Seller Performance Solutions: Recent Episodes
ecommerceChris
This is the definitive podcast that covers performance and policy teams from the perspective of a former Seller Performance team member, and former Amazon employee Chris McCabe. Leah McHugh nails down analysis of listing compliance violations and presents viable solutions to troubleshoot product takedowns.
We created Seller Performance Solutions to help sellers better understand the inner workings of the team I worked on at Amazon, and to help 3rd party marketplace sellers cope with account and listing suspensions. We answer questions around things like, How does Seller Performance investigate a seller before taking them down? What do they need to see in an appeal, to reactivate the account for future selling? What are common mistakes that sellers make trying to get reinstated on Amazon?
Planning your trip to Amazon Accelerate from Sept 22nd -24th? Don't let your 20 minutes turn into glorified note-taking with zero resolutions. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh share actionable strategies on how to get real results from Amazon reps. Discover why rep incentives lead to passive conversations, how to structure an active game plan for account health and compliance issues, and how framing your problems as systemic errors can jumpstart stalled escalations.
Is Amazon threatening to take down your entire account over a single listing issue?
In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down Amazon’s massive surge in Evasive Behavior enforcement. He explains why even 8-figure brands are falling into dangerous traps and why blaming your agency or VAs won't save your business from an account-level ban ahead of Q4.
📧 Need help avoiding suspension—or getting reinstated the right way? Reach out at support@ecommercechris.com 👍 Like, comment, and subscribe for weekly episodes with real talk for serious Amazon sellers. https://www.ecommercechris.com
Amazon is rolling out major changes to Seller Assistant, abuse reporting, intellectual property complaints, and internal enforcement tools, but will these upgrades actually solve seller problems? In this episode, Chris McCabe shares his biggest takeaways from Amazon’s Seller Growth Summit in New York, including conversations with Amazon executives about AI-powered support, repeat abuse offenders, false IP claims, and Brand Registry revocations.
📧 Need help avoiding suspension—or getting reinstated the right way? Reach out at support@ecommercechris.com 👍 Like, comment, and subscribe for weekly episodes with real talk for serious Amazon sellers. https://www.ecommercechris.com
Stop guessing, stop copy-pasting, and stop letting AI write your executive escalations. With Q4 just around the corner and brand margins tighter than ever, there is absolutely zero margin for error on Amazon.
In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down the reality of preparing for the high-stakes holiday season, why generic appeals are a death sentence for your ASINs, and how to successfully navigate Amazon’s broken support systems.
Heading to the Seller Growth Summit in NYC on July 16th? When the day wraps up at 5pm, head over to Connolly's Pub & Restaurant and join us for a laid-back happy hour from 5pm to 7pm: https://luma.com/3bjv389f
📧 Need help avoiding suspension—or getting reinstated the right way? Reach out at support@ecommercechris.com 👍 Like, comment, and subscribe for weekly episodes with real talk for serious Amazon sellers. https://www.ecommercechris.com
Amazon is cracking down on compliance violations and evasive behavior, and the sellers who try to “fix” problems with Photoshop or AI may be putting their entire accounts at risk.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh explain how abuse reporting incorrectly can lead to Brand Registry revocation, and what sellers should understand before escalating compliance or abuse issues to Amazon.
Heading to the Seller Growth Summit in NYC on July 16th? When the day wraps up at 5pm, head over to Connolly's Pub & Restaurant and join us for a laid-back happy hour from 5pm to 7pm: https://luma.com/3bjv389f
📧 Need help avoiding suspension—or getting reinstated the right way? Reach out at support@ecommercechris.com 👍 Like, comment, and subscribe for weekly episodes with real talk for serious Amazon sellers. https://www.ecommercechris.com
Prime Day is over, but the real question for Amazon sellers is what comes next.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down why this year’s Prime Day felt different, and why sellers need to start thinking about Q4 now, not later. It's time to ask the uncomfortable but necessary question: what could put you out of business?
Prime Day is not the time to test bad Amazon escalation advice.
In this episode, Chris McCabe explains why sellers cannot afford slow reactions or repeated appeal mistakes when listings go down during peak sales periods. If you have already wasted precious hours on botched escalations, copy-and-paste legal templates, or dead-end executive emails, learn how to quickly pivot your strategy and deploy an accurate appeal before your Prime Day and Q4 momentum are completely ruined.
Just days before Prime Day, e-commerce brands are facing a massive surge in automated compliance takedowns, price-scraping errors, and aggressive competitor sabotage. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Andrew Morgans of Marknology to break down the dark reality of marketplace compliance and what it actually takes to defend your brand. Questions for Drew? Reach out to him at https://www.marknology.com/
We're just days away from Prime Day, and the black hat attacks and bot glitches are already hitting earlier and harder than last year.
In this episode, Chris McCabe discusses exactly how competitors are weaponizing miscategorization complaints, messing with ASIN data, and triggering fake compliance issues to knock you offline before the big sale.
Halfway through the year, "uncertainty" remains the defining word for Amazon sellers.
In this episode, Chris McCabe is joined by Chris Moe from Cartograph to break down how global price shocks and rising fuel costs are squeezing margins forcing operations to rethink their strategies, and mapping out what it takes for low seven-figure brands to survive and maintain profitability through the rest of the year.
Questions for Chris Moe? Reach out at chris@gocartograph.com
As Prime Day 2026 approaches, Amazon has ramped up food safety and compliance enforcement, using automated systems to flag listings based on as little as one customer comment. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down the shift toward zero-explanation appeals and the rising threat of competitor sabotage.
Need help avoiding suspension—or getting reinstated the right way? Reach out at support@ecommercechris.com 🌐 https://www.ecommercechris.com
Is your Amazon PPC structure ready for the biggest traffic spikes of 2026?
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Elizabeth Greene of Junglr to break down the most common PPC mistakes that drain seller budgets and explains why "setting up Prime Day campaigns" at the last minute is a recipe for disaster.
Questions for Elizabeth? Reach out to her at https://junglr.com/
Prime Day can make or break a brand’s summer sales momentum, but too many sellers wait until the last minute to deal with compliance issues, account health risks, and listing vulnerabilities.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down the biggest mistakes Amazon sellers are making right now ahead of Prime Day 2026
Is your Amazon business actually sellable? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Stephanie Khalikyar of Uncapped to expose the hard truths about what sophisticated buyers are actually looking for in 2026.
Stephanie breaks down why "8-figure sellers" are often less profitable than boutique brands and explains the "Who, Not How" framework for scaling without burning out.
Is your Amazon brand hitting a wall? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Andrew Maff of BlueTuskr to discuss the harsh reality of selling on Amazon in 2026. The "Golden Era" of simply slapping a label on a generic product and watching the money roll in is officially over. With FBA fees rising 10% year-over-year and CPCs climbing steadily, many brands are finding their margins evaporated. Chris and Andrew pull back the curtain on why Amazon is shifting its focus toward the deeper supply chain and why the most successful sellers are actually moving their traffic off the platform.
Most sellers are still optimizing keywords. The top 1%? They’re building audiences, tracking lifetime value, and using data you probably aren’t touching. Brent Zahradnik joins Chris McCabe to reveal how the top 1% of sellers are using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and custom AI tools to stay profitable while their competitors drown in margin compression.
Is the "Amazon Dream" dying for small sellers? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Jed Rawson, CEO of Pirawna and Uptick, to discuss the brutal reality of the 2026 Amazon marketplace and the strategies that separate the winners from the losers.
The era of "set it and forget it" on Amazon is over. As margins shrink and complexity grows, many sellers are falling into analysis paralysis, stuck waiting for the perfect data point while their competitors seize market share. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Jeff Cohen, Chief Business Development Officer at Skai and former Principal Tech Evangelist at Amazon, to discuss why sellers need to shift into a mindset that treats complexity as their greatest opportunity and how the "disappearing middle" of the market is leaving a void that can only be filled by brands willing to master advanced tools and strategies.
Is your Amazon business running on a "patchwork" of short-term strategies? In 2026, the margin for error on Amazon has never been thinner. Chris McCabe sits down with Cas Sanderson of Cartograph to break down the Amazon mistakes that quietly drain sales, waste ad spend, and put long-term growth at risk.
Amazon is no longer the same game it was two years ago. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down what they saw at Prosper Show 2026, and why the gap between top sellers and everyone else is getting wider fast. The biggest shift? There’s no real “middle” anymore. You’re either scaling with strategy, capital, and precision… or you’re getting squeezed on margins and falling behind. If you don't have a viable strategy for 2026, you're already behind the curve.
As black hat tactics evolve, sellers are finding it harder and harder to protect their listings.
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Shane Barker of TraceFuse to pull back the curtain on the increasingly sophisticated world of Amazon review manipulation, and discuss what it actually takes to win a dispute in today’s high-stakes ecosystem.
Is your brand ready for the "Agentic AI" shopping revolution?
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Matt Kostan from ProductPinion to break down how agentic AI shopping, Amazon Rufus, and LLM-powered search are reshaping ecommerce. They discuss what this shift means for Amazon sellers, brands, and listing strategy, including how to stand out when AI models are choosing which products to recommend.
Are you getting "mush" back from Amazon Seller Support? In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh dive deep into the current state of Amazon Seller Performance as they prepare for the 2026 Prosper Show and MDS Inspire. The landscape has changed: Account Health leadership is shifting, and the escalation strategies of the past are being replaced by AI-driven decision trees. Chris and Leah break down why your current appeal strategy might be failing and what you need to change before your next submission.
Is your Amazon brand being managed by an expert, or a $2,000-a-month "ghost" agency? if you’re paying pennies for account management, you’re likely getting exactly what you paid for.
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Andrew Morgans of Marknology to discuss the trend of agencies slashing retainers to stay alive, the reality of offshore outsourcing, and why brands are finally hitting a "come to mama" moment with their in-house teams.
Think you know Amazon’s rules? Think again. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down the surprising results of Leah’s recent Amazon Policy Quiz. If you’re a brand owner or high-volume seller, the data is alarming: even experienced sellers are failing critical compliance questions that lead to immediate account suspension.
Is Amazon product search dead? Are keywords obsolete? Is AI about to rewrite the rules of eCommerce overnight? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Bradley Sutton of Helium10 to break down the truth behind Amazon’s AI-powered search assistant, Rufus, and what the data actually shows.
Most sellers think they’re playing a "cat and mouse" game with Amazon’s TOS, but many times they're actually playing with federal law.
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Andrew Smith of Swapt to unpack one of the hottest and most misunderstood topics in eCommerce right now: how brands can encourage repeat purchases, improve customer education, and build long-term growth without crossing compliance lines.
Questions for Andrew? Reach out at https://swaptqr.com/ or reach out to him directly at andrew@swaptqr.com
Join us in NYC on Thursday, Feb 12 for an in-person, hands-on meetup built for serious brand owners navigating tighter enforcement and intensifying competition. See Andrew Swapt LIVE for his session on "How to Increase Customer Loyalty on Amazon." Tickets + details: https://luma.com/bgw413hl
Amazon enforcement is getting stricter, and a lot of sellers are still getting tripped up by the same avoidable compliance gaps. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh talk about what’s actually causing suspensions right now, why “longer appeals” often backfire, and how the rise of AI-generated advice is leading sellers to submit misinformation (including completely made-up “laws”) into cases.
Are you losing thousands in daily revenue due to an Amazon ASIN deactivation? In this episode, Chris and Leah dive into the "compliance trenches" to discuss why so many Amazon sellers are failing their appeals in early 2026, breaking down the most expensive mistakes sellers make when hit with restricted product flags or safety concerns.
Is ChatGPT helping or hurting your Amazon appeal? Many sellers are now using AI tools to scrape the web for information on how to handle specific ASIN takedowns or account suspensions. They treat ChatGPT like a crystal ball, asking it to predict the viability of an appeal. In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down this alarming trend of Amazon sellers outsourcing their judgment to ChatGPT and then acting surprised when Amazon sends back a boilerplate denial. AI tools scrape the internet. The internet is full of confused sellers, failed appeals, and bad assumptions. If you base your strategy on that, you’re stacking the deck against yourself.
Is your Amazon Account Health strategy simply "waiting it out"? In this episode, Chris McCabe exposes the dangerous reality of the "180-Day Roll-Off" strategy. Many sellers believe that if they ignore a violation for six months, it simply vanishes. The truth? That violation is likely sitting dormant in your history, ready to trigger a suspension the moment a new complaint comes in. We are seeing Amazon teams pull data from as far back as 2023 to justify suspensions today. If you are sitting on your hands or clicking "Acknowledge" just to clear your dashboard, you are painting a target on your back.
Amazon doesn’t “keep reviewing” your appeal. They decide whether you’re serious, competent, or confused, and they decide it fast. Once you submit a weak, rushed, or inconsistent appeal, your case drops into the generic-denial lane. From there, every follow-up gets skimmed, recycled, and dismissed while your sales bleed out during Q4 and beyond. In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down why changing strategy mid-appeal, outsourcing blindly, or sending AI-generated filler destroys credibility with reviewers and quietly eliminates escalation leverage.
Cyber Five is finally behind us — and for once, the sky didn’t fall. In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down what actually happened across Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the peak week that followed, and explains why abuse attempts were lower this year, how Amazon’s internal teams seem to be improving their detection game, and why seller-led reporting is becoming a real force multiplier inside the marketplace. He also digs into the problems that did surface, suspicious refund spikes, targeted negative review attacks, and illicit keyword injections, and what sellers must do to escalate those issues correctly without wasting time on dead-end Support cases.
This Holiday season, enforcement teams are in full zero-tolerance mode, and sellers are getting hit for mistakes they didn’t even realize were violations. If you think “gray areas” still exist, or that Amazon is too busy to notice what you’re doing this week, you’re already in trouble.
In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down exactly what Amazon is cracking down on this Black Friday: abuse reports that boomerang back onto your own account, sloppy listing edits made under pressure, appeals that miss the point, and compliance shortcuts that get flagged instantly during peak season. When enforcement is this aggressive, one wrong move can drop your top ASIN (and your Q4 revenue) with no warning.
Too many brands are going scorched-earth on Amazon and it’s blowing up in their faces. In this episode, Chris McCabe explains why aggressive tactics against resellers, sloppy counterfeit claims, and “secret” removal services are triggering enforcement actions against the brand itself. Chris breaks down where sellers go wrong: unproven counterfeit allegations, missing test-buy evidence, misuse of Brand Registry, and blind trust in consultants who won’t disclose their methods.
Evasive listing tweaks are triggering suspensions at record speed. One tiny change to a title, one “quick fix” from a VA, or one unnoticed ASIN edit can flip your entire account from green to red overnight. In this episode, Chris breaks down the exact behaviors setting off Amazon’s enforcement systems: misbranding, hidden detail-page edits, restricted-product evasion, illicit ASIN merges, brand registry mismatches, and competitor-driven sabotage you might not catch until it’s too late.
Some sellers are finding out the hard way that Amazon’s AI has no idea what their products are. Chris and Leah dig into what’s really breaking down inside Amazon’s compliance system, how bad categorization, automation, and silence from support teams are creating a perfect storm right before Q4.
We’re already in Q4 (peak chaos season) and Amazon is rolling out massive layoffs. When 30,000 people leave in the middle of the busiest quarter of the year, sellers could feel it first. In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down what these cuts actually mean for sellers, how internal churn impacts Account Health and enforcement, and what you can do now to stay ahead of the fallout.
It’s Q4, and “escalation” is officially the most overused word in Sellerland.
Everyone’s talking about “taking it up the chain,” but most sellers are just sending the same broken appeal to more inboxes. In this episode, Chris and Leah break down what areal Amazon escalation is, and what it’s not.
When one Amazon marketplace goes down, they can all go down. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down how international marketplace issues—like Brazil verification failures, account linkage, and Build International Listings (BIL) errors—are deactivating U.S. seller accounts right before Q4.
Think you’re “mostly” following Amazon’s rules?
In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down why “almost compliant” is a fast route to suspension in Amazon’s new zero-tolerance era. Amazon’s patience for gray-area behavior is officially gone.
Chris explains what really triggers enforcement, how to build a bulletproof appeal, and why relying on shortcuts, masterminds, or cheap Fiverr fixes is a guaranteed way to lose your account in 2025.
Drowning in tool fatigue? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Yoni Mazor of GoFlow to cut through the chaos and map a simple operating system approach for Amazon-native brands to scale across Walmart, Shopify, eBay, and fast-growing channels like TikTok Shop, Temu, and Shein.
Sellers came home from Accelerate buzzing about “account health improvements” and AI helpers, but what really changes your odds on reinstatement? In this epis0ode Chris McCabe debriefs Leah McHugh on what he heard directly from Amazon teams and execs: tighter intake rules at the on-site support desk, a push to explain denials better, and a higher bar for evidence on review-manipulation cases.
Before you chase rank, name the margin you’re willing to sacrifice. In this episode, Chris McCabe sit's down with Michael Maher of Cartology to break down when to keep work in-house vs. hire an agency (and dodge “agency burn”) and how to set goals you’ll actually honor when rank and margin pull in opposite directions
Amazon just pulled the plug on FBA prep — now what? If you’ve relied on Amazon to handle labeling, packaging, and prep, 2025 just threw you a curveball. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Ephraim Ausch of Tactical Logistic Solutions to unpack Amazon’s decision to exit the FBA prep business — and what smart sellers are doing in response.
When it comes to Amazon suspensions, your first move matters more than you think. Amazon’s enforcement is only getting tougher. Sellers are seeing escalations hit walls faster than ever, especially as we head into Q4. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down the rising complexity of Amazon appeals, why Account Health reps are pushing bad advice, and how DIY appeals are killing your chances of reinstatement.
Amazon is set to deprecate over 7,000 variation themes starting September 2nd, and if you're not prepared, your ASIN families could be split apart without notice.
In this episode, Chris and Leah dive deep into what this massive variation update actually means for sellers. They break down how to identify if your listings are at risk, what happens when variation themes are retired, and why misuse (even accidental) can now lead to suspension with no Plan of Action option.
If you're waiting until October to start prepping for Q4, you're already playing catch-up. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Keith Hartnett of Better World Products to talk through what brands need to be doing right now to avoid stockouts, optimize listings, and prevent the kind of last-minute chaos that kills margins.
Things look good on the surface.. sales are up, listings are live, ads are running. But when you check the numbers, you’re barely breaking even. Or worse, losing money.
In this episode, Chris McCabe talks with Jay Lagarde from eComEngine about why profitability on Amazon has gotten so much harder and what you can actually do about it. They cover everything from rising fees and ad spend to the risks of shortcuts, staff turnover, and chasing the wrong metrics.
Q4 is the most unforgiving time of year for Amazon sellers, and even small mistakes can lead to major losses. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Andrew Morgans of Marknology break down why a rushed approach won’t cut it, covering real examples of promo failures, listing suspensions, and delayed responses that cost sellers thousands. If you want to stay competitive and protected, now’s the time to get strategic.
AI is transforming the way customers shop online, and Amazon sellers can’t afford to ignore it. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Emma Schermer Tamir to explore how ChatGPT, AI search, and AI-driven product discovery are changing the e‑commerce landscape.
Learn how these trends will impact Amazon listings, product visibility, buyer behavior and what sellers must do to stay ahead of the competition.
Amazon sellers— Prime Day may be over, but the real work starts now. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Daniela Bolzmann of Mindful Goods to break down what they saw during Prime Week 2025, what went wrong for sellers, and how to avoid those same pitfalls heading into Q4.
Is Amazon’s AI about to wipe out millions of listings? GS1 barcode enforcement isn’t new, and we’ve been warning sellers for years. In this episode, Chris and Leah cut through the noise about UPCs, GS1 and AI "crackdowns."
Everyone thinks they’re invisible… until Amazon proves otherwise.
In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down what’s really happening behind the scenes of Prime Day... account suspensions triggered by sloppy review hacks, sudden takedowns from competitor reports, and why Europe’s sellers are getting hit hard than ever.
Some sellers are still gambling with Prime Day. They’re adding risky keywords, ignoring compliance issues, but their competitors are watching and waiting for the right moment to report them. In this episode, Chris and Leah discuss how sellers are getting caught pushing the limits on compliance, how black hat tactics spike during big sales events, and why second-time violations are landing people in dispute-only appeal paths with no recovery.
Prime Day’s around the corner and sellers are already seeing bogus flags, listing takedowns, and last-minute compliance requests. In this episode, Chris and Leah break down what’s hitting accounts now, and what sellers need to know (and fix) before it’s too late.
Amazon’s internal teams are triggering suspensions over actions they don’t fully understand. In this episode, Chris and Leah break down recent cases of variation abuse flags, catalog errors, and Brand Registry misuse, where sellers followed Amazon’s own guidance and STILL got suspended.
Missed Seller Velocity France? In this episode, Chris and Leah break down the top takeaways, key Amazon compliance updates, and what every seller needs to know about doing business in Europe in 2025.
How are top Amazon sellers weathering the latest round of tariff shocks and global market shifts? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Matt Kostan of ProductPinion to talk about practical ways brands are boosting their conversion rates, stretching budgets, and surviving shifting trade policies.
Ever wondered how to protect your Amazon listings from review abuse? In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Shane Barker, founder of TraceFuse, to discuss how sellers can effectively remove fraudulent reviews, safeguard their listings, and sharing insights on recent competitor abuse tactics—and how to fight back.
The days of easy wins on Amazon are over, and those who don’t adapt will get left behind. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Josh Hadley, who shares how he transformed his brand from being 98% reliant on Amazon to just 70%—all in under a year. His strategy? Building demand off Amazon through smart omnichannel growth.
Amazon is cracking down on shady review tactics, and many sellers are finding themselves caught off guard. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh expose the real risks behind popular strategies like rebates, influencer campaigns, and product inserts. Think your methods are safe? Think again.
Things move fast in the Amazon world—too fast for many sellers to keep up. In this episode, Chris McCabe talks with Brent Zahradnik of AMZ Pathfinder and SellerPlex on how to stay focused amidst constant changes, and why events like Seller Velocity are more valuable than ever—especially when sellers are hungry for real strategy, not just surface-level advice.
With tariffs rising, is expanding to Europe your best move? More Amazon sellers should be eyeing Europe, not just as a backup plan, but as a real growth strategy. In this episode, Chris McCabe talks with Vincenzo Toscano of Ecomcy about how Amazon sellers are pivoting fast, and what it really takes to make a European expansion work.
What does it actually take to survive—and thrive—as an Amazon seller in 2025? Chris McCabe sits down with Brandon Young (DataDive, Seller Systems, CampEcom) to talk about the real challenges sellers are facing right now: tariffs, rising costs, sourcing shakeups, and a rapidly shifting global market. Brandon breaks down why the days of casual, side-hustle selling are over—and why sellers who want to stick around need to level up their strategy. Plus: a preview of what to expect at this year’s CampEcom in Cancun.
While everyone’s chasing growth, too many sellers are gambling with compliance, cutting corners, and hoping for the best. In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh break down the mounting pressure from both Amazon and the market—and why the smartest brands are treating this moment as a make-or-break turning point. If you’re still hoping for a return to the old Amazon, you’re going to fall behind.
In this post-Prosper recap, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh dive into the most common (and dangerous) assumptions sellers are still making in 2025, breaking down what sellers are still getting wrong—and why it’s costing them more than they realize.
Most Amazon sellers don’t permanently lose their listings because of bad luck—they lose them because they mishandle the recovery. In this episode, Chris McCabe breaks down how sellers unintentionally bury their chances of reinstatement under a mountain of misfires and why a disorganized approach often leads to silence from Amazon.
Amazon sellers are facing a new reality in 2025—one where outdated tactics don’t just fail; they make things worse. In this episode, Chris McCabe uncovers the biggest mistakes sellers are making when trying to reinstate their listings and accounts, and why Amazon’s dispute-first approach means old strategies won’t cut it anymore.
As Amazon’s enforcement evolves, sellers are turning to AI to draft appeals—but is it making suspensions worse? Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh uncover why AI-generated appeals are often ineffective, how Amazon detects them, and why a strategic, human approach is still the key to reinstatement.
Amazon’s compliance policies are stricter than ever, and sellers need to stay ahead of enforcement trends to avoid costly suspensions. With Prosper Show 2025 around the corner, Leah McHugh will be taking the stage at the Amazon Compliance Lightning Round to help sellers navigate these challenges and protect their accounts.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh discuss the biggest compliance pitfalls that lead to account suspensions, restricted product issues, and appeal dead ends.
How do Amazon sellers adapt to the relentless changes in policies and fees? In this episode, Chris McCabe speaks with Bradley Sutton from Helium 10, exploring effective strategies to handle Amazon's unpredictable environment. They discuss utilizing comprehensive data analytics and equipping sellers with the necessary tools to succeed amid frequent shifts.
AI is increasingly involved in the processes of appeals, investigations, and listing management, which is leading to unforeseen challenges that can directly impact seller operations.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh discuss how these systems, while designed to streamline operations, often result in errors and miscommunications that can jeopardize a seller's standing on the platform.
Amazon's internal confusion can severely disrupt seller operations, and many are learning this the hard way. From policy enforcement to compliance, the disarray within Amazon's systems often leads to miscommunication and errors that sellers must navigate carefully.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh dive deep into the tangled web of Amazon's seller support system. They discuss the alarming regularity with which Amazon representatives acknowledge issues without having the means or access to resolve them. They highlight the critical importance of understanding Amazon’s internal processes to prevent common missteps in seller communications.
Amazon's internal confusion can severely disrupt seller operations, and many are learning this the hard way. From policy enforcement to compliance, the disarray within Amazon's systems often leads to miscommunication and errors that sellers must navigate carefully.
In this episode, Chris McCabe & Leah McHugh discuss the critical importance of understanding Amazon’s internal processes to prevent common missteps in seller communications. They delve into strategies for effective escalation, the dangers of falsifying compliance documentation, and why early intervention in compliance matters is crucial.
Navigating Amazon's New Reimbursement Policy Changes
In this episode, Chris McCabe (ecommerceChris) and Yoni Mazor (GETIDA) delve into the significant changes to Amazon's reimbursement policy set to take effect on March 10th. The shift from reimbursement based on retail price to manufacturing cost for lost or damaged inventory has huge financial impacts for sellers. Sellers need strategies to mitigate substantial revenue losses and increased financial pressures. These changes also mean that sensitive product cost information must be shared with Amazon.
00:00 Introduction
00:29 Reimbursement Policy Changes Overview
01:44 Detailed Explanation of Policy Changes
03:17 Mathematical Impact on Sellers
04:22 Strategic Adjustments for Sellers
08:12 Amazon's Broader Cost Restructuring
12:45 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Amazon sellers, are you prepared for the challenges of 2025? In this episode of Seller Performance Solutions, Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris talks with Eva Hart from Jungle Scout about the key financial hurdles facing sellers today. Discover how inflation, rising costs, and increased competition impact your bottom line—and learn actionable strategies to navigate these challenges. Gear up for Q1 or plan for long-term success.
In this episode of Seller Performance Solutions, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh dive into the latest compliance trends affecting Amazon sellers. They explore GS1 barcode issues, misaligned brand names, and the growing challenges with Amazon’s automation-driven review processes. The discussion highlights common pitfalls, such as reliance on inaccurate Amazon advice, the risks of faulty compliance documentation, and ineffective appeals. Leah shares insights on navigating stricter enforcement, particularly around product compliance and regulatory changes.
AI is changing the game on Amazon, and sellers who adapt will thrive. From listing optimization to ad strategy, staying ahead is no longer optional.
In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Vincenzo Toscano of Ecomcy to explore how sellers can leverage Amazon’s new AI tool, Rufus, to gain a competitive edge. From reverse-engineering AI to optimizing listings for better recommendations, Vincenzo shares insider tips to help sellers navigate this new landscape.
They also dive into strategies for cutting rising ad costs, including creative approaches with TikTok and DSP, and discuss why 2025 could bring fresh opportunities for those who master AI-driven SEO and PPC. Whether you're scaling a brand or just staying afloat, this episode delivers actionable insights to future-proof your business.
Q4 is crunch time. Precision and preparation make all the difference between smooth sailing and unexpected chaos. With ad suppression, pricing pitfalls, and peak season pressure, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
In this episode, Chris McCabe chats with Adam Mellott of BTR Media to tackle the most pressing challenges sellers face during the holiday season. From avoiding ad suppression disasters to managing last-minute pricing adjustments, Adam shares his expert insights on keeping campaigns running strong during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond.
As Q4 continues to ramp up, Amazon sellers are exploring new ways to boost visibility and capture more sales during this high-stakes season. TikTok has quickly transformed from a social app to a powerful marketing platform attracting a diverse audience, making it a perfect stage for e-commerce.
In this episode, Chris McCabe talks with Michelle Barnum Smith of TikTok Shop Sellers, who reveals how TikTok's unique, authenticity-focused platform can open new doors for your Amazon brand, sharing strategies for using TikTok Shop to connect with engaged audiences, drive brand awareness, and direct more traffic to Amazon listings.
Amazon sellers are gearing up for one of the most competitive quarters of the year, where every detail counts, and impactful content can be the key to unlocking record-breaking sales. In this episode, Chris McCabe sits down with Rafael Veloz from Share It Studio to discuss proven strategies for creating high-impact Amazon content that drives results during this crucial season, including planning ahead, optimizing hero images, and leveraging A+ content to capture attention and increase conversions.
With Q4 upon us, Amazon sellers are entering a high-stakes season where smart content strategies and timely listing adjustments are essential for standing out. In this episode, Chris McCabe speaks with Daniela Bolzmann from Mindful Goods to discuss how brands can maximize their Amazon listings during peak season with insights on optimizing A+ content and tips for making incremental improvements to drive revenue.
As Amazon sellers prepare for the peak Q4 season, understanding how to maintain account health is more important than ever. In this episode, Chris and Leah explore the complexities of Amazon’s account health dashboard, addressing the confusion around resolving individual ASIN violations and what sellers can do to avoid account-wide suspensions.
Amazon is cracking down on altered or falsified compliance documents, and sellers are feeling the impact. Whether the manipulation comes from suppliers, manufacturers, or third parties, the consequences for sellers are serious.
In this episode, Chris McCabe & Leah McHugh tackle the growing problem of fake or altered compliance documentation, covering the key steps you need to take to verify compliance documents with labs directly and why trusting unverified paperwork is a risky move.
When selling in international markets, sellers face significant compliance challenges that vary widely from one region to another. Each marketplace has its unique regulations, which can impact everything from product listings to shipping methods.
