. They don’t have the incentive to change it. Really, I mean, do they? They would prefer to build a team that you call into who can maybe interpret what that message means or doesn’t mean. The problem is you call into account health reps and you get seven different answers about what that single message meant or didn’t mean. And some of the misinformation you get from account health reps makes you make a mistake in terms of what you send in next. Or you might even spend all day revising an appeal based on what one person tells you. I mean, it just keeps spinning at that point. Right, it’s not just making more work for people, it’s like garbage and garbage out at that point. So how do they train people Like when you went in.
Kevin King:
I may be different, a little bit different now, but how do they just throw you to the fire and say these are SOPs. Try to match this up, because a lot of the people that are doing this, they have no clue about the other side. They don’t know what it’s like to be a seller or what it’s like to you know that their whole livelihood is on the line here, or they’re supporting an office of 50 people. So how do they? How is the actual training, or is it just? There’s just too much to know and that’s why, like you said, that’s why it’s so generic.
Chris:
There’s a lot to know. There’s more to know now than when I was being trained. I had really good training. I think I kind of got lucky. One of the people that trained me back in the day, you know, works with us now, so you know, obviously he knew what he was talking about and I kind of got lucky that I was rubbing elbows with him. I had some other people who ended up working 10, 15, 17 years at Amazon who also trained me back in those days. So they don’t really have I mean, they do have veterans who stay that long. It’s increasing increasingly rare. But there are people who stay with the company a long time but those are like S team executives, people at the higher echelons of the company. These days people move on a little quicker.
Chris:
The SOPs, I think, just weren’t updated often enough. I think people were sort of just thrown the SOPs like hey, read this and learn this. There isn’t a lot of auditing in terms of, hey, after a year do you really understand that SOP or did you kind of start wandering away from it and maybe your account annotations aren’t so great anymore? I mean, is anyone really evaluating the quality of account annotations when investigators make a denial decision on an appeal. And also, I don’t think they emphasize hey, this is a business. This is a company that we’ve invited in one way or another to be on this marketplace to serve our sellers, to sell their items, and we are making business critical decisions that could impact the life of that business. They’ve lost that. That piece was omnipresent when I was working there. We talked about it in weekly meetings. We talked about it on individual seller accounts, whether it was yes or no. On reinstatement. If you wanted a second opinion, you’d run it by a colleague or maybe a superior, and maybe they would have a different opinion than you would, and you wouldn’t really. I mean, I was training for months. It wasn’t like I was thrown into the email queues at some point, but people were still watching what I was doing. I mean, do they have that oversight now? It doesn’t seem like they do. If they do, the auditing quality is so low that it’s not really valuable or significant. You’ve seen seller support cases. Right, it’s like obviously they’re not interested in quality of those teams or the delivery of information, don’t they?
Kevin King:
have a KPI, they have to hit so many per hour or something like that, so they can’t spend a lot of time on each one. Do you know what that number is or have a rough idea of what?
Chris:
that might be Not for support For seller performance. I had to get through, I don’t know, 13.5, 14, 15 of them an hour.
Kevin King:
Oh, wow.
Chris:
Yeah, I kind of was lucky in some ways because A I had wonderful training by people who had been there like a decade before they even met me, who had been there at the beginning of the marketplace. I think they understood some of my strengths. I didn’t have a lot of e-commerce experience, but I had fraud prevention, fraud investigation experience from other companies and they kind of knew my strengths and weaknesses and they knew where they had to devote their time with me. But we also had managers who understood like hey, this is one to learn from. This is a use case that a couple of us didn’t quite understand. We know we’re going to get 200 of these over the next 10 days. We’re going to talk about it in the team meeting, take it apart, analyze it. It was before the marketplace became so rush, rush, rush. Let’s just make sure we get through the day, let’s just make sure we throw bodies at a problem without knowing if it’s the right bodies or if they know how to solve that problem.
Kevin King:
Speaking of those bodies, where does it start when someone, when I get a performance notification or if I just happen to open up a case about something? The first level is pretty much based in India for the most part, right.
Chris:
Yeah, I mean with the work that we do with the kinds of appeals we have to work on the kinds of brand registry, whatever rain, state, nascent troubleshooting we do. We don’t work with the case system much. The case system for support is primarily like account compromises, technical issues. You know there’s a glitch with my image. Can you get me to the catalog teams Very, very specific stuff. We don’t rely on or use the case system with any of our clients for any major league impact. You know I’m losing thousands of dollars a day my asin’s down or appeals stuff and we try not to rely on anything we’re hearing from the account health reps either. I mean occasionally, yes, but the case system lion’s share of that is in Hyderabad, but technically those are global teams. You know to keep it 24 hours.
Kevin King:
Is it true? I mean, like there is a team in what South Dakota and a team in Costa Rica. You hear these things like oh, you try to speak Spanish and you’ll get directed to the Costa Rica team.
Chris:
There’s some of that A little bit smarter.
Kevin King:
You’re called during these business hours, you might get the South Dakota team and talk to a Western person. So there is some truth to some of that as well.
Chris:
Yeah Well, Costa Rica. There are also some strategic account managers there, SAS core. It changes over time. There used to be no account managers in Costa Rica, Now there’s several, you know. So what’s?
Kevin King:
performance based is like what you said you guys are dealing with. Is that mostly people for someone selling in the US market? Is that mostly you’re dealing with someone based here in the United States?
Chris:
We deal more with the account health teams and support.
Kevin King:
So if we’re talking about account health services. That’s what I meant to say. That’s what I meant to say, yeah, sorry.
Chris:
That’s fine. So for account health services calling later and those are global too you can easily get someone in India, as most sellers hearing this can attest to. You want to call later in the day to minimize the chances you get somebody in India for account health. I’ve gotten to the point and you know I’ve listened in on and participated in I don’t know thousands of those calls at this point over the last few years. We’ve gotten to the point where we just tell people if you get somebody in India hang up and call back for account health issues, because you might get generic information, you might get them reading from a script, you might get misinformation, wrong information. That will only hurt you, not help. It’s one thing if you don’t get any help, but if you get negative help, that’s even worse.
