August 1, 2025
by Chris McCabe
CAMBRIDGE, MA – While it’s never a good time to get suspended on Amazon, appeal mistakes cost more dearly now given the state of brand competition and the routine denial of most appeals. Sellers lose revenue, crucial page rank, and other benefits sorely needed in today’s marketplace. While your competitors gain from your losses, your listings face a longer recovery time and you have fewer resources to devote to fees, ads, and other badly needed tools.
Check out the top four mistakes we see, along with ideas on what to do instead. While no one enjoys hearing about suspension nightmares, solid preparation will help you avoid mistakes that plague otherwise profitable Amazon businesses.
By understanding how ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) or account review processes changed on my former teams, you will understand the lack of any real margin for error. Bad or weak appeals today lead to serious account health challenges tomorrow—up to and including reviews for a full suspension that didn’t need to happen.
1) Account Health Assurance – The Three Days You’re Given to Save Your Account
Nowadays, most sellers are part of Amazon’s “Account Health Assurance” program. Reps from those teams contact sellers to tell them they have only 72 hours to prepare a convincing appeal to keep the account active. If they fail, they are looking at full account deactivations. This deadline often leads sellers to panic into submitting inaccurate or incomplete appeals via Seller Central. If they’re not actually suspended, they may try to submit something, hope for the best, and not consider the consequences.
If you begin on the wrong foot, a torrent of appeal rejections may begin to flow. Hasty work usually produces (at best) a poorly considered or “not ready for primetime” draft. At worst, it leads to weak appeals that create additional risk of more rejections. Remember, you have a full 72 hours to submit your first appeal. Does that deadline mean you may be deactivated if you fail to appeal? Yes, of course.
But good news – it doesn’t mean that being rejected on one or two appeals submitted within 72 hours guarantees an account deactivation. Sometimes Amazon takes several days, even weeks (!) to review and respond. You need to prepare for any and all outcomes, just in case anything goes wrong.
While I could do an article on the confusion around this “72-hour” process, suffice it to say: Amazon investigators may not keep an open mind for your subsequent appeals after your initial submissions fall flat. Yes, they know that a badly composed first appeal may include incomplete content, lacking the details needed to accept and to clear you of a potential suspension.
But Amazon routinely gives up on sellers early in the process and quicker than they’d like to admit. Upgraded submissions are often handled similarly to the prior ones out of institutional laziness, requiring follow ups and escalations accordingly to resolve it at a higher level.
Expert Tip: Get it right the first time, or, at least early in the process. Don’t keep sending in new appeals based solely on something you have heard (either from an Amazonian, or another seller) about where and how to send an appeal. Don’t re-appeal with only superficial, cosmetic edits. You won’t improve the odds of acceptance by sending rehashed appeals if you’re just guessing, unsure of what to do next.
Understand how Account Health Assurance works, what it gives you in terms of benefit of the doubt and additional time to appeal, and what it cannot provide. And don’t blindly accept whatever Account Health team reps tell you regarding account current appeal status. They may be guessing too, unfortunately, or just telling you what you want to hear.
2) Avoid Thinking That Appealing Means Admitting Fault or Sending Plans of Action
Guess again if you think an Amazon appeal simply means taking responsibility, admitting fault, and submitting a Plan of Action so that you can tell them what they want to hear and go back to selling. The scariest conversations I have had this entire year, and even back into 2024, were with sellers who didn’t even understand the difference between sending in an improvement plan (a POA for short) which acknowledges fault– versus disputing the legitimacy of the suspension to begin with. This is the biggest mistake made right now in seller appeals for reinstatement.
Many sellers want to dispute the suspension threat, but don’t know how. If you fly blind and wing it after one token rejection, don’t just ask Amazon account health reps to tell you how to handle it. And don’t fail to realize this: a rep may just tell you the easiest thing available—to acknowledge fault and stop resisting the validity of the action taken.
That could be the worst possible thing you could do. It’s hard to reverse course later and dispute it after you’ve already acknowledged having violated a policy, right? It’s not believable, and it makes it look like you don’t grasp the situation.
This is never more true than on review manipulation suspension appeals, since we’ve encountered numerous brands caught trying to pick a path to appeal only to double back on it. I can’t tell you how hard it is to push Amazon to ignore a prior acknowledgement of wrongdoing where none may have been present at all. They don’t go for flip-flopping.
Expert Tip: Before you do ANY appealing, decide on the right approach to resolving a suspension threat. Are you able to dispute it convincingly? Is that even an option? Do Amazon teams tell you that disputing it has no chance and that your ONLY way to resolve it is to acknowledge it or submit an appeal regarding future prevention measures? Know before you start.