In this episode, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh discuss the crucial role of compliance documentation and the importance of understanding regional regulations to maintain a competitive advantage on Amazon.
Amazon sellers are increasingly baffled by Amazon's inconsistent policy enforcement, with some accounts ending up suspended while others with the same issues remain active. In this episode, Chris and Leah examine the confusion surrounding these enforcement discrepancies, focusing on cases where sellers are deactivated while the problematic listings continue to stay live with other sellers. They discuss why this inconsistency occurs, the challenges Amazon’s internal processes face, and how sellers can protect their businesses in this unpredictable environment.
Amazon sellers are increasingly frustrated with the unpredictable appeals process, with many stuck in long backlogs or facing rejections without any clear reason, often left in the dark by Amazon’s support teams. In this episode, Chris & Leah take a deep dive into the current state of Amazon’s appeals process, examining why so many appeals are being denied with little to no feedback, and explore the ripple effect this has on sellers trying to keep their businesses afloat.
In a surprising move, Amazon has started to terminate select vendor agreements as part of its strategy to optimize operations and serve customers more effectively. This abrupt shift could result in severe operational disruptions and a steep learning curve for established vendors.
In this episode, Chris & Leah explore the consequences of Amazon’s decision to terminate certain vendor agreements, highlighting the challenges brands face when forced to transition to a 3P model.
Related account suspensions are becoming increasingly common for Amazon sellers. While the platform continues to implement strict policies to prevent abuse, many sellers find themselves suspended for reasons they do not fully understand, often receiving unclear or incorrect messaging from Amazon. In this episode, Chris explains why Amazon’s messaging often mislead sellers into filing ineffective appeals and offers actionable strategies for sellers to properly identify and address account links, such as shared IPs or third-party services.
Not all appeals are created equal, and desperation can lead to some unorthodox strategies. Attention-grabbing tactics may seem clever on the surface but they tend to backfire, attracting the wrong kind of attention from Amazon’s reinstatement teams. In this episode, Chris & Leah unpack the often bizarre and counterproductive tactics some sellers use in their desperate attempts to get reinstated, and what you should do instead.
When an Amazon seller's account gets suspended or an ASIN restricted, the immediate recourse is to engage in a dispute process with Amazon. This involves convincing Amazon that an error was made in the enforcement action against their account. In this episode, Chris and Leah break down what Amazon considers a valid dispute, highlighting common mistakes sellers make, and the inconsistent advice given by Amazon's account health representatives.
The rapid changes in Amazon's policies have had a significant impact on sellers. From sudden adjustments in FBA reimbursement claims and stricter listing requirements to escalating fees, sellers find themselves constantly adapting to maintain profitability and compliance. In this episode, Chris McCabe speaks with Elizabeth Greene from Junglr to delve into how sellers can navigate these changes by asking better questions, making informed decisions, and maintaining a holistic view of their business operations.
The spotlight intensifies on product safety and compliance. The recent CPSC decision, holding Amazon accountable for product safety, emphasizes that Amazon can no longer claim to be just a marketplace without liability. In this episode, Chris and Leah share key observations and practical advice on navigating these new challenges, emphasizing the importance of providing concrete proof of compliance, reporting unsafe products, and seeking specialized legal support.
A significant and urgent update for Amazon sellers is the recent change to FBA reimbursement policies, drastically reducing the time frame for lost warehouse claims to just 90 days. This means sellers must act quickly to audit their claims and secure reimbursements before the window closes. In this episode, Chris McCabe talks with Yoni Mazor from GETIDA to discuss the impact of these changes and provide essential information for maximizing your reimbursements before the October 23rd deadline.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. Leah is smiling and laughing, which is always a good sign. Yeah. Especially leading into Prime Day, which is practically on top of us at this point. I think we're finally at the one week mark. So as you can imagine, Leah and I have been looking at last minute random ASIN reviews, listing takedowns, occasional account suspensions, of course, primarily for listing violations.
[00:00:27] Chris: We've noticed some interesting trends we wanted to share with you. We'll just do a couple because I know you've got a lot going on. Every brand owner is managing lots of deals and A plus content that may have gone awry. I'm not sure how many different random messages we've seen from people doing some last minute scurrying, but the bottom line is you don't want to spend time the next seven days or during prime day doing appeals work of the kind and variety that we do.
[00:00:54] Leah: No.
[00:00:55] Chris: No. So I guess my first since you've been seeing and you usually in your consulting see a wide variety and array of listing violation messages from Amazon, people's appeals, denials from Amazon that are generic, that have no information. Given the constraints of timeframes, right, where you can't necessarily jump on quick calls to catalog and get quick answers, or you can't, even if it's not listing compliance related, you can't necessarily talk to account health reps and get a straight answer.
[00:01:28] Chris: So given the constraints of both the timeframe and the fact that you'd have to wait for Amazon to reply to any appeal, what are your tips based on what you're currently seeing in terms of, you know, avoiding problems or tidying up things quickly if they do come to pass?
[00:01:46] Leah: Yeah, so there's actually a couple of good things that I've been seeing.
[00:01:49] Leah: One is that I think that Amazon has done a little bit earlier of a cleanup before Prime Day than they normally do. We seem to get a big influx of ASIN takedowns and account suspensions. It's kind of well in advance of Prime Day this time, as opposed to right before Prime Day, when they usually happen.
[00:02:08] Leah: So, I think that that is beneficial to a lot of sellers. Doesn't mean that you're not necessarily going to be attacked by a competitor. But, at least Amazon actually did things a little bit earlier. I'm also seeing a lot more on the, PCRP compliance side of things, where Amazon's actually giving you a bit of a warning.
[00:02:27] Leah: They're giving you a leeway before they block the ASIN, which makes things easier for a number of reasons. One, because you have time to fix it before the ASIN is blocked. But two, it's a lot easier to correct things on the detail page before the ASIN is blocked, which generally makes it a lot faster to resolve those.
[00:02:47] Leah: So a lot of those were getting resolved In less than 24 hours before the ASIN is even being taken down. So as long as you are ready to go, as soon as you get those sorts of warnings to correct the detail page and make sure you check the A plus content as well, not just the backend of the listing.
[00:03:02] Leah: Those are a lot faster to resolve. On the not so great side of things, I think seller performance is very backed up right now and are taking a long time to respond to appeals.
[00:03:13] Chris: Yeah, I think the first thing you have to think, if you submit any appeal for anything from this point out, I think you have to factor in what is my plan if they don't respond within 72 hours or 48 hours.
[00:03:25] Chris: If it's on the cusp of prime day, and you're listening to this and prime days tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, you should already have a plan B in terms of a request for an update, perhaps multiple different avenues that you plan to pursue to get an update, to nudge them along to at least review what you already sent.
[00:03:45] Chris: If it's the day before the day, or two days before that, and you haven't even sent the first appeal in, you have to factor in that you could have to send a second appeal, whether they respond to you or not, whether they deny it or not, you might have to send that second one during Prime Day.
[00:04:02] Leah: Yeah, we're also seeing a lot, and I'm assuming this is a glitch, we're seeing a lot of appeals from Seller Performance being marked as evaluation completed without any notification being sent.
[00:04:18] Leah: But on top of that, also, when you call into AccountHealth to find out why the appeal was denied, AccountHealth tell you that it actually hasn't been reviewed yet. And so I think that evaluation complete messaging hopefully is, is being sent an error and AccountHealth isn't the one that's wrong. But we are seeing a lot more of that than we have, I would say in the last.
[00:04:38] Leah: I would say like, beginning of this year, I didn't really see that. It's only really in the last month that they seem to be having account health dashboard glitches again. Which is always fun before, but, but you need to make sure that you're verifying anything that you're, that you're seeing in account health.
[00:04:53] Leah: That doesn't make sense. And you also need to make sure that you're checking account health dashboard rather than just waiting to get an email notification saying that your account has been reviewed or your ASIN has been reviewed.
[00:05:04] Chris: And peak sales periods, they're always going to have these. Misfires where they think they've sent you something but they haven't like factor this into how you appeal.
[00:05:14] Leah: Well, and a lot of them are saying even though it says evaluation complete account health says it's still pending review So you just need to you just unfortunately need to spend the time on the fire and verify this information
[00:05:27] Chris: Yeah, and a SAS core reps Sometimes they also tell you, I need 48 hours to get an answer, 72 hours, and again, same problem.
[00:05:39] Chris: If Prime Day is the next day, 48 hours isn't helpful. They know that. They are not supposed to say anything other than that one script that they give that it's going to take the team a couple days. They already know it's built in, that it'll take longer during a peak period. And even now, a week before Prime Day.
[00:06:00] Chris: The amount of appeals are increasing, right? There are unresolved issues from June that haven't been fixed. The people are still appealing. They're probably appealing it more often.
[00:06:08] Leah: Which actually that made me think of a tip that I had forgotten about before.
[00:06:11] Chris: Okay. You mentioned if it's an account suspension, let me just run through this and then jump to your tip.
[00:06:18] Leah: Yep.
[00:06:19] Chris: If it's an account suspension from June that has not yet been resolved, We're 10 days into July. I mean, of course, people are feeling that twice as often as they would have been if it weren't prime day. So this just makes sense.
[00:06:34] Leah: Yeah. and the tip that I had, I'd forgotten to mention earlier, uh, if you have an advertising rep and whatever the issue on your account is affects one of your prime day deals, your advertising rep is very much incentivized to help you because if your prime day deal doesn't run, then they're advertising KPI metrics.
[00:06:54] Leah: are harder to meet because you're not able to spend the ad dollars that you had put down that you wanted to spend. So if the issue is, is any in any way going to affect your Prime Day deals, then I would be reaching out to my advertising rep if I had one and trying to get them to push things for you because they are very much incentivized to help, whereas, you know, support performance, they don't really care about your Prime Day deals.
[00:07:18] Chris: Right. Another trend I'm seeing is people are still getting misuse of variation suspensions. Those are, those are still, I don't know, I thought we had peaked on those. Those are still happening in a rapid clip. Yeah, bundles. And then miscreation of bundles. That, as far as I remember, started later in May or June.
[00:07:39] Chris: And that hasn't really abated. So, like you said, this year, what's different about Prime Day? Well, the enforcement teams kind of rolled out the tanks earlier and in a more widespread fashion across not just one trendy topic like reviews abuse, which circles around every so often, but across all these different listing violations.
[00:07:58] Chris: So I'd say it's been six weeks solid of that now. And there's always kind of a period where it takes time to die down. So if prime prime day is only one week out, that means this is going to linger and people that haven't resolved their variations, abuse suspensions. And as you know, many haven't, the bundle stuff, I'd say lots of people are confused about that.
[00:08:21] Chris: Whether it's the sellers, whether it's Amazon itself, maybe catalog teams. There's a lot of confusion around anything that involves complication or nuance. We don't think listing policies are a hundred percent terrible, complicated, impossible to interpret, but we deal with this stuff 24 7.
[00:08:41] Leah: So one thing I have noticed is that people like to read the sentences that they like in the variation policy and not read the sentences that they don't like in the variation policy.
[00:08:49] Leah: And if you only read some of it, it's very easy to make them wrong.
[00:08:52] Chris: And I don't want to throw the doors open and say if you're interpreting They send variations to be this, and Amazon thinks it's that, show us everything, we've got time right now to look at all your flat files, all your variation themes, and we will give you a definitive answer.
[00:09:09] Chris: I'm not in a position to say that, what we are in a position to say is, get your number one compliance person, in terms of listing creation, and in terms of a proper interpretation of Amazon's policies, to come down on one side of the fence or another. These are compliant, these aren't. And if you're on the fence, if you're really not sure, then yes, that means you need help.
[00:09:32] Chris: If you're 100 percent sure they're compliant, Amazon sent you no warnings, nothing's being reviewed, you haven't had prior listing takedowns for this, let's say you haven't had any prior situations where Amazon separated variations that you had merged, anything like that, then fine. You've made the decision that this is not something you have to worry about.
[00:09:53] Chris: But if you're on the fence or if you're like, you know what, I don't think we're doing these right. That means you need help, and this is not the time. We've got listing suspension purges happening right around Prime Day. Now is not the time to just wing it and just wait until Prime Day is over. Will some people skate through and slide by and not have to deal with this during Prime Day?
[00:10:13] Chris: Of course some people will. My theory now, based on everything, well, what we've seen for five or six weeks is that I think that's a minority of sellers that can count on just flying under the radar. Now, we have had a few people say, well, I'm in the Account Health Assurance program, and for some reason, lots of people still think that's meaningful.
[00:10:31] Chris: It is meaningful in terms, well, there's one way it can be meaningful. If you get the notification the night before Prime Day, and they give you 72 hours, then yeah, that does mean you can deal with it.
[00:10:41] Leah: Well, but that's the thing, I'm still seeing tons of accounts that are in Account Health Assurance that aren't given 72 hours for variation misuse.
[00:10:50] Leah: They're suspended, their account health still says a thousand points or whatever, but they, they don't get that. They get an email saying that you've been removed from account health insurance and then they get an email saying your account is suspended.
[00:11:05] Chris: And I promise you, we are going to do a podcast very soon on the meaning of AHA, the Account Health Assurance Program, and the fact that abuse, they can take you down any time. You're not necessarily going to get a warning. You know, I was talking to somebody the other day, why didn't I get a warning? Well, they reserve the right to take your account down at any moment for any reason.
[00:11:25] Chris: So just the fact that you're in this program doesn't really amount to much if they can take your account down any time and if they don't need to justify the 72 hours. I have heard from some people. Who got the 72 hour message and then nothing happened within 72 hours? Like haven't we talked to people who missed it?
[00:11:44] Chris: And didn't even see it?
[00:11:46] Leah: Yeah.
[00:11:47] Chris: For four days and then like they didn't get suspended. Well, why didn't I? Well, that's because there are a lot of people on that list of 72 hours and it takes them time to get through it.
[00:11:55] Leah: Yeah, and i've also seen more recently, policy warnings or Asin suspensions where they are giving the few days in advance, like I mentioned, but I've also been seeing on the account health dashboard, those dates actually getting pushed.
[00:12:08] Leah: So when you first got the notification, they originally said that you had to submit it by July 8th or, you know, whatever. And then I looked at it the next day and that date had actually been pushed forward. So I think they are actually thankfully adjusting some of those things as they are getting more behind on their end.
[00:12:26] Chris: And then, and we will address that in a podcast before the month of July is over, but closing remarks on this, I just had one other thing to say, maybe you can jump in if you have anything else we haven't touched on, but this concept of, I don't know who made our listings. Somebody else made our listings.
[00:12:46] Chris: We hired somebody. We didn't know what they were doing. They said they were TOS compliant, yada, yada, yada. We've heard a laundry list of excuses from people. Who basically out of sight, out of mind, had someone else do it and had no idea of what policies they might be breaking, whether or not the work was compliant, so on and so forth.
[00:13:05] Chris: If you choose to do that, I understand maybe you're trying to get some tasks off your plate, you don't have time for it. I understand maybe it's cheaper to have somebody else do it. The bottom line is, you are in charge, you're the seller of record, you're in charge of what happens or doesn't happen on that account.
[00:13:22] Chris: So form your own strategy for reviewing their work or double checking it or checking it with somebody who understands this material. Because going to Amazon with a generic appeal, thousands of which we've seen denied at this point, saying we didn't know what was going on. They knew what was going on.
[00:13:39] Chris: They did it wrong. Sorry. Here's a plan of action that's not flying anymore.
[00:13:44] Leah: Nope. Similar to, you know, the reviews abuse back in the day, that stopped being an acceptable excuse a long time ago, and we're now seeing that with the variations as well. Although, honestly, that was never really an acceptable excuse for variations, to say that you didn't know what was going on.
[00:14:01] Chris: Yeah, I mean, Amazon does like this concept, which we can do in yet another podcast, of, Oh, you're blaming a third party service. That's why when a lot of you are calling Account Health for any policy violation, What's the first thing they say? Were you using a third party service? Yeah. They're trying to create rosters and lists and they're trying to be aware of who's out there breaking their policies, creating these suspensions, making life miserable for the seller, for Amazon, for everybody.
[00:14:29] Chris: So they do like it when you put in your appeal. We've got information about a third party service. It depends on how you do it. You can't just throw blame at somebody and say, well, we don't know who these guys are. They were cheap and we found them on Fiverr and they had good reviews. I mean, these are, you know, Terrible excuses, which I won't waste your time explaining why, but just be prepared for having to give them more than just we found these guys.
[00:14:54] Chris: We hired them. It looks like they screwed everything up. Sorry about that.
[00:14:59] Leah: Right.
[00:14:59] Chris: On that note, on that cheery note, thanks for listening in. We will be back very, very shortly, right? I mean, maybe not during Prime Day itself, but just before it with another episode and thank you again, Leah. Take care.
[00:15:14] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I am here today with Marc Bruggemann of Cartograph, an agency that we've worked with you guys for, I want to say, two or three years. Is that accurate?
[00:00:15] Marc: Sounds about right.
[00:00:17] Chris: And you are based in New York City?
[00:00:18] Marc: Just outside of new Jersey.
[00:00:21] Chris: New Jersey. Okay. Let's say, let's say close to New York.
[00:00:24] Chris: I don't know Jersey so well. That's sort of foreign territory for me. So, I met you in the city at least. We've worked on some stuff with you guys. We have conversations about big topics that impact a lot of people like upcoming prime day with agency owners and people who work on brand pain points like yourself. What is the typical conversation you have with a brand owner who's worried about something heading into prime day Or do you typically work with people who are like we're 100 percent set all the deals are ready to go, what could possibly go wrong so many things?
[00:00:59] Marc: Yeah, if I'm talking to a brand owner going into prime day You know, we're talking about a deal strategy. Well, we want to be mindful of, you know, if we're talking like Listing health right? I want to be mindful of list price going into prime day, your discount has to be 20 percent lower than your list price, I think 30 days prior to the sale period.
[00:01:18] Marc: So that's something to be aware of. We've seen last minute suppressions immediately before Prime Day as well. So playing things safe, making sure your listings are clear of anything that might cause a flag. Prime Day is not the day to experiment with I wonder if Amazon will catch me for doing this.
[00:01:33] Marc: So, avoiding any of those errors, but otherwise, it's mostly structuring deals, we're looking at couponing strategies, going in, setting up advertisements, how we want to handle our advertising strategy to build consumer interest, and then after Prime Day, kind of following up and making sure we tap back into those consumers and do anything we can to kind of help support sales rank after the Prime Day hangover.
[00:01:55] Chris: Right. One of our favorite hangovers is the prime day hangover. But at least we get a chance in later July to kind of recoup. And, it's not quite like Black Friday, Cyber Monday after that's over, you're like, Oh yeah, by the way, it's still peak holiday for another three weeks or two weeks.
[00:02:11] Chris: Do people ever watch what their competition's doing and get worried? Like, Hey, these guys are doing this. We should be doing it. Why aren't we doing it? You're proposing that we do something new from different from last year. Do you have those kinds of conversations with people?
[00:02:25] Marc: Yeah. I think one of the largest items that I'm typically been asked about is, these guys are doing like 30%, 40%, 50% discount, right? Like, you see people go pretty steep and in some categories that works. Interestingly enough, and this is something, you know, again, certain things I necessarily don't want to experiment with on Prime Day, maybe in other tentpole events, but, steeper discounts in some categories can actually negatively impact conversion rate. This is something I have seen in the past where we have premium goods, specifically 1K6T, where we tried running with a 50 percent discount. We had overstock, and we were trying to move through units a little bit faster.
[00:03:00] Marc: And conversion rate dropped significantly, and it turned out consumers were actually concerned that the product was not of sufficient quality, that there was a bad reason that it was being discounted so heavily. So it makes me less quick these days to drop steep discounts on things, on one hand the client gets to save a little bit, they're making a little bit more money.
[00:03:17] Marc: They don't have to lose as much to a discount. But consumers also have a level of assurance that, you know, the product is in such low quality that you can afford to discount it by 50%.
[00:03:27] Chris: Yeah. And I mean, the ad space has changed a lot too. Are people talking about ads versus Prime Day as much now, or is that kind of the same as it was last year?
[00:03:38] Chris: Because the ad space just seems to have exploded in terms of using AI testing, the AB testing of different concepts. I mean, I don't know if 12 months is, completely changed it, revolutionized it, or if it's just like tweaks.
[00:03:52] Marc: There are more things we're doing now. Like we have, access to things like brand tailored promotions, which I guess, isn't strictly advertising.
[00:03:58] Marc: It's technically a type of promotion, but running it does get you exclusive placements. If you get push notifications on your phone, exclusive deals just for you, brand tailored promotions. You've been targeted with some specific discount for a product. You know, as certain like newer levers, brands are interested in subscribe and save coupons, somewhat new.
[00:04:16] Marc: It's one of those things that can work, it depends on the business. It depends on how much of a discount you're offering. subscribe and save motivation is usually, you know, a significant discount, right? You have 10 percent coupons, not gonna cut it probably, so there's a lot of that that we have to be mindful of, like we see competitors doing these things and like, can we do it too?
[00:04:34] Marc: Like, well, you know, it depends, how does your margin shake out? We're doing unit level economics. We're looking at what your cost breakdown is on a per unit sold basis. So. It's something that we try to be mindful of as we get close to Prime Day.
[00:04:45] Chris: Right, do people talk about the types of things that we work on in terms of, last year I had a random ASIN restriction, or I was asked to appeal something right before Prime Day.
[00:04:55] Chris: Are those the types of things where people express concern about it way before it happens, or do they really only bring it up if there's some sort of crisis or emergency like the night before?
[00:05:04] Marc: Savvy brands are going to be a little bit more on edge. They know what can happen, the dietary supplement space especially, right?
[00:05:11] Marc: We now have these lab service requests that brands have to go through. So now it's sending product out to a lab and getting it tested. We're seeing like six to eight week turnarounds in some cases, but from initiating a request to being live again. So, right, if you're in the supplement space, Personally, that's a question I'm asking between now and Prime Day.
[00:05:30] Marc: I'm like, am I gonna get hit with a request for lab services two days before Prime Day? Outside of that, I've had things like, in the toy category. We got hit with a test. There's like a lead test that you're supposed to perform on kids' children's toys, something to that effect.
[00:05:44] Marc: We had hit with that request day before Prime day. So things like that can be a concern on a seller's minds.
[00:05:51] Chris: Yeah. And not to give anyone ideas, but I think this is already out there. Some competitor attacks have taken the form of trying to create doubt over whether their competitors have compliance documentation ready to go.
[00:06:03] Chris: And then magically, mysteriously that seller is asked to produce those documents. So I think that's kind of a lingering trick from last year. Hopefully Amazon's kind of caught up on that, and they're aware of these things , that they're being kind of played a little bit.
[00:06:16] Marc: To that point, even the supplements case, it just takes one person complaining, I think my favorite one is this product tasted so bad it made me nauseous, right? Like, you're not saying that there's anything wrong with the product. Maybe you're using hyperbole. It's all Amazon needs to hear. They will shut your listing down. They'll start putting you through compliance process. So there are black hat tactics like that, that sellers should be aware of.
[00:06:41] Chris: I think Amazon's getting at least a little bit better.
[00:06:43] Chris: I mean, that was bad last year and the year before. I think now Amazon's kind of catching up to this idea of, you know, maybe we're being played here. I mean, they don't really think about it when it's an automated trigger. And Requesting documentation. People might just not really even give it a second thought if they see a buyer complaint that says certain things, but there's much more of a concept now that Amazon has to punish some people for reporting their competitors for something that's not legitimate, that's fake.
[00:07:13] Chris: And they've started suspending sellers. I mean, I've seen it on the suspension side. They have started suspending people more for you made false allegations against the competitor, or you tried to weaponize us to make them look bad, or to make us do something against them. And they weren't really hip to that as much until I would say this past spring.
[00:07:36] Marc: So it's shocking it took them that long, but I'm glad they caught on to it. It's definitely been prevalent for a while now.
[00:07:43] Chris: Usually there's like an initial mistake where an action is taken. I'm saying you can contest it more easily. Now you can say this is a mistake. We're disputing it. We're being falsely accused.
[00:07:53] Chris: These guys have done it before. That is much easier to make that argument now than way back when, when you were saying, Oh, I'm being attacked. This is a mistake. We've already passed this process, whatever it might be for compliance or Amazon would say, Oh yeah, sure. It's a mistake. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't believe you.
[00:08:10] Chris: They're more, they're more likely to believe that you're being attacked. Now that's my good news.
[00:08:15] Marc: That's a huge change for them
[00:08:17] Chris: Yeah. And I think they're also a bit more suspicious of timing. You know for years black hat attacks would happen on like friday night at midnight And for some of the clients we had it would be every friday night at midnight And so the timing I think they're kind of Hip to this idea of they're trying to hit you when you're paying the least attention or when you're at your weakest Or if it's right before Prime Day right before Black Friday I mean, they're finally you're right like that.
[00:08:44] Chris: We should have been talking about this in 2022, but they're finally catching up to these guys.
[00:08:48] Chris: So people have kind of made some plans for deals. They've got strategy already set up.
[00:08:54] Chris: Do you guys as agency owners have contingency plans in case there's a glitch, there's a technical problem, their listing goes down, whether it's an Amazon screw up or a technical issue? Do you have irons in the fire already?
[00:09:07] Marc: I think a good example of this is a lightning deals.
[00:09:10] Marc: these are really prone to issues, pretty often, whether it's maybe you accidentally set your committed number of units too low. So the deal is a hundred percent, you know, it's user error. But you know, it could be that I've had it where Amazon reflected that a lightning deal was running.
[00:09:26] Marc: But you pull up the detail page in a Prime account and no Lightning Deal. So in those situations we want to have these listings prepared with Prime Exclusive Discounts to run in the background. So what will happen is if a Lightning Deal and a Prime Exclusive Discount are scheduled at the same time, only the Lightning Deal runs.
[00:09:43] Marc: So something like that is a great contingency in the event that, okay, my Lightning deal has gone down. If there's been a technical issue, it says it's running, but it's not. Worst case, you could simply end the Lightning deal, Prime Exclusive Discount should take over. Or alternatively, if the Lightning deal never ran to begin with, or if there was some other error for it, the Prime Exclusive Discount should just take over automatically.
[00:10:02] Marc: Or if you, if the Lightning deal just ends due to all the reasons being claimed. So you can at least make sure that you have something there to support the listing in that situation. Otherwise, it's mostly just sitting there and watching, you know, are my deals active, checking in, are my listings okay. To your point, you know, this is when you're most likely to be under attack.
[00:10:23] Marc: A seller could come along and add all your units to their cart and try to, you know, take them out of circulation. That's something that I've seen before. So things like that, you just want to be prepared. Maybe it's turning on an FBM listing instead. Just so you have something to offer, if there's some sort of a more gray issue on your FBA listings
[00:10:43] Chris: and now some of your clients have SAS core reps or a majority or a more, a majority done?
[00:10:49] Marc: Not a majority. There's a wait list to get an SAS rep, right. Most recently we saw had around like a three month wait. and you do need to have minimum sales volume before SAS will even talk to you. So some people are left out in the cold because they haven't quite reached that point yet.
[00:11:05] Marc: Other accounts, it's a question of whether or not the investment is worth it. SAS is helpful in certain situations. I'm sure you have more insight on that on your end.
[00:11:14] Chris: I think when there's a crisis around Prime Day, some, depending on the rep, sometimes they act quickly and know what to do. I think it's useful if they have both of those.
[00:11:24] Chris: Like the skills and the experience, so they know what to do and they act quickly. You kind of need them both together. If you only have, well, they act quickly, but they take the wrong action. Obviously that's not very helpful. And we've had to kind of pick up the slack in a few instances where that happened.
[00:11:39] Chris: Or if they do have the wherewithal to take the right actions, but they're not that responsive. Of course, prime day is only two days, so they have to be responsive in order to create an internal escalation or to show their prowess in this field or their ability to make an impact that's going to you know, positively affect your revenue for that two day period.
[00:11:59] Chris: Otherwise, if you don't have both of those acting together in unison, then you're probably missing out on something.
[00:12:05] Marc: Exactly. Yeah. And I think one of the advantages for the SAS reps is, they can trigger something called a hot PO. So if you need like inventory checking faster, you know, that is partially with Prime Day coming up as a great ability to have, sometimes, you know, bad situations occur.
[00:12:19] Marc: Actually, I think one that I forgot about was FC processing, you know, the state of inventory being in a reserved state, under investigation, right? We've all seen this. I have seen, where the majority of the seller's inventory is locked in that state immediately before something like Prime Day, which is the absolute worst timing you could possibly imagine.
[00:12:40] Marc: So in situations like that, I expect having a savvy SAS rep to be pretty helpful. I've spoken to people that had a prior experience in Amazon's warehouses. So bad grader insight than others.
[00:12:52] Chris: , do you ever hear people looking past Prime Day? Like they expect, Oh, Prime Day is going to be this.
[00:12:59] Chris: These are our projections. Let's talk about Q4, the second Prime Day is over. Is that the point we're at now with brand management and selling on Amazon? You're looking three, four months down the road because of the low inventory fees, other fees, things like that.
[00:13:13] Marc: It's funny, the low inventory fees have not played as much of a role as I expected that they would.
[00:13:18] Marc: And the changes to that policy have, they made a lot of changes before enacting it. I think the final state that it took was pretty good, it was nerfed quite a bit. , in terms of like planning ahead, right, this is a prime day is going to come. We have the rest of the summer. So there's a lot of categories that are sleeping down during those months.
[00:13:36] Marc: I think protein powder is worst month of the year, September. Summer's over, summer bodies are made in the summer. And summer's over.
[00:13:44] Chris: Well, September is the month to let yourself go.
[00:13:47] Marc: Exactly. Yeah. You got to start, start bulking up for the winter. So you can get into hibernation.
[00:13:52] Chris: Interesting.
[00:13:52] Marc: Yeah. A lot of the conversation then becomes, you know, like we have tent pole events. We have prime day. Some brands we have back to school, right? Back to school is coming there. There are brands that apply there. So how do we build momentum from one to the next? How do we keep people in the funnel that we've worked so hard to acquire?
[00:14:07] Marc: Tons of people are discovering new brands for Prime Day. The week leading up to Prime Day, there's a lot of customers that are simply doing research. Even if you compare day one versus day two of Prime Day, you're going to see much lower conversion rates on day one because a lot of customers are coming back on the second day after having looked around, shopped around, looked at what deals are running.
