What to Do If You Get Your Amazon Account Gets Suspended or Blocked

Amazon’s Customer Metrics are targets put in place to make sure sellers adhere to Amazon’s policies to make sure Amazon continues to be a marketplace where buyers and sellers interact well and all have a positive experience. If buyers got burned by poor performing sellers, it will only take one or two such experienced before they stop shopping on Amazon. The more people who stop shopping on Amazon the harder it will be for them to get more sellers as well.

Its hard to put policies around customers, so instead they have seller rules and targets, but you might find that you have fallen below their targets for a variety of reasons which can result in the closure of your Amazon seller account. If this happens, do not panic, it is serious, but there is a course of action you can take.

First, like most areas that deal with customer complaints, you want to be calm and cool when working your replies and appeal and in dealing with the reps at Amazon. It does not matter if they are 100% wrong and shut your account down without notice…you will still need the rep of the rep at Amazon that you are dealing with. Once you get reinstated you can fire off some angry reviews about your experience, but for now, you want to keep the Amazon agents on your side.

Amazon want to know you have a plan in place to improve your seller rating First, identify why your account was suspended Review the notices they have sent. Did you have policy issues? Did it take too long to process orders? Was it an issue with the products you listed or a performance issue?

Next, determine why the issue occurred Did you list items from your supplier as shipping same or next business day, but that supplier takes 3-5 days before shipping an item? Were there policies at Amazon, such as claims, ingredients, product type, or other issues which you were not aware of that impacted the products you can sell? Let them know you are aware of the issues, and have filtered NOT ONLY the items they sent a notice on, but also other items which have yet to be found out as an issue. They will also let you know if it was a pre-fulfillment cancellation issue or a late dispatch rate so you can take the needed course of action.

Does your supplier have a high number of UPC/ASIN match issues? If so, you can look at a change in your suppliers used for Amazon or purge the one with the issue. Sometimes it might be an issue specific to a specific category or brand. If you see this trend you can easily filter out the full brand or Let them know you have stopped selling the brands which had more of the UPC/ASIN match issues.

NOTE: If you can find cases where the issue seems invalid, you should make this clear. If they send you a notice about a SKU violating a policy….this is the PERFECT time to actually review their policies again. If your research seems to show they have made an error and you find no reason for it to be listed as a violation let them know now. You should FIRST still filter the item from your Inventory Source account tools and live listings….so it does not continue to show while its being reviewed…but follow up right then with your findings before you get a ban. If you have complaints from a customer about not getting a shipment, but everything in your shipping documents and details from the supplier shows when it was shipped and delivered, these are best followed up with once the issue is first reported before you get more complaints…valid or not.

You need to document your plan of action. Let them know you are using inventory management software to aid in the help of your account with tools and filters which you have set in place (make sure you are reporting any UPC/ASIN match issues to our support team so we can help with this and use the other filters in your account to reduce the items which might have an issue or have the same issue of other policy violations noted in your Amazon email).

Let Amazon know the steps and plan you have in place. You need to demonstrate to Amazon that you are serious about adhering to their rules and they will review your appeal. Make sure you include some examples of the types of things you have filtered, how you are using the tool, or let them know you are using an inventory management company to not only update your price and quantity changes but to also help you apply the filters as well. If you found other items which violated the policy let them know you found a way to search through your item descriptions, etc to quickly identify any other items which had the same issue and have filtered them as well.

You have a large number of tools in your Inventory Source account to filter items through a variety of account controls. As issues are reported from other sellers we also help block those on your account so everyone using Inventory Source can benefit by resolving more Amazon issues before they happen on your account. We can also help you map ASINs instead of the UPC/ASIN match if you send us any SKU/ASIN file for you with your feeds or help you to scale down your listings using your account filters. It is always a good idea to use some of these filters out of an abundance of caution for the next few weeks to reduce your SKU count while your account is being reviewed or is newly renewed. You can always expand it later. When you start on Amazon, we recommend starting small and expanding from there…the same advice is true when getting reactivated.

If Amazon can clearly see that you are serious about improving your practices and maintaining their targets, they will be open to allowing you to remain as a seller on their marketplaces.

For more info, see our guide to selling on Amazon.