Amazon is an eCommerce platform that allows sellers to sell their goods online. It allows buyers to check their desired goods online and buy them.
Amazon has its rules that govern the process of trading across its platform and a seller must abide by them to enjoy trading privileges on the same platform.
If the seller operates outside the set rules his/her account gets suspended and may risk from being banned from the platform.
Once the sellers account is suspended for some reasons he or she can get it reinstated.
For many sellers, an account getting suspended is one of the stressful experiences and also a major risk to their income.
Every day several accounts get suspended, denied or banned by Amazon. Suspension means that you still have a chance to appeal.
You only need to work a plan of action. Denied means that your appeal was rejected but you still have a chance to submit a revised plan of action.
Banned means that your appeal has failed and Amazon will no longer read your emails. This is the worst scenario of all.
Amazon may decide to remove selling privileges from a seller for several reasons that is:
- Selling restricted goods. Once Amazon finds out, they have no other choice than to suspend your account as a seller.
- When Amazon feels that your performance is diving. Since Amazon competes with other online platforms once they find out that you are under-performing they will have your account suspended.
- When you have violated Amazon’s policies. As a seller at Amazon, you must abide by the amazon’s rules or else they will have no choice than to suspend your account.
To check if your account has been suspended, you will check your performance details on the notification within the central.
If your account is suspended, you will receive a notification saying that your Amazon.com selling privileges have been removed.
Once suspended sellers are expected to create a plan of action based on the information in the notification.
Suspended sellers are expected to appeal to Amazon for their accounts to be reinstated. Before writing the appeal, the seller is required to thoroughly investigate the reason behind the suspension of his/her account.
To have an effective appeal you will have to consider these things:
- State that you take responsibility and acknowledge the harm done to the customer.
- Do not criticize the Amazon product quality process.
- Your appeal should be based on your internal account findings.
- Tell Amazon that you are committed to offering awesome services to the customers and you realize it is a privilege to sell at Amazon.
- Keep it simple and give them facts while you focus on policy matters and not performance metrics.
- Ensure that the plan of action has all the elements that led to the suspension addressed specifically
As a seller, you can prevent your account from being suspended by:
- Reading your listing to check any potential flags. Make sure that you give both an accurate and honest description of the goods you offer.
- Pay attention to listings. Examine your items and ensure you choose the correct condition category.
- Do not sell counterfeit goods.
- Ask Amazon to put an annotation on your account to state that the ASIN was not counterfeit.
However, if your seller account gets suspended, here’s the right way to get it back:
Get Your Suspended Amazon Account Back
If your account has been suspended or you need to know what you can do. This experience is quite stressful and requires one to calm to deal with the situation. Once you get the suspension notice from Amazon do not respond immediately, but rather follow the following steps:
- Determine exactly why Amazon decided to suspend your account.
- Take steps to resolve the issues in the eyes of Amazon and the affected customer if applicable.
- Implement new systems to ensure the issues do not happen again.
- Determine the root cause of your suspension.
When writing the appeal you must include the following details in it:
- The root causes that led to the issues and your account suspended. You should have done a thorough research to establish a good idea of the root cause and concisely state what the original issue was and show you understand the problem.
- The actions you have taken to solve the current issue. Once you have established what the issue you have to clearly show what you have done to address the issue.
- The steps you have taken to prevent future issues. You have to let Amazon know that you have learned from the mistake and you are implementing procedures to prevent the issue from happening again.
- Clearly explain the reason for the suspension to show that you understand the violation.
- Identify the causes of the problems and explain the steps taken to rectify and prevent these issues from occurring again.
As you write your appeal there some things you need to avoid:
- Writing too much. You must ensure that you are clear and concise.
- Deflecting blame or making excuses for what happened. As a suspend seller you have to take responsibility for what happened and make it clear that it won’t happen again.
- Bringing up problems that were not in the suspension notification send by Amazon.
- Do not try to make your response overly personal. You should not go into great detail about how sorry you are for making such a mistake.
Your appeal should be submitted in the format that Amazon requests it to be. You will be formatting your appeal in the same way you write emails.
Make sure you use clear headings and break it up into paragraphs to make it easy to read.
After writing it you can proofread it severally to ensure it meets the Amazon’s requirements and then you can send the appeal to Amazon.
As suspended seller you can choose this kind of template:
- Greeting and introductory part thanking them for the opportunity to appeal.
- Identify the general reason for suspension and then list issues that you have identified in your business.
- A line stating the actions you are taking to rectify those issues and also adding those issues in bullet-point format right under that line.
- Thanking them for their time and then your signature.
Once you are done, log in to seller central and browse to your suspension notification then click “Appeal decision” to submit your appeal.
You will have to be patient and never send them consecutive emails as the process may take even more than 48 hours for your appeal to be responded to.
After suspension there various things that you are not supposed to do:
- Opening a new account. This action may kill your chances of getting your appeal approved.
- Threaten, blame, criticize or be rude in any way.
- Emailing seller support or submitting multiple appeals. Seller performance often does not respond with any confirmation when receiving a seller’s appeal. This causes further delays in response and it is not advisable.
- Do not modify, fabricate or edit any requested document.
If your account gets reinstated make sure that you do everything in your power to keep your account in good graces so that you can sell on Amazon for a long time to come. (How to sell on Amazon)
Conclusion
Suspended, Denied or Banned are three terms that a correlated in the Amazon trading platform. Being suspended means that Amazon has revoked your ability to sell on the platform. Your current listings are not publicly visible and obviously, you can not publish new ones. Denied means that you have already submitted an appeal to Amazon and have failed to convince the Amazon Seller Performance Team. Banned is the end of the road and happens after sending multiple appeals that fail to win the ASPT over.
After receiving a suspension notification from Amazon you need to follow the following steps before coming up with the appeal:
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Investigating the reason behind the suspension.
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Digging into the reasons behind the reason. It is important to identify what caused the reasons for the suspension.
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Plan of action.
Make sure you address all violations. Go through your account and look at older notices or warnings you may have missed or ignored.
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