[00:14:27] Marc: On day two, they decide what to buy. So now all these new customers, all these people who are aware of you, how do you keep them, you know, how do you keep your brand top of mind for these consumers until the next tent pole events or whatever motivates them to purchase? So if you have back to school, you want to at least stay top of mind for when back to school comes.
[00:14:44] Marc: Otherwise you might have to wait until fall prime day in October. And then you have T5. and Q4 as well. For giftable brands, right? You have Christmas coming. So the entire lead up to Christmas up to like the 20th, there's people still buying gifts. I worked on a toy brand once again, 90 percent of our sales were in for the entire year we're in the first three weeks of December.
[00:15:08] Marc: It's things like that to be aware of. One day prime. One day prime. Exactly. Making sure you're everywhere. 0. 5 day prime. Making
[00:15:16] Marc: sure that you're distributed across every single location possible. Oh my God. Yeah. It's actually, you know, and even that, if you, if you have like inventory concerns, right.
[00:15:24] Marc: I think at this point we are officially past the shipping cutoff for prime day. Uh, but, uh, one thing that, uh, for brands in a difficult operation situation where, maybe supply was low before prime day. One feature that we were taking advantage of is Amazon's placement services. You can select West coast, East coast, or central us for your shipping destination.
[00:15:44] Marc: And so we were rotating through regions for shipping and inventory to kind of like, so that by the time inventory is checked in, we're already distributed throughout the fulfillment center now. So things like that can kind of speed things along.
[00:15:58] Chris: Nice. Nice. Do you work on the creative side too? Like one thing I'm always watching YouTube videos for, I mean, different people covering the Amazon space from different angles. I'm always wondering why YouTube isn't feeding me like Prime Day specials for like different brands doing their YouTube videos. For some reason, the algorithm isn't pushing brand video content to me about Prime Day, but maybe there's a reason for that.
[00:16:25] Marc: I think that a lot of brands are afraid of their advertising or rather advertising their Amazon channel will end up cannibalizing their DTCs.
[00:16:37] Marc: They want to prioritize DTC. Maybe, brick and mortar. I think there's still a lot of fear amongst brands around Amazon. They think it's going to erode at their consumer base. Uh, one point that I've made in the past to brands is that, uh, consumers know Amazon exists, right? If they're shopping with DTC, other DTC channels, it's not because they've never heard of Amazon.
[00:16:58] Marc: Uh, they, they know it's there. They know it's an option. Uh, but DTC customers will generally prefer to purchase from DTC. You're not really going to see a lot of customers migrate away from DTC over to Amazon just because. They saw an ad for your prime day sale. Um, yeah, so I think that's one of the, I think we'll see more advertising and channels like Google, social media, YouTube.
[00:17:20] Marc: Uh, as brands see that there's not as much cannibalization as they originally suspected.
[00:17:26] Chris: Interesting. Yeah, I didn't think of it that way, for sure. Well, cark of Cartograph, thanks so much for joining us. Any last insights about Prime Day or should we just give people a chance to contact you, the best way to reach you?
[00:17:38] Marc: Reach out through gocartograph.com, fill out the contact form. You'll be placed with a Brand manager like myself, a part of our team, a lot of smart people here and yeah.
[00:17:50] Chris: Any, any last words of wisdom in terms of Prime Day, other than watch your back?
[00:17:55] Marc: Please don't take any of the things you heard here as advice, as far as tactics.
[00:18:00] Marc: One of them is to stay up. Thank you, please.
[00:18:03] Chris: Yeah, exactly. Please leave Mark's brands alone. Just for a couple days. At least for a couple days. You can, you can ease off. All right. Thanks again, Marc, for joining us. Thanks everybody for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. We'll catch you next time.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm with Drew Morgans of Marknology. Drew, how are you?
[00:00:08] Andrew: Good, and it's good to be back.
[00:00:11] Chris: Great having you back. Always great talking to you. Great seeing you in Hawaii. You weren't around for me breaking my finger, I think.
[00:00:17] Andrew: Was going to ask like how the spill is going, like, are you able to type, like, where are you at with it?
[00:00:23] Chris: You know, I learned how to type without the very important middle finger. I use it for other stuff instead.
[00:00:30] Andrew: You're crazy. I'm sure our listeners don't know, but like you went on a hike by yourself, I think a big one, and had a little spill or something, but you already do crazy things when you're not behind the computer, Chris.
[00:00:45] Chris: I can be a little crazy. There were other people in the vicinity. They were just more capable and competent than I was, so they were quicker to the summit and back. So I had to summit by myself.
[00:00:56] Andrew: Those rocks are super sharp, I don't know if they're like considered volcanic rocks or what, the reef there, like whatever you could be hiking, but some of it's really sharp.
[00:01:03] Chris: Lots of mud, yeah, lots of ropes, lots of mud. I should connect this to the agony that some people experience around Prime Day, somehow.
[00:01:13] Andrew: Well, this is what you have to do to let it, let the stress out sometimes around the Amazon space, you know, it can be, stressful. So when we're having fun, we gotta have a lot of fun, but no Hawaii, the BDSS conference was, was awesome.
[00:01:26] Chris: Yeah, there's, this is my hand over hand climbing metaphor for prime day. This will be my sloppy segue. Do you work with people who freak out over prime day? Like we're not going to sell enough. Our competition's going to come up with tips and tricks and crazy stuff that's going to kick our butts.
[00:01:47] Chris: Is there like a freak out element to it? Or is Prime Day so ingrained now that they're kind of like, Oh, it's that part of the year. Let's get the ads set. Let's get the initiatives on the marketing side set. How is the experience as an agency owner?
[00:02:00] Andrew: Well, that's a good question, Chris. I think it's actually a little bit of a mixed bag.
[00:02:04] Andrew: As an agency now and experienced agency, we're definitely putting out information ahead of prime day better than we did in the past. So we're educating more, we're giving suggestions on what deals can be or what type of assets they should be sending us if they want to participate.
[00:02:20] Andrew: So we do a little bit better job of just what Amazon sends out of educating our customers, and we're talking to them weekly or bi weekly, depending on kind of what plan they're with.
[00:02:28] Andrew: That's definitely something that account managers are wanting to bring up. At the same time, I would say, if a client has been selling on Amazon for several years, It seems like they are less stressed out by prime day than a new seller, than a newer brand.
[00:02:41] Andrew: They just know the hype. They're like, are we taking advantage of it? What can this be? so kind of like if you have a seasoned seller, I feel like they're less stressed about it or they're more prepared. They're like, let's do something. But they're not like we have to go crazy in.
[00:02:53] Andrew: And then I'd say there's this like, almost every year coming down to the wire, there's like a couple of brands that won't have listened to us for the weeks leading up to prime day. And then getting right down to the wire, they're wanting to add some deals or something like that. And I think it's really just about next question.
[00:03:08] Chris: Yeah.
[00:03:09] Andrew: Yeah. There's always a few that are like, Oh, we want to do something big for prime day. And we do the best we can, but it's really just trying to not every category, in my opinion, and every product type, you know, basically because it comes down to margins and things like that.
[00:03:25] Andrew: Not every product type is an amazing fit for prime day. So, it's really a selection of brands that are a great fit and some that are just barely participating.
[00:03:33] Chris: Oh, so some of them are kind of a poor fit for it, but they think they're a great fit. And you have to have that conversation with them.
[00:03:38] Chris: That sounds awkward.
[00:03:40] Andrew: It is. And it's just trying to be realistic with them about expectations. If they don't have a significant discount on their products. They're not offering a real deal, so to speak. And if they don't have the margin to be able to do that. And so they're like, let's just do a 10 percent deal or a 15 percent deal or something like that.
[00:03:56] Andrew: It's not going to have any real effect. And you might just be losing margin on sales. You were already going to get. So unless it's just really a product that they can discount strongly, and they have a good amount of stock in all of those things, then it's kind of like better to just save your margin and back off those few days.
[00:04:11] Chris: Right, right. Are there people trying to make up for lost time, like they haven't sold as much this year as they thought they would for whatever reason, and now they're like, we got to double down. We'll increase our budget. We'll do whatever you want us to do. Or are there people less, I mean, I'm sure it's a mixture, but are there people like more conservative about it?
[00:04:31] Chris: Because they don't want to spend as much because they haven't sold as much this year.
[00:04:34] Andrew: I think it's a mixed bag. I'm glad you asked that too, because I was going to say that's when we kind of get into trouble or some of these stressful situations is when sales have been poor for a lot of the year, and then they're trying to get so much out of prime day and trying to really milk it, let's remember that prime day was a holiday created by Amazon because it's a slow time of year.
[00:04:54] Andrew: So in general, sales can be slow around this time. They're trying to create some hype around it. And there are ways to win here. You know, if you have product you're trying to sell as part of a variation that might help something out. At the same time, if a brand's doing okay and margins are okay.
[00:05:09] Andrew: I wouldn't say that they're crushing it or anything like that, but they might back off a prime day. They're saying, Hey, we're happy with what we've got going on. It's not the gross point, but let's not sacrifice a lot of margin for no reason. If they don't see an opportunity.
[00:05:22] Chris: That's true, right?
[00:05:22] Chris: Because of all the new fees and everything, everyone's motivated to sell through inventory as fast as possible. So maybe if they see that for the first five months of the year, whatnot, they've sold through their inventory extremely quickly. Why would they start discounting it heavily just because of this, right?
[00:05:39] Andrew: And there's certain products that I don't think people are like, I'm going to Amazon to buy this, to get a deal on prime day. I know that any brand and any product can have prime day deals, but in general, I think people are kind of looking for these certain type of items, and so if you have let's say everyday items that people are going to come back and buy, let's say you're selling toothpaste and people are going to come by toothpaste year round, whether it's prime day or not, you're not having to convince them to buy this gift midsummer or something like that, you know?
[00:06:05] Chris: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is their version of Christmas in July, right? It's not a hundred percent new retailers tried this off and on over decades before. So I suppose, is that part of the marketing strategy to not necessarily Christmas, but the idea of like, it's the holidays, but it's warm outside.
[00:06:25] Chris: Does that play into some of the creative stuff you guys are doing? Everyone knows what prime day is now. We don't have to do that.
[00:06:32] Andrew: Yeah. I think it's changed a lot, right. In the last 10 years from when it first came out, it really was an amazing holiday, like just like for sellers to be able to take advantage of it.
[00:06:40] Andrew: And then it became so many brands jumping on it that you really need a significant discount to kind of stand out from, from the other deals. If You're doing a mediocre deal, it's just a wash. You're not getting listed on anything. You're not really getting seen.
[00:06:51] Andrew: You're just kind of giving up margin. So even to a couple of years back, they shut down because we had so much traffic. So I think it comes back again to like, what type of product, like, is this one that we can really take advantage of? Like if you're selling swimming rafts for the pool or something like you could crush it right around now, Christmas in July type of stuff.
[00:07:11] Andrew: If you have that type of product. But to just discount products that no one's caring about, like you don't see a lot of lift, like in general, we are telling brands to participate in prime day, but it's not a general statement. Like, if they can have a significant discount to their product, we're going to say, yeah, let's do it and see if we can get some momentum because as an Amazon seller, you're always looking for momentum, I think, and prime day is an opportunity for that.
[00:07:35] Andrew: It's just not a one size fits all.
[00:07:37] Chris: Yeah. What we see on our side sometimes is people don't feel prepared enough. They don't feel like their listing is as good as it could be. And so they go nuts on listing optimization. And sometimes they start inserting certain keywords or playing with the detail page in ways that might get it suspended because they just didn't understand that they were taking that risk.
[00:07:58] Chris: And then they come to us for reinstatement help. So have you had to have those kinds of conversations like, well, it sounds like you want to do X, Y, Z. That could result in a listing takedown. So you won't be optimizing anything or improving anything or selling anything, potentially. You're just creating risk.
[00:08:15] Chris: Do you have to explain that to people or do you need like the risk assessment people like us to kind of come in and be the bearers of bad tidings?
[00:08:22] Andrew: Well, a little bit of both too, right? For the most part, I would think we have trust with our clients and they're listening to us when we're like, guys, We're we're in selling season.
[00:08:30] Andrew: Let's not let's not tinker , with what we're trying to do. There are like, for me, with the existing accounts, that seems to go pretty well. \ we've got that trust with them. We're doing it, let's say we onboarded a brand starting in May or June and they're trying to get their products up and get them ready.
[00:08:46] Andrew: And they're like prime days up here, we need to take advantage of it. Like let's push, push, push. That can be where we get into some of those, like, that gray area where we don't have crazy trust with them yet. We're new. They're wanting to push the envelope to get some things done before prime day.
[00:08:59] Andrew: You know, we know what can potentially happen if that listing goes down during those big days, so yeah there have been a couple of times where I'm like, Chris, can you be the bearer of bad news or back me up on this. But in general, as long as we're setting expectations with them and letting them know, Hey, this is what the cost could be.
[00:09:16] Andrew: The opportunity cost even of doing things. I think one of the things about my knowledge is we try to stay really true to terms of service and, and pretty white hat and, and keep things above table, so to speak. So we're doing our best to mitigate those problems before we get there.
[00:09:30] Andrew: But yeah, whether they're the ones getting themselves into trouble or they simply have an ASIN and coming into prime day, still suspended. Those are both scenarios that are very real.
[00:09:40] Chris: Yeah. And of course, we're putting together tons of content for people in terms of your ASINs down, heading into prime day. What's the emergency response, rapid response for that.
[00:09:51] Andrew: Chris, I have a question for you. I would flip the script a little bit on the podcast, but how much of like, Listing suppression or listings being taken down or deactivation happens around this time in regards to like sabotage, just a competitor knowing they can take their product down for a couple of days in it being enough to kind of like miss that window.
[00:10:10] Andrew: Like, is that something that happens, you know, semi frequently?
[00:10:13] Chris: I would, I would say still most of it right now is sort of the stress testing month, like let's screw with these people a little bit and see if they notice. Or if it succeeds and their listing goes down, let's see how long it takes them to get their listing reinstated.
[00:10:27] Chris: If it's a day or two, okay, maybe it's not worth going through this again when it's Prime Day. If it's a week or two weeks, then maybe it's really worth trying to go after them right before Prime Day. Most of the attacks happen on Prime Day Eve or like the night before that. Middle of the night stuff is that's common every week.
[00:10:45] Chris: We see that on Friday nights, Saturday nights, but yeah, I mean, most of it's in July, the June period is more like let's mess with some backend keywords and see if anyone notices or see if it gets the listing taken down. Or do they just overwrite whatever contributions we make on the ASIN side and get it fixed with their flat files before anything really substantial happens, before we even make any money out of it because people like that are looking for bang for their buck. It's not worth their time. They'll focus their energy someplace else. I mean, unless they're just dead set on attacking you and only you, they're probably looking around at different categories, different brands, different sellers, so they're looking for a soft target, right?
[00:11:30] Chris: If you can fix stuff quickly, they're less likely to spend time, effort and energy on, on you, which is good news for you and probably they wouldn't really come back, unless they come back in Q4 and try to mess with you again.
[00:11:42] Andrew: There's like, we're going to take on someone that we can, we can, we can make this last, this impact last.
[00:11:47] Chris: Right. They're looking to bully somebody, if it's somebody that's gonna punch them in the mouth, they're not going to go for that but also I think one important thing about Prime Day is it's a great time either just getting appeals that you may need on paper or even just strategies in place or ideas in place.
[00:12:06] Chris: It's a good practice run for what you might have to do in Q4 in case you get attacked, or even if it's not an attack, I mean, Amazon can randomly take an ASIN down due to screwy automation or just technical errors or just a mistake. Right. And it's great to have at least some content, maybe not the exact blueprint, but at least some kind of an outline ready.
[00:12:30] Chris: So that you can have a rapid response in place to resolve it quickly.
[00:12:35] Andrew: What are some of those, putting you on the spot here, but what are some of those, maybe they don't have an appeal prewritten or done, but they're just selling products. So they're not to that point where they've been suspended, but product documentation, like those types of things, what are the things that they should have ready, at least for their top selling ASINs, like going into a hot season like that.
[00:12:53] Chris: Definitely have your compliance documentation handy, which you should all the time anyway.
[00:12:57] Chris: If it's something where you got testing done at an ISO certified lab, you have that handy and you know that the lab is going to be iSO certified and acceptable. That's one example. If it's electronics, other types of compliance and testing paperwork, but for most people, it's the invoices, right?
[00:13:15] Chris: Make sure your manufacturer is quickly and easily verifiable and they've got like a website just in case there's a random inauthentic complaint or somebody is challenging the authenticity of your products. Well, obviously they're authentic. You are the brand, but instead of getting caught in the weeds and back and forth with seller support, you've got all the paperwork they want ready to go so that if for some reason they write back and say, this isn't enough.
[00:13:39] Chris: You can call account health and say, we are the brand. We had all the paperwork handy. We sent it to you all within hours. What exactly is missing? Right. Get some answers from account health. So you can at least quickly hurdle over those first initial obstacles on the basic level, the first rung of the ladder.
[00:13:57] Chris: And skip up the food chain to kind of like starting to email from the primary email on your account to senior management or executive level people. We know what you guys thought happened here. We already addressed it. No one's reading it. What are you going to do for us now? So at least you can get, cause you know, managers are, are their direct reports.
[00:14:17] Chris: Somebody manager level is reviewing that. They might not review it well every time. But your odds are way better than just emailing it to the seller performance queues or to my former team's queues, or they're like, you know, support. It's not that every call to account health is worth it. I know they take you in circles sometimes, but I mean, I know you've dealt with this yourself.
[00:14:36] Andrew: Yeah, and I was thinking just like what might be helpful for some of the listeners to is, in addition to just like having your paperwork together, like, well, what does that mean? Well, just having it organized and ready to go in case you have to reach out to someone like Chris and say, help me with these ASIN suspensions on the agency side, like what we're doing.
[00:14:53] Andrew: Are you thinking of us like the seller or working with the seller is, we have software in place where we have alerts on our top selling listings, so if something happens, they go down, we lose the buy box, content changes. We're getting alerts that that's happening. During prime day, we also have like, almost like a double schedule happening with our team where we're like physically checking accounts and top selling listings to make sure ads are deploying to make sure listings aren't being taken down because depending on what you're selling, depending on what size brand you are, , a few hours difference can be the difference in having a successful prime day or not if you're moving a lot of volume during prime day.
[00:15:28] Andrew: So, it's just extra eyeballs. , it's not the weekend to just like shut your computer and not look at it. It's definitely a time to be, be vigilant.
[00:15:37] Chris: Be engaged. I'd imagine your strategies have changed a little bit with the advent of some of the AI flags that Amazon's implemented, right? So you're looking for certain stuff and maybe trying to stay away from certain AI triggers when you're optimizing their listings.
[00:15:53] Andrew: Yeah. And like, you know, this is like, I guess, like you would say in June, like the stress testing, any kind of changes we're trying to do or anything aggressive, we're trying to have those things done quite a bit before we even put in for our prime day deals.
[00:16:05] Andrew: So we're not trying to make changes down to the wire, down to the wire changes might be like trying to get a deal to go through or a discount or a sale. But definitely not like listing optimization changes. There's a belief and I mean, pretty sure it's in place that just like during around some of those big traffic days, like Amazon's catalog is not, is not updating the way it should, like they're not processing it.
[00:16:27] Andrew: There's different cues happening. It's a slower cue. So like, you're not going to get the support you normally get. You're not going to get like the catalog features. It just seems like everything's slower. Like they slow all that down. So in. Understand that that's the case. Like probably a week before and a week after we're not touching anything.
[00:16:43] Andrew: And I think even maybe further out than a week out, right?
[00:16:45] Andrew: Yeah, that's the biggest problem of having to do ASIN appeals is everything slows down. They've got way too many people appealing way too many times for account reinstatement and ASIN reinstatement. Um, and people like another thing we haven't talked about is people are all over their SAS core reps in this time to trying to fix last minute stuff, asking questions, their SAS core reps are probably not as available as they would like to be, or should be because they're helping other sellers they work with.
[00:17:14] Andrew: Putting out fires and helping them resolve problems. So everyone wants their attention at once, you know, Um, it's probably like being a parent with 12 kids or something like that. Everyone's fighting for your attention at the same time. Um, and so there's strain within internal teams on the Amazon side too.
[00:17:34] Andrew: Not everyone comes back with a great answer within 24 hours. And if you push them and we're accustomed to pushing people to come back with answers. If you push them too quickly on the wrong stuff, they might come back with an answer fast, just to get rid of you, but it's not a good quality. Answer. That's the other risk.
[00:17:51] Andrew: So the best way to deal with it is to not deal with it at all, which is just good preparation. And obviously you want to be ready if it happens, but what can you do ahead of time to just, you know, dot your I's and cross your T's.
[00:18:03] Chris: For sure. Any any last ideas or tips for our viewers before we check out?
[00:18:09] Andrew: Yeah, I think it's like, it's a simple basics, but not, not understanding, you know, Who all is listening, but for me, it's, um, you know, having your inventory, like a double, triple check of your inventory, making sure you're stocked to the point where you, what happens if you are, have a very successful prime day and plan for that.
[00:18:26] Andrew: Um, you know, it seems like kind of elementary, but having FBM, if you don't have that, maybe it's a little late right now going down to the wire, but you know, making sure that that's plugged in, making sure your warehouse knows that it's prime day. Simple communication, just because they're, they're in the warehouse, they're working around your business.
[00:18:42] Andrew: Doesn't know that they know exactly that Tuesday is going to be a heavy day or Wednesday is going to be a heavy day. So just, um, if you have your own small warehouse team, bring them lunch, bring them, you know, uh, you know, bring in donuts. Uh, bring in Gatorades, like, you know, kind of treating them. Like they're very important when it comes down to these big sales days.
[00:19:03] Andrew: Um, and giving them a little bit of extra TLC, a little extra communication, a little extra support, um, because like your success depends on them. So set them up for success from letting your, you know, If you have, if you're working with an agency, they should be, you know, they should be on point, like checking all these things.
[00:19:19] Andrew: But if you're working with your own internal team, communicating to them, not just that you've set up the deals, but Hey guys, we're coming into these days that I I'm expecting you to double check, triple check the listings. Um, you know, make sure stuff like, you know, Actually go to Amazon, search for our product, make sure it's showing up.
[00:19:34] Andrew: And it's like, it's, it's indexing, um, you know, make sure the warehouse team knows what's going on. Um, and then also set some benchmarks. If you guys use software, or even if you don't set some benchmarks before prime day, so you can see how successful your prime day was and then set some benchmarks after maybe you did 25 percent last year and this year you're doing 15%, like try to track the differences, um, whether it's successful or not, a lot of the data that you get and the feedback you get from, from This prime day can help you for the next one or help you in Q4.
[00:20:02] Andrew: So I think a lot of times you're prepping for it, prepping for it, prepping for it. No one takes the time really to even just kind of document and take notice of where they are so that they can come back later after the craziness is done and kind of evaluate how successful or unsuccessful it was.
[00:20:18] Chris: Awesome stuff. Well said. Well,
[00:20:22] Andrew: you know, it's um, you know, for the season seller prime day is, it's, it's back, right? It's, it's, you know, you're 10, you're 11, you're 12, depending on where people are, they've, they've done this, they've seen this for the new seller can be intimidating. So, um, you know, just set yourself up for success by, by over preparing.
[00:20:39] Andrew: And, and I think you'll be fine.
[00:20:41] Chris: And words of wisdom from Drew Morgans at Marknology, where can people reach you?
[00:20:47] Andrew: Yeah. on LinkedIn, Andrew Morgans with an S. Otherwise it's, it's marknology.com. I love interacting with people on social media, especially if you're passionate about the e commerce and Amazon space, would love to talk to anybody.
[00:21:01] Chris: Cool. All right. Well, wishing you and your clients wonderful success on prime day. And thanks again for joining us for this episode. It's been great having you back.
[00:21:10] Andrew: Thanks, Chris.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm here with the wonderful Janelle Page, who was our wonderful MC at the Seller Velocity Conference, which by the way, feels like it was maybe two years ago, was that four weeks ago, the month of May?
[00:00:18] Janelle: Yeah, like a month ago. It's like a time warp.
[00:00:20] Chris: It's like a month ago. Just you're used to action packed weeks where you go to Italy in the beginning of the week and you went to France at the end of, was that this week, last week? I don't know. But I'm like the hamster wheel struggling to keep up with you.
[00:00:36] Chris: So, bottle that energy. That should be your next brand.
[00:00:40] Janelle: Sell a little bit of myself. I think that's like prostitution, isn't it?
[00:00:45] Chris: 99 bucks a bottle. Is my recommended price point for your energy bottled up. I will
[00:00:51] Chris: pay for that.
[00:00:52] Janelle: Okay. I was thinking a little more premium.
[00:00:55] Chris: Okay. 199. That works. I'll pretty much pay any rate for your energy.
[00:01:02] Janelle: We have proof of concept.
[00:01:03] Chris: Exactly. Awesome job, emceeing the conference. You had conversations with brand owners. I had conversations with brand owners. We went through the month of May into June, which is where we now sit. I think with a good head of steam in terms of where people see the rest of this year.
[00:01:20] Chris: Going the next big thing is prime day and you have so much experience telling brand stories, connecting people with their buyers, everything like that. But even before we get into that, what is your kind of, when you get to this time of year, right around prime day, What are the top one or two tips that you give people in terms of, I mean, aside from the batting down the hatches, because you're going to get ready for a big ride through tons of sales.
[00:01:50] Chris: Do you have any bits of advice? I'm sure people ask you all the time for advice.
[00:01:54] Janelle: I mean, it's probably what everybody says to do is like, make sure you get your prime exclusive deals set up. I remember one year when I had an assistant and I thought I explained to her how to set up the deals. And I said, I'm going to do 20 percent off on like all the skews.
[00:02:07] Janelle: And she has set them up as coupons, not prime exclusive deals. And that shows up quite differently in search when on Prime Day, people just want to search by, you know, what's running a PED is what, you know, the abbreviation, but, so like, yeah, don't assume that everyone knows what you're talking about if you're not doing it yourself, so make sure you set up your prime exclusive deals correctly.
[00:02:28] Janelle: There's also those MTB deals. Like if you have a SAS core rep you can get, you know, Some in on some of those, they get great placement and push on Amazon, especially pages and those we did one for mother's day. They ran an event where they did those, they call them multi brand top deals.
[00:02:44] Janelle: And I was actually impressed with how much traffic that generated in sales. So they have those running for Prime Day. It'll be too late this year, but like next year, make sure you're asking and advocating for yourself, especially if you're paying that extra money for a SAS core rep. Unfortunately, I don't know how to get access to that if you don't have a SAS core rep.
[00:03:02] Chris: You can fill out a form or, I mean, there's a way to do it.
[00:03:05] Chris: Usually I think the SAS core reps are better now at kind of getting out in front of that and having these conversations with people way before prime day. But for those people listening or watching who don't have a SAS core rep, the kinds of prep we're telling people to do, of course, is get ready for random ASIN takedowns, get ready for competitors and do something weird, get ready for some sort of snafu where you've gotten appeal already waiting in the wings.
[00:03:32] Chris: But I would imagine with you, since you're doing kind of longer tail, Brand development, brand story, work with people. You've had to troubleshoot things last minute yourself, right?
[00:03:44] Chris: If you didn't have a SAS core rep, what would you, you know, I mean, it depends on what it is, of course, but---
[00:03:49] Janelle: no, I mean, SAS core rep can't help you.
[00:03:51] Janelle: I mean, last Prime Day we had an ASIN go down. And anyone who has a SAS Corp rep knows you have to still make a case and you have to wait for 24 hours for them to respond before you can then escalate it. So you're not going to get anything done to salvage that prime day, unfortunately. So, your contingency plans are basically the things that we can control.
[00:04:10] Janelle: Let's focus on what we can control. Cause there's so much that can go wrong on Amazon that you can't control. So what we can control is inventory. To some extent, like make sure we get our inventory sent in, whether Amazon will receive it and get it in time, you never know, right? We've sent some stuff months ago. That's still sitting as Canada's notorious for taking forever to get things in inventory. So, you know, making sure that you've got the inventory locked and loaded, your PED set up. And then just, I have brands that we're building. Amazon's just a sales channel for us. So we have a whole strategy on prime day, you know, we're going to be blasting our email lists and SMS messaging them because reality is, everyone who lives on this planet knows about Prime Day now, pretty much. They're going to be going to Amazon anyways. We usually don't like to send our email list or SMS over to Amazon. But on Prime Day we know that they're going to be looking for those deals anyways, so we go ahead and encourage it.
[00:05:01] Janelle: So we're going to be sending that traffic to Amazon, and we're not going to try to match the deals on our website. It's going to go all through Amazon. And then we'll have those halo sales from ranking, from sending all that traffic for the next few weeks. And then we go back to promoting our primary asset, which is our website.
[00:05:17] Janelle: We still would rather have our customers shop on our own marketplace than on Amazon. And to any extent that we can encourage that. Great. And you know what, we spend a lot of off Amazon advertising dollars to generate brand awareness. And those translate directly into Halo sales on Amazon. So anytime I'm speaking to brands or e commerce, and when they call themselves Amazon sellers, I try to get anything else out of the box.
[00:05:41] Janelle: Let's not just be Amazon sellers. That's such a precarious position.
[00:05:43] Chris: Be a brand, be a brand owner.
[00:05:46] Janelle: Yeah. I would just say a brand. Yeah. Cause we want to go into retail. We want to have affiliates. We want to use all the spokes in the wheel for distribution. And again, Amazon's just one of those.
[00:05:55] Janelle: So I'll be it for many people listening to this podcast, probably their primary, but can we expand, you know, that's how I want them to think.
[00:06:03] Chris: Yeah. You probably talk to brand owners, whether you're a speaker at an event or brands that you're working with directly. You probably talk to them all the time about what they're worried about.
[00:06:12] Chris: One of the things they're worried about is probably my God. I'm like 90 something percent Amazon. What happens if Amazon does something to me? So you're probably teaching them how to hedge their bets without giving up Amazon and throwing it away. You're probably hedging their bets all the time. I mean, in terms of strategies for doing more on their site and building brand awareness off Amazon, right?
[00:06:34] Janelle: Yeah. And building that email list and SMS list. I mean, that's your true, that's your asset, right? We all know that when we go to sell our companies, we're going to get more. Greater multiple, we can do better when we've, de risked the company, when we have an owned asset, which is an email list. So, how are they building that?