Chris:
When you’re talking about an appeal, I have had some India reps that I’ve quizzed and talked to who knew their stuff cold and they were good. But those are so few and far between you can’t count on that. And if you’re going to be on a 10, 12, 14 minute call some people are on 40 minute calls you need to make sure you up the odds that you’re talking to somebody who at least has a chance of knowing what they’re talking about. So, east Coast time, call later in the day. If you’re on Pacific time, try to call mid afternoon. I guess something like that to increase the odds that you don’t get a rep who’s based in India, because I just don’t think they’re reliable enough. There are some US reps that aren’t reliable for other reasons but your odds of getting usable info improve. When I say usable info, I’m talking about somebody you had an appeal denied. You don’t want a pat on the back. You don’t want their coaching. You don’t want their generic plan of action advice. You need to know one thing which you should be able to find out within two minutes whether or not they’re going to tell you. Not 10 or 20 minutes, that’s sometimes where I get an email.
Kevin King:
We had this problem with selling hand sanitizer in 2020 and I had a business rep from business development he was in charge of he was business development for travel or something and when COVID hit, he got moved over to the COVID store and was in charge of, like, the whole COVID store. We had set up this special COVID store and we were 100% approved all the way up the ladder to legal signing off on our labels at Amazon the whole nine yards. But we were constantly, constantly, constantly, constantly shut down on our listing and I had his speed number, I had his phone number, I had his home phone number. He’s like call me anytime, it doesn’t matter. And he was on our side and he was going to bat. This guy was like look, this is the type of client that we want on our platform. They are doing true branding. They’re not fly by night, they are from FDA. They are all this Quit effing with them, quit fucking with them. And the system kept doing us Like isn’t there a toggle you can switch that says leave them alone? He’s not. Unfortunately, there’s not. I said, yeah, there is. Nike, didn’t go through this shit. There is a button. And he’s like, yeah, there is a secret button somewhere you know, but most of us don’t have access to that.
Chris:
So this is an important thing. To answer your old question about how did we view sellers 10 years ago or something, we did consider how long they had been on the platform. I don’t think anyone thinks about that or cares about that anymore. We did look at their revenue level. Have they responsibly shown they can sell 10, 12, 14 million a year and they haven’t really created headaches for buyers, for Amazon, for other sellers. That should be a point in their favor and this has just gotten lost along the way. It’s kind of lost in the background noise. I think they pay lip service to it. But they don’t make business decisions that make sense anymore, that are logical to the rest of us who have been in business for as long as we have, because somewhere along the way they got tunnel vision with, like certain elements of an SOP and they forgot about is this a trustworthy seller or not?
Kevin King:
I think some of that is branding. Though You’re going to do that with Nike or with a big international brand, but if you’re X, y, z Chinese seller with some strange brand name, and even if you’re doing $100 million a year on their platform, I don’t think they really give a shit. Because if they knock that guy, if they take you off and you might have been doing something you shouldn’t have been doing maybe you deserve to come off, but if they take you off, there’s 26 others waiting to take your place and you’re not Nike and you’re not going to go out to the press. You might complain to the Chinese press, like some of those did a couple of years ago when they took a bunch of big ones up 50,000 accounts went down. Some multi-billions dollars worth of revenue, but Amazon didn’t miss a beat, didn’t miss a lick, just some other people just took their place. A lot of those guys are right back under a different name or different, whatever they rebranded.
Kevin King:
Yeah, they just yeah. Most of those are all back, so that’s a problem, and I don’t know how you fix that when you’re as big as they are, and that’s where we need people like you that are advocating for us. So what are you seeing? That’s like, what’s something that people shouldn’t. A couple things here. What are some people? People come to you. You get a call at midnight one night. Oh my God, my account’s down. I’m doing 80 grand a day. Help me, help me, help me. They’re frantic people and you look into it and they’re actually doing something they shouldn’t be doing. They claim they’re not, but they actually are. What are some of the things you see there? And then we’ll take it from there to the flip side is like what are some of the things that you see that Amazon thinks people are doing and they’re not doing? They’re totally innocent that they get problems with. What are a couple examples that you are seeing over and over and what are some advice you may have on help people? Can sellers can deal with this stuff.
Chris:
Yeah, and of course, suspensions of accounts. If we’re just talking mainly about accounts right now, yeah, are trendy, right. There are things that Amazon’s willing to do in August, september and even October that they won’t necessarily do in November and December, when things are really kicking. They’ll kind of back off for a while. Historically they’ve done that in Q4, but related accounts are the ones where we see all the head scratching. They’re still kind of, after all these years, after all these tool improvements, sop improvements, so called, we’re still amazed at some of the ridiculous investigations they do where they conclude that two accounts are related, even if they haven’t really had any data points that align between them for like four years. You know, you could probably almost guess that maybe it’s just you know, like a service provider that they were using four years ago, that maybe they share with another account, or I mean they just don’t make intelligent business decisions.
Kevin King:
So related accounts though, like I have. Like there used to be a thing about people say don’t always log in from a VPN and never you know, never log in when you’re traveling, or something like that, and because you, if you have multiple accounts, that they’re going to tie them together. I have five different seller central accounts. Two of them are not active, but three of them are active. I don’t have a problem switching around between them. Service providers don’t have a problem switching around between them. But I did seven or eight years ago.I was one of my companies. I was buying a lot of hard drives and in the hard drives I could get them back then for like 39 bucks and I was. I was using, putting data on them and then reselling them for like 400 bucks. I was. It was a. It was a service where we loaded up with a bunch of data and then sell it as a package just said downloading it from the internet and you were limited to buy like 10 per account or something you know people had limits on. So I just had multiple accounts and they figured that out and they shut my other accounts down. But what is it that they’re looking for when? What is a related account. I thought it was always like if you’re selling the same thing, if you’re trying to sell that’s multiple accounts.
