October 31, 2024
by Chris McCabe
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The holiday is here. Your sales are peaking and you’re raking in the revenue. It’s all you can do to keep up and run your Amazon operations smoothly during a major sales event. No one wants to handle listing takedowns, messages from Account Health about an account review, or worse yet—a suspension of any sort during Q4. But if it does happen, you must be prepared to handle it appropriately.
Above all, you want to avoid making mistakes that could prolong the agony longer and cost you revenue. A worst-case scenario is that you could take a minor emergency and turn it into a major one.
I grasp that even mentioning emergency Amazon appeals during November may bring about anxiety, stress, or make you want to change the subject. If Amazon takes down a top-selling product ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) or your entire account right before Black Friday or Cyber Monday, it will dampen your Q4 excitement fairly quickly. Since sending in hasty, error-prone appeals could undermine the chances of reinstatement or distract you from what you do best, you’ll want to ensure you’re appealing these the right way.
Anything less will likely result in a generic rejection because account investigators will decide right away they can’t accept it. They’ll stop reading and send out the basic reply indicating you failed to send “sufficient information” in.
As you contact Amazon Account Health teams to decipher the exact reasons why you’ve been denied, try to determine if your appeal was even reviewed at all. If the reps don’t see any actual reasons why an appeal got rejected, you can use that to escalate it and push for a managerial-level review. Since lower tier investigators didn’t take the time to consider your appeal properly, you can lobby for someone else to.
Generally speaking, Amazon only needs one reason to deny an appeal, so if it’s a poorly written document, or you go off-topic at all, Amazon won’t bother to go through it. That mistake is pretty common among Amazon sellers, so I’m offering tips on how to manage emergency appeals during this (and any) peak season.
How Did This Happen? Do I Just Send A Plan Of Action To Solve It Fast?
First things first. Is the suspension valid, or did Amazon make a mistake? You should dispute the restriction if Amazon erred when they took you down, but you’ll need solid evidence to demonstrate why and how they took the wrong action. If they still don’t agree or don’t acknowledge your appeal, yes—it can be escalated. Just be sure you have a significant foundation for disputing it, not just a feeling or sense that you haven’t been treated well and you want to get back up ASAP.
One natural reaction sellers have of late is to start submitting Plans of Action (POAs) whether or not it’s been asked for, or whether or not it actually makes sense to send one. Numerous sellers seem to believe that every appeal has to have a POA included, and otherwise, it won’t be accepted.
But when you dispute an account or listing suspension, you don’t send in a POA at all. Disputing it means you’re contesting the reasons and terms under which they took you down, so there’s no place for presenting new solutions and improvements. Yet these POAs often float in without prompting and confuse the issue. In many cases, it results in a standard rejection and little else. You can’t expect any quick emergency reinstatements if you’re using the wrong format.
OK, Amazon Asked For A POA – There Are Right Ways And Wrong Ways Of Doing Them
Let’s say you do need a POA and your top selling listing is down right before Black Friday. A compelling POA is only needed if Amazon requires one and specifically requests it right? But you had some complaints that you need to address, and Amazon wants a POA that clearly identifies and analyzes each root cause of the suspension.
You are not just telling a story about “what went wrong” – that’s not enough. Be sure to outline specifically what operational oversights or failures occurred, and to what degree. If your systems began failing and you did not analyze and assess immediately, to limit the damage and initiate solutions, then that becomes one of your “root causes” as well.
Make sure that when you present each corrective measure you’ve executed, you explain why and how those actions remedy the situation. Be thorough when you lay out how you’ve addressed the issue—to convince Amazon that it won’t happen again. That’s what a POA is all about.
Prove wherever possible that your fixes aren’t just in place, they are working! Amazon won’t need to come back and review you again. You solved the problem at the source. The more details you have in your POA, the more likely your emergency reinstatement request will be accepted. And if they reject you anyway, you now have a great basis to escalate and demand further review by a higher-level Amazonian.
What If I’m Attacked By A Black Hat Competitor? Isn’t That An Emergency?
Yes, it most certainly is. Since various types of attacks ramp up during holiday sales, you can’t just let Amazon take their time reviewing abuse reports. If your attacker really knows all the latest greatest sabotage techniques, you may lose a lot of revenue simply because the other seller is aware how much time Amazon takes to fix it. They may also expect you to receive a canned answer back from support or policy teams, further delaying any relevant solution.
Whether it’s a black hat seller making you look bad with bogus intellectual property or fake buyer complaints, you need to protect yourself in advance, just in case. Your competitor may be experienced with anti-competitive behavior or could hire accomplished fraudsters to attack you on their behalf. Either way, be ready to gather up as much evidence and detail you can to present (via email) to Amazon’s senior management. Prepare abuse reporting steps to take ahead of time, then you won’t be scrambling later on.
Chris McCabe is CEO and owner of ecommerceChris, Cambridge, Mass. Part Two of Emergency Amazon Appeals will appear in an early November issue of the Prosper Show Newsletter.
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