[00:06:50] Janelle: And you can have strategies, while you sell on Amazon, that, you can create insert strategies that help you build your list, and funnels. I know a lot of people are like, you can't do an insert. I'm like, absolutely you can. You just gotta know how to do it. And you guys teach that too, how to do it compliant.
[00:07:05] Janelle: So, you know, that you can and can't do certain things is ridiculous. I'm like, I just got big brands that I buy on Amazon. I've got inserts in there, you know, so.
[00:07:17] Chris: Yeah, we get the ones who do it just the wrong way. You know, what bothers me the most is that they're using really outdated marketing techniques or solicitation techniques.
[00:07:28] Chris: And I went through this, and you and I were both at the event in Hawaii last month and I met a couple of people there. Who I talked to in this month about some things that they were planning on doing. And I was like, these are like kind of older techniques. Where are you getting these?
[00:07:43] Chris: Are these just in the rumor mill? I'm wondering like, we can talk about this and speculate, but are these WhatsApp groups where people are like, did you try this? Did you try that? Cause I'm on a couple of those groups and I see some of these things, just random WhatsApp groups of sellers. And it's just like, this is so 2019, you know,
[00:08:03] Janelle: so 2019 and the whole, I'm a small business really need your support.
[00:08:08] Janelle: I'm like, nobody gives a crap about that. And like, it's so, it feels like you're begging, you know, it's like, don't do that and don't ever ask for reviews. I'm never at, you know, I have all the, Gosh, I know at all my presentations where I'm speaking a lot. I try not to give the same presentation ever, you know, but I like to do new stuff and what I'm doing in my businesses and my companies to grow my brands.
[00:08:31] Janelle: But one of the things I just recently did was the insert strategies. I went through like, gosh, last year I launched 10 new brands and showed the actual inserts and that presentation. I mean, I won like best speaker at the event that I gave that at. Yeah. And so I turned it into, they had recorded it. So I just turned it into a mini masterclass that people can go and buy.
[00:08:51] Janelle: So I'm like, if any of your listeners are like, I don't know how to do inserts, just tell them to go. I think it's on my website. It's super cheap. It's like way cheaper than a consult with me, you know? And I have that for, I think all my presentations, I started just turning into little masterclasses because even when I'm doing consultations with clients, I felt like I was repeating myself over and over and over again.
[00:09:10] Janelle: And I was like, This isn't the best use of our time together on the phone, go watch this training and then you and I can talk and apply it to your brand.
[00:09:19] Chris: Instead of just the same old, we're a small business, help us out like the requesting. Like they're doing you a favor basically.
[00:09:27] Janelle: I don't know. That's such a turnoff to me. I'm like, I don't care if you're a small local business, I just had a consult today and these guys were selling their t shirts. They wanted, how can we sell more merch? And all they had on their t shirts is their logo.
[00:09:40] Janelle: And, their pickleball brand. I'm like, your logo is not even that cool. Like make something for the customer. Like, I don't want to be a walking billboard for you unless you're maybe Nike or Puma or something cool right now that like, It gives me a sense of status, but like, to wear a t-shirt that has your logo on it when you're no one, like, and that's what most of these inserts are, you're basically asking the customer to do you a favor.
[00:10:02] Janelle: That's not how we add value to someone's life. So, an example, like from the motorcycle brand that I gave in the class I taught, like, Yeah, we did a detailer. It's a spray.
[00:10:12] Chris: Gloves, right? The gloves?
[00:10:14] Janelle: Gloves too. And I was going to talk about one of the inserts to get their information is I literally with the detailer kit came a microfiber cloth.
[00:10:23] Janelle: And if they wanted a free microfiber cloth, the offer was just in there to, Come visit, scan the QR code and get an extra microfiber cloth. It's a premium microfiber cloth. Like we grew our list hundreds of thousands and that cloth costs me like less than a dollar to ship it another dollar.
[00:10:38] Janelle: So for 2, I'm getting everyone's email and their shipping address. Like. That's not breaking any rules. That's not asking for a review. That's just, that's a brilliant strategy for growing a list. Like you can do the warranty thing on certain things, but that didn't make sense for a 14 bottle of detailer, like warranty that like, so I see people using the dumbest tactics because they were in a WhatsApp group where it says use a warranty.
[00:11:01] Janelle: I'm like, nobody's going to warranty warranty this tape measure.
[00:11:07] Chris: There's a cycle of regurgitated ideas that are, that just make the rounds and then they go away and then they cycle back in. And a couple of people have said like, why do these ideas keep rotating around?
[00:11:20] Chris: Like some sort of orbit around a planet every three years or two years. And you know what? It's just a sign that people, it's a lack of creativity and people are out of ideas. Some of the lack of creativity is that Amazon restricts some of the creative ideas you can come up with. And I totally get that.
[00:11:34] Chris: They don't want undue influence. On their buyers because it's their buyer, not your buyer, but just like think think about off amazon for a minute like Think about why would you want to join somebody's email list? Well, it's not just for free stuff. It's because you might be interested in accessories for the stuff you already got, right?
[00:11:53] Chris: That's a legitimate reason for me to buy something and then want to be on their email list. And if I know I'm gonna get some news from them, some special offers perhaps, but that's like, I can just delete that email if I don't want it, right? I'm not gonna like hate them and unsubscribe the email list the day they send me the first email, unless their content is just drivel and stupid and boring. You know what I mean? And no one really wants to say that, I guess maybe that's the issue.
[00:12:20] Janelle: Yeah. No, brands we don't even do anything that creative. We just know that like our customers would love to join our list to receive free samples of the new product launches.
[00:12:30] Janelle: Like we have a feedback group when we're getting ready to launch a new product. We like to send out, the beta basically and have people use it and get feedback. And for our users, like our demographic, this is a female brand. They get like so pumped. That's the offer we have to offer. That's it. And we get like 30 percent opt in rate for just, Hey, yeah, I want to try your next new thing and give you feedback.
[00:12:51] Chris: Yeah. One of the things I love that you talk about and you talked about it in New York at our conference, but you talk about it a lot elsewhere is get to know the person behind the brand. The person is the brand, get to know more about them. And so then once they get to know the person and the brand, then there's some curiosity built around what's this person going to do next.
[00:13:12] Chris: And I know you work with some celebrities where they're already known, maybe even before you work with them on some brands. And that's the case some of the time, but if you build that curiosity around what else is this person into, what else do they care about, what other products might they be involved in.
[00:13:29] Chris: Then there's enough curiosity for them to follow that person, not just on social media, but to follow their brands too. I mean, \ is that a safe and friendly description of what you spend a lot of time doing in the brand development process?
[00:13:40] Janelle: Yeah. Launching the brand with an influence or celebrity.
[00:13:42] Janelle: It's like they already have the audience. The audience already knows, likes, and trusts them. And so like, it's like a slam dunk. We create a product that's a perfect fit for their audience. And that hero product usually, you know, So for instance, let's talk not in theoretical, sometimes it helps to give examples, but right now, you know, and now everyone else, I'm working on launching a supplement brand with Derek and Julianne Hough.
[00:14:03] Janelle: They're like the foremost dancers on the planet. And so we're making the brand for dancers. Like when they first came to me, they're like, we want to make it for like artistic athletes. So that'd be like ice skaters, gymnasts, dancers, martial artists. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold the phone. Like you guys are dancers. So this supplement line is going to be for dancers. Made by dancers for dancers. And like later, after we've owned the dance market, which Between you and I and everyone on the listening to this is plenty big. We don't need to own anything else.
[00:14:31] Chris: But you might attract other interested parties.
[00:14:36] Janelle: So down the road, Derek, Julianne, yes, we'll go for all your performers, but let's start with dance.
[00:14:41] Janelle: That's a hundred million dollar industry company. Easy for us. And then we can laser beam focus and we can talk specifically to dancers about that because the dancer has a very different Problem in regimen and train schedule then a gymnast and even an ice skater. And so I'll let an ice skater come out and launch a brand to ice skaters.
[00:14:58] Janelle: Like that, that's what we would right now get smeared. If we tried to market Effectively to all those segments, even though they're artistic athletes, which I love and we trademark that name, they are not dancers. And so we're going to own the dance market. And so I encourage brands. I encourage anyone I work with to go narrow, as narrow as you can, because then you can get laser beam focused marketing that really resonates and connects and converts the customer.
[00:15:23] Chris: Right. And then you can go wider later. Right. Or no?
[00:15:26] Janelle: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But what you'll find is that most people, they don't ever have to, because when you go so deep and niche with your audience, that's where brand development really occurs because you start building a raving band of loyal fans and when dancers, so we can now start breaking off and try to get an ice skater, or how about I'll launch a hair, nails and joint supplement for dancers, you know, I'll just go deeper with the dancers, with other products, instead of trying to go to an adjacent market.
[00:15:56] Janelle: Where my marketing messages aren't going to resonate without me shifting tonality, right? So I would first exhaust the entire product line for dancers that you want to do before then you start, you know, going wide, I've never had to start going more wide. You just, you can get, I mean, I guess I haven't ever been so niche niche because I was explaining, I was just at an event in Austria, so a bunch of European sellers, and I was trying to help them understand this concept that when you really focus how powerful it is. And so I gave him the example of when we launched the supplement company and we were doing a post workout recovery and we were at the Arnold marketing at one weekend to bodybuilders and the next weekend we'd be at like, you know, some rowing competition for Olympic rowers, trying to get them to use the post workout recovery.
[00:16:41] Janelle: And then we'd be at a CrossFit event and CrossFit was this new sport. And then it was like, we just had this aha moment where we were like, why don't we just focus and go all in on CrossFit? Because then like we know which athletes to go after. We know which magazines to advertise on. We know like the language that we need to use, we talk about doing your WOD, not your workout. Cause CrossFitters don't do workouts. They do WODs, workout of the day. They don't go to gyms, they go to boxes, you know, they do Fran and Murph. And so there's this whole language that then we could connect with our audience. And then we had apparel for CrossFitters.
[00:17:15] Janelle: We knew that we'd become the official supplement sponsor of the CrossFit games. We threw CrossFit events. There was so much that we could do that we didn't even do in that CrossFit market. There was no need to then say, Hey, let's try to go after rock climbers or spear fishers, even though we got those markets, because guess what?
[00:17:33] Janelle: Our surfers and our spear fisher divers, whatever they were doing CrossFit. As a primary training. And so we were picking up those secondary markets by virtue of the fact that, Hey, surfers were using CrossFit. And so then we had the surf community that evolved, but that evolved.
[00:17:49] Chris: you picked up that secondary market without expending the resources or without even trying to target it. It was word of mouth.
[00:17:57] Janelle: Yeah. And it was all in on CrossFit, which, they'll have that overlap. So like pickleball, I'm going to go all in on, I'm watching a supplement. I just was prior to this call. Sorry, I was late as I was wrapping up with one of the athletes in pickleball. We're watching a supplement line for pickleball.
[00:18:11] Janelle: And that's how I work. I'm not trying to go after racket sports. I'm all in on just pickleball and it's going to be a pickleball supplement. And when you and I talk like this and people listening, it sounds so no duh. But yeah, every day I'm doing consults with brands. They're like, I'm launching a supplement and I'll be like, awesome.
[00:18:29] Janelle: And they'll be like, it's a all in one vitamin drink for weight loss. I'll be like, cool. Who's it for? They're like, for everyone. We will sell no one then because something made for everyone connects with no one, so we spent the whole hour and a half identifying where we could go in and identify a market that we could connect with and own.
[00:18:48] Janelle: And it was brilliant at the end. They were like, Oh, awesome. Now they know exactly what to target on Instagram and Facebook with their marketing, what kind of ads to make, where we need to be in Reddit or on Facebook. You know, we know where we're going to get our traffic, who we're going to hit. It just changes the game and we can actually own a market.
[00:19:04] Chris: I guess that's it. People don't understand that their target audience can be divided in as many slices. In different interested parties without having to go, well, we already know we're going for these people, but we want to add all these people on the fringe and hope they're going to buy too.
[00:19:21] Chris: So we're going to divide our messaging into 17 different pieces. Because it'll be too jack of all trades, master of none, right? It'll be that approach and they'll miss the mark on connecting with these people.
[00:19:33] Janelle: And you can do that when you're like, you know, everyone will be like, they would tell me, well, we want to be like AG1
[00:19:38] Janelle: and I'm like, okay, well first AG1 is like 10 years now in business, they're not overnight success. And that guy floundered for so many years. And he landed, was it Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss that blew him up. Right. And that's when it finally takes off. And so now if you're going to go take on AG1, like, that's what they would tell me on the phone.
[00:19:56] Janelle: Like, we're going to be, we're AG1, but better. I was like, I don't care if you're better. Do you have private equity money? Like how deep are your pockets? Because AG1 right now has Tim Ferriss, Chris Williamson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, all of these guys pumping them and they have so much money now in marketing, but they didn't start that way, you know, they had to earn that, so unless you have money that we can go out there with a bigger megaphone and, you know, throw cash at it.
[00:20:22] Janelle: You're going to have to go niche and you're going to have to like gain each foothold in that niche, which you can do. That's the best way to gain traction is to go narrow and then just build that loyal raving fan base and then you'll, you'll grow out of that naturally.
[00:20:35] Chris: So is this the number one, I mean, you and I go to different events and we see each other.
[00:20:40] Chris: When people approach you, not in a consult, but they like hear you talk and then they come hang out with you afterwards, ask you questions. Is this the number one thing? That they want to talk about, like, how can we get more Amazon's so competitive, our competitors are doing some things right and we're not doing it right enough.
[00:20:59] Chris: How can we attract more people? How can we sell more? I mean, is it this conversation. I see your slides. I'm sure you get interesting questions about the different facets of your talks, but is this kind of the number one thing where people are kind of unsure how to build their brand the right way before they think of expanding it?
[00:21:16] Janelle: Honestly, when it's an Amazon seller approaching me, it's usually like, ah, man, I heard you speak. And I agree with everything you said. How do I change from just being an Amazon seller? Cause a lot of times it's an Amazon event. These people got into the Amazon business cause they bought like ASM or some guru that taught them how to find products on Amazon launch money.
[00:21:36] Janelle: We all know that margins are getting slam on Amazon. it's a flea market. It's a price driven platform. So good luck. Mr. American or European who's sourcing in China, beating the Chinese who are selling exactly what you're selling because the Chinese have gotten good at branding, frankly, they call me, I help them.
[00:21:52] Janelle: You know what I mean? I had a whole agency that was just helping the Chinese, India, all these manufacturers, Brand and market the products because that's what they sucked at. They're great at creating the products but their marketing was bad. So now that they've got that figured out, you have a really hard time beating them because they can beat you on price and Amazon's a price driven platform.
[00:22:10] Janelle: So we have to be better at building a brand, creating a product that is unique enough and positioning it. So I do a lot of work on positioning and depositioning the competition, because when you can position a product. Then price is no longer relevant because we're establishing value and nobody fights on price if they feel the value is there.
[00:22:28] Janelle: And so learning how to position the product so that they will purchase it based on the brand, the story and the U S and they also want to not be so dependent on Amazon. They want to build a brand. Amazon is just a sales channel, like I talked about. And so we want to be channel agnostic.
[00:22:46] Janelle: Like when I build a brand, I don't care where you buy it. Because as long as you buy it, I'm going to have Amazon rocking and rolling. I'm going to have walmart. com walking and rolling. I'm going to have my own website rocking and rolling. I'm going to have retail. And so it's kind of just, they come to me and say, help. I started out as an Amazon brand. I have no like real congruent, cohesive story. I don't know how to drive my own traffic. I don't know how to do this whole branding, but I hear you and I know what you're saying is true and it resonated with me, what's my next step. And that's kind of where we go from there.
[00:23:17] Janelle: Let's build you a brand for reals this time.
[00:23:20] Chris: I hope they're listening with wide open ears and absorbing all your knowledge because the better they compete in some of these other areas, they less, the less they have to sweat the fees on Amazon. For example, I know fees suck and I know fees going up, but I mean, we can see Amazon's attitude, which is, Oh, well maybe you should be more established as a brand before you start complaining about things we do, because honestly we can raise your fees and you're just going to have to put up with it. You're not going to leave. You're not going to go anywhere else. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, maybe they can sell more on their site. Maybe they won't. But the bottom line is if they're cornering the market on post recovery workout supplements, for example, or on artistic athlete designated products, then they don't have to worry about some of the like, what's Amazon doing right now is Amazon sneaking up on me and they're going to surprise me with something they don't have to worry about that stuff as much because they're killing it within the market they're in.
[00:24:17] Janelle: Yeah. And I think, I mean, I don't know if this is true, but my feelings on Amazon is that they want brands on the platform. They don't really care about the little guy. The little guy causes problems. The little guy's not got a corporate law team that's got product liability insurance. Thats vetted. And so by virtue of Amazon with all these new fees and policies, I really do believe they're trying to squeeze out the little guy because the little guy causes it's like the 80 20.
[00:24:43] Janelle: If you've got Nike on your platform and you've got like Pumas and you've got, you know, Maybelline and you've got these real brands. A lot of your headache goes away because these real brands, you know, I work for them. We consult with them. It's like they have complex legal teams. They've got HR. They're doing things by the book because they have to, and that's the law of Amazon's play as well.
[00:25:02] Janelle: So they want, they want real brands on the platform. We are a risk when we are these little noncompliant just thrown up stuff on Amazon and they don't need more stuff. How many garlic presses do you need?
[00:25:12] Chris: Everyone always uses the garlic press example.
[00:25:15] Janelle: It's just like, I feel so sorry for these people that are buying these courses to learn how to make side hustle money, selling products on Amazon.
[00:25:25] Janelle: I'm like, you're not going to make a lot of money or even make it worth your time anymore doing that. No thanks, There's easier ways to make money. Go start washing windows for the neighbors.
[00:25:36] Chris: Well, the days of easy margins, I don't know if we're defining that as 2016, 2017, 2018. It's several years ago at this point.
[00:25:45] Chris: And the competition has gotten to the point between the competition within each category. And going up against competitors who have a bigger ad spend, who have a bigger marketing budget, who are tighter with successful influencers, whatever it is, plus the fees. You're not going to just jump into that and start clearing all those hurdles and making a bundle.
[00:26:05] Chris: I mean, that's not going to happen. You have to create that foundation and then build on it, but organically, not like shortcuts, right?
[00:26:15] Janelle: I have an Amazon only brand, only one. I started it in 2014. And just for an example in 2014, and it's just a tiny little paper company and it did like 120, 000, you know, take home and it's very little work, you know what I mean?
[00:26:31] Janelle: My kid, it's my kid's brand. So by my kids, like almost 10 years ago, actually 10 years ago, they would do the inventory. We'd ship it from our home. If we made any FBM sales, everything else goes to FBA. But now that all my kids are grown, I'm the one managing this brand. And just over the years, my margins have gone to what the take home last year, remember 120, 000 in 2014, same amount of work to last year, just finished my taxes, my take home on that was 10, 000 kept dollars, same amount of work, same, same sales velocity. That's how much my margins shrunk from my PPC costs going up to the new inventory fees. Just everything like my cost of goods because I have raised prices a little bit But with how much inflation and my product shot up like I couldn't really charge, you know, 40 bucks for these products It wasn't feasible, but I needed to everything my costs doubled But I couldn't double my sales price.
[00:27:30] Janelle: So it's just, that's kind of for an Amazon seller, that's what they've been feeling the last few years. It's gotten really bad the last three years. I'd say the squeeze on those margins. So if you're just an Amazon brand, I don't know how you're doing it.
[00:27:45] Chris: Well, I'm glad you went back to 2014 because that's when I started all this ecommerceChris stuff.
[00:27:50] Chris: So I'm approaching my 10th anniversary. Hard to believe, but everything has changed, everything. There's like almost nothing except for Amazon's lukewarm messaging around suspensions and listing takedowns. Some of that's kind of the same. But almost everything has changed in that time. And it's like, if you don't move with it and if you don't stay aggressive and competitive across all of these facets of selling, then you're just guaranteeing that you fall behind.
[00:28:17] Chris: So in order to keep up on things, if they want to keep up with you, what's the best way to do that and how do they reach you?
[00:28:23] Janelle: Yeah, my website's janellepage.com. So that's, you have my spelling, so, and, and I'm on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. So yeah, just, shoot me a message and I'd say follow me.
[00:28:35] Janelle: But it's funny, people will go follow me on Instagram. They're like, it's just you doing handstands. I'm like, yeah. Like my business is, like my, my Instagram is my scrapbook. I'm a mom of four kids and I, I, you know, do fun stuff. I ski.
[00:28:50] Chris: You're in front of a lot of waterfalls. Yes.
[00:28:52] Janelle: So if you want to see what it's like to live an entrepreneurial life, and I guess my Instagram does display me working all over the world and I think try to live my best life.
[00:29:05] Chris: And under the water you were, I saw some, I saw some diving photos there. So yeah, I can attest to that. Those were not fake.
[00:29:13] Janelle: We do it together. That was so fun.
[00:29:17] Chris: That was great.
[00:29:19] Janelle: This is why we wanted to have our own businesses so that we could have freedom and time flexibility.
[00:29:25] Janelle: And so I guess if you want to see that it actually can happen, then that's what my Instagram is good for, but I'm not dishing out sales advice on my Instagram. You'd be sorely disappointed, but you could go to LinkedIn for that or my website.
[00:29:39] Chris: LinkedIn, or, I mean, if you don't happen to see Janelle hosting our Seller Velocity Conference, she speaks at many other places because of her wisdom and knowledge in her years of voluminous success as an entrepreneur.
[00:29:52] Chris: So thanks for sharing your pearls of wisdom once again, always great talking to you. And scuba diving with you occasionally and, hope to see you again soon.
[00:30:02] Janelle: Awesome. Take care.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions I'm your very thrilled to be here host, Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. And we are talking about prime day prep, but from the angle of proper communication with Amazon teams, because as you know, during hectic, busy periods, Amazon communicates in little bits and pieces and fits and starts that are not always useful. And when there's more contacts coming in, more people to get back to that gets even more fragmented and more difficult to follow.
[00:00:35] Chris: So that just means your communication game has to kick it up a notch, especially if things go wrong in real time, where thousands of dollars are running out the door more so than usual, and you're waiting for them to get back to you with a response that might be kind of lower quality. So what we're talking about today is crafting a proper communication strategy so that before anything even possibly goes wrong, you know that you're not going to be opening seller support cases, sitting and waiting.
[00:01:08] Chris: You'll have emails ready to go pre written if possible. If you're not sure what is most likely to go wrong during prime day, you've at least got a plan for what might go wrong. You're working on kind of the more nuanced compliance cases. So the first question I had for you, Is what are the main areas where you think people might get randomly last minute flagged for something, whether it's legitimate or not, where they would have to have communication written and prepared in advance.
[00:01:38] Chris: Is there any tips or tricks you can give people in terms of not opening up a seller support case and waiting, for a miracle, but actually having kind of a one first step, third step, game plan in place before they get started.
[00:01:51] Leah: Well, usually if we're seeing compliance takedowns during a busy period, if they're incorrect, it's usually because of keyword abuse.
[00:01:58] Leah: So the first step is checking your listing for any information that shouldn't be there and removing it, of course. And then, unfortunately, the first step is, it's not technically a support case, it's appealing it through the account health dashboard, but that does get routed to support for compliance cases for some reason.
[00:02:15] Leah: My weird tip, but for some reason is required, because these cases get routed through support, even though you're appealing on the account health dashboard. Sometimes they don't get routed to the right team. So you'll just get like a response back from general support saying like, we understand you're having problems with blah, blah, blah.
[00:02:33] Leah: And it's like, yeah, that's what we already told you. So I actually recommend starting all of the appeals that are going to the compliance team with the line, please transfer this case to compliance. It's not foolproof, but it does actually work a lot of the time. Sort of weird when you're going through the appeal form that you have to tell them where to route it, but it is something that I have been seeing for years and still see, especially during busy periods where support or just trying to answer cases as quickly as possible to maintain their metrics.
[00:03:00] Chris: Yeah, and I haven't been working on the compliance stuff that you do, but for the other things that I've been troubleshooting for people I've Suggested having something pre written and ready that says this went to the wrong place already Maybe multiple times if so chart those out and say how many times and on what dates it's gone to the wrong team But you know this belongs with the blank team Send it there or start naming, like which team sent it to the wrong place to make sure that it doesn't go back to that team.
[00:03:35] Chris: So the person reading it knows before they even say, Hey, I know where this should go. They already know that you've been there and they already know it came to them because that team didn't want it, didn't take it, didn't look at it. So having that kind of ready to go, ready to launch, whether or not you need it during prime day, I think is a good idea, but whether it's a technical issue or some sort of false flag on Amazon side, or if it's a competitor attack or if it's abuse, I also recommend, and I wanted to get your take on this, what you think of having people write something that doesn't necessarily decide in advance or land on one diagnosis, but like something went wrong. It could be a tool misfire.
[00:04:23] Chris: It could be an attack. We're not sure. Our listing is down. I mean, we don't always advise people to say, we can't tell what's going on, you look into it, you figure it out and you get back to us. Usually Amazon wants you to tell them what's going wrong, but in some cases you can write something up for It could be technical, it could be a glitch, it could be an attack.
[00:04:45] Chris: We don't have time to go back and forth with seller support on this. We need a higher level team to hop in, review it and get our listing back up. Because of course, Prime Day is only a couple of days. If it takes them a couple of days to even decide what it is, then you've already lost that opportunity.
[00:05:03] Leah: Right. My concern with recommending that approach to people is that people will start using it for absolutely everything. And a lot of times. The fault, the problem. So now we're just, we're now, we're just adding more traffic to already busy escalation paths that are kind of like useless traffic because like, they're the ones at fault.
[00:05:23] Chris: No I'm saying these are cases where you've already done your due diligence. You've already looked at your own listings, your own side of it, and you've determined that that's not where the flaw is, so you're not sure if it's an attack, you're not sure if it's technical in nature.
[00:05:38] Chris: But the only way to get it solved quickly is to press them to take a look at it and determine what the cause is.
[00:05:45] Leah: Yeah, I mean, those are escalations that we send. I mean, you can't always tell, particularly on the things that I work on. You can't always tell if it's an attack or something else. It, it does certainly slow things down a little bit when Amazon is the one having to do the troubleshooting.
[00:05:59] Leah: But I mean, of course, yeah, there are times where you don't know what the problem is. You just know that you are not the problem. There is something going on on their side. But yeah, certainly, I mean, technical issues tend to take longer to resolve, too, because usually they require multiple teams, but I try to get as much information as I can, because if it's up to Amazon to find that information, they slow.
[00:06:19] Chris: Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting is that on the one hand, There are some sellers who are like, if it's not fixed within two hours, they come back and say, why isn't it been fixed? What's going on. And they're all too willing. They're all too willing to reply or re I'm sorry, within two hours. Well, you can't wait two days during prime day.
[00:06:42] Chris: That's the problem. So on the one hand, you need to give Amazon time to look at something and get back to you in a realistic amount of time. But on the other hand, there are lots of sellers who, when they're told to wait, they will wait. And they might not be waiting for anything. They might be told to wait for no reason whatsoever.
[00:06:58] Chris: So how do you reconcile that? How do you know when it's right?
[00:07:02] Leah: Don't wait forever. But I mean, It depends on who you're dealing with, too. I mean, two hours or you're just going to have it routed to a different person when you send that two hour update. So, I mean, it depends on what teams you're talking about and what the situation is.
[00:07:19] Chris: It also depends on if you have an account manager. So I wanted to talk about that for a minute.
[00:07:23] Leah: It also depends on if Amazon decides to flag you for abusive communication because you're overusing their messaging tools.
[00:07:29] Chris: That's very infrequent. We can do a different episode on that.
[00:07:32] Leah: I've been seeing a lot more warnings about that lately, actually.
[00:07:36] Leah: A lot of people have been being warned for it, but not actually taken down. Like, just a reminder, it is a violation of our policies.
[00:07:43] Chris: Okay, so you're seeing that more than I am. That's useful information. I'll keep an eye out for that. I haven't seen more than a couple of those lately.
[00:07:52] Chris: Usually, I mean, for a quick sidebar on Contacting Amazon too much or being abusive. What I see is usually like, you've been unprofessional in your communication with us. Not that you've been spamming us, but that you've been going crazy in your communications with us. And you've been not driving us crazy because of frequency, but driving us crazy because of the manner in which you communicate.
[00:08:14] Leah: No, I've seen more recently about around frequency or about reopening cases or starting a new case because you just didn't like their response.
[00:08:22] Chris: Okay. That's fair. Yeah. When I brought up SAS core and account management, those are the paid account management programs that a lot of our clients use, and I'm sure a lot of listeners have as well.
[00:08:34] Chris: They might not get back to you within 24, 48 hours for something on Prime Day either. So it's probably number one, good idea to talk to them about, hey, if crazy crap goes down right before Prime Day or during it, can I get on the hotline to you? Can you do something quickly? That's a good conversation to have in your monthly call or long before the actual mid July dates kick in.
[00:08:56] Chris: But let's just say you've already had that conversation. They've said, yep, we're going to be there for you. We're not going to let you down. Something goes crazy. And then something does go wrong. Just make sure when you are emailing with them or talking to them, that you get a definitive one, two, three, four steps that they're going to do so that you're not just going to have them do one thing and come back with a shrug and oops, I'll try something else.
[00:09:19] Chris: Make sure you've got a clear idea of what they're doing internally, what their expectations are, and how quickly they're going to hear back. They might say, Hey, it's prime day. Things are crazy. We're not going to hear back right away. Best thing I would advise when you're having that conversation, or you're on that email thread with the account manager is to say, okay, well, then I want to plan for that too.
[00:09:39] Chris: Not just a plan for something that goes wrong. And then we figure out the rest later after you've opened up a case. Let's just say your case languishes. Let's say your case gets a generic. Internal response. Hey, we'll check into this and get back to you. What do you expect to be able to do further at that moment in time?
[00:09:55] Chris: Or are you just going to level with us and tell us that you can't do much more than wait? And at that point, it's the burdens on us to do all the escalations from there. Get that expectation clear and have that discussion well in advance. I mean, some of our clients are probably talking to their SAS core reps.
[00:10:14] Chris: What once, once a month, really just 12 times a year. Unless something else goes wrong, but in the absence of things going wrong, they have that conversation once a month. So prime day is a month away. I mean, have those conversations now so that you're not scrambling, right?
