Amazon Seller Account Suspensions: How to Avoid Bans Like a Pro

This article shares the process involved in keeping your Amazon seller account and seller metrics in good health. The goal is to outline practical tactics that are vital for protecting your Amazon selling privileges and product listings from suspension.

Its primary focus for big, medium, and small Amazon sellers. Even well established Amazon sellers should be able to find one or two ideas that are worth testing right away.

Preventing account suspension

One of the trending Amazon seller concerns is seller account suspension. This is probably the most dreaded issue for Amazon sellers.

The first approach Amazon sellers should take to protect their business is to prevent suspensions altogether.

Most sellers get in trouble because they don’t stay on top of their customer metrics.

The consequence often is that you lose the Buy Box share for some or all products.

Let me give you an example from Bindwise. One type of alerts that we send to Amazon sellers are notifications when they lose the Buy Box for certain products. Alerts look like this:

After receiving this alert, sellers write us back asking typically one question:

Where can we find this on our Amazon profile and how do we reverse it?

Unlike Bindwise, Amazon is not reporting this information to you. To answer the second part we should dig deeper and try to find the cause.

One way is to be more demanding with metrics like ODR (Order Defect Rate), cancellation rate and valid tracking rate. Make sure you monitor and improve these.

Amazon has defined those metrics, so sellers should be working towards achieving and maintaining a level of customer service that meets the performance targets. Failure to improve may put your Seller Account in negative standing.

You may have A-to-Z claims, too many negative seller reviews, canceled orders, a lot of returns for a particular product, or even something as simple as customer emails that are not answered quickly enough.

If you check regularly your account health you may notice warnings there. As a rule of thumb, at this point, you should react quickly and try to fix issues.

Depending on the severity of the violation Amazon expects to hear from you immediately.

Timing is your one chance to get back on track.

Amazon Suspensions often happen because of tiny details on your seller dashboard that you may not even notice.

Performance issues are the easiest to address and fix. You need to address each issue promptly, don’t panic.

Let me give you another example from the Bindwise service. Bindwise performs 24/7 assessments of your performance metrics and takes detailed notes regarding any small issues that may lead to problems with your Amazon account. The system provides these details as immediate alerts for you, including any potential account problems before any further issues come up.

During the last 3 months over 1000 of our sellers have been making the use of it. We’ve seen how during less than 2 weeks after they started to use our Suspension Prevention Service most of our customers have fixed both small and severe unnoticed issues. Almost for every one of them the dashboard in the Seller Central became “green”.

And that is really great because it helped sellers not only to reduce the chances of getting suspended but also it improved their Buy Box share, which consequently led to growth in sales.

Performance metrics within Seller Central can help you address issues before suspension. Amazon will communicate with you solely through this channel. This is not convenient and some potentially dangerous issues may stay unnoticed.

At the end of the day, it comes down to taking a proactive approach in response to all communications with both Amazon and the customers.

Maintaining your selling privileges

Far too many sellers run their business without a proper understanding of rules and procedures needed to stay the path towards the same way Amazon manages its business.

Competitors may be committing policy violations, however, you shouldn’t consider them as a free pass to rule-breaking. While you know and see a competitor doing something you were told not to do, remember you have to keep your account in good standing and don’t focus on what your competitors are up to.

But here’s one trick. Surely, you can report other sellers, if you know they violate Amazon’s TOS. If, e.g., another seller created bad product detail page content to the detriment of all, take appropriate steps and report it to Amazon teams for corrective actions.

Getting kicked out of Amazon

The point is not to get kicked out. You have to know what you shouldn’t be doing. Here are a few reasons why Amazon suspends sellers:

• Late fulfillment — if you have too many late shipments for any reason you can be suspended
• A-to-Z Guarantee claims — if you have many unsatisfied customers using the A-to-Z Claims issue as their “last resort” with returning an item/getting a refund you can get suspended
• Late or ignored Amazon email messages — if you’re late getting back to customer questions or complaints through Amazon, you’re at danger. Don’t forget, if you include external links to your site in these messages you’ll likely get suspended
• Re-direction of a customer off Amazon — exactly, if you accidentally watermark an image with your website, include a link to your website in the description or even just reference your website that’s all it takes for listing removal or account suspension
• Duplicate ASIN/product pages — if you list the same item under multiple ASINs you can get suspended. Amazon has a very strict policy on duplicate product pages in general

Monitor these metrics daily. Each of them needs your full attention — daily!

• Order defect rate
• Policy violations
• Contact response time
• Late shipment rate

Just to name a few.

Monitor Customer Feedback

In theory Amazon documents 4 reasons that feedback can be removed:

• Obscenity
• Personal information
• Product review
• FBA sale

However, experience has shown that Amazon will remove feedback for a large variety of reasons. With a good appeal and some logic, you can get a lot of feedback taken off that doesn’t meet the 4 reasons above. Read more about the tactics on bad feedback removal.

Be serious about emails from Amazon

Whether general notifications, future rule changes, etc. While you may think there is no specific reason Amazon sent you notes, there is almost always a good reason why you get them. It’s up to you to make sense of notifications, even if that means reaching back to Amazon for further clarification.

Avoid a single point of failure

Orders shipped later or not arrived on time means a bad buying experience. Those buyers also won’t be ordering from you in the future. So the good practice is to cross-train your warehouse staff to avoid getting stuck with shipments due to the unexpected absence of a single warehouse employee.

If you cancel the orders, it will affect your metrics. If you ship more than 3 days late, it will affect your metrics.

However, the target for late shipment is higher than the target for order cancellation, so shipping late is probably better than canceling.

The real issue is what will lead to an unhappy customer since in either case, the customer can leave you negative feedback which affects a more important metric — the order defect rate.

For instance, there were cases when Amazon suspended sellers over missed shipping deadlines.

In conclusion

Once you are suspended, it can be very difficult and expensive to recover and very time-consuming to get your account or listings re-activated. It can crush your business.

There are consultancy firms that can tailor customized appeals, etc. Their average quote is around $700.

Many sellers think: I know I was playing by the rules… so how could this happen?

The best course of action is to prevent your selling privileges from being compromised in the first place.