Chris:
So related accounts I mean like being related to a suspended account.
Kevin King:
Oh, okay, okay, Okay, related the ones that we work on, I mean okay. So like if I get since I have three account, my three accounts if I got suspended on one of them, they may put two on two together. Say, this is the same guy that’s running these other two. Okay, Okay, that’s okay, it’s not just IP address.
Chris:
If they, if they just see an IP address in common, then they’re probably taking treating it like it’s a strong relation, but it’s actually a weak relation if it’s IP only. But generally speaking, sometimes they’re just not using logic and they’re not using timelines in terms of oh, there’s a relationship between these two accounts. I mean, I don’t know, are they signing into the same two accounts from the same computer every day? Yeah, that sounds like a strong relationship. Was it four years apart? Maybe not a strong relationship Somewhere along the way. The logic behind relating accounts because obviously they don’t want people getting suspended, evading that suspension by just creating another account that’s the intention. Right, that’s the intention of the policy and I think most people can understand that it’s. It’s pretty logical. And then, of course, if it’s like well, a family member, you know, sometimes you try to argue well, it’s, that’s my uncle, that’s not me, but Amazon doesn’t know whether it’s you or your uncle and they don’t care. It looks like you got somebody else to start an account for you and you’re selling the same stuff or the same brand, or from the same address, the same location and so forth. It’s not a convincing argument.
Kevin King:
Right, that makes sense.
Chris:
There’s a lot of screwy decisions being made where accounts are clearly not related. Our heart goes out to the people who get stuck trying to appeal that stuff. Fairly simple, straightforward Amazon doesn’t want to hear it. Amazon rejects the appeals. Amazon won’t say why it’s being rejected. All that ridiculous stuff. When we have to intervene and get their escalations going for something that they really probably didn’t or shouldn’t need us to do. I mean, related accounts is one of the things. That’s kind of just. Why are we still so far in the dark ages on how this information can be evaluated? This is not the early days of the marketplace. This is not 2011 or 2008. It’s like what’s going on? Why can’t we get past this seemingly easy hurdle?
Chris:
The things that you were saying in terms of things sellers are still doing to get themselves into trouble. I mean it’s cyclical, it’s trendy. Sometimes Amazon forgets about product review abuse for nine months at a time and then all of a sudden, they’re hot and heavy on it. Those are things that I think some sellers think that, just because they haven’t heard that there’s been a mass purge of suspensions, they think that maybe Amazon doesn’t care about that. Whatever it is that kind of compliance anymore. They either go back to something they were doing before and they get reprimanded for that, or they’re caught again for it. Or they just assume, like well, amazon’s so busy and I haven’t heard about it, maybe they’re just finished with that, they’re not going to suspend people for that anymore. Or again, using the example of reviews abuse, they forget that, hiring a third-party service or a consultant or a marketing company whatever you’re on the hook for, whatever they do on your behalf, if they do something non-compliant, you can’t go to Amazon and say, oh, I found them on the service provider network that you guys have. I’m not responsible for what they did, they’re responsible. You can’t finger point. You’re still on the hook for it. Or if you just went on their website or had a phone call with them and you said, hey, do you follow Amazon’s rules? Are you TOS compliant? If they just say, oh, yeah, we are. Or they put something on their website, that doesn’t really mean anything to Amazon. Amazon doesn’t care. They care about whether you are following the rules, because the buck stops with you. You paid the ultimate price If something they were doing gets you suspended.
Chris:
Now, back in the day, like a couple of years ago, you could squirm out of that by saying, look, we fired them. We can document when we terminated them. We don’t work with them anymore. We understand everything they do. That or were doing. That was wrong. These are the fixes we have in place. These are preventative measures. You could neatly lay that out in your plan of action and Amazon would take it. The problem is especially as we saw in Q4 recently, they’re much less tolerant of that kind of. They see that more of an excuse now, not an explanation or not a justification. Now they come back and say oh, you know what? We’ve seen a bunch of you that we’ve had to suspend because you worked with this company. Tell us more about them. We’re not interested in you anymore. Maybe we’ll give you a chance to come back, maybe we won’t. We want to go after those guys and we’re going to use you to do it.
Chris:
They turn you into a stool pigeon of sorts they’re trying to address. They’re trying to attack the problem at the source. Amazon used to have no relationship to Facebook, no relationship to groups on Facebook. That helped people fake reviews. Now they work with Facebook directly. Well, how did that happen? Well, they decided they wanted to attack the problem at the source and they realized that a lot of their Facebook groups were responsible for it. Well, they can’t punish Facebook. They have to go to Facebook, work with them to identify who’s behind the groups, get them in the court, sue them, get them out of business or whatever. They’re using the sellers as human shields to get to the people who are promoting the bad practices. That is not something they were doing two years ago, that’s not just meta, though, right.
Kevin King:
Don’t they have a relationship with PayPal now, and a few of the others too, right?
Chris:
I think it started with meta, though I don’t remember them. I am by no means taking credit for this, but I was one of the people two, three years ago who was kind of banging my fist on the table. Why is Amazon not working with another giant tech company like Facebook to help solve some of this out? Because I think I was quoted in a couple articles about it so I can go back and prove that I talked about it then. The bottom line is somebody heard it, somebody took action, somebody decided we’re treating the symptom, not the disease. What’s the disease? The disease is sellers need sales rank. Sellers need positive reviews. Some of them don’t know good ways of getting them or they’re not willing to wait for positive experiences from buyers to play itself out. They want to take a shortcut. Some progress is made with this stuff. The message for sellers anyone listening to this is be careful who you work with. First of all, you don’t want to pay somebody for a service only to have them get you in trouble and get your accounts suspended. That’s a really nasty experience to go through.