[00:10:31] Leah: Yeah, absolutely. Especially because your account manager likely has multiple accounts that they're managing and they're all probably wanting immediate responses during that time of year.
[00:10:41] Leah: It's certainly better to have a stronger relationship with your rep before it's an emergency.
[00:10:46] Chris: And account managers get just as frustrated as the sellers they work with in terms of the answers they get back. You can read between the lines, sometimes it's not so hidden in terms of their frustrations when they get a completely worthless answer from an internal team.
[00:11:02] Leah: Those are actually my favorites. Not specifically SAS reps, but sometimes when I speak with catalog or account health, I like when I get the jaded employee that's been there for a long time, cause you just hear like an audible sigh when they look at the case notes. Those are my favorite people to speak to actually.
[00:11:17] Chris: Or the emails sometimes contain a non audible sigh. They're writing in this interesting kind of indirect language style. It's almost like a version of legalese without the legal part where they're just talking around it. But you can tell that whether they say something like, we understand this answer isn't what any of us hoped for, but we will check back and try to get you a better answer.
[00:11:44] Chris: Or I will. It's just interesting how they're Frustrations are almost on a par with what their sellers are experiencing.
[00:11:51] Leah: Not that I'm happy that they're frustrated, but it just makes me feel better. That it's, it's not just external, it's not just on our side.
[00:12:00] Chris: It's not just on one side. No, that's a great note to end this podcast episode on.
[00:12:06] Chris: Something I can address in a different episode, when I'm speaking with people in person, in Seattle. And one of my many trips, I mean, there are internal people that'll say, I checked into this for you and I got a really lame answer back and I'm embarrassed or I'm frustrated, or I share your angst over this.
[00:12:25] Chris: And they do, you can tell when you're talking to people in person, you don't have to do side trips to Seattle like I do. You can go to Amazon, accelerate and be there in person and attend. Speak to some of these people directly who will try to do things for you and maybe talk to you on the phone or on a chime call later, and they will sometimes be more upset than you are because you're numb to it.
[00:12:47] Chris: And they might not be, they might've actually expected a better answer from a fellow Amazonian and they didn't get one.
[00:12:53] Leah: Yeah. That's also kind of nice for me when that happens, like I'm not happy that it's not working and I'm not happy that they're frustrated, but it's nice to know that it happens internally as well.
[00:13:04] Chris: It's not even, it's not even that we're joyful over it.
[00:13:10] Leah: No, I mean, of course I'd be happier if it worked.
[00:13:13] Chris: Well, it's like comradeship, it's like some camaraderie that you get out of hearing it because you get to say to yourself, great. So further evidence that I'm not completely crazy.
[00:13:25] Leah: Right. Exactly. I'm like, Oh good. I'm not losing my mind.
[00:13:28] Chris: It's not me. It's you. It's not me. Not the person you're talking to, but the overall entity, that is Amazon. So bottom line, Prime Day, it's an exciting time. It's a complex time. There's nuance to some of these troubleshooting, urgent care type resolutions.
[00:13:47] Chris: So if you have problems with this, questions about it beforehand, no better time than the present, the month of June to have these conversations or to contact us and go over some of these things, because come July, things do get wild. Pretty, pretty quickly. So thanks again for listening. Thanks again, Leah, for joining from so far away and we will talk again soon.
[00:00:03] Chris: Hey everybody, Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe with Leah McHugh, both of ecommerceChris back with another wonderful episode about things to worry about or have anxiety about, or to look forward to quote unquote, when it comes to Prime Day and the types of things which, of course, Prime Day may, for some people, feel very close.
For others, it might feel far away. But, either way, there could be trouble brewing now that will impact you on Prime Day. So we're trying to use some of this month's episodes to get people to look at things, That could mushroom into a much larger problem, look at those things now versus down the road or God forbid waiting for account health to just call you randomly.
That was kind of the 1st point I wanted to make or ask you about your clients is I'm hearing from a lot of sellers saying account health called us out of the blue to say they wanted to discuss stuff that. Maybe they had already addressed, like they thought there were unresolved IP complaints that were already off their account out.
Maybe you've seen resolved compliance issues that they've gotten calls about, but it's another instance of the right hand, not knowing what the left hand is doing. And a phone call like that just serves one purpose, which is to alarm the business owner. So have you have had the same conversations that I have?
[00:01:19] Leah: I've had different ones, actually, because with the restricted products, a lot of people just acknowledge them, and then they're removed from the account health, and then they get a call from account health saying, we're suspending your account because you have unresolved restricted products. So a little bit different on my side.
[00:01:32] Chris: Yeah, a couple of people have told me as well, and we don't have to go down the road of all types of policy violations, code of conduct. Some people have perfect account health and they still get a call from account health reps saying you've got unresolved issues and it might just be a policy violation that they haven't sufficiently addressed, which is interesting because a lot of times they don't tell you what ASINs it's around, or they don't tell you what you did to violate that policy.
So part of getting ready for Prime Day, of course, is scrubbing your account. For unresolved ASIN level issues and complaints and problems, but keep an eye out for policy violation warnings, or even just random references to, we see you may have artificially inflated your product reviews or your positive reviews, or you might be harming another seller.
They never provide examples for what they think you've been doing. But unfortunately, some sellers are just kind of like, eh, sounds like this was just a random thing, probably sent an error and they don't really look into it because there's no followup. But just because Amazon doesn't follow up today or tomorrow, like they say they will, we're going to get back to you within 24 hours.
I know they say that, they may bug you a week or two down the road.
[00:02:47] Leah: Do they still tell you 24 hours? I'd never get told 24 hours. Their like, we'll get back to you in like 10 days or seven days. I get, I get way longer lead times than the 72 hour that they say.
[00:03:03] Chris: Yeah. The 72 hour language language is still there for you might be suspended your whole account within 72 hours, because those are people who are told you have to address these problems within those three days or you will be suspended. Some are given this 48 hour window, 24 hours. I think where I'm getting the 24 hours is they say, we weren't able to reach you about XYZ problems. We're going to try you back in 24 hours.
But yeah, but my main point stands in terms of like, if you're late June, knock it on the door prime day. That's the last thing you want is a surprise phone call. And also I'm getting people who are like, they called me at three in the morning. So of course I didn't answer it. Check your missed calls, just the way you might check your performance notifications, but bottom line, don't let things fester.
Some of the work you do with people around compliance, they can't do anything until they have the compliance documentation in their possession. Right? So they can't react right away.
[00:04:10] Leah: Well, I mean, ideally, we should have that documentation before Amazon warns you about needing it, because usually there are legal requirements.
But yeah, sometimes they do ask for additional testing on things. And those testing do take time and aren't always. Like mandatory legally. So, so yeah, I mean, certainly some of those, you can't really rush. I will say they have gotten a little bit better on giving you lead time for those. As opposed to just taking down the ASIN and then requesting something that takes like six weeks to complete.
[00:04:38] Chris: Exactly. So we're six weeks from prime day, maybe less. So like, think about that now and I'll tell you why, a lot of competitors I think have figured out. That they can at least attempt to poke Amazon and say, wait a minute, do they have compliance documentation? Are these products compliant?
Sometimes that will result in Amazon asking you when they otherwise wouldn't have asked you. And of course, if you have all your documentation, your competitor loses because they didn't really get anything out of it and they just wasted their time. But they're willing to try it on the off chance that you don't have it altogether.
[00:05:14] Leah: Yeah. Or they add information to your listing that implies that it needs something that it doesn't necessarily need. I would be keeping a very close eye on things like age ranges on detail pages for products, because there is a lot of scrutiny right now around baby and toddler products.
You don't want your listing to look like it's for babies or toddlers when it's not actually allowed to be sold to babies or toddlers, also lots of keyword information you want to be looking at. You don't want to have information in your listing that could make Amazon think that it's something else.
And that includes saying that your product is not something. So I do still see listings get flagged as a pesticide because it says that it does not contain pesticides or that they don't use pesticides in the making of the products, so take a very close look at your listing content, including images as well.
Amazon is getting better at. Scanning information and images with their AI. Make sure that there's nothing in there that could get you flagged because the last thing you want is trying to resolve that around Prime Day. And also keep an eye on listing contributions and make sure no one's adding stuff that could get you flagged because that's still an abuse tactic that we see all the time.
[00:06:22] Chris: We've had a lot of questions, which tools should I use? You're kind of better on the tools side than I am, but for changes, ASIN contributions, for changes to detail pages, You do have to really stay on top of it because again, competitors will try to make adjustments to your ASIN contributions just to see if you're on the ball and just to see, you know, if they can get anything out of it, because if you're slow to respond or react or do anything, then that tells them you're a worthwhile target for more abuse.
[00:06:57] Leah: Yeah, it just shows them that they can do things without you noticing or without you taking action. And that's usually what we see. We'll see a small change made to a listing and it's usually not anything particularly bad. It'll just be them testing to see if you do anything about it and then they'll come back and either add a piece of words or try to hijack the listing.
So definitely recommend using some sort of alert software to let you know if there are changes to any of your detail pages, especially in the lead up to peak sales periods, like Prime Day.
[00:07:27] Chris: And product dimensions. Keep an eye on those.
[00:07:30] Leah: Especially with all the new fees.
[00:07:31] Chris: Yeahh. People trying to push your inventory into the oversized category by making your product, changing the product dimensions. To make your product, you know, bigger to make it cost you more.
The bottom line is you have to keep an eye on all that stuff. I mean, my suggestion was going to be designate an employee. If you're working with an agency, make sure the agency designates a specific person to keep an eye on this stuff. For the next, four or five weeks, because yes, in some cases they're going to wait right before prime day and then unload all this stuff on you.
But consider these weeks, trial weeks, they're going to stress test you with, did they notice this? Did they notice that? Can we buy from them and report the item for defects or for not being as described or being defective in some way or anything that would force Amazon to come to you and say, Hey, Inspect your inventory better or check your detail page.
Make sure there aren't mistakes. Now is the time to do that. Right? We're weeks and weeks before prime day, not months away, but we're weeks away. So this is the time to sort of, I would say, make an initial assessment of, has anyone already started doing this to me? And have I kind of just not noticed because we open cases or we bug our account manager and we get it fixed quickly?
And does that tip their hand in terms of what they might try when you're closer to
[00:09:06] Leah: yeah, and something that I'm expecting to see this year. And I'm always reticent to say it because I don't want to give people ideas. But something that I'm interested to see this year is people taking advantage of the high pricing error.
Because all you need is somebody selling your price lower off Amazon than on Amazon for you to lose the buy box. And there are plenty of marketplaces online where people can easily list your products for a lower price. So make sure you're keeping an eye off Amazon as well for anything like that that could cause you to lose the buy box during a peak sales period.
Distribution control is more important than ever.
[00:09:42] Chris: Oh, of course, of course. Lots of people are selling products that they say they've sourced from the brand. Maybe they're counterfeit. You got to do a test buy, but I've seen a lot of brands getting accused of submitting too many unsubstantiated IP claims.
That's a big thing. Again, this is a terrible time of year to be told that you can't report anyone for intellectual property violations.
[00:10:08] Leah: or lose your entire brand registry,Which is usually what happens.
[00:10:11] Chris: One of three things. You either lose your ability to report intellectual property violations, you lose brand registry, or you lose your whole account for abuse.
So people are out there pulling these tricks, expecting you to slip up and to over accuse them so that they can report you for that kind of abuse. That's somebody baiting a hook and waiting for you to bite. So this is not the right time of year. There's no good time of year, but especially now, heading right into prime day, this is not the time to start making lots of mistakes around reporting unauthorized sellers.
[00:10:46] Leah: Let's just make it clear. Amazon doesn't care about unauthorized sellers on Amazon. You can't report unauthorized sellers on Amazon, an unauthorized seller doesn't constitute an infringement claim and reporting it as such on Amazon can lose you brand registry for that brand.
And also access to brand registry for any future brands you would like to register.
[00:11:10] Chris: Or other brands. Weren't we just talking to somebody today where multiple brands were impacted because they were submitting--
[00:11:17] Leah: One brand gets revoked from brand registry any brand that you're associated with gets flagged as abusive and if you try to Enroll a new brand it'll get flagged as abusive and they won't give you brand registry.
So infringement claims are only for confirmed infringement. If you know it's a counterfeit product or somebody is using your trademark, improperly on a totally different product or a totally different listing. That is IP infringement. Unauthorized resellers are not infringing on your IP on Amazon so aren't reported to Amazon as that.
[00:11:49] Chris: 2024 seems to be the year that Amazon's really just slamming their foot down on this whole thing of we have listing hijackers. We have to kill them. We're going to report them for counterfeit or for this or for that. That's also not what listing hijacking is, first of all, that term, every time you use the word hijacking improperly to Amazon, you're only making matters worse.
You should be using Amazon's definition for listing hijacking, which is I took over your detail page, changed the content, change the photos, the images. So on and so forth. I hijacked, I took over your page, resellers are not hijackers. So that misnomer is just creating more confusion. And more brand pain. And I think that's kind of enough pain for one episode.
We've discussed so many things that can go wrong for Prime Day. We're aware that things can go very right on Prime Day, by the way.
[00:12:43] Leah: We have given solutions also.
[00:12:46] Chris: But we've talked about so many storm clouds and we will be using and sharing on future episodes this month of June into July.
Trends and examples that we're seeing. We're not quite there yet.
[00:12:59] Leah: No, they usually don't start this early cause it gives you too much time to fix it.
[00:13:02] Chris: Right, right. But as the month progresses, I think people are going to be stress testing and sending up trial balloons to see what works and what doesn't.
So be vigilant. Keep your eyes out and on this stuff. See anything weird that you don't understand. Always ask Leah before you ask me.
[00:13:20] Leah: Yep. And then tune in as in the lead up to prime day, as Chris and I look progressively more and more tired.
[00:13:25] Chris: More and more saddened and discouraged by the evolution of Amazon's failure to understand common black hat trends and competitor attacks and techniques.
So thanks for listening again. We will be back at you soon. Thanks, Leah.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. This is Chris McCabe. We're back with Seller Performance Solutions. I'm back with Leah McHugh. We had a, I think, a couple weeks hiatus while we were doing the Billion Dollar Seller Summit stuff in Hawaii.
[00:00:12] Leah: Was that a hiatus? It didn't feel like a hiatus.
[00:00:15] Chris: Didn't feel like a hiatus. Yeah. Those are some long conference days, but we did manage to go diving a couple of times. So we got a couple of fun days in, right? Saw some colorful fish and, back at it this week with more variations, misuse slash abuse. Still a hot topic. We've become a bit alarmed. We talked to some sellers who are thinking of copying their competition, people who are getting away with variations, misuse or abuse.
I understand that some brands are losing money because their competitors are getting away with it. We've worked with some sellers who are reporting it and reporting it well, and we do recommend that people do report any variations, misuse or abuse, but do not copy your competition just because they're outranking you or outselling you temporarily.
So I thought that was a good place to start. And my question to you is, are you still getting people sending you flat files and category listing reports saying we're doing this all right. We shouldn't be getting punished by Amazon. We shouldn't be getting flagged, but they are getting flagged.
[00:01:12] Leah: I mean, yeah, a little bit, maybe it's with a little bit less conviction than before, but yeah, I still have that conversation where these are essentially the same product, but they still differ by more than the variation theme, or they differ by something other than the variation theme, and so that is an invalid variation still.
[00:01:28] Chris: And some of the people I talked to at BDSS, Billion Dollar Seller Summit, thanks to Kevin King, by the way, for putting that event on. Some of the people I talked to told me that they had to get creative because their products didn't naturally fit into variation themes and compliant schemes. So I guess that the place to start?
[00:01:51] Leah: I mean, let's start with that and just don't do that. I mean, that's pretty simple.
[00:01:55] Chris: Okay, I'll rephrase my question. Are they forced to be creative because Amazon's scheme or system doesn't allow for a natural fit for their particular kind of product?
[00:02:05] Leah: When Amazon doesn't allow for a natural fit for their particular kind of product is because Amazon doesn't want that product in a variation.
[00:02:12] Chris: Okay. Fair enough. We also talked to a lot of people who have problems with they don't sell in international marketplaces, their product has been listed in an international marketplace, and maybe there's improperly created or inaccurate detail page in that marketplace, and maybe there's even violations on that detail page that involves their brand.
Right? So, for starters, what do you do to prevent that from from happening to you if you don't sell? In the UK or in Singapore or in Europe or whatever.
[00:02:44] Leah: Oh, I think we're talking about two different issues, but I mean, yeah, that's something as well.
[00:02:48] Chris: Let's start with that one.
[00:02:49] Leah: Sure. I mean, you do need to be conscious of your listings and international marketplaces, particularly because incorrect information on an international marketplace can trickle over into your main marketplace, which is usually the US for our clients. What we used to see many years ago and now I'm starting to see again is that that was actually an abuse tactic. So if you have brand registry in the US but you don't have brand registry in the UK, it's a lot easier to make incorrect changes to your listing in the UK and then wait for that to trickle through or to add abusive content to try to get your listing taken down in the US, that's something we saw a lot a few years ago and now I'm starting to see a little bit more of it again, I still don't really know why that loophole exists. I guess, you know, build international listings is probably why they need to have that functionality available.
But so it is important to keep an eye on all international marketplaces when it comes to your products, not just the ones that you're actively selling in. But the thing that we had discussed before we started recording was People accidentally listing products in international marketplaces because build international listings is turned on and even though they aren't actively selling in those marketplaces, those listings are still in those catalogs in their seller central. And the issue that we're seeing with a lot of people is because they don't sell in those marketplaces, they're not really looking in that seller central, so they're not realizing that they're listing products that aren't allowed to be sold in those countries within their seller central and so those accounts are then being suspended for listing restricted products, even though they never actively sold. Amazon will still hold it against you if it's in your catalog in seller central. So they're getting their international marketplaces suspended for listing restricted products, but they didn't realize that they had even listed those products there in the first place.
So make sure you're checking your build international listing settings and make sure you're checking all of your international marketplaces to make sure that you have an accidentally listed products that aren't supposed to be listed in that country. And also make sure that you don't have any performance notifications in those marketplaces because what we see a lot of the time is that an international marketplace goes down, then brand registry goes down, and then their main marketplace goes down for being related to the suspended account overseas.
[00:05:04] Chris: You stole my thunder. That was my follow up comment. So yeah, in the advent of global selling and in the 2024 age of marketplace management, it looks like there's much higher likelihood that an international marketplace being suspended can impact your US account.
That's what we're hearing for the most part, we do hear from Europeans, of course, who have problems between different countries and regions there, but most of the people contacting us now are either seeing their us account suspended because of these things or threatened with suspension. And that's what's scaring everyone.
Definitely that deserves its own episode. So it's kind of my fault for weaving these two topics together. Usually we stick to one core topic, but I did want to hit both of these because last week in Kauai and in Hawaii, we talked to a lot of brands who are having these two types of problems. And with the case of that particular event, just like with our Seller Velocity Conference, most of the sellers attending are high seven figure, low eight, low to mid eight figure.
There's a lot of money at stake. And even with one ASIN going down for a restricted product flag, even if it's an erroneous flag, Or you mistakenly created some variations. You might've broken a couple of listing policies. It just seems like that gets the dominoes to start falling a little bit differently than it would have been in the last year or so, is that fair to say?
[00:06:29] Leah: Yeah, and we've mentioned before that they're not handling the restricted products appeals the same way that they used to. So if the account is suspended for restricted products, you have to dispute that you ever listed a restricted product, is the path that Amazon gives for that particular kind of reinstatement and what we're seeing in the international marketplaces is that it is a restricted product in that country. It's just was never intended to be listed there in the first place.
[00:06:52] Chris: Another problem we're seeing is sellers have been caught multiple times making mistakes in their listing creation process, which leads to restricted product violations.
And if these start piling up, not only does it negatively affect your account health, but I'm starting to hear, I don't know if you have from brands who are suspended once. Maybe they have an account manager. Maybe they sort it out. Maybe they write an appeal. Maybe they acknowledge the previous violation, but they get caught doing it twice.
They make the same mistakes with ASIN variation creation. We see a lot of people repeating the same mistakes. Those people get placed in the re-offender bucket. So it's not as easy to dispute it because you've already been caught twice.
[00:07:36] Leah: Well, and that's not even necessarily multiple account suspensions.
I've talked to far too many sellers who are suspended for variation misuse, and then they showed me their previous warnings. And so they go into account health. They acknowledge the warning to get it removed from the account health dashboard and then they recreate the variations that Amazon just told them were incorrect in the first place.
So now to appeal, you not only have to show that you're never going to do it again, but you also have to explain why you already did it again after Amazon already told you not to do that, and at the account suspension level, if you're suspended twice for this right now, I mean, I would not want to be taking that case personally.
[00:08:13] Chris: Right? No, it's finally gotten to the point where, which I've only seen with product reviews, abuse suspensions in the past, or for flagrant violating policies repeatedly, whether you're warned or suspended or not, we're getting to the point with Things like variations misuse, other policy violations, where if you reoffend, if you're caught twice, you should not expect, not just leniency, you shouldn't really expect to get the business back on, and it's becoming fewer and farther in between people who say, yeah, we were caught twice. We were suspended twice. We worked with our account manager, we finessed it and we got reinstated. Without too much pain, you know, both times. I mean, those stories are becoming fewer.
[00:08:53] Leah: I think what's concerning to me is that I've had a lot of conversations with sellers lately where they're either their account manager or a business development person are actually the ones that are pushing them to make the listings this way or pushing them to do things like just to do things that are like against Amazon policy.
And the concerning thing I think for me is that some of these people are suspended and then are able to get reinstated because of that, but then there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of like, Oh, well, we better not do that again type of conversations after that.
[00:09:30] Chris: No, There'sone, there's none of that. I was going to suggest we do a separate episode.
So maybe we can do that next week on, can you do a successful dispute based on Amazon told me to do the wrong thing? Historically, you haven't been able to.
[00:09:41] Leah: Well, I still don't think you could with support, but I think when it's an account manager, it's for some reason being treated differently.
[00:09:48] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. That'll be our next should be our next episode , if your account manager is telling you to do something that breaks listing policies and it gets you into trouble, the first time they may be able to go to bat for you and get, get you back on if they don't understand.
[00:10:05] Leah: Make sure you get their suggestions and writing if, if you're going to be doing that.
[00:10:10] Chris: Okay. That's a good point that I didn't even think to make. Make sure you have this documented in email so you can quote from the email.
[00:10:16] Leah: Not just like a phone call that they told you to do something, make sure it's in writing.
[00:10:21] Chris: Not a monthly call with your SAS core. Excellent point. But secondarily, if they get it resolved because we've spoken to sellers, whether it was at the Hawaii conference or not, who had been suspended briefly because they had followed their account manager's advice or someone else at Amazon, not seller support, or just another member of the catalog team or so forth.
Make sure you don't do the same thing a second time just because the person who advised you to do it a certain way doesn't know the rules doesn't mean you can get away with it twice because you don't want to have to appeal right after that a second time saying, oops, it looks like an Amazonian misled us again.
But some of these Amazonians were just people who were wandering around the Accelerate conference, at least in one case, and who just gave out some bad advice because this isn't even what they do for their job for Amazon, and they directly led to the account suspension.
Was it fixed? Yes. Is it sortable? Resolvable, yes, but we don't even, I don't even have enough use cases to tell you what the percentages are in terms of how many appeals it might be, what kind of trouble you could get into, who do you listen to, who do you not listen to, all Leah and I can tell you right now is take it with a grain of salt the way you do anytime you talk to support or account health and don't just blindly follow, make sure you have a conversation slash email thread where you show them the policy and you say, look, you're advising me to do ABC, When I read this policy page, I see X, Y, Z, is this going to be a problem?
Have that conversation before you do it.
[00:11:58] Leah: I mean, I think that is the problem is that the seller doesn't know the policy. So when the account manager or whoever says to do it, they're like, cool. But yes, learn the policies.
[00:12:08] Chris: But you don't even initially need to know the policy, you just have to ask the question before we do this. Mr. Amazon account manager, can you show me the policy, what you're saying we can do legitimately? I want to review it and make sure that we're doing everything we're supposed to. You can make it sound like you're internally reviewing their advice, just to make sure that you have it straight, but make sure that you're talking about rule compliance and listing guidelines, because I don't think they're going to be that offended if you're like, Hey, we just want to make sure on our side, we've got our game tight and we understand this backwards and forwards before we implement what you're recommending we do. It's a good way and do it by email so that you can show if you need it down the road. You can show that you ask them questions before you did it. To make sure those listings are valid and compliant.
[00:13:02] Leah: Yeah. My favorite is still the one that suggested adding names of diseases to the back of a supplements listing. It's like, that is legal, but thank you for that advice.
[00:13:12] Chris: That'll that'll stay your favorite for a while. I think I was sitting with you and you discovered that. Anyway, I realized we wandered a bit off topic this time.
We're a bit over time. Thanks for listening. We'll come back at you next week with some Seller Performance Solutions brilliance and expertise. And thanks, Leah. I'll talk to you soon.
OMGCOMMERCEOMGCOMMERCE[00:00:00] Chris M: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe of the Seller Velocity Conference most recently, also the Seller Performance Solutions Podcast, and I'm here with Chris Brewer of OMG Commerce. You were at our conference, and you've done our podcast maybe once or twice before, I'm not sure. We had great conversations, Just two weeks ago at the conference, we had a lot of great brands there.
The conference feels like it's two months ago to me, so I don't know how it feels for you. But we talked about talking today about, How you work with brands, how you collaborate with them, pain points and et cetera, but maybe if you can just take a moment to introduce yourself as well.
[00:00:41] Chris B: Yeah, thanks, Chris.
It's great to be here and absolutely things move at warp speed. I think in other businesses, you know, you know, you talk about, Hey, you know, remember back in the nineties when we did this or that.
[00:00:53] Chris M: Yeah.
[00:00:53] Chris B: And, and really for us, you know, two weeks ago, it feels like the nineties, you know, things can move, move quite quickly, but yeah, I'm a 14 year co- founder of OMG Commerce with my business partner, Brett Curry, who hosts our eCommerce Evolution podcast and today is out speaking at some conference somewhere actually, and we're a performance marketing e comm for both B2B brands and D2C brands, covering everything from Google, Microsoft ads, We're well known for our YouTube expertise.
We get invited usually once or twice a year out to Google to present on their campus. Had a event there with about 60 brands a couple months ago, and we've been re invited back in August and we're going to do it all over again with a focus on Q4 planning. Pretty cool in the Howard Hughes hangar out there in LA where the YouTube offices are.
It's a great venue for an event. But yeah, so we're on the Google side, YouTube side, also have full service, Amazon and DSP for our clients. In addition to Klaviyo SMS email and meta TikTok, we can kind of handle it all for D2C or B2B brands, but it was great being at your event. You do a great job.
It was. A solid group of brands that were there and I'm looking forward to doing the next one.
[00:02:22] Chris M: I know, huh? It really exceeded all of our expectations too. And we're so nose to the grindstone with it. Sometimes it's hard to see left or right , but it turned out really well. , we're happy about it and we got a lot of good feedback on it.
So I wanted to kind of ask you, like, how do you decide it's the right fit for you to work with a brand? How do you communicate with them? How do you collaborate with them? Do you have a process that you barely deviate from is it all customized? How do you make sure that your goals to develop them and ensure their success will align with the goals of the brand that you could potentially work with?
[00:02:55] Chris B: Yeah. And I'll kind of answer this in a way where if brands are listening, they can think about this in terms of really what to look for when they are looking for an agency, because this is the way we do it. And I personally feel like this is the way brands should also go about it. Brands are making more, I would say more meaningful decisions these days than they were 18 months ago with agencies. There was a lot of, Hey, we heard you guys are great. Let's get moving, ready, fire, aim kind of stuff. When things were really rolling and now that the money system's a little tighter and maybe some consumer behaviors have slowed, people are in some ways, taking a little more time, I think than they may need to and talking to too many folks, which can sometimes confuse the issue. But I think that you should definitely do your homework when you're hiring, whether you're hiring in house or an agency. And I, I often ask brands when they come in, have you spent the same amount of time evaluating agencies to this point as you would for an in house hire because I think that is a vitally important and along with that goes what we look for. One, we just pass on opportunities with brands that are not going to have either a culture fit with us or it's just too preliminary.
So I love entrepreneurship. I've been one in multiple businesses over the years, and I know how passionate I can be when I start a business. And so sometimes folks, passion overrides what actually is possible in the first six or eight months of building a brand. So a lot of times it's, Hey, we really want to work with you and we can spend as long as we're getting results, we can spend and then I've got to tell them that, Hey, for what category you're getting to, can you manage losses for four to six months and that usually ends up with a referral to a freelancer or a course or something like that. So we're looking typically for established brands that have shown success, even if they're having challenges where we can go in and evaluate. Are the objectives that you think you can accomplish within a certain time window, do we also agree with you that that can be achieved?
Otherwise, can we reach a middle ground of agreement? At a certain stage, or do we just need to say our goals are not aligned? We will just let's go in a different direction here.
[00:05:40] Chris M: That's kind of similar to how we operate too. So I can relate to that. That kind of leads me to my next question though.
Like, this is maybe 1 of the mistakes. Potential mistakes that a brand makes when they're looking to line up with an agency. What are other, maybe one or two other top mistakes that you think people, whether getting ahead of themselves or not understanding that some agencies are better at some categories.
I mean, I'll let you answer. Those are ideas I had because I wonder about this stuff too, right? We're not a full service agency. So I kind of think about these things because we do get so many queries from brand owners about like, yeah, who do we work with? You know?
[00:06:16] Chris B: Yeah. I think one mistake is adding to the vetting point is requesting to speak with a current client about the experience.
And here's the one that'll tell you usually if it's a good fit or not. And let me speak with somebody who used to work with you. A former client. So if an agency is unwilling to provide one or both of those, they should be off your list and the other mistake I think that brands make when trying to find an agency here is not asking enough questions about the team that they're going to work with.
What time zone is the team located in? What is their experience level? Who am I going to talk to after these sales calls? Am I just talking with a really brilliant, bright co-founder who knows a lot of things about a lot of things or am I going to be disappointed with someone who's fresh out of college? Has a lot of energy, but is going to really struggle at a strategic level. Potentially. Yeah. Those are a couple of extras.
[00:07:30] Chris M: High on enthusiasm, low on knowledge. I mean, which can be pleasant for certain things, but not for troubleshooting. it could cost you revenue too.