I know you may answer some of these with “I don’t know” but that’s what we’re here for, to help guide you through that process. It’s better to do nothing than to guess and submit appeals that have almost no chance of success. Only send Amazon a POA if they ask for one specifically and won’t accept anything else to clear you.
3) Popular Misconceptions about Escalating Stuck Appeals
As we often tell those who come to our Prosper Show booth with stuck ASIN or account suspension problems, if you ask low level internal teams at Amazon for help with an escalation, you get a low level answer. They don’t have the means to properly escalate anything for you, and the word has become overused by those who don’t understand the meaning of the term.
In a few recent cases, we resolved stuck cases after the sellers had focused only on where to send an escalation they put together, instead of on the quality of what goes into one. For almost all of them, their failed Seller Central appeals were emailed with the same basic content to a few different Amazonians, citing unfairness and asking for help. We took over to make sure escalations were treated as requests for high-level reviews by senior management, or executive-level Amazonians, not destined for “run of the mill” staff. Those escalations, emailed in with customized language for the audience targeted, turned the tide.
If you plan to send an escalation appeal anywhere meaningful, you must draw attention to specific reasons why you were forced to appeal it via email and include the details that investigators missed. The proof must be attached and well presented to increase the chances that you’ll be reinstated (and after one attempt or two, not twenty that take a month and a half to complete).
Expert Tip: Don’t dwell on the fact that appeal review teams send you generic messages that don’t say anything: amazon teams know ALL about those. That’s a waste of their time, and of your “appeal space” on the email. Instead, push for new eyes and proper consideration to resolve it. You’re looking to motivate them to reinstate you, and they likely need to find a reason to agree with you, and to care enough to read it. Don’t just vent or stray from the core topic.
Instead, introduce the problem briefly to prove you understand the nature of the suspension and make it clear: are you disputing or acknowledging it? Since Amazon investigators occasionally miss important details, call out the main two or three main points in your appeal that they should have accepted.
If a prior team failed to appreciate the value of the specific details presented, propose a more accurate approach. Be sure to present info professionally, succinctly and with specifics in a bulleted timeline from past submissions. Emphasize any conflicting info from the Amazon side about their previous denials.
4) Are appeals to Legal teams the way to get attention?
Several recent clients explained when they first reached out to us that they wanted us to push Amazon Legal teams to accept their reinstatement appeals. Many believed that going directly to Legal, and skipping the usual escalation channels, helped them battle Amazon on even ground. Others even believed it gave them some kind of upper hand. They wanted to start there, instead of using it as a last resort when nothing else worked.
How often have you heard of Amazon Legal caving in or accepting defeat? Would you not have heard about it a lot, if so many law firms succeeded in doing this? Remember, when you sign Amazon’s BSA, you accept Amazon’s Terms Of Services for third-party sellers. You’ve already agreed not to sue the company, so there’s no pressuring Legal teams unless you think you’ve caught Amazon violating the law themselves.
Either way, there is no legal letter in existence that forces Amazon into giving up and reinstating on the spot. Most of those get a reply that serves to deflect any legal arguments as baseless. Many legal letters get the same response that “letters to Jeff” or Andy do. The idea that a seller will be taken more seriously simply because they contacted Legal is a fallacy. If you have a legal argument based on a legally thin restriction, you may have a case to escalate this way.
Legal threats to sue Amazon have no punch and most sellers don’t have the patience (nor cash) to go through arbitration. And, after all, if it’s not an intellectual property issue, arbitration is the only thing you’d need a lawyer for.
If you find an attorney with previous experience strong arming Amazon Legal to accept their arguments to reverse a prior determination, ask them to show you that precedent. If they mention having legal contacts at Amazon, make sure you know who they mean. Writing letters to a specific lawyer on the opposing side doesn’t mean it will help.
If the plan is to send Legal executives the same desperation emails you sent elsewhere, don’t bother. You’re trying to get your appeal reviewed by someone with proper training and the authority to reinstate, not random or lower tier legal staff.
Expert Tip: You’ve ignored or cut out many possible escalation appeals paths when you send letters straight to Amazon Legal. Other execs or senior managers won’t touch it or feel the need to work on it if they see in account annotations that your appeal has been locked to Legal teams.
Conclusion: Since most Amazon sellers can’t afford to risk long-term listing takedowns and full account suspensions due to ill-considered appeals, avoid making these core mistakes. Once you get an account or ASIN back up and selling, you will have the ability to focus on sales growth and brand expansion. If you ignore all current appeal trends now, you’ll kick yourself later for making avoidable mistakes that significantly damaged your odds of reinstatement.
Chris McCabe is founder of ecommerceChris, Cambridge, Mass.
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