Kevin King:
What about all the search find by companies? That was a hot thing for about two years and then Amazon, kind of a little over a year ago, said, hey, this is not allowed anymore. It still exists, they’re just not as out there as much. But in those companies we’d always say we’ve never had a single one of our people, we don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never had a single one of our people suspended. For us doing a search find by and for those that don’t know what search find by is, there were services. There’s some that were legitimate, like rebate services, but there was a side that rebate key and there’s others that were just straight up. You pay us $15. We got somebody. We have a Facebook group or we have a Manichek group or we have a group of people moms that will go and buy your product. You give us $15 as a service fee, or sometimes more than that, depending on supplements, and you give us whatever the price of your product is, if it’s $20 or whatever. So you pay us $35, we’ll get these people to go buy your product, search for whatever keyword you want. So you rank and then write reviews on them and that got cracked down on. It still exists. But how big of an issue was that? Did you see a lot of people getting suspended back then and do you see that still continuing now? Off of that.
Chris:
Well, I mean, first point is the service or the company that you pay can disappear. They can declare bankruptcy, maybe, or their business dries up and they made a nice score of money for a couple of years and then they move on to something else like no one pays them for. You know, they get a bad rep. Nobody pays them anymore. There are no consequences, of course, and they move on. Nowadays it’s a little bit different, because the FTC is very involved in this stuff. This is one reason why Amazon’s chasing the companies and the service providers themselves, because the FTC started going after some of these companies and suing them or outing them or whatever, because it was obvious that they were just helping fake online reviews, which is a form of fraud which is against the law and it’s hurting consumers. Right, the FTC has to take an interest in that. So we did see a lot of sellers getting busted. I would say it was. They were overly trusting. You know, they went to an event, they joined a group and word of mouth told them hey, I got a bunch of views from so-and-so and they were just kind of riding along on the say so of another seller or maybe even a service provider or a consultant and maybe they didn’t ask the consultant hey, are you getting a piece of this action to recommend these guys? Is there a reason why you’re so pro, you know, promoting these types of services? Because it seems like they’re a little shady, a little iffy, People weren’t really doing due diligence, they were overly trusting, maybe a little bit gullible. And it’s like again, whichever consultant you’re believing or whichever seller you’re talking to, maybe that other seller is doing the same thing you’re doing you’ll be suspended and they won’t be suspended.
Chris:
I mean, enforcement at Amazon is very, very inconsistent. There are people out there doing exactly what you’re doing. You get in tons of trouble and they get a policy warning or they get like some quickie call from Account Health saying we need you to write a quick plan of action in 72 hours and include a couple of these things in it and tell us what we want to hear, and then we’ll go away. Sometimes they will go away. Obviously, if it gets rejected, they won’t go away and they’ll suspend you too, but it’s all over the place. Some people run through the raindrops and never get wet and that’s just the way it goes. I mean, what happens to one seller doesn’t always happen to another. They could be using the same playbook. What are you?
Kevin King:
seeing. One of the big topics out there is inserts lately, and there is some people that do manipulation on inserts where they’ll put an insert in and they’ll say if you like the product, go, leave us a five star review at this link on Amazon. If you don’t like it, email us. Or there used to be old ways where we would back in 2016,. There was a tactic where we’d say if you like the product, leave a review, click this link. If you don’t like it, click this link. It would go to seller feedback because we know we could get those removed and all those things Amazon does not like. There’s no question about that type of stuff or putting five stars down at the bottom of your inserts and leave us an objective review, but there’s five stars that look like it’s Amazon on the bottom. You should not be doing any of that. But some people are also saying now that you should not be putting directing anything off of Amazon, and I know that’s the fact on Amazon. Like, if you’re on Amazon or doing the email correspondence with a customer, you should not be directing them to your website. You should not show your URL and your product packaging, your photos or anything like that, but in a package insert. If I’ve got a package insert and I say, go to my site to get a warranty, or go to my site, I’ve got all the accessories for this product. Or if you join my VIP club, you know, under Shopify site you get this.
Kevin King:
There’s a lot of people that are saying don’t do that, that’s against the terms of service, you’ll get in trouble. And I’m of the opinion that, even though Amazon’s wording may be able to be interpreted that way, that’s not the intent of it and that’s not what they’re going after. Because big brands do that all the time, I mean every. They have inserts. When you buy a new Sony keyboard, it has an insert. It’s totally fine. But there’s a lot of gurus in our space are saying don’t ever do that, don’t ever do send them anywhere else except back to Amazon and insert. Can you clarify what you’ve seen on that, just so people can hear it from someone that’s probably dealt with some of these kinds of issues?
Chris:
Yeah, it depends on what’s on the insert. Of course. No one said every insert is the worst thing in the world. I think there was anxiety and panic around inserts for a while because of the number, the sheer number of suspensions, and people forgot about. Is one insert different from another? A while ago having five stars at the top of the insert didn’t really mean much. Now it means everything. I mean you can definitely get suspended just for that. We can say that’s nitpicky and petty. Amazon thinks you’re tipping the scales by having the five stars.
Kevin King:
You’re psychologically influencing.
Chris:
I mean the contact us if you have a problem, if you’re happy, leave a review. That went out a long time ago because so many people got suspended for doing that. No one’s willing to do that anymore. I still see it occasionally, but very infrequently. The warranty stuff went away because people weren’t just redirecting buyers for warranty purposes, they were mixing in other language, other messaging that talked about discounts, that talked about special offers, or they sent you to a page on their website that mentioned a warranty but also mentioned other stuff. That’s where the warranty stuff got tricky. It polluted the whole warranty conversation to the point where now Amazon’s just having heavily suspicious of the use of the word warranty on inserts just because of so many bad experiences with so many sellers who are trying to use that as a gateway to other things. Sellers were, I mean, just as well as I do. Sellers are trying to use the warranty to open this wide variety of conversations with buyers and direct them over here. Qr codes, really it takes you somewhere else. But it’s not just that you’re going somewhere else, it’s what do you see when you get there.
Kevin King:
It’s on that landing page. I mean I have an insert in my. I sell calendars on Amazon, seasonal. I’ve been doing it for 20-some odd years. It’s one of my product lines. I have an insert in every single calendar on Amazon. It says congratulations, you’ve won a free calendar. Just pay $10 shipping and handling. You get a random calendar and I get rid of my excess stock and my excess stuff that way. There’s nothing about reviews, there’s nothing about a warranty, there’s nothing. It says go to the website and buy it or send us a checker in the money, in the checker money or in the mail and we’ll send it to you. It pays for itself and I get leads off of it. I’ve never had an issue with that, but I’m not doing anything around warranties or ratings or reviews or anything to that nature.
Chris:
The word free. Use of the word free is not risk free. It doesn’t actually the biggest misconception to answer your question. A different way that we saw in Q4 just now and then that we see ahead in 2024 is do not assume that just because you’re not asking for a review that you’re okay to give product away or heavily discount product. That’s not true. If you net or create a cluster of positive reviews because you’re giving product away, amazon will probably start the investigation by identifying that data cluster. But they will enforce that. They will take action on it because you’re not supposed to give product away. They assume that you know that if you give product away, you will have a net positive of reviews, which is considered tipping the scale.
Kevin King:
What’s free? Mine, in my case, is free plus shipping. You’re paying 10 bucks.
Chris:
I get that, but there are a lot of people offering freebies, exactly and the free.
Kevin King:
Then they come back a week later or a month later and say hey, I hope you like that, Please leave us a review. There’s a review. Mention or amplification.
Chris:
If you would have compensation, though I just want to. I mean, it’s not that you’re paying people to leave you five star reviews, which is considered terrible and, of course, something they enforce. This is considered an incentive by Amazon policy enforcement Right.
Kevin King:
If you are a product review abuse team. Yeah, but yeah, in my case, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not doing. I’m not worried about it because I’m not doing anything on that side. If they ever, somebody ever came, and I’ve never done anything black at at all. I like to know what the hell is going on. You know, I’ve been to meetings of when there’s 20 black hat the most black hat people in the building that you’ve ever seen. In this thing I’m like my eyes and my ears are open. I’m like my mind is blown on what they’re doing. I’m like holy cow, how do you have all these SOPs and how do you know exactly what the limit is? Don’t do you know? 13 is a threshold. Go to 14 on whatever it may be. They have it all down.
Chris:
Those people had Amazon SOPs. They were just paying bribes to employees to get internal info. Right, yeah, yeah, they had. They had that. We know what was happening now from the guilty pleas and the indictments from last year.
Kevin King:
Yeah, there’s been some big indictments and some big things that have come down on that, and I think even one of the people that was indicted basically said F you, but it’s a Went to Guam or something. Yeah, there was one in that big case that’s still in India that they can’t find. Yeah, well, but yeah, there’s international fugitives fact of life.
Chris:
But it’s not so much that you are going to get in trouble, it’s that somebody who’s gunning for you might make a report. A couple of years ago Nobody was even knew there were abuse prevention teams, let alone that you could report abuse.
Kevin King:
Now it’s so that’s where it’s coming out. Is that where that it’s? How does Amazon If I got it let’s go back to the insert thing If I’m putting my insert in there and it’s saying, get a free bottle of my supplement for you know, in exchange for review or whatever is Amazon in their warehouse randomly just opening the stuff up to see what you’re doing? Or is it they randomly looking at the reviews where someone put a picture of it and talked about it and that just catching those words? Or is it somebody actually report a competitor most likely report title telling on you? Where are these leads coming from?
Chris:
I mean most people that are reporting the abuse. They’re buying from competitors. If you’re making a valid report, you can buy from a competitor. It’s not just straight up. You know nefarious anti-competitive behavior. They take a picture of the insert and they send the picture to abuse prevention teams.
Kevin King:
I know people have done that and it just goes on deaf ears.
Chris:
They’re probably doing it just by opening seller support cases or doing you know first rung of the ladder stuff and that will often fall on deaf ears. It’s unfortunate that happens, but people who understand how to escalate this stuff it won’t fall on deaf ears and they’ll put the abuse prevention teams in position to take action on those accounts because they can go. I mean, you know, most of our clients at least are 100% FBA. They can just go open up your inventory and look at the insert themselves. I mean it’s not that difficult. The people who are reading the abuse report aren’t the ones opening it. But obviously they can do it internally.
Kevin King:
What’s the way to do? That Is there. I know there’s some links that are like abuse at this and abuse at that, but the abuse probably gets abused.
Chris:
I mean it gets abused, they’re not going to take action if it’s not a valid abuse report, if it looks like you’re just sniping at somebody. We’ve had people, we’ve heard of cases where they faked what the insert was like through Photoshop or really they tried to make it look well. They could say, like here’s our order. You know there’s a real order number, but the insert wasn’t the one that was in there. They might have monkeyed with it or something, and maybe the person that opened the package and looked at the insert didn’t notice that it wasn’t quite the same thing. So I mean that has happened. But if it’s a valid abuse report, yeah, they’re going to take action. If they think your inserts are resulting in an unfair competitive advantage you versus your competitor, or if they think you’re deceiving buyers, negatively impacting buyer experience in any way, or if they think you’re creating risk and problems for Amazon itself. I mean Amazon’s under the microscope right now. You know there’s a reason why you keep reading articles or hearing about FTC and Amazon in the same sentence. This is a big deal. The FTC has been cracking down. I think it was 2018 was the first time they came out with. Hey, there’s a lot of artificially inflated product reviews on Amazon or a lot of reviews, abuse on Amazon. It’s been. You know you’re talking five, six years at this point.
Kevin King:
So that’s not even October.
Chris:
3rd 2016 was D-Day and that was back when you remember the exact date, I remember that date.
Kevin King:
It’s like Pearl Harbor Day or that was the death day for Amazon sellers. Because on that day Amazon said no more and still not buy its reviews. Because in the old days it was no problem Give the product away for free or for a penny or whatever, and as long as someone put a disclaimer in the review that they got this and this review is in exchange for their honest opinion for a product, you’re totally fine. And then the FTC came down and went away overnight.
Chris:
Yeah, but that’s a good point you make about the honest review. That used to irritate the hell out of me, because if it’s incentivized it’s, by definition, no longer honest.
Kevin King:
Right.
Chris:
Right. So the idea that like well, we did incentivize, but we only asked for an honest review.
Kevin King:
I was so grateful when that whole thing went away and it doesn’t really come up anymore because that never made sense to begin with and Amazon should have shut that down a long time ago and they wiped a ton of reviews away too off of that.
Chris:
You know, what’s worth mentioning about review wipes is they overwipe reviews. Sometimes they send emails. We’re working with some brands who had a couple of ASINs where Gray area, you know there was heavy enforcement by Amazon abuse prevention teams. It was kind of a border borderline case. But they said, well, we’re going to take your reviews away for a couple of ASINs, and then they ended up deleting them all. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of fact checking in terms, or double checking in terms of did we take away too many of the sellers reviews? We ended up doing appeals for people like hey, remember this message you sent us. It’s right here. You mentioned one Asin. You deleted all the reviews for all these other ASINs. Do you have a reason for that? Do you have an explanation for that? And they were calling into account health or emailing executive seller relations or whatever. The messaging coming back from Amazon was kind of like I don’t know, we’ll go look into that, and then they would never get back to them or they would restore the reviews. We saw lots of crazy stuff in Q4 like that, where it was just like they overstepped the bounds of their enforcement. Sometimes the reviews mysteriously show back up too. Sometimes they pop back up. I mean, there are some people that hire us to report reviews abuse and Amazon takes them down for a day or two and then they pop back up and we have to do it again. Amazon never explains.
Kevin King:
How does that pop back up? Someone just override somebody. Good question.
Chris:
How does that pop back up? Lots of interesting internal questions, I think around how sometimes that happens. But another big thing that’s happened since I left in the years since the indictment, which was in 2020, for consultants and service providers who were found to be paying bribes to employees, to whether it was reinstate seller accounts that were suspended, or attack one brand at the behest of another brand, amazon was forced to silo their teams even more than they already had. They were already internally communicating poorly with each other. They were already very siloed Amazon’s famous for this both inside the company and outside. They had to silo everyone even further and limit their access to certain kinds of information. Like account managers complain about this all the time. You mentioned earlier the account manager who showed the seller a copy of an internal message because they were so fed up and frustrated. Well, account managers are increasingly dragged into the fray. For why is this happening to me? Am I being attacked by a competitor? Is an employee at Amazon doing something they shouldn’t be doing against me? Well, amazon had to keep account managers away from certain kinds of information because some account managers were being incentivized externally by other illicit factors and players from sharing info that they shouldn’t have been sharing. Not just account managers I don’t mean to throw the SAS teams under the bus there were lots of people working at Amazon who were doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing, financially incentivized or otherwise. So Amazon had to limit their access and keep their eyeballs away from competitor information or sales reports that they shouldn’t have been viewing.
Kevin King:
One of the things I always wondered was well, a lot of these cases came down like the 2021, some of the others, a lot of the data back when the brokers were actually selling. You could get PPC reports and all kinds of stuff before Amazon started showing. They’re revealing more of that now with brand analytics and some of the different reports, because they almost had to Used to. You had to pay for that from someone on the inside, and that was always coming out of India or China. I never understood why did the people in India or China have access to US stuff? Shouldn’t that have been siloed, that US only and India only, or something like that?
Chris:
Well, the India teams. I mean a lot of marketplace management, seller performance and beyond happens in India. Several teams were slowly, gradually shifted over there over the years. That started when I was still there. Actually, yeah, right, then, right, there’s a misconception that this was all coming out of India and China. A lot of it was, but there was plenty of it happening with Seattle-based teams too. That was in the indictment. I mean, I don’t know how many people sat down and read either the 38-page initial indictment or the sentencing that was this year, or the guilty pleas and everything in between. It was clear that there were Seattle people involved. Those are financial crimes committed on US soil and that’s why the US Attorney’s offices were getting involved. To an extent. Maybe they can get involved in things that are happening with overseas employees of a US-based company, but that’s a lot harder to take action on. A lot of employees were simply terminated. They weren’t really prosecuted for doing this, which is another thing. A lot of people in the general public don’t understand that maybe one or two employees were given a present sentence, but not really. We’re talking about hundreds to low thousands of employees globally minimum involved in this stuff.
Kevin King:
There’s a big one they made a case of back in the last summer. Was it in Atlanta or something? There was someone yeah well that’s a case.
Chris:
There are other employees who are just simply stealing from the company, which has nothing to do with marketplace sellers or third-party sellers. Yeah, there have been some employees that just rerouted returns and money into their own pockets. Those people got long sentences. I think what was interesting about the bribery corruption case was not only that it never went to trial, of course, everyone pled guilty with minimal fines, minimal jail time, prison time but also you never got to find out answers to all these questions like were there executives in Seattle taking bribes that were six or seven figures? If you look through the indictment and you go through a lot of the other anecdotal info out there, yeah, of course that was going on.
Kevin King:
What about all these guys? This is coming out of China, especially right now that they’re doing the mirroring and shadowing accounts and they’re doing all this crazy stuff. Does Amazon have enforcement teams that are going after that as well, or is that just way they got to wait for someone to abuse? There’s Vine review abuse going on right now. One of the strategies is, for a while, sending 10 different products of the same product and put them under different ASINs 30 reviews on each and then merge them together into one Merge them together. Shiny sellers especially that have 10 accounts and nine of them are burner accounts. The last one is the main account. They keep Squeaky Clean.
Chris:
What is Amazon?
Kevin King:
doing on those fronts? Are they proactively trying to take steps? You would think they could flag these things pretty easily.
Chris:
You could look at them and view and see if it’s Vine merged because it’s got seven different UPC codes on it.
Kevin King:
It’s easy to spot.
Chris:
It is. Maybe they don’t have the tools. Technology they definitely could. They’re a technology company or, if they want to call themselves a tech company, they could devote sufficient engineering resources.
Kevin King:
They’re doing AWS on NFL games where they can tell you freaking something in a moment.
Chris:
This guy just ran the speed and whatever they can do it if they want to do it. They can do it. It’s a trillion and a half dollar company. They can do it anyway. It’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. If they have the motivation, they can do it. I think the review harvesting. It is ridiculous that you can see listings that have been merged where the sixth, seventh, eighth page are reviews for a totally different product. That’s so basic. You would think that they’re embarrassed by that and they’re going to take action on it. The reason so many people are doing it is because enforcement has been light and lax and a lot of people are getting away with murder with that. They are taking action on some of it. If anyone is listening to this and wondering why they’re not taking action on more of it, all I can say is use escalation channels, because if you’re doing low-level reporting on that, you’re incentivizing Amazon to ignore you and you’re wasting your time. It hurts me to say that some people are really organized put together lots of great spreadsheets and data and screenshots and they’re flushing them down the toilet. They’re not using them in a way that gets it in front of the right people.
Kevin King:
If you send an email to abuse prevention teams.
Chris:
That’s a starting point. You have to persevere. You can’t send one email and say why aren’t they doing anything? They never do anything. I’m going to forget it and I’m going to give up. If Amazon thinks you’re going to give up after one attempt, or even two, let’s say then they’ll ignore you because they’re hoping you give up, because they want you to go away and they don’t want to be buried in these. What you have to do is say no, we’re not going away. If the team that’s responsible for this this is a basic escalation concept for anything you’re trying to do, even reinstating suspended accounts, if the people let’s say, sell at performance responsible for this aren’t reviewing it, aren’t doing their jobs. Go to another team and say we’ve already been where we were supposed to do. We did what we were supposed to do. We gave you everything you asked for or everything we know that we’re supposed to give you. Nothing happened. No one did anything. Somebody transferred it. They passed the buck. No one audited investigative quality. No one kept their eye on the ball. Everyone just kept going without even noticing that there was a huge gap in enforcement. Go to other teams, go to other executives, go to other people in the company who are responsible for maybe even multiple parts of managing the marketplace and tell them we were forced to go to you because XYZ didn’t do what they were supposed to do.
Chris:
That alone is an escalation that would pay dividends. If, of course, you go to the second team and they don’t take any interest, go up another rung on the ladder. Eventually you’ll find somebody who’s interested. That the people who report to them directly or the people who are adjacent to their teams aren’t doing a good enough job to make their lives less miserable. Now that’s spilling over into them. It’s like two countries are at war and it’s spilling over into a third country. Now that country’s life is miserable because the two countries are fighting with each other and it’s dragging in a nearby country. Same concept in Amazon. If they are going to have to start reading those escalations, they have to spend time on it. If they ignore an escalation, then it comes back on them negatively. Then they’re going to be more interested because they’re motivated in solving the problem. Everyone’s motivated to make their lives less miserable. If they find a way out of it, they’re going to go back and try to solve it at the source.
Kevin King:
Ecommerce. Chris, when someone calls you in the middle of the night freaking out, what are a few of the big things that you help people that are listening deal with If they get into this situation. What are three, four, five of the main things that you guys are really adept at helping people work through and solve?
Chris:
We can help quickly with identifying the source of the problem if they’re not being clear about why they’re suspended. Sometimes people get two different messages and their performance notifications about why they’re suspended. If they’re not able to squeeze it out of account, health reps we help them do that. If they need an escalation just to determine what the hell is going on, we know how to do one of those quickly. It’s not so much about rewriting plans of action anymore. If that’s really what’s going on and they’ve done their due diligence and they figured out that their plan of action is where the battle will be fought and it’s missing a few things, yeah, of course we’ve done millions of those. We can sit down with them, help them rewrite it, get it in front of the right people, get it solved faster. The difference with us, I think, is that you come to us expecting that it’s going to take days instead of weeks to fix, or hours instead of days, depending on the nature of it, especially just coming out of Q4. If it really is something that takes weeks which I guess occasionally that’s the case you’re talking about one or two weeks, not six weeks, not eight weeks. I want you to call me in the middle of the night. This is a strange thing to say. I would prefer you do that instead of appealing something seven, eight, nine times completely the wrong way and letting six, seven, eight weeks pass, waiting to hear back from teams that have no interest in solving it and then calling me and saying here’s my shovel. I dig myself a really deep hole and now I want you to dig out. Bother me early in the process, whether it’s a phone call or an email. Show us even if you don’t hire us to take over everything initially show us what’s going on. Get a quick assessment. We’ve been through everything that could possibly be going on into the sun thousands of times. I can give you a quickie assessment of these are your choices.
Chris:
If you’re deciding to handle it yourself, then fine. You’re making a conscious business decision to handle something yourself and you just need some coaching and suggestions and advice. We won’t take it personally. If you don’t want it, bring us in, but don’t say I want to handle it myself. Get in six or seven terrible appeals and then call out for help and say well, I changed my mind. Now that I’ve been final worded, now that Amazon doesn’t take me seriously, now I want Chris to fix me. I might be able to fix you, but why not involve us early in the process where we can at least give you your options? One good thing about again coming out of Q4 and being into early 2024, one of the great things about Q4 is that so much is on the line and the typical client we have is selling so many thousands per day of each ace in or on their account that they bring us in earlier in the process because they are losing so much money and they are afraid that Amazon is drowning in appeals.
Chris:
Everyone appeals twice as often, twice as many issues in Q4. That makes it more likely that your appeal will be lost and misplaced and confused and Amazon is very disorganized and inconsistent. At least the good thing about Q4 is that people hand us the keys to drive a little earlier in the process. Think about the value in doing that year round, not just in Q4, because Amazon won’t take you seriously If you go to them and you send them an appeal and they look at it and within two seconds they realize you’re guessing or you don’t know what’s going on. Are you getting advice from somebody who’s guessing and doesn’t know what’s going on? They’re not going to bother reading it. You’re disincentivizing them from taking you seriously, which means they’re not going to spend time on the appeal. One of my looking at that’s one middle of the night call is make sure your damage assessment fits and makes sense before you start hastily planning how you’re going to fix it.
Kevin King:
When I call you, depending on the case, is it a simple thing, as low as $500, a complex thing as five or $10,000, or what’s a range?
Chris:
Yeah, not $10,000, close to $5,000. That’s our full project rate in terms of priority, hiring us to take over $500,. We have one hour consults for interpretive services, strategic assistance. This is what’s going on. Figure out if you want to write an appeal. If you do want to write an appeal, consider putting these things into it. The initial information is just show me the performance notification, which is the messaging Amazon sent you when they announced the restriction or announced the deactivation. If you’ve already appealed it, show me that. If you’ve already called Account Health to figure out what the hell is going on or why your appeal was rejected, tell me what they told you. Make sure you push them for rejection reasons or denial notes, not just some generic story that they give everyone when people call those three things. That’s the best place to start.
Chris:
A fourth question would be is this the first time you’ve been suspended for XYZ? Is this the first time your ASIN has gone down for XYZ? Because if it’s a recurring problem, then obviously that impacts your strategy. If it’s the fourth time it’s happened, maybe something’s going on that you need to address operationally. Those are the key pieces for what we start with. We believe in self-determination. If it’s something you think, you can appeal and you’ve appealed successfully before. Maybe you can use some components of a previous appeal now. I assume it’s the same exact thing. Make no assumptions. That’s another word of caution.
Kevin King:
Chris, I think we could sit here. We’ve been going at this for over an hour. I think we could sit here. Probably we can talk about this for quite some time. There’s so many aspects and avenues to go down. If someone wants to reach out and consult with you guys or hire you if they’ve got a problem, or to get ahead of a problem, what’s the best way to do that?
Chris:
Our intake form, our inbox, is support. That’s a great place to send us copies of suspension notifications. You wrote an appeal. You want us to take a quick look at it. Send it there. I don’t recommend people send us mountains of attachments. It’s usually better to just show us the initial basic info and then we can tell you what we want to view from there. What we are known for, not just escalation strategy and high level strategies. We’re also known for being responsive and for being attentive to the urgency, because we’ve seen all those nightmares. We’ve seen the train wrecks. Even if you don’t end up hiring us to fix something, I’d rather just know the nature of your situation and keep you away from bad decisions early in the process so that you can go make an informed decision. There’s nothing wrong with just running stuff by us quickly. We’re happy to help, especially if you’re a frequent listener of the AMPM podcast. That’s a good thing to put in the subject line of an email. Maybe I’m a bit of a traditionalist People do message me on WhatsApp and so forth but email is a great way to start because you can put something like that in a subject line. Account suspended frequent listener, ampm. I know that I need to get eyes on that contact quickly and respond. If I can’t respond right away within a couple of hours, or at least before the end of that business day.
Kevin King:
Awesome, Chris. Support at ecommercechris.com is the best way to reach out to them. Chris, looking forward to maybe seeing you in May at the billion dollar seller summit or at another event out there somewhere.
Chris:
I really appreciate you taking time, seller velocity conference, that’s right Seller velocity.
Kevin King:
When is that? What’s the dates on that one?
Chris:
May 1 and 2 in New York City.
Kevin King:
Check seller velocity May 1 and May 2 in New York City Chris’s event that he’s doing, which is going to be. You got a pretty good line of people coming to that right.
Chris:
Yep, Bradley, hooray All right.
Kevin King:
Bradley’s going too?
Chris:
Yeah for one. Leah McHugh speaking. She works with us on. She does types of consulting no one does which should be of interest in terms of brand registry, troubleshooting, listing and compliance and safety compliance A lot of things that sellers assume they understand maybe don’t always understand. Emma Schirmer-Tamir, listing optimization. Janelle Page is going to be our MC Awesome, everyone knows how wonderful and Janelle is the MC.
Kevin King:
She’s speaking in Hawaii too. She’s a hoot. Here’s an MC. That’s going to be-. Everybody kick off their shoes. I’m going to have some fun. The energy is going to be good, awesome.
Chris:
Awesome.
Kevin King:
Chris, appreciate it man.
Chris:
See you soon.
Kevin King:
So much to know when it comes to what’s allowed, what’s not allowed on Amazon, how to deal with it when you’ve either done something you shouldn’t have or maybe you haven’t. Maybe a competitor’s reported you for something. That’s great information from Chris. Be sure to check out ecommerce Chris Support at ecommercechris.com. If you’ve got any problems with your account, day or night, they can help you out. Great guys over there at that company Got another really killer episode coming next week with someone that is a billionaire Actually has sold crazy amounts of companies it’s just a serial entrepreneur and products and digital stuff. It’s going to be an awesome episode. Anybody that’s an entrepreneur does not want to miss this episode. It’ll be some great stuff on mindset, on how building teams and a whole bunch of cool stuff. So don’t miss next week’s episode. Before we do that, I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. This is a filter that I use sometimes. When making decisions Always ask myself how much can I influence the outcome after the initial choice is made? How much can I influence the outcome after the initial choice is made? Have a great week. We’ll see you again soon.
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