[00:07:37] Chris B: And I also would say, don't judge a book by its cover. Cause for instance, I have two young ladies that work on my team that are outstanding but occasionally they might be judged by their youth and their appearance, but I would put them on any account.
[00:07:55] Chris M: For sure. ,
[00:07:56] Chris B: That happens sometimes Within our business as well.
[00:07:59] Chris M: Yeah, there's a nine figure brand, that came to the conference a couple weeks ago, and actually there were a few more nine figure brands there than I expected, or that I knew about upfront.
I met their teams, before and at the conference, in person. And some of them are very young, you hear lots of things about gen Z, you know, things are different with this generation. You kind of hear that with every generation, but you can't judge a book by a cover and you do have to go by knowledge base.
And, and some people have only been in, it's not just about age. Some people have only been, their Amazon age is only 18 months or two years. But in those 18 months working with a top flight brand, especially for High eight, low nine figure seller, you can learn a lot in 18 months. And it kind of reminded me of my first 18 months at Amazon.
I mean, I learned a ton of stuff in 18 months, condensed and packed into less than two years. It took me, I would say a couple of years to be full on expert at it at Amazon, at least a year, but I think it's similar with brand management and brand development.
[00:09:02] Chris B: Oh, I would agree with that.
[00:09:04] Chris M: Now that's an interesting kind of segue in terms of some people want to do in house hiring versus agency hiring.
That's another question we get a lot. And I give the same answers. Ask a lot of questions, get referrals, testimonials, make sure it's unique, any unique things you need. Can be addressed by the agency or is it so unique that you need full time staff in house, but how do you answer that question when people say we're kind of on the fence between in house hiring or hiring you.
[00:09:34] Chris B: I would say be an open book with the agency about what you're looking for.
Who are you looking to hire in house? What's their role going to be? What's the salary or pay structure going to be? Especially on that role side, you get the right agency, they'll be able to say, Hey, you know what? This person is going to be great at these things, but what are you going to do? Like take a Google ads example. For instance, if we're taking on a seven or eight figure brand, they're going to have a lead specialist, a support specialist, a conversion tracking specialist, a data feed. Specialist, whereas if you're hiring in house, you may be able to find an outstanding lead specialist up there with one of my people.
But if that person doesn't understand data feeds or what to happen when it crashes or Google wants to suspend your feed, you're going to be looking out of house to fulfill that if you've got conversion tracking attribution issues. So those things, you just have to go in eyes wide open. And that's why.
We're also an agency that like, we want to support an in house team. So if you're, if you are just dead set against an agency, maybe you need to hire us for consulting, or maybe you need to hire us as an over the shoulder person to check in with your in house person. And that's usually what we find is there's deficiencies there that wouldn't lead to you terminating that in house person, but definitely could level them up.
I noticed this today just in another forum called e commerce fuel that I think we're both in, someone asked a question today about branded search and what should I do? And this is a 10 million plus brand is categorized by ACF. For me, it was like, this is basic 101 stuff. And I got, went and got three different responses from my team and replied to him.
And those are the things that you're going to miss unless you've got a great forum like that, those things you're going to miss within house, because we've got millions of dollars of data. We can look at, we've got premier partnership with Google with access to beta programs. And having access to knowing here's exactly what you do in this situation, rather than having to stop, pause, ask somebody, get an opinion, and then hope that that works.
[00:12:05] Chris M: The stop and pause part really resonates because I think that's where opportunities are lost.
[00:12:09] Chris B: And asking the agency to like, your last three folks that quit working with you, why did they quit working with you? Right. The number one reason I hear when people are coming to us is our agency was good at the beginning, but now we feel like we're having to lead strategy.
We're having to be proactive ones. And, would say this environment is, you don't see a lot of movement with brands right now. I think they have understood that those changes can be very disruptive, especially with algorithmic AI programs even with Google ads and performance max, there's things that can, can go wrong when you're making switches.
So you have to be very confident in that. I think that slowed some of the churn and transition between agencies this year. And I'm not saying that's unwise, but you definitely sometimes want to get a third party look to see what you're looking for. And also be fair to your current agency. If you're breaking even this year, I can tell you, I've got a lot of brands that are stoked to be breaking even this year.
If you're down a couple of points, maybe take a look. Maybe you're getting competitors that have encroached on you, but we've seen this for multiple years, double digit growth year over year for brands and people are just expecting that kind of growth.
Yeah, but I can just tell you a lot of our brands that are super happy with us this year are, are up slightly to some in the double digit range.
[00:13:48] Chris M: Right.
[00:13:48] Chris B: And, and so I just think you've got to keep election year mentality in mind, macroeconomic trends in mind, the secret recession.
[00:13:59] Chris M: Oh boy.
[00:14:00] Chris B: Nobody wants to talk about.
[00:14:01] Chris M: Don't use the R word. I mean, you've had successful collaborations with Great brands in the past. What was your secret ingredient or ingredients that made those work? What would you say were the lessons you learned, what they learned from you, what you learned from them.
[00:14:17] Chris B: Number one, personal contact. I always invite clients to come to my office. We invite clients to come to events. We offer to go to clients offices and do a strategy session. The face to face personal interaction is very much lost today. And I can tell you with our longest running collaborations, these are people we've had meals with.
These are people we've gone to events with. These are folks that trust us because they know that we have their best interest in mind. And when you're just on a call. Like this, where you've never shaken a hand, never sat down and really talked about what's going on in your business at a personal level, it's a lot easier to disrupt that and go searching for something else.
The other thing I would mention is just complete financial transparency. So being able to completely open up your books to your, your partner, your agency, so that they can see what's happening from all angles. And so if you're an Amazon brand and you've got someone running Google and Facebook traffic to it, but you don't know how that's impacting things for good or bad, that can put you at a disadvantage or for us on the Google side, If another agency is running a hundred thousand dollars worth of spend a month and all of a sudden you tell them to cut that back by half, that's going to affect our performance.
So the last thing we want to do is come on harping about the great data points we see in the growth we're seeing on Google ads, but you're looking at a negative balance sheet on your Shopify store.
[00:15:53] Chris M: Are there any brand shout outs you wanted to do in terms of, Examples of success story.
[00:15:58] Chris B: Oh, I mean, great longterm relationships we've had would be, you know, we, we like to talk about Ezra Firestone's brands with Boom and Overture, which is one he's picked up in the last several years. And he's always been good about us mentioning those brands. Those brands are starting to transition a bit because of his exit and needing to hire a CEO and things like that. But, to have a eight plus year relationship with Boom, essentially being able to see what we've been able to do to grow that brand over the years, knowing that the owner has been with us through the ups and downs of those transitions and being able to give them a I think it was a 5 million a year, their first year we had them on Amazon, those are things that are really rewarding.
I think other brands, microfiber wholesale. I don't think Brent would have a trouble me mentioning that again, nearly a 10 year relationship, right? Long time. We've had FaceTime with that individual. We've got teams with really deep relationships. We have a deep understanding of the brand.
Those are things that, I think really go for those longer term relationships. And that's what I would say is at any time that you're having, if you're hiring an agency, Are you going to give that agency the same length of rope to turn things around and correct things that you would with an in house person?
And if you are, fantastic. You know, if you're gonna say to an in house person, Hey Joe, we got to turn this around, man. You, you've got 60 days to make a course correct here, or we're going to need to go in a different direction with the position. You should be giving your agency the same opportunity with the same Length of rope to be able to turn around the situation.
[00:17:41] Chris M: Agreed. Awesome stuff. Excuse me. Thanks for joining us for this. I appreciate it. And for supporting the conference as well. So where do people reach you when they want to get in touch with you to talk about all this wonderful stuff?
[00:17:53] Chris B: The easiest thing for me is my email, chris@omgcommerce.com. You're welcome to visit our website. If you want to schedule some time with me, you can do that on our free strategy session. It is a free strategy session. It's not a sales pitch and that's at omgcommerce. com.
Great. So once again, Chris Brewer, OMG Commerce, thanks for
[00:18:16] Chris M: joining us. And if anyone has any questions about anything today, you can ask Chris, you can ask me, we'll see you next time.
Take care.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the seller performance, not seller velocity solutions podcast, but I'm glad I almost made that mistake. I'm wearing my, I love New York hat from our swag bags, right? It's been two weeks and seller velocity.
So quick shout out to anyone listening who came. Thanks for coming. It was great. I think it's fair to say it went even better than we hoped and expected. Thanks Leah for helping with so many facets of the conference while also being a speaker. I was a mere panelist, so I was not speaking this year, but, yeah, great two days in New York and, well, one day outside of the city, but, if you met anyone at the conference and you didn't finish your conversation, if you had any questions for me, Leah, any of our speakers, for Janelle, our emcee for anyone, just let us know.
I think we're still kind of digging through the comments from people, like, what was the biggest takeaway they got from the conference? We're still going through that. So we'll have a future podcast episode on it. Today, we are focusing on the rampant suspensions we've seen for ASIN creation abuse and variations misuse.
And there's about six different ways of saying that. But where would you like to start? Because I want to start in one particular place where we were talking to somebody said, well, I'll make some quick changes just to kind of slide through this initial review. And then I'll go back to what I was doing.
I think the bottom line is they've caught on finally to all these, tricks, the bag of tricks. And there's kind of a hundred percent intolerance of that now. And they're just going to start shutting people down.
[00:01:40] Leah: Well they have started shutting people down.
[00:01:41] Chris: Well, they have, the reason I say starting to shut people down is that a lot of people are getting the, you are under review message or, I believe this morning, I saw the 72 hour message started popping back up. Like you have 72 hours to appeal this or to fix your broken variations or to prove that you understand the policy correctly and that you're compliant. I think there's still, I mean, you can maybe chime in on this point first, I think there's still some doubt on whether or not they're giving you 72 hours to fix everything and then appeal, and then you're okay.
Or is it just 72 hours to appeal proving to them that you've been, you know, Following the policy the whole time.
[00:02:20] Leah: Well, and that's the thing is that people, different people are getting different forms. So I think some people, they are giving the opportunity to correct it and then submit a plan of action.
Other people are only giving the option to dispute. I will say if you're getting the 72 hour message that tends to be more often you're getting the opportunity to correct it, because the form is asking for a plan of action. It tends to be more once the account is suspended. Now your only option is to prove to Amazon that you didn't violate their policies, which all of the ones I've seen so far were violating Amazon's policies.
So that's hard to do when you were doing that.
[00:02:58] Chris: Leads me to my second point, which is whether it's people creating bundles or people creating variations or people creating nuanced listings, anything that involves thorough understanding of listing creation policy, almost everyone says Amazon's an error, I'm appealing this as an error, and they want to dispute it because they think they were doing it right.
Is that fair to say?
[00:03:20] Leah: I get more of a sense this time around that more sellers know that they weren't fully following Amazon's policies, but they were following the spirit of the policies, if not the actual policy. so it's more of a, cause previously, yeah, that would be the conversation of, I've been doing this totally correct I don't know what Amazon's talking about, this time the conversation is a little bit different where They're like, you know, they're mostly correct or I see other sellers doing it and that's fine. That's usually where my conversation goes is other sellers doing it or Amazon is doing it, which would be my first piece of advice. Don't use Amazon's own brands listings as what you can and can't do because that's actually, I usually use their listings as my examples of policy violations when I give talks, because that way I know that brand won't be in the room as I'm dissing them, but yeah, you can't go off of what Amazon is doing and you can't go off what other sellers are doing.
You need to know the policy yourself and follow it very literally. And this is something that I did actually speak about at the conference.
[00:04:19] Chris: I have been again, kind of waking up to the inbox of emails. These are all the other sellers doing what I'm doing. Here are all these examples that prove, or I see if they've appealed it in the past, I see it in the appeals that they've written,
[00:04:39] Leah: I mean it's wasting everybody's time. It's wasting your time, it's wasting our time, it's wasting Amazon's time by giving examples. It burns an appeal. As I like to say, I can go to Amazon. com and in about three clicks I can find a policy violation. So, just because there are other people doing it doesn't mean that it's okay. And I think what's frustrating for me is that I've been telling people about correctly making variations for like five years now, and so now they're coming and say like, Oh yeah, so I was suspended for that. And I'm like, yeah, that's, yeah, this is what I was talking about guys.
[00:05:12] Chris: We have the luxury of sometimes we go back and email records and find like, Oh, you emailed us about this three months ago, and we pointed out like, yeah, don't make your variations like that. And we didn't hear back. And now there's a suspension. There's a reason for that, and Amazon's late to the enforcement party, as they almost always are, but when they arrive, they make a splash, right? And that's what's happening right now.
[00:05:36] Leah: Well, and the current theory is that their AI is like so good now that it can pick up these discrepancies, which I'm sure AI has a part of it, but my theory as to why we're suddenly seeing a lot more enforcement of this is because the FTC cares about it all of a sudden. And so once the FTC cares, Amazon wants the FTC to stop caring.
And the best way to do that is to start policing it better.
[00:06:00] Chris: It's not even just the FTC. In my last Seattle trip, which was not long ago, I was talking to a reporter who was interested in the topic. And they were saying, uh, that Once they make the call or start asking around, Hey, what, to Amazon itself directly, what's going on with this, there's an uptick in enforcement or why isn't there an uptick in enforcement?
That Usually means Amazon anticipates a story to be written about it. Could be an embarrassing story, and then they also find that interesting and start moving. The motivation to move comes from the outside instead of from the internal.
[00:06:36] Leah: Right, but we've been seeing this for months, not weeks. Usually if it's in response to a story, it's a Small, quick blip, and then it goes back to normal.
We are seeing more consistent enforcement on this than I have ever seen previously. We've always seen purges for variation misuse, where all of a sudden we'll have tons of people contacting us about variation misuse issues, and then we never see it again for another six months to a year.
Yeah, of course. This has been The most consistent I've seen this enforcement for a longer period of time, for this particular area of policy, both on the variation misuse and on the bundle policy, or ASIN creation misuse. I'm also starting to see it across international marketplaces. So it's not just the US and Canada, which is usually where we see these main purges. I'm also starting to see it on smaller marketplaces, such as Japan, which is not that small, but it is in terms of numbers of sellers. So we are starting to see it being enforced more internationally, which also indicates to me that this is more of a a long term enforcement strategy, rather than just a quick look, we did the thing guys. And then forgetting that it exists and that ever happens.
[00:07:41] Chris: It's global, but more things are global now. We're also hearing more from people who are like, I was suspended in a totally different regional marketplace and it's impacting my us account.
[00:07:51] Leah: Well, and that's a big thing to be aware of is that, is that your international marketplaces do impact all of your other accounts.
So if one account goes down, most likely your other accounts will go down for being related to that suspended account because I also regularly have the conversation of, well, we don't really care that much about this marketplace. So we'll just ignore this. You can't ignore it and you can't just close the account.
Once the account is suspended, you need to resolve that suspension before it impacts your other accounts.
[00:08:17] Chris: Also, we've had the conversation where people want to just delete a few listings and call it good and then appeal it as a dispute. I don't think, The appeals process is well understood in terms of like, well, let's make a cosmetic change. Then we'll dispute this and give examples of other listings that were compliant.
And ignore the ones that weren't compliant. I've seen people doing that in their appeals as well. And then the usual conversation over, Oh, somebody dashed off a plan of action for me, and I inserted some ASINs and some examples of correct listings, and I think that's going to pass. And then they get rejected, right? We don't have to go into the whole nuances of why a plan of action won't be acceptable in this particular case right now.
[00:09:01] Leah: Well, some of them are being asked for plan of action. That's the thing. I've seen three different forms for this. One is requesting a plan of action.
One is requesting documentation, like training documentation and assessments, to prove that when you put in your plan of action, that you've retrained all the people that you actually have. And there is real training there. In those cases, they're not even asking for the plan of action. They're just asking for the proof that retraining happened or assessments happened or that you hired An expert to take this over for you and then the other one that I'm seeing is just the straight dispute. So there is no appeal other than proving to Amazon that they wrongly identified you as violating their policies.
So it depends which form you get and I'm not necessarily seeing like, if it's the 72 hours, you definitely get this form. I've seen all three forms across all three scenarios. So first of all, you really need to read the appeal form before you start writing anything up because they are asking for different information from different sellers.
[00:10:00] Chris: Read the forms. We still get people very frequently in our support inbox for ecommerceChris. And they'll say, I appealed this a couple of times. I have to admit, I didn't really read the form. I checked a bunch of boxes. That's becoming a real problem. It's been a problem, but now it's a major problem because people are alternating from shifting their weight left foot to right foot. I'm disputing it. I'm doing a plan of action. I'm admitting it. I'm disputing it. I think you had a consult or a call like that just yesterday.
[00:10:31] Leah: Yeah and I mean, part of the issue is if you were violating the policies, how do you dispute it?
[00:10:37] Chris: Right. You can't, you can't.
[00:10:39] Leah: And also account health keep telling people to submit a plan of action when performance is not asking them for a plan of action. So there's also that, which adds to the complication or seller performance sends you the wrong template and response asking you for greater details of the root causes when they never asked you for a plan of action in the first place.
[00:10:57] Chris: Oh, that's just another way of saying you haven't sent us sufficient information.
[00:11:02] Leah: Right, I understand that but we understand that because we're seeing this all the time. If you're a seller and you're dealing with this, how are you supposed to know? Oh, they must've sent me the wrong template here. Especially when account health is supporting that incorrect template that you received.
[00:11:15] Chris: So, I mean, pay attention to the details. What else should people do in terms of their listing creation that we can talk about in the next couple of minutes that you'd guide people to do?
[00:11:24] Leah: Yeah, I mean, the best thing you can do is not get suspended for this. So I would be reviewing all of my listings. Currently, if you're listing bundles, you need to make sure that you are correctly identifying the main product in the bundle. So Amazon's bundling policy requires that the main product be the most expensive product in the bundle that then dictates what category your bundle goes into and it also dictates the brand attribute on that bundle. There is a very popular strategy of creating bundles where you get your own private label brand and you get some cheap little thing like a pen or something that you add to the bundle so then you can brand the bundle under your brand. When it's like a pen that comes with a phone and you're trying to tell Amazon that the pen is the main product in that listing, that is something we're seeing a lot of enforcement around currently. So you need to make sure that you're correctly following the bundling policy, particularly when it comes to the main product and the brand attribute. If you have incorrect bundles, you can't change the brand attribute. So if you have incorrect bundles, you need to deleting those. On the variation side, like I said, Take the variation policy very literally. If you're saying that your products vary by color, they can only vary by color. They can't vary by color and something else. So that's usually where I see sellers run into issues, where they have, say a color and size theme, but then some of them are two packs, and some of them are one packs, and some of them are Like a totally different style, but a similar type of product, the products can only vary by the variation theme that you've selected and those variation attributes.
So just using color again, as an example, if you're saying that the products vary by color, the color attributes can only have a color in it. So it can only say black or white or pink. It can't say pink velvet. Black polyester, you know, it needs, it needs to only have information about that specific attribute.
And, you need to read it literally, because this is the argument that I have with sellers all the time where they're like, well, it's basically the same product, but it's not the same product. It can only vary by whatever you're saying that it varies by. And that's where people are being suspended because they are putting products together that shouldn't be put together under a variation theme.
The other thing that I've seen a lot of, and this is what the FTC is more interested in, is taking new products or new versions of a product and then making it a variation of the old version of the product so you can merge the reviews together so your new product looks like it has lots of old products.
You can't do that. That's against Amazon's policy. And like I said, this is something that the FTC is very interested in. So if you're making a new version of a product that needs to be on its own listing or on its own variation family with the new versions, you can't Put that together as a variation of the old version.
[00:14:14] Chris: Right. And maybe I'll close with this, we're aware, we're not naive, we're aware that the longer this enforcement lag has existed, the more that's encouraged sellers to do whatever, when it comes to these.
[00:14:25] Leah: It doesn't matter if you've had your listings like this for 10 years, you need to fix them now before you get suspended.
[00:14:30] Chris: They're finally interested. I mean, when Amazon finally gets interested, when they're finally interested in enforcing their own policies. Then you have to turn on a dime. You can't say we've always done it this way. All these other sellers are doing it. They'll just say, okay, well report all those other sellers if you want. And we'll look at those, but that has nothing to do with you.
[00:14:52] Leah: Well, and they know other sellers are doing it. You're not telling them anything they don't know. Kind of like you're not telling me anything I don't know when I get told that other sellers are doing it. Everyone's aware of that. It's just, they know that they're inconsistent with their enforcement, but that doesn't affect how they enforce against you.
[00:15:08] Chris: So, we'll leave on that note. Questions on this, make sure you send them all to Leah, all your slack files. None of that should go to me, because she is 100 percent handling all ASIN Creation, misuse, abuse. We're going to have to come up with some new acronyms.
[00:15:22] Leah: For the past nine years.
[00:15:24] Chris: Next time I will not wear an I love New York hat. This is just an honor of our recent Seller Velocity Conference. And by the way, just want to point out, this is not like wearing a Yankees or a Mets hat where you're saying you love them. This is about a city that we go to all the time and that we have a regular meetup in.
Questions on this, definitely let us know. This is going to be with us for a while, maybe for the whole summer. I don't know how long Amazon will be hot and heavy on this before they lose interest as they typically do. So thanks, Leah. Talk to you soon.
[00:15:53] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
PODCAST: If you can't dispute, you can't reinstatePODCAST: If you can't dispute, you can't reinstate[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm back with Leah McHugh, who's back from Japan. We're back into our normal everyday flow. And interestingly enough, on your long flight back to the United States, we saw a major uptick in the account level suspensions, not just ASIN, account suspensions for ASIN creation misuse. Right?
[00:00:22] Leah: Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of these in the last few weeks, but they seem to have had a big intake while it was on the plane.
[00:00:30] Chris: Yeah, so we've dealt with these over the months and years prior, but there's a spike or there's a new cycle of these. The difference this time seems to be, the biggest difference seems to be there's no option to write a plan of action, right? This is their new thing of not even giving you the option of appealing it and admitting something. Dispute only, Amazon made a mistake only, it's an error. That seems to be what you're seeing in the messaging, correct?
[00:00:58] Leah: Yeah. So the only appeal path we're seeing for these ASIN variation misuse account suspensions is to dispute it. So you have to provide proof that you didn't violate Amazon's policy. And that is the only path that they are giving for reinstatement. I will say that all of the ones that I have seen so far. Had been previously warned about variation misuse. So it's not like the account suspension came out of nowhere. They had previously been warned about ASIN misuse and then received the suspension saying that they could only dispute that they had violated the policies.
That's the only path available for reinstatement. And it's something that we also saw, I would say in the last few months for restricted product account suspensions as well. I've worked on a number of those now where the only path for account reinstatement for restricted products was to prove that the products you listed weren't restricted under Amazon's policies.
[00:01:49] Chris: This is a trend across all suspension appeals. And this is a big topic that we're covering at Seller Velocity in New York in a couple of weeks, because brands have very little margin for error in making mistakes in the first place. I mean, you can't go back in a time machine and undo some of the things you've done before you hear this podcast.
[00:02:08] Leah: Well, right. And I'm still hearing a lot of advice in the Amazon seller arena around, well, just do this hack and then if you get warned, don't do it again. The problem is now if they're suspending an account and the only way to reinstate it is to prove that you never did it, you're putting your entire account at risk for what may or may not actually improve your sales.
[00:02:30] Chris: Right. And this is just not our comments and observations on cases that we see anecdotally. Account health reps, and compliance team members, and if you're paying for an account manager for SAS core, they will all say the same thing, which is I checked with so and so or I checked with the team, they came back with this is dispute only, you need to prove that you didn't violate the policy. And of course, if you did violate the policy, everyone's immediately stuck. And that's why we are getting all the queries.
[00:02:59] Leah: Right. And I, unfortunately, have had to have a number of conversations where I reviewed their variations and they were violating Amazon's policy. And so I had to say that there is no path to dispute this. You were violating the policy and that's all Amazon is accepting at this point.
[00:03:15] Chris: I mean, some people are throwing themselves on the mercy of the court saying, because they can't prove that they weren't violating the policy because they were violating the policy, they still attempt to appeal it, you know, through other means. But the objective right now should be making sure that you never get suspended for this in the first place, and you observe full compliance on ace and creation policy. So I guess the question to you, since you see a lot of these kind of train wreck variation creation setups, after they've been suspended is how you can recommend that they go through, do a compliance scrub before they really get caught doing something. Because so many sellers we talked to lead with, comments about how wonderfully compliant they are, and then you take two seconds of looking at it and you realize they're not compliant at all. So where how do how do we fill that gap in knowledge?
[00:04:12] Leah: Yeah, so first of all don't acknowledge policy violations for variations misuse, and then just recreate the variations exactly how you had them before. I see a lot of people do that. Don't do that, amazon seperated those listings for a reason. Secondly, a lot of sellers read the variation policy kind of with their own intentions in mind. So they read it and they're like, well, these products are similar, so they can be listed together under a variation family. And Amazon is very literal in their enforcement and their reading of the variations policy. So the variations can only vary by the variation theme that you've selected. And the variation themes that you can select are different for each category. So you need to check your category to see which variation themes are available for that category of products. But if you're saying that your products vary by color. Those products can only vary by color. They can't vary by color and maybe like one comes with an extra accessory and one doesn't, or they can't vary by color and size, or color and weight. They can only vary by color if you're saying it's color. And same for size, and size refers to dimensions, not quantity. So if you're saying something varies by size, you can't say one is a three pack and one is a two pack. That's not size. That's quantity. Quantity is only available in subcategories. But by misusing the variation themes, and usually what people do is put additional information in those attributes to try to make it make sense on the consumer side, that's actually a second violation because you're misusing the attribute as well as misusing the variation family. So you're now violating multiple policies to try to make your listing make sense within the framework that Amazon provided because you're not using it properly, which is why it doesn't make sense if you're using it to use those attributes correctly.
[00:05:55] Chris: Yeah. And I've seen different WhatsApp groups and chatter about like seller hacks. And I think I understand where some of these ideas are propagating and coming from.
[00:06:04] Leah: They've been around for years. I've been seeing these for as long as I've been working with clients with you.
[00:06:10] Chris: But even recently, well, of course, but in the past you could appeal it, admit wrongdoing, and lay out a plan to be compliant in the future. This is different. If that's still going on now, which I don't see any difference in chatter now from two years ago. Never any discussion of the risk, never any discussion of the consequences.
[00:06:30] Leah: Well, and I think it's because Amazon has been so inconsistent in enforcing this. You know, we won't see any account suspensions for this for like six months, and then suddenly we'll get a whole slew of them and then we won't see any more for another six months. So, you know, I regularly have this conversation with sellers who are like, I had it like this for years and it was fine and it's fine until it isn't. It's fine until Amazon decides to start enforcing it again. And in this instance, they're enforcing it without giving you any kind of appeal path, only a dispute path. So one, if you're knowingly breaking the policy, you're putting your entire account at risk. Two if you don't know the policy very well, you could potentially be putting your account health at risk. So it's definitely worth checking the policy checking your variations if you're not sure. Email me and ask. I will be very blunt about whether it is a valid variation.
[00:07:21] Chris: Well you know within moments. I mean Leah tends to know for those of you listening, within moments whether or not the claim that you're following policy or aware that you're not following policy, you know, will be vetted and understood quickly. That also means that anyone at Amazon that has any comprehension of their own policies or of what's a good variation, what isn't, will understand that as well. It won't take them day and night to figure this out. You're not really hiding from anybody. I understand, Leah understands, everyone understands that you are going to go on Amazon and see lots of variation violations.
[00:07:54] Leah: Right, including Amazon's own brands. Amazon's listings are actually my favorite example to use for listings that are violating policy, because most of them are. So you can't go off what you see, you have to go off how the policy is written.
[00:08:07] Chris: Well. Some people who are violating the policy are submitting disputes and trying to get their accounts reinstated on the basis of, let me show you a bunch of Amazon's own listings that are violating policy. I mean, if that actually works, let us know. Power to you. Because I haven't seen it work.
[00:08:25] Leah: Nope.
[00:08:26] Chris: Any more than I've seen people submitting a plan of action and having that work. Sellers are still obsessed with this idea of I'll get suspended for this, but I know people who have, they wrote a POA, they got reinstated. That's what I'm going to do. I've still heard.
[00:08:41] Leah: Yeah, because that's how it used to work. But that's no longer how it is working, at least currently. And you have to adjust to that. The fun thing is, or not so fun for the sellers, is that they're only accepting a dispute.
[00:08:54] Chris: And that's worth talking about for a couple of minutes before we wrap up this episode, which will be wonderfully short to give you a chance to get back through your post Japan inbox. And of course, Seller Velocity is two weeks away. So, so many wonderful things to do. I hope you can join us in New York, May 1st.
Account health reps, and I know people have gotten better. I hope they've gotten better at speaking to reps in terms of what they can get out of those conversations. But account health reps are still telling people to write a plan of action, even if it's not a plan of action situation. Keep an eye on that. Take it with a grain of salt.
[00:09:30] Leah: Well, just question it. If, the form isn't asking you for a plan of action and account health says you didn't submit a plan of action, ask them where it says that is required.
[00:09:40] Chris: And scrutinize the original performance notification to see whether or not, A, you were sent the correct message or B, did they actually ask you for a plan of action? Maybe you got an old message that asked you for a plan of action, and then you should rectify that. Call account health and say, I see that I'm supposed to appeal this as a dispute only, but this message asks me for a plan of action. Amazon's never going to take responsibility for this disorganized, incompetent sloppiness.
[00:10:04] Leah: Right.
[00:10:05] Chris: And the fact that their own people are telling you to do the wrong thing.
[00:10:08] Leah: Well, and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people in Seller Performance that haven't been told that they're not accepting plans of action for this either.
[00:10:15] Chris: Or that. Or people who don't even know that a major change like that has been made. That will not serve as an excuse later. Make sure you call in, talk to somebody. I mean, if you get some random person, the same as any problem with any company you have, where there's a phone number that you call in. If you get somebody who sounds like they don't know what they're talking about, you don't continue the conversation, and you don't assume that the information is gold. I understand that it's a dicey situation, and if they sound authoritative and confident, you might want to believe it. Don't do that. Make sure you get this one particular appeals path, method, or strategy clear before you start submitting anything.
[00:10:55] Leah: Well, and particularly, if you aren't actually violating policy and it has been incorrectly flagged, too many sellers are just in the habit of, well, I just have to admit that I did it wrong and then I'll get reinstated. The thing here is that if you're admitting wrongdoing, and then you didn't do anything wrong, and then you're reversing that and disputing wrongdoing, you've now given Amazon Very good reason to deny your dispute because you previously told them that you did violate their policies.
[00:11:22] Chris: And I've, I mean, we can close on that note because do not knee jerk write a plan of action and do whatever you did last time. I have a theory that I'm working on that some of the sellers we hear from have a previous POA that worked. And so that's why, like it's already been written and they want to modify it. And that's why they're sending it.
[00:11:40] Leah: Yep.
[00:11:41] Chris: But some people are just doing it because they see crazy old articles that mentioned write a plan of action and how to do that. And it's just a knee jerk response to a bad situation. Amazon's changing appeals. A lot of the seller central appeal button options have changed a lot in the last 60 days.
[00:11:59] Leah: Right at this point I'm making everybody send me a screenshot of the appeal form before we start work. And I realized for some people that probably seems weird because we work on this every day and I should know what the appeal form looks like, but I've had five different appeal forms for the exact same violation across different accounts. They're trying out new things right now. Every appeal is different. You need to make sure that you're reading what they're asking you to submit before you submit anything. And you need to make sure that you're following the instructions that are explicitly laid out in that specific appeal form. Not what you've done previously, because they're testing all kinds of stuff right now.
[00:12:33] Chris: Yeah, and I'm sure you're creating a couple of wonderful slides for your presentation at Seller Velocity in two weeks that will address this particular topic. All right. Thanks everybody. This is third rail stuff. Be very, very careful with base and variation creation and also how you appeal it if you're suspended. If you have questions on that, let us know.
We're happy to help and, happy springtime. We're back in East coast time zone. So reach out to us anytime. Thank you. Bye.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. This is Chris McCabe of the Seller Velocity Conference. And I'm here with Jason of AZSellerKit today, one of our wonderful esteemed partners, thank you so much for supporting the conference, of course. And we're going to talk mostly about pricing. You guys are the pricing experts you have, I don't know how many clients you have under management now, but I would imagine they've got terrific pricing needs in the competitive marketplace that we find ourselves in these days.
[00:00:28] Jason: Yep. Sure. We manage as an agency, we have a company called MMX Distribution. where we manage 16 accounts. That's where we kind of really handle everything and are all in from inventory management and listing creation advertising.
So we understand that quite well. And then we have our software, which we have a few hundred clients on, which does automated pricing is really hook to kind of get people in the door, it does full business intelligence and reporting. All of those bells and whistles that come with a robust software.
We are lucky enough to end up in conversations with many, many sellers and a lot of them are doing 20, 50 million plus per year and just going over these different ideas of how they're using pricing and how we're automating different things specifically for them in order to really just take advantage of the current environment.
[00:01:21] Chris: Does the pricing conversation change from year to year or do the fundamentals stay the same and the tweaks are just what you discuss or is it like nope every time competition goes up you're changing the conversation?
[00:01:33] Jason: The pricing conversation, you know changes a lot I mean during covid the world was in a place where inventory was not available, So a lot of what we were doing was figuring out how far we can stretch pricing You know how far we could raise pricing when you were running low on inventory and how to deal with that . Covid finished and a lot of people then had tons of overstock.
So everybody ordered like crazy, thinking that the trends would stay the same, world came back to normal. Everybody had tons of inventory and the name of the game was more, how do you price your items down without getting killed. Where can you see margin?
Where can you not sneak margin out? And there were a lot of competitors also that were buying for $5 and ultimately selling for a net of $3 because they had a glut of inventory. And that really affected the market in a major way. And now we're kind of in an environment, I will say over the last six months where things seem to be normalizing as far as, many people are, are are out of their inventory problems and are now kind of into a normal flow of business where now you're back to, we don't want to buy for five and sell for three anymore.
You know, I'm ordering product now I gotta be able to buy for five and sell for seven, sell for eight and try and make sure that we're making margin and , taking into account the tons of new Amazon fees that Amazon's throwing in there and trying to understand all of that.
[00:03:01] Chris: Spending more on ads, right? I mean, that's top of the list in terms of expenditures and costs that, I mean, they weren't exactly unforeseen. I think people knew they were going to be spending more on ads, but did they know they were going to have to spend this much on ads this year? Yeah, definitely not.
[00:03:18] Jason: So, I mean, Amazon released it a couple weeks ago I think their Q4 ad spend results, and the company, I believe, went up in sales by 20%, I think, or 18% was their sales revenue, but their ad revenue went up by 40%.
Which just by definition is telling you that in order to do. The same sales, you need to almost spend twice as much money on advertising in order to do the same thing. And everybody's seeing that page one is now 30, 40% more sponsored ads than it was before the cost per clicks are going up but what that does, just kind of wrapping it back to pricing is if you're not factoring that into your initial decision, you're going to end up pricing your products lower than you should be because you need to factor that into your margin that maybe two years ago, you can get away with 5% now it might be 10%.
[00:04:12] Chris: So when you're at Seller Velocity, May 1st and 2nd, by the way, for those of you that don't have a ticket yet, 2 day New York conference that we do, this is our sixth one, sellervelocityconference. com. When you are there, what questions, what are the top two questions? Let's say not three, but two top questions you're expecting people to walk up to you and ask you about first?
[00:04:34] Jason: I mean, everybody is usually asking questions about the new fees. That's kind of a very sensitive topic of what's happening with inbound placement fees, what's happening with all the storage fee changes.
There's just a lot of different returns fees are changing in June. So everybody's confused. So like when you, you know, everyone's fees focused and Amazon is not making it easy to understand what's coming.
So for us, that is a very just common refrain of when we're talking about pricing, you're obviously talking about margins and then it automatically goes back to fees and it's always, can you explain to me what the new inbound placement fee is? Can you explain to me, just all of these different fees and what are you doing about the fact that advertising fees are going up? Like, what can we do with all these increased fees?
[00:05:26] Chris: Right. I think the day, the morning that we're recording this, there's a fee change today. March 1st.
[00:05:32] Jason: We have a profit calculator that we have on azsellerkit.com. That's a free tool and we just updated it with inbound placement fees.
But even putting that in there, just discussing with my team, we know that whatever we put in today, once Amazon rolls it out, I'm sure we're going to change it because I'm sure that the fees that they said were going to be, there's going to be nuances that make them different where, you know, if they said 21 cents, it might actually be 31 cents.
It might actually be 41 cents or it may not be as bad. Like who knows? You just don't really know until things roll out, how they're really going to affect different people in different categories. So they leave a lot to the imagination, unfortunately, which is not, not what it should be.
[00:06:16] Chris: Right. And by the time the conference comes around in May, Prime Day will be roughly two months past that. So how far in advance do people calculate, recalculate, What they plan to do for prime day. Is it two months? Is it a full quarter? Has that changed? And how do you answer prime day questions that are two, three months in advance?
[00:06:39] Jason: Yeah. I mean, it used to be that the 30 day number was the number that you had to prepare for because all of their pricing rules 30 day metrics of lowest price in the last 30 days. And that last year changed. So all of a sudden they now have what's called their reference price or there was price and how they determine that reference price, which is basically on prime day, you're going to need to lower, in order to do a deal, you have to make a deal that is 15 percent lower than this reference price, 20 percent lower than this reference price. It used to be much easier to understand what this reference price was going to be now 90 days out you have to start thinking about already What you're doing with your pricing and is that going to negatively affect some of the deals that you may be running And for us at the 90 day mark that it is now, we are, I'm not going to say throwing in the towel, but to a certain extent, we are not going to let a prime day affect our pricing decisions for 90 days, for 30 days. We used to, for 30 days, we used to hold prices higher.
We used to make sure that we were doing things in order to get to that day and make sure that we were still be able to have margin and high sales for that day. If they're going to make this window a 90 day look back, then we can't have our business affected for 90 days waiting for that one day. It's just too much. It's a bridge too far.
[00:08:11] Chris: I'm curious just because of what we do with suspensions and reinstatement strategies and everything. Do people ever bring that up when they're talking pricing in terms of, well, we had an ASIN go down that was a big winner for us. So we'd like to do XYZ on pricing this product. Do people mention these things?
[00:08:29] Jason: I mean, a massive thing. So it's not taken down like our version of an ASIN being taken down is losing the buy box.
[00:08:37] Chris: Yeah, that's like a suspension for you.
[00:08:40] Jason: That's our version of it. And it's a, it's a service that if you're, and again, I'm not so intimate with your services. I know it is suspensions and ASIN suspension, but it is something that if somebody's not doing it, they should be because opening cases with Amazon to try and get you your buy box back is something that can be done. We spend a lot of time on it. Again, if an item is, you know, cost $10 and now you need to be $9.
Whatever, you know, we don't, we won't necessarily spend a lot of time on it, but if an item is $300 and they want it to be $250 for whatever reason, you got to open cases, you got to do what you have to do. And there are ways to speak to Amazon and explain to them that there is no competition. It is not on another site.
Like if they really are just, so this is something where, making sure that they're not suppressing the buy box is something that is, there is a business there. I would say for you. To, you know, or for anyone, you know, to sort of go after trying to help people get the buy box back.
[00:09:41] Chris: Yeah. I mean the, the recent, so this would have been a February post that was fairly recent that we did about buy box suppression, got ridiculous traffic on LinkedIn and tons of comments. So that's definitely a hot button issue for 2024. Unfair suppression of the buy box, but is it a bot? Is it a flag? Is it a flag? What are people doing?
[00:10:05] Jason: Amazon is in the middle of a lawsuit with the state of New York, who's basically went after them for that. And they're making these competitive pricing, they're making it less visible. Because they don't want to necessarily make it as easy for the attorney general of New York to go after them and say that this is anti competitive behavior, but that being said, we are seeing more success over the last couple of weeks of calling Amazon and and screaming and trying to get the right person in the catalog team in order to get an ASIN to have a buy box.
If, again, if you're selling it on another marketplace, it's not going to work. If you're on Walmart for $20 and you're trying to be on Amazon for $30, it's not going to happen. But we do run into a lot of companies that aren't on any other marketplaces and they had sold it for $20 on some sort of a deal and they tried to raise it back to 30 and Amazon has stuck at $20 and you got to get on the phone, you got to work your angles, get to the right catalog team and do your thing, but you can get those things turned over. And it's a big deal and there is a lot of buy box suppression that people need help with for sure.
[00:11:12] Chris: Useful skills to have. Not to force you to predict the future, but what other trends do you see unfolding? Or if they haven't been handled properly now will be worse and become a big problem by May by the time we meet in New York
[00:11:26] Jason: Honestly, if you had to guess, I think that going forward, the things are going to stabilize , would be my opinion on kind of what's going on. I think that Amazon is getting more in tune with what's going on.
I think that these lawsuits are actually kind of helpful where they're going to have to make things a little bit more sensical. And I feel like the business community in general is kind of up in arms and Amazon seems to be listening. They seem to be listening more than they have in the past.
So I think that as time goes by, I think it is actually going to get better, not worse. So again, I could be proven wrong, but. That would be my prediction is that it's going to get better.
[00:12:08] Chris: I completely agree. I just did an interview yesterday with someone about is Amazon being more receptive, responsive, maybe not communicative enough, but better in terms of seller needs, pain points, frustrations.
And I think the answer is yes. It's a definite yes for versus say 2021 or 2022 could have improved of course, but I think things might be trending in the right direction. not just sellers. I think also with service providers, consultants, if they think you're educating sellers, you've got core knowledge for your area of expertise. You're playing by the rules. You're a legitimate player in this system, then why should there be a lack of communication or a lack of embrace for your presence in, as a stakeholder in this whole ecosystem?
[00:13:03] Jason: People might disagree with this, but I really believe they are trying and I speak to a lot of higher level people up at Amazon that it really is the best way to describe it. It really is. It's its own government. And there are people inside that bureaucracy that really do want to help but at the end of the day It's a bureaucracy and it takes time but the people that are on the inside Like the higher up you get the the better they are and the more they care which is actually a good sign, I feel like sometimes the higher up you get the less sometimes people care.
[00:13:42] Chris: And yeah, that's interesting I never thought of it that way.
[00:13:45] Jason: Yeah, they so You know, and even like what, you know, what you do, you know, as you're, you're effectively, you're a lawyer, you know, you may not be a lawyer for the state of, you know, New York, but you are, you're an Amazon lawyer because they have a government and you know how to speak to the Amazon government.
You know what I mean? And there's a lot of people that are inside that government that want change and they're trying. So, but again, it's a big thing and it's a big organization, but the more we talk to people, the more we see that they are, you know, they're trying to work with us as opposed to against us.
And I'm happy to hear that. And I can say that, like you said, 2021, 2022, the further up the chain we got the less helpful everybody was, now it seems like they really understand that.
[00:14:35] Chris: No, I completely agree. And Yeah, sometimes I feel a little bit more like a lobbyist than a lawyer. Exactly, you know a lobbyist to the amazon government, but it's like i'm a lobbyist without all the you know fancy meals at washington dc restaurants and Pricey lounge drinks and all that, but I do the lobbying anyway. This government is a lot less fun.
I know that couldn't, that's an excellent point to end on.
Couldn't have put it better myself. All right, Jason, thanks for joining us. Thanks for supporting and sponsoring the Seller Velocity Conference, of course. AZSellerKit, you'll be meeting with people in New York, May 1st and 2nd, interacting with them. We have multiple networking opportunities.
Again, one last time, if you are listening to this and you're not a ticket holder already, SellerVelocityConference. com. We have several sponsors, several speakers. I want you to just take a few moments and review our content this year, because it's certainly not the same every year. We're looking for high level strategy for established and developing brands.
And we're going to be answering a lot of questions over the course of two days. So I'm looking forward to seeing you in New York.
[00:15:46] Jason: All right. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate your time.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe, once again, here with ASIN variation, listing policy expert, and other things, Leah McHugh. My head is still swimming with a lot of the questions and examples I saw in the Prosper Show workshops. Yes, I realized Prosper Show was a couple weeks ago, but we're hearing a lot of these types of questions and comments from people about their ASIN variations, about reviews not showing appropriately, variation families being separated and re merged inappropriately. Is that fair to say? I mean, what would be the first, I know there's more than one thing going on here, but if you had to break it down for somebody who walks up to you at an event, like our upcoming Seller Velocity Conference, and you're one of our speakers, of course, they will be doing this just to prepare you. I mean, it's a hot topic and it's a big problem. What do you expect people to ask you when they're like, Why aren't my reviews showing up? Why aren't these listings merging properly?
[00:00:57] Leah: Yeah. So that's an issue that God, we've probably been hearing about for a few years at this point. I'm very bad at how time works. So possibly two years, possibly five years. I don't know.
[00:01:09] Chris: But worsening in the past few months, isn't that fair to say?
[00:01:12] Leah: No, it's just something that's come up again and I'm not sure why exactly. I mean, it could just be Amazon is making a lot of changes to the catalog lately. So people could just be seeing this more, because it is generally a catalog error. Or people are just paying attention to it again and they'd kind of stop paying attention to it for a while. So what Chris is talking about is when you have a ASIN variation family, generally speaking, the reviews for each of the children merge into a total number of reviews across the entire family. But occasionally, when you go to your ASIN variation family, it'll still keep those reviews separate. So you'll see, like, one child ASIN has 60 reviews, and another child variation has, like, a thousand reviews. Those should be merged, so the family shows 16. I'm sorry, 1, 060 reviews.
[00:01:59] Chris: Right.
[00:02:00] Leah: So it's actually a fairly easy fix, but most sellers aren't familiar with it. So what happens is they'll call account health and account health don't know anything about this.
[00:02:09] Chris: Or brand registry. I heard.
[00:02:10] Leah: Yeah, they'll go to brand registry and brand registry will be like, here's how you create a variation family. Which it's like, yep, already did that. Thanks.
But it is actually pretty easy to fix. So first thing I recommend doing is downloading a category listing report, and taking a look at the product type and the item type keyword for all of the children and the parents within that variation family. Usually when we see this error, it's because one of them doesn't match.
So maybe the parent will be in a different product type, or you'll see a different item type keyword on one of the children. That's usually why the reviews aren't emerging. So the first thing you need to do is update whatever isn't matching. So everything within the variation family is in the same product type and in the same item type keyword. So you do that flat file upload and then wait 24 hours. And then if you still don't see the reviews merging on the front end, that's when you call the catalog with your batch ID from your flat file upload, and they can make sure that it's pushing all the way through in their tools. Sometimes they call this a refresh. And then, usually within 24 hours of that, you will see the reviews merging across the variation family.
[00:03:22] Chris: So I have a comment and a question. The comment can maybe explain why I was furiously scribbling on the Prosper pad. And that's what you saw when they said they were calling account health. I think a lot of sellers don't know about calling catalog for this, or they try it and maybe they don't execute it properly and there's a problem. So many of them call support. Of course, most sellers begin with seller support, or failing that, they get a bad response or no real answer from support, then they do call account health. Not necessarily to get them to work on it or fix it, but just for guidance. Like what, based on your experience, what should I do next? And so that probably explains the account health services comment that you saw me scribble on that pad.
[00:04:09] Leah: Yeah. I mean, account health just doesn't, this isn't their purview. They don't really have a lot to do with how the catalog works. And a lot of them don't even fully understand how the catalog works. So getting them to troubleshoot this sort of issue, you are very likely to be sent down the wrong path.
[00:04:23] Chris: Right. Well, sometimes they try to help. But what they say is well, this isn't in our area so what I'm going to do is create a ticket or ask a colleague, or I'm going to have somebody, this is their new thing, right the last year? I'm going to have somebody call you. And you don't know when that call is going to come. You don't know which team member it will be. So if you do get one of these random calls, make sure it's not another account health rep calling you in that person's stead.
[00:04:48] Leah: But I mean, also rather than waiting for account health, all you have to do is call support and ask to be transferred to the catalog team. One of the issues that sellers run into with this is that they're used to making changes manually in seller central, rather than using flat files. And the issue with that is that there is no documentation. There's no paper trail for the catalog team to follow. So they can't actually see the changes that you're making in Seller Central. If you give them a flat file with a batch ID, however, they can see when that was uploaded. They can see if there are any errors. They can see the batch processing report and they can help push those changes through the system. Flat files make your conversations with the catalog team a whole lot easier because they can actually see what you're talking about.
[00:05:32] Chris: Yeah. And if you're listening to my voice and not looking at me, I am wincing and cringing at the thought that anyone is not using flat files at this point and making their manual changes.
[00:05:45] Leah: I thought you were cringing at the thought of how much time I've spent on the phone with catalog.
[00:05:50] Chris: With catalog. That's very cringy. When we're coworking and I hear you on those calls, It helps me appreciate the value of the yoga and meditation that you must do.
[00:06:01] Leah: Well, and don't get me wrong, I love the catalog team. The catalog team is probably one of the best teams that I deal with on a regular basis. I mean, there are obviously, you know, it's a mixed bag, but generally speaking, they are the most well trained of the teams that I deal with on a daily basis.
[00:06:18] Chris: Still underscores the notion that you're amazing at what you do. We say a lot, but maybe still not enough. The question I had was, do you think that this has become a bigger issue because there's been so much abuse and, you know, mismatched listing merges and people taking zombie listings and merging them with a totally different product to harvest reviews, that kind of listing abuse, or just variations abuse of other kinds has stuck around for a millenia It seems like. Every kind of random WhatsApp group I'm in, and sometimes events you go to, and articles you read, you see all these kinds of tricks and hacks and recommendations about, you know, workarounds. I mean, do you think that's why this has become more of an issue as opposed to just being a one to one straightforward problem solution?
[00:07:14] Leah: I mean, I think the matching issue is just a technical issue. But I mean, I think we see a lot more improper variations because variations merge reviews. And that is what the FTC sued Supplement Seller for last year. So I think that is why there is that kind of abuse. But I don't think that this technical error is necessarily exacerbated because of the abuse.
[00:07:38] Chris: Right. But as you know, sellers often misconstrue or confuse what is a technical glitch and what's an attack from a competitor. Since sometimes it's hard to tell.
[00:07:49] Leah: I actually think that, I think we're seeing an uptick in this less from competitor abuse and more because of catalog changes that Amazon has been making. They've definitely been playing around with automated, category changes internally. We're seeing a lot of people's products getting moved to a different category based on new rules that Amazon are applying to listings automatically. And so I think that's where we're seeing, more of this, less because of an abusive attack. I mean, you know, it will affect somebody because their reviews stop merging, but it's not, you know, it's not going to put your competitor out of business for a couple of days, you know. So if it is an abuse tactic, it's not a very good one.
[00:08:28] Chris: I think sellers might interpret it as abuse because they're aware of so much listing related abuse floating around in the entire ecosystem. I mean, they hear us talking about it quite a bit, but they're seeing it and hearing it from events or, you know, other podcasts because other sellers are reporting and listing related abuse consistently. So maybe they're jumping the gun?
[00:08:49] Leah: So usually when we see somebody. Being attacked either by keyword abuse or listing hijacking and more so on the listing hijacking side, what we'll see is just a really small change made to like one attribute on the listing. And that's usually the abuser, like testing it out.
See if you'll notice, see if it'll go through. And then we'll start seeing bigger changes where they're starting to change it to a totally different product. And so, you know, I would say this sort of issue as a standalone issue, probably not abuse. But if you see this in conjunction with other changes to your listings, then potentially, yes, there is an attack happening. It could just be that they just tried. I mean, cause you know, if somebody changes the product type on one ASIN in a variation family, unless you're using listing alert software, you're probably not going to notice that right away. But again, unless you're seeing it in conjunction with other changes, I wouldn't jump straight to abuse, and I definitely wouldn't report it as abuse to amazon because that's not enough information for them.
[00:09:47] Chris: No, it's not. And I think sometimes account health reps are saying, you know, if the seller brings it up, which many more sellers each time are initiating this abuse conversation, based on other things they hear going on. I think sometimes the reps are saying, maybe, you know, do you think this is abuse? They might be saying like, well, maybe we're not sure. Like they're not sure. So they say that, and maybe that creates additional, Oh, maybe it is abuse, you know. And then people kind of go down that road.
[00:10:14] Leah: Right. And so this is another reason why it's important to talk to the correct team. Cause the catalog team can actually see Where the contribution came from. So if they say, oh it was an automatic change by Amazon, then it likely wasn't abuse. If they say it's a retail contribution, possibly as abuse, because that usually means it came through the vendor program. And usually when we see weird contributions coming through the vendor program, it is in fact abuse.
[00:10:41] Chris: Great.
[00:10:41] Leah: So speak to the right team and you get the right information. They won't tell you who it was, but they can tell you where it came from and whether it came from your account. Because also sometimes sellers just make this mistake themselves and don't realize it until their reviews aren't merging. So the catalog team can tell you. They won't say specifically which seller, but they can tell you like, whether it came from another seller, or whether it came from retail, or whether it came from an Amazon internal team.
[00:11:07] Chris: So what other tips, tricks, any trends. Tips, tricks, and trends, do you think you see for this topic because it's a vast topic and, you know, like I said, you're going to be going into it in vivid detail at Seller Velocity in May, but for the time between now and May what should people be looking out for?
[00:11:28] Leah: I think the main thing, and I sort of mentioned this a little bit earlier in the episode, we still see a lot of variation misuse. And like I said, that is mostly brought on because of the review merging. And also, I guess, you know, you want people to see as many of your products on one page as possible, which I get. But we are, I think it's Amazon sellers consider it as sort of a less important violation. They don't really think that it's going to put their account at risk. And we do still see account suspensions for variation misuse. And like I said, somebody was sued by the FTC because of variation misuse. So it isn't just, you know, a little catalog technical thing that isn't important. Amazon tend to go on a rampage of account suspensions for this. We won't see it for a while, but then they'll shut down tons of listings for variation misuse, particularly when they are getting negative press, or harassed by different government agencies. So I think it's really important to understand what a correct variation family is. And obviously there's different themes for each category in terms of variations. But the main thing to keep in mind is that Amazon considers their variation themes extremely literally. So if your product doesn't 100 percent fit within that variation family, or it varies by anything other than that variation theme, that's a non compliant variation family. And you know, best case scenario, they break up the family, worst case scenario, they suspend your account or you get sued by the FTC. So just keep it in mind when you're creating your listings.
[00:13:10] Chris: Yeah. And, you know, like I said, you're going to be talking about this with a lot of people in person very soon. And also by the way, it's not just the government or the media triggering these, they do review these internally, and if they're getting a lot of complaints and reports, they do initiate. I mean, as long as somebody like, you know, VP, or senior VP, or higher gets a lot of complaints about this, whether it's from seller emails or from anywhere within Amazon or outside of Amazon, they do initiate these account suspension reviews themselves.
[00:13:38] Leah: Right. And I think also sometimes sellers get too focused on number of reviews and how many products they can have on a detail page. And they kind of forget about the buyer experience because I've also seen a number of these where I'm like, there's no way that this improved their sales velocity. This is so confusing, having completely different products that you say vary by color, but they're like a totally different thing. Like that is not a good buying experience. And I would be very surprised if that actually improved sales more than having listings that make sense to the buyer.
[00:14:10] Chris: You showed me one the other day and it was just very confusing. We won't name the products or anything but, it was just confusing and I could see somebody being discouraged if that's the word.
[00:14:20] Leah: Right. Or just you get bad reviews because they think they're buying one thing and it's actually a totally different product. I don't think that the benefits outweigh the costs there when it comes to variation families. But it is important to understand Amazon's rules. They are different than how you would maybe list things on your own website. So it is very important to understand the policies around variations. But like I said, when in doubt, the most literal meaning of the variation theme is what Amazon wants you to use.
[00:14:52] Chris: For sure. For sure. Well, as I mentioned, this is 1 of the many things Leah will be talking about at the Seller Velocity Conference, which is coming up in New York, May 1st and 2nd. Thank you so much for taking us through this. We're going to revisit this topic again and again and again I am sure, throughout 2024. But we're hoping that they don't do one of these mass suspension purges.
[00:15:14] Leah: There has been an uptick, but I haven't seen like a full on purge.
[00:15:17] Chris: Well, the reason they do those, and I know we've said this on between maybe a dozen to two dozen episodes so far over the last three years. The reason they do this is if they see something is a bad behavior trend, and they decide that doing the one at a time enforcement isn't getting the message out, they think that a clean sweep is easier for them and convenient for them. And also will send the right message to the broad seller community all in one swoop. Because they know people will say, I got suspended for this, so did I, so did I. Maybe it's on seller forums. Maybe it's on Facebook, for those of you still using Facebook. Maybe it's on TikTok, maybe it's wherever. But the bottom line is they have a very easy way to push one button or two, and get communication blasted out to all these people because they're saying, you're either under review for an account suspension, or hey we are suspending you today. So that's why it plays out the way it does all these years later. They're definitely conscious of the, you know, appearance of suspending 5, 700 sellers all in one foul swoop, but they still do it.
[00:16:22] Leah: Yeah. And I would say don't look at Amazon's own listings to see what is compliant, cause they break their own policies on this all the time. And don't look at other sellers because as I regularly say, I can find a policy violation in about two clicks from Amazon.Com. So you need to know the rules yourself.
[00:16:40] Chris: Excellent point to end on. This is why we are honored and privileged to have you as a speaker this year.
[00:16:45] Leah: Chris is in a very good mood today.
[00:16:48] Chris: No, I mean, you know your stuff and people need to know these things. And it's you know, tectonic shifts sometimes under their feet that they're not quite feeling at the time because they don't think it's a major violation. They are focused on other stuff and that kind of thing could happen to any business owner that takes their eye off the ball for a second. So it's important stuff. All right. Thanks again for talking to me about this. And if anyone has questions about any of the content in today's episode, or questions about Leah and what she's talking about at Seller Velocity, please let us know.
We're happy to answer those. Have a good one.
[00:17:21] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, or welcome for the first time. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, I'm Chris McCabe with Leah McHugh. We're fresh off the Prosper Show, or one of us is. You stayed at home to work compliance cases, and appeals, and escalations non stop, so I spared you the flight to a hotel in Vegas this time.
[00:00:22] Leah: Yeah, while Chris was partying, I was writing appeals.
[00:00:24] Chris: Oh, I would not use that word. I would not use that word, but it's funny because right before we started recording this, I was just thinking how seven, or eight years into prosper I think it is. I'm still getting people like sending me these messages. Have a great time in Vegas. Don't party too hard in Vegas. What are you gonna see? What are you gonna do? I was in Mandalay Bay, I think for two and a half days straight without going outside.
[00:00:51] Leah: No, you went to Topgolf, right?
[00:00:53] Chris: I did go to Topgolf and that was sort of like going outside, but I got a ride there from the casino. So, like, I was dropped, I mean, I went up the steps.
[00:01:01] Leah: So, you just didn't see the sun for two and a half days.
[00:01:04] Chris: No, I saw the sun through a window. Like through the hotel room window, or through the window by the, is that the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, I guess?
[00:01:12] Leah: So, for those who have not been to Prosper, Prosper is a full day show for multiple days, and then every single night there are multiple parties.
[00:01:21] Chris: Three days.
[00:01:22] Leah: So you are non stop for three whole days in Vegas.
[00:01:28] Chris: For those of you not listening.
[00:01:29] Leah: It is quite a lot. Intense.
[00:01:31] Chris: For those of you not listening who are looking at a video, I'm holding up three fingers. It's three days. And yeah, I did go outside. By the way this whole podcast won't be about this. I did go outside at night. So I did not go out in the daytime for almost the entire time I was in Vegas. I did go to one of those famous Frank Sinatra, you know, restaurants. That was at night, and I went to Topgolf at night. So there you go. And I went to the ice bar party. Yes. Thank you to Smartscout, and to Jed Ross, and The Piranha who sponsored the ice bar party. I did go to that. That was very cool and interesting.
[00:02:10] Leah: And Brandon Young data dive topgolf party.
[00:02:12] Chris: Yeah. Brandon Young did the Topgolf party. He does that every year. So if you haven't been to that go next year. That's kind of a who's who of who knows what to do with Amazon selling, and brand management. I spent all three days in the think tanks. Not entirely. It was kind of chunks of each day. But the think tanks are like workshops at Prosper. I'm pretty sure they went well, and they'll get good feedback on them. I'm pretty sure they'll do it next year.
[00:02:40] Leah: Well it's a change up from the other, cause most of the talks at Prosper are mostly, you know, presentation based. They have panels. And they do you know, sort of interview style. But the think tanks are really the main piece where it's interactive, and the sellers get to speak to each other, get to speak to the moderator. Which is Chris for many of them today. I think Liz LaVallee was a moderator of one of them.
[00:03:02] Chris: Liz LaVallee, josh Cowan was there. He used to work at Amazon. Oh, Silvio of Quartile was one of the moderators. There were several. There were different people every day. Oh, Josh Hadley was there. I think he's the only other one that did every single day. So I did three. One group was kind of like newer seven figure brands. I think they called it zero to six years of selling. I mean forget the years because, it's more like how big the account is and how rapidly they grow, right? That's kind of one observation I took away, because I also did another day with established brands who were, you know, either past six years or let's say past 6 million in sales, probably 10 or more million. And it was just a good mix of questions. I really hope they bring it back next year. It was a good chance for me to interact with people one on one, or six on one. I think there were six per table. And then the tables would rotate, right? I would go to a different table.
[00:03:55] Leah: Right.
[00:03:55] Chris: And the questions would be different every table.
[00:03:58] Leah: Well, and this is a very big reason why we structure the Seller Velocity Conference the way we do. So there isn't really just, you know, sitting and being talked at.
[00:04:06] Chris: Right.
[00:04:06] Leah: You are having the interaction. You're getting to ask questions. You're getting to riff with the other sellers in the room.
[00:04:11] Chris: Right.
[00:04:11] Leah: And you're really getting to network at the same.
[00:04:13] Chris: And they did. And there were a few brand owners that were sitting in a row. Three women were sitting in a row, and they were like talking to each other, and networking with each other kind of before I was talking to them. And after, I saw them and they were answering each other's questions because they were seasoned vet brand owners, but also maybe they had experienced some of the same things. Which again is what's great about, not to shift the conversation to our conference so quickly, but that's what we're doing too. We're getting seasoned veteran, high strategy seeking brand owners together so that they can talk to each other. Not just to talk to us.
[00:04:46] Leah: Right. Well, I mean everybody always says the best biggest thing they get out of conferences is their relationships, and so why not combine the content with the relationship building together, and utilize the expertise in the room rather than just the expert in front of everybody.
[00:05:02] Chris: Yeah, and why i'm jazzed up about this today isn't just two the two, three cups of coffee I've had, it's because I think this is a fundamental shift in Amazon / Ecommerce conferences with Maybe the slides. I mean, for stuff that's really nuanced or complex where you need the visuals, yes, of course there's going to be a handful of slides. But maybe the 45 minute PowerPoint slide deck we talk about this all the time, maybe that's finally receding into the background. And quite honestly, when I've given those talks six or seven times at Prosper, there's a line of 12, 15 people who queue up to ask you questions.
[00:05:39] Leah: Yep.
[00:05:40] Chris: Which is not ideal.
[00:05:41] Leah: Well and then everybody doesn't benefit from the questions and the answers, because they have to come to you after the fact.
[00:05:46] Chris: Not only that, and I put a lot of thought into this again, because I did the think tank tanks every single day. And it really just pounded home the message to me, not to, you know, attendees as much, that this is a fundamental shift and it's better. Because when a dozen people are queuing up, I mean, we used to do the workshops together at Prosper2. So if you're in a room with us for three hours, of course you're around us long enough to get your questions answered. But when I do talks for 45 minutes, and then there's a dozen people who queue up at the mic, time would run out on some of those, some of them would lose interest, some of them would peel off, and they would maybe never find me later at the conference, or maybe it would be up to me to find them during the lunch, and it's just not the best way to do it. With the think tanks, some of those attendees came back on multiple days. So if they didn't ask me something day one, they saw me on day two. Everyone got their questions answered and everyone knew where to find me, whether it was within Prosper or afterwards. So I'm definitely a believer in the workshop model, and the interpersonal connection because I had a chance to tell them stuff. They told me their stories, but there is also time for Q and A.
[00:06:58] Leah: Well, and it kind of goes back to what we talk about in terms of the consulting. There's a big benefit to having a wide range of experience and, you know, we're lucky enough to get that because we're working on lots of people's accounts all of the time, but if you can extend that to the experience of all of the people in the room, I mean, why wouldn't you do that? There's so much value to be had there and it's so much more easy to integrate when that is the format.
[00:07:24] Chris: Yeah. So, we can do kind of a part two episode with examples of some of the questions that we were going through. I'm still kind of sifting.
[00:07:32] Leah: I think this is part two. That would be part three.
[00:07:35] Chris: We'll do it. We'll do a sequel to this because I have a lot of notes. Another great thing about the think tanks, by the way, you're writing everything down as you go. It's kind of hard as a moderator because I'm asking questions while writing. So you have to walk and chew gum, you know, times a thousand.
But, I have tons of notes afterwards. So that's another thing, that this doesn't fade into the ether. Like I have the notes on those flip boards. I don't know what you call those things. That like butcher paper stuff that you're writing on.
[00:08:05] Leah: Flipboard, I think.
[00:08:06] Chris: Right. And they say that they're going to email all that out. They're going to take pictures of all of it. I took pictures of all of it so I can share it too. But it means I remember people's questions, and I probably wrote something indicative of my own answer to their question. So you know, enough promo about the think tanks. I'm sure they'll bring those back. A lot of brand owners I spoke to are catching up to the idea that their ASIN flags and takedowns are a mixture of automation, and human error. And the biggest takeaway I had, I'll let, you know, some attendees kind of chime in and speak for themselves, but was how the appeals process has changed. Has kind of gotten past a few of these brand owners that were checking boxes without knowing what they were checking. We talked about that before. Some of them are still hooked into what account health reps are hooked into. Which is this plan of action, plan of action. And that's the old days. That's not really now. So some of them are kind of living in the past, but they're catching up to that.
[00:09:06] Leah: They do still ask for a plan of action for a couple of things, but it's very specific scenarios that they're asking for that.
[00:09:12] Chris: And we talked about that. We talked about that. We talked about, look, they still do say, you know, give us a plan of action in legitimate circumstances when they do need one, but that's when it's in the performance notification that says if you fouled something up, long story short, if you're accepting responsibility for whatever the problem is in the ASIN could be a bunch of things, then we're going to need a plan of action. If you're disputing it. Dispute it. The problem is there's a lot of false flags. There's a lot of automation errors. Sometimes the automation isn't even that incorrect per se. It's just an understandable automation error, but there's a human error that compounds it. And so we spent a lot of time talking about that because for the first day, day and a half, especially with the newer brands, newer sellers, I was talking to, they were just confused. Like you're flagging this. It's obvious that this is a mistake. It's like, yeah, I know it's a drag. You have to spell out to Amazon why their automation sucks, or why it's a mistake. But that's the dispute. I mean, at least now they give you that.
[00:10:11] Leah: That's true. At least they give you the option. They kind of hide it down the bottom of the page, but they do at least give you that option. I think what is confusing, and I believe I maybe mentioned this in last week's episode, is that sometimes when you send in the dispute, if they reject your dispute, the rejection letter says to provide greater details on your plan of action, which then further confuses sellers as to what they are supposed to provide.
[00:10:30] Chris: And we talked about that, or they, for whatever reason, they just get the generic message that doesn't say greater details. But they think, okay, the dispute was rejected. Now I got to switch to sending in a plan of action. And then they just start spinning. And then it's worse that, and I had a conversation with somebody last night who said they called in account health and they talked to several reps, according to this person. All of them were in the U.S., none of them were in India. They all said, provide a plan of action. What are we doing with them today? We're doing a dispute. I'm about to sit down and write it. Why am I doing that? Because they never should have been asked for a plan of action.
[00:11:05] Leah: Well, right. If they didn't do the thing that they're accused of, then a plan of action doesn't make any sense. I'm also doing that for a client currently.
[00:11:11] Chris: Today. Yeah. And it's preposterous. It's one product review by a product reviewer who's left ridiculous reviews on all kinds of pages, and accounts, or ASINs. And, you know, it's, it's one single one off it's ridiculous.
[00:11:26] Leah: Yeah. The one thing I've been asking myself lately is, is the automation getting worse, or is the automation just getting more prevalent? So like, were things just more manually checked before, and so it just seemed like the automation worked better?
[00:11:40] Chris: I mean, I have a good answer, though. I think it doesn't matter. I think we can just safely assume the automation might get worse. The appeals strategy and approach is going to be similar to a dispute.
[00:11:52] Leah: Oh, I mean, in terms of just, I mean, across the board. So in terms of it being flagged and in terms of the review, I mean, at least on my side, more and more of my stuff appears to be being automatically reviewed.
[00:12:02] Chris: Compliance is getting worse on the... Sorry for stepping on what you're saying. Compliance flags, I think are getting, I mean, you're doing that 90 percent more than me. But it looks like those are getting worse. And I think I mentioned to you a couple of examples from my think tanks, where people were selling, there was somebody who's selling rope, but not climbing rope, and they kept hounding him for, you know, these are the climbing rope. I mean, it's another kind of rope. Right. And there were so many examples of that. That made such an impression on me that it kept recurring over and over for three days, all these false flags. Well, some of them have account managers. I mean, some of them, like I said, on day two or was it day three, there were the larger established brands who had been doing it, you know, six or more years, they were mostly eight figure sellers, so they knew what they were doing. They had account managers.
[00:12:55] Leah: Managers don't always, you know, have the ability to resolve these either.
[00:12:58] Chris: Well, it was, sometimes they were eventually fixing it. It was just taking so long. Really long time. But some of them weren't relying on their account managers. They were trying to do it themselves, or talking to account health, and they realized, you know, there's, there's a mixture of compounded errors in the system. Some of it's automated, some of it's human. There doesn't seem to be a lot of quality assurance on either side. I don't think they're tweaking the bots or the algorithms in terms of which they want to grab.
[00:13:26] Leah: For me on the compliance side of things It just seems like they give you the option to dispute, but they don't seem to give the people reviewing it instructions on how to review a dispute. Because very rarely do they accept a dispute. Usually you just get the same response back asking for the same nonsensical information, but that doesn't apply to your product. So if you're going to have the option to dispute that something applies to your product, you need to have the people reviewing it knowledgeable enough to be able to understand the dispute, because consistently we have to escalate disputes in order to get them reviewed properly. Whereas if it were just they have the option, but they didn't do the training, it seems like.
[00:14:12] Chris: I mean, I think what scares me the most is the compound nature. It's like, one error is hard enough to resolve when you're dealing with one. It's kind of like fighting a two front war when you're trying to reinstate a really important ASIN, you're trying to clean up your account health, and you could be doing most of it right on your side. And it's frustrating to have Amazonians getting in your way or tools getting in your way. I know that's kind of an old story, but what worries me for 2024 is that, you know, two, or three hurdles versus one is a different equation, and it's going to be harder to strategize that.
[00:14:50] Leah: And what worries me, and I know we talked about this on LinkedIn. I'm not entirely sure if we talked about this on the podcast before, if we did, and I'm repeating myself, I'm sorry. But a lot of times sellers give up, they just are like, I just won't sell this product anymore. It's not worth it. And they don't bother getting it cleared from their account health dashboard because they get stuck in this nonsensical loop.
And then we're seeing people getting their accounts suspended for having unresolved restricted products.
[00:15:16] Chris: Or lower account health scores as a result. Yes.
[00:15:19] Leah: Well, so restricted products have no impact on account health until it suspends your account. But I think that's why people do leave them. They get stuck in this loop, and then they're just like, It's not worth selling this product. I'm just not going to sell this product anymore. The account health dashboard says this has no impact on my account health, so I'm just going to leave it and give up. And then they get an account suspension, and then they have to deal with that all over again.
[00:15:43] Chris: Right. I'm not even talking about restrictions, I'm talking about other types of things that would hurt your account health. Simply because they don't care about that ASIN or they don't want to worry about it right now. And they don't resolve it, because the performance notifications they get, versus what account health says, versus what they try to put in the appeal, the cycle, and the back and forth.
[00:16:03] Leah: Right. It would be one thing if you submitted a good dispute or a good appeal and then Amazon was like, yep, sorted. But you often end up in this like loop forever where you're like, I just gave you that information that you were asking me for again, like what is happening here? And I understand why sellers would be giving up. It's frustrating and they have better things to do.
[00:16:21] Chris: Right. So to avoid going over long this week, I'd say we'll talk again or talk next week about some of my insights from those think tanks, from those brand conversations. Most of it was worthwhile and valuable for other people to hear. I kept thinking, you know, if only we had 200 people in the room, or listening to this conversation. Maybe those can be recorded in the future. I don't know. But thanks to Prosper for doing the think tanks because that was an extremely good idea.
It was a good experience as a moderator. And I am hopefully going to get some feedback from attendees and from Prosper.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. This is Chris McCabe coming to you from Las Vegas, Nevada, where the Prosper Show is happening. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh, who is not in Las Vegas. How are you doing?
[00:00:14] Leah: I'm happily not in Las Vegas. Yeah. Happily.
[00:00:17] Chris: Leah is one of those anti-vegans. Is that the word?
[00:00:21] Leah: Anti-vegan? No, that is not the word.
[00:00:24] Chris: Anti los vegans is what I meant to say. Sorry about that. As you can imagine, lots of wonderful evening networking events last night. So I'm a little, a little slow right now. What was fast and furious yesterday were the think tank sessions, one of which I'm moderating. I'm doing another one today. And we talked with a lot of sellers. So the way the think tanks work at prosper, for those of you who aren't familiar, we have one of those flip charts. So we write the best ideas from all the sellers, and brand owners. The top paying points, top problems, and then the best solutions, best practices during these kind of 10, 15 minute windows.
And then we switch, we rotate. So, I grabbed my flip chart and run to the next table and do it all again with another group. So, some of the ideas mimic what we've been talking about on this podcast this year so far in terms of restricted product, ASIN takedowns. Some sellers I spoke with yesterday, just to give you an example since you're working with these types of things a lot, they had the claims unsubstantiated. Cure claims or health claims on the listing, which they successfully got deleted and they temporarily got the listing back up, which I thought was interesting, but the claims were still present on their packaging. So, I mean, this is something you see quite a bit, right?
[00:01:42] Leah: I mean, the compliance team failing to properly review the packaging. I mean, I guess. I usually see it the other way though, where there aren't claims and they can't tell that there aren't claims. But yeah, unfortunately, when it's on the packaging there is no path to reinstatement. You have to create a new ASIN for compliant packaging of the products.
[00:02:01] Chris: I mean, is this just people not doing due diligence before they get their packaging made, or are there other steps they can put into place? These were relatively new sellers at the one table that I did. And I think they thought they had done compliance reviews and research before they launched. But, you know, that's a painful process to go through pulling all your items out of FBA after paying to ship them in.
[00:02:26] Leah: Yeah I will say, certainly the larger supplement companies do their due diligence and some smaller sellers do too, but I also speak to a lot of sellers who had pretty much no compliance review of their packaging before they started selling. They just went off whatever their manufacturer said was okay. Which I think I've talked about before but possibly at in person events rather than on the podcast. The trouble with taking your manufacturers advice is that your manufacturer is very much biased in that they want you to continue to buy their products. I'm not saying that they're all like this, but I would take any sort of compliance information you get from your manufacturer with a grain of salt. You want to have your own separate compliance review, either done by an expert through party or you yourself learning the requirements. I would certainly recommend learning some of it yourself anyway, even if you are still hiring somebody else. Because, you need to be able to know enough to judge their work, if you're hiring somebody else to do it.
[00:03:27] Chris: Words to live by, for sure. Part of, I think, the instructional sections of what we're doing here at Prosper show is just to get people good info before anything bad happens. Many of them are appealing just through seller support cases. From what I learned yesterday, even the disputes, right? There was 1 seller who was selling certain kind of rope and then they got flagged for being like a mountaineering or a climbing rope.
[00:03:56] Leah: Mm hmm.
[00:03:57] Chris: And this happens a lot, false flags, right?
[00:04:00] Leah: Like half of my work.
[00:04:01] Chris: Half of what you do. Yes. But the problem is how they start the appeals process. And if they just stay stuck in like cases. You know, as you can imagine, events like this, everyone's main complaint is how long their ASIN is down. And how they provided the info they needed to on the first pass, usually your second, and they just go in circles with seller support. I think part of the problem is it's the nexus between seller support and compliance teams right? And the flags from automation. I mean, sellers are just kind of left to fend for themselves when it comes to appealing this stuff. And I was encouraging everyone. You know, you got an email from your primary to get this done.
[00:04:49] Leah: Yeah so unfortunately, if it's not kind of clear cut, you do end up in a loop with the compliance team where they're asking you for information that you have either already provided, or they're asking you for documentation that doesn't exist. Which is my personal favorite. When they're asking for things that don't exist or can't exist. But yeah, if you get stuck in that loop where you are actually providing what they're asking for, or you know, your product is not what they say it is, you do generally need to escalate it in order to get a response outside of just the generic template template asking you for what you've already provided. Unfortunately it seems to be trending downwards in terms of how often they are able to resolve it correctly in the case system, versus having to escalate it. And I'm also seeing a lot more wrong templates being sent recently. And that's not just on the compliance side, I've been seeing on the performance side too. Where the original notification isn't asking for a plan of action, it's asking for a dispute. And then when you provide a dispute, they respond back saying you need to provide greater details of the root causes and the immediate actions. Which is, you know, already a confusing process made even more confusing by being told the wrong things.
[00:06:06] Chris: We talked about that a lot, too.
[00:06:08] Leah: I'm sure you did.
[00:06:09] Chris: They know what we do in terms of reinstatement strategies and appeals work and we talked about Disputes. I think part of the problem is, again one of my tables yesterday was newer brands, newer sellers, they dispute it once through the case system, they get one of those types of gibberish responses back, and then they start casting about, within groups or online, or seller forums, or whatnot for alternative solutions. Or maybe they even have an account manager that suggested, I don't know. That's when they start saying "It's time to submit a POA", you have to do a POA.
[00:06:47] Leah: And account health too, tends to encourage that. If you are legitimately disputing it, sending in a POA is like the worst thing.
[00:06:55] Chris: It's the worst thing, and of course the account health reps say this solely because, you got rejected. They can't seem to figure out why you've been rejected. There might be no annotations at all that indicate it was read at all. So instead of saying disputed again, or giving an alternative path, they're just saying, well, that didn't work, let's try the other way. I mean that's just fruitless and unproductive to do.
[00:07:22] Leah: To Account Health's credit, I have had a number of Account Health reps who do understand that it's a dispute being asked for, and who do know how to properly review that and to tell you what's needed. Unfortunately what happens is, on the investigator's side they then still reject it for another unrelated reason. We had one recently where it was rejected for being too similar to the previous dispute. But if you're disputing something and you're providing evidence, I mean, it's not going to change that much. We were providing additional evidence, which was what we were told to provide. And then the investigator note said it was too similar to previous appeal.
So, It's like half of the team has been trained on disputes, and then the other half of the team is still kind of stuck in the old POA system of it needs to be totally different if we projected it before.
[00:08:15] Chris: The old POA days. This is something, conversations and some of the networking sessions. A few people have commented on things we put on LinkedIn over the past month. About, you know, one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing. This has been going on for years.
[00:08:30] Leah: Yeah.
[00:08:30] Chris: And one of the conversations I had, this wasn't in the think tanks, but they were just saying, you know, well, it's been very public and very obvious that the training is lacking. Decision making doesn't make sense. I mean, if all the complaining and all the exposure of this problem hasn't changed much, what else can be tried? Is it just keeping the drum beat up and constantly referring to it? Or, is it the people inside Amazon that need to be like, look, it's making our lives miserable to have account health run like this, and have the advice be this bad. You know.
[00:09:05] Leah: I don't think anyone's going to care if it's making their lives miserable. I mean, I care. I don't think Amazon will care. My hope is that somebody internal to Amazon will run the numbers and will say, Hey, these teams being this inefficient is costing us this much money every single day. Imagine if they were well trained and worked efficiently, we would save this many man hours and this many dollars every day, because ultimately that's what they care about. And if I were a manager in Amazon, that's what I would be doing.
[00:09:34] Chris: But they never did that for years within the seller performance teams, which was the best place to start doing things like that.
[00:09:42] Leah: Right? But we're also seeing them cutting costs by sending jobs overseas, and by laying people off. Certainly, we're seeing longer timeframes for responses from teams. And I think a large part of that is because they are on sort of a skeleton crew on some of these teams, at this point. And so I think that eventually, you can only cut costs in so many ways without looking at efficiency. I think eventually they're going to have to look at efficiency, in terms of how this cost center could be fixed and less costly.
[00:10:13] Chris: And so I spent a lot of time at yesterday's think tank encouraging sellers not to give up on disputes after 1 attempt, just because they get a generic denial. Also, some sellers at the other table I was working were in the SAS core system. Had an account manager. And I thought it was interesting that, you know they said, well we keep getting these flags. I mean, 1st of all what you said a moment ago, if it's the same ASIN getting flagged inappropriately over and over, of course your appeals are similar. So that's kind of ridiculous. But what's kind of crazy to me is that some of these brand owners are paying 3k, 4k, 5k a month for an account manager. You would think they would just be able to report, Look, I got flagged again overnight. You know, can you open an internal case, take care of this? Sometimes that happens, but sometimes it takes days for that to play out.
[00:11:08] Leah: Well, so that's what I find so interesting about the SAS core is that we talk to a lot of sellers who are handling things through their SAS manager. And, you know occasionally I will go through that if one of our clients wants to go that route. But in general, I find it takes so much longer to resolve having SAS open internal cases, than opening internal cases via other teams, or externally escalating. It's like the time frames. You know, you'll just get "still waiting to hear back from the team" for like 20 days from SAS core. And they don't seem to have any way of like pushing that team to get a response within their KPI's.
[00:11:49] Chris: Even if it's not 20 days, they often get an answer that's, well they needed more information from us. So can you grab two or three of the case IDs you create? Like they waste all this time asking for stuff they can easily find themselves. Case IDs or, you know, give us the key bulleted points of your appeal, I will create a ticket. I mean, it's just all this busy work, that's extra, that shouldn't really be necessary. I mean, why do you have to provide your account manager all this new info, when it's the same info as the last time you were flagged? And it's just, look, the automation, the bots grabbed this listing again. They haven't been tweaked or fixed.
[00:12:35] Leah: Right.
[00:12:36] Chris: We've been down this road before, and that's one of the main pain points we talked about yesterday here at Prosper. Just why do we have to relive this nightmare over, and over, and over when you, as an account investigator, or compliance team member, whatever it might be, you can just look at what we did 30 days ago, or 15 days ago, and you can see like, oh, this is the same exact thing. We just put them through 2 weeks ago. Well, and from the compliance side, am i empowered to just check that box and be like, this is a rerun.
[00:13:07] Leah: I mean, honestly, I'm not even sure if they have access to the previous cases in the compliance team. But I can understand why, you know, on their side, on the compliance or the performance team, they're measured on speed and are measured on, I mean mostly speed, but also I assume at least partly on some sort of correctness. Whereas the strategic account managers are mostly graded on how much you sell. So you would think it would be in their team's interest. And I understand that they're not really there to help with listing issues or seller performance or compliance, but it is within their interest to help you there, because if your listing is constantly being blocked, how are you supposed to effectively sell it.
[00:13:54] Chris: Yeah, we can get into that again in its own episode. There's a line or two from an email, that I saw between an account manager and the client, the seller, that I thought just really hit the nail on the head to paraphrase it now. Hopefully we can put all this ugliness behind us and get back to what we're discussing end of the year, beginning of the year, expanding your presence on Amazon and driving more revenue. I thought she put it just in really good, stark, simple terms, and I'm sure so many account managers feel that way. And a lot of the account managers, are frustrated by this.
[00:14:30] Leah: Of course. Yeah.
[00:14:32] Chris: It's eating up all their, I mean I don't think they have extra time. It's eating up a lot of time that could be devoted to other things that they were hired to do.
[00:14:40] Leah: Mm hmm.
[00:14:40] Chris: Simply because, like you said, no one sat down and ran the numbers. How much is this inefficiency? And incompetence costing the company. Like just their own selfish goals of making money, not the brand owner losing it. We'll set that aside for a moment.
[00:14:56] Leah: No, exactly. And what's worrying to me is that I've had conversation with, you know, business development management within Amazon. And I basically said, you know, how are you expecting brands to invest all of this time and effort in growing their brand on Amazon, when there are constant issues. Often through no fault of the sellers that's taking their listings down or making them unbuyable. And what's concerning to me is that I've had a number of these conversations, and on more than one occasion the business development team members told me that they had no idea that sellers were dealing with stuff like that on such a regular basis. So I'm like, if they don't even know that it's happening, how is it ever going to actually get resolved? Which goes back to the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
[00:15:49] Chris: And just priorities. They just, they've never prioritized quality work on the teams I used to work on. They've just trended downhill steadily over the years. Not just because I left, but because many people left.
[00:16:01] Leah: Nope, it was just because you're not there anymore.
[00:16:02] Chris: I know. Some of the SOPs deteriorated. And no one really took ownership for that. And people move on. People aren't going to work in seller performance for ten years.
[00:16:13] Leah: No, it's true. I mean, Michael still gets upset when they incorrectly do the related accounts SOP. I enjoy his little outburst every time that happens, because he was part of creating that, and it still drives him nuts when it's used incorrectly.
[00:16:28] Chris: And just people sending the wrong template, you know. You violated our multiple accounts policy. That creates so much confusion just because they pick the wrong message. And you know, conferences like this, I'll see what kind of tidbits come out of today's Think Tank and we can, you know, talk about that next week. But, conferences like this, you really get to see the exasperation, not just the frustration, we all see that in spades. But people saying, you know, I just don't understand why this is so hard to fix in every single way? Why you can't work part of the problem, or just take the mountains of evidence that sellers have struggled to get their minds wrapped around. I mean, I think some of it is they just don't understand it. Amazon often fails to understand how sellers operate and think, and what running a business is. I mean, that's somewhat understood depending on how much experience you have selling but just the throwing up your hands of why is this so impossible for them to make inroads on?
[00:17:36] Leah: Well and what frustrates me the most on the compliance side is that it was getting better. Things were trending upward and then it's like they did a complete reverse and it's now worse than it's ever been, in terms of things being flagged incorrectly, or evidence not being reviewed properly, or being asked for documentation that does not exist. That was getting better. And I mean, I'm sure there's a podcast episode where I said more than once about how things had been so much better lately, and it's just gone in the exact opposite direction. So it's like, I know they can make it better because they did it before.
[00:18:19] Chris: But it's I have good news for you. When I'm down in the exhibitor hall, I'm going to check in with some of the Amazon booths.
[00:18:26] Leah: I'm sure they'll be thrilled.
[00:18:28] Chris: And find out what's going on with compliance. Because I know that does drive you nuts, and unlike what we were dealing with where it's kind of always been the same, you experienced a bump in positive direction and then it kind of reverted back to something else. So we will cover additional experiences, comments, and questions from sellers that we talked to at the think tanks, here at the Prosper show in Las Vegas. And yeah, it's been interesting so far, so I'll be taking some photos we can share on social, and I will talk to you again soon. Thanks for listening.
[00:00:02} Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, or welcome if it's your first time. This is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris. I'm here with Leah McHugh, also of ecommerceChris talking about restricted product. This is a kind of a boom time, if that's the right phrase, for restricted product suspensions that are now turning into account level suspensions.
[00:00:24] Chris: And I guess I'll apologize to you personally in advance that my former team seems to be spearheading the review, and resolution, and decision on those account level suspensions. So I don't know why that's happening because these are compliance in nature, and my former teams don't work on these things typically and don't seem to know what to do with them. But my first question to you would be When do you remember starting to see that restricted product listing ASIN level suspensions have turned into account level suspensions? I don't remember that being a 2023 thing.
[00:01:01] Leah: I mean, it's always something that we would see outlier cases of, but I never really saw like a large amount of account suspensions for restricted products. And incidentally, when you have a restricted product warning on your account health dashboard, it says that there is no impact to your account health.
[00:01:20] Chris: Yes.
[00:01:20] Leah: So what's interesting is that we're seeing some accounts being suspended because they've had a number of products being flagged as restricted, but we're also seeing some accounts being suspended for one product being flagged as restricted. You know, cause I've reviewed the products and one, it's often misclassified as a restricted product, and two, the products that seem to be one and done aren't necessarily things that would be more unsafe to people. So I'm not entirely sure what criteria they're using to decide which accounts get suspended and who just gets a restricted products warning.
[00:01:56] Chris: Well, that's one reason I want to talk about it today. I don't think they've fully formed the criteria yet, number one. I think they're feeling their way in the dark. But, it's alarming that they're doing that on an account basis, account level basis, instead of ASIN level, which is historically what we've seen. And I think I know why, and I'll share that in a moment. But yes, the number one comment we're getting from people is, why am I getting this account health message that this will have no impact on my account health? Oh, by the way, your whole account's been taken down. No one can make sense of that first piece, right?
[00:02:30] Leah: No. And you know, you've seen a lot of these cases where the products are just incorrectly flagged as restricted products. I think every seller at this point has had at least one thing flagged as a restricted product, which isn't a restricted product.
I mean certainly pesticides are one that we see incorrectly flagged all the time. Medical devices, things like that. And so all of the cases that I'm working on weren't actually listing restricted products. They've been incorrectly flagged as restricted. But if the compliance team can't do a good job of differentiating between restricted products and non restricted products, how is the seller performance team supposed to review this?
And they're not asking for a plan of action. They're asking for a dispute. So you have to prove to a team who doesn't understand product compliance that your product is completely compliant, when the compliance team isn't even good at reviewing this. So like, you're explaining your innocence to someone who doesn't understand.
[00:03:26] Chris: Yeah. Pardon my laugh. I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing due to the absurdity of it. I think to answer your earlier point though, I understand why one instance, one ASIN, one flag is turning for restricted products is turning into an entire account suspension. They've married themselves to this notion since maybe about a year ago of this.
You have to dispute it, and prove to us you never did what we're accusing you of and get reinstated, or that's it. You don't have a basis to appeal it. There is no request for a plan of action. And of course that rolled out very kind of in a sloppy disorganized fashion, so a lot of the account health reps, if you call in, will still tell you "oh, I'll tell you how to put a plan of action together," because they were trained on that. That's their primary training two or three years ago. But that hasn't kept up with this trend. No plan of action, only dispute or goodbye, get lost.
[00:04:29] Leah: Well, and we're still seeing sellers send in plans of action when they're not being asked for. So that's the biggest thing to start with. You need to make sure that you're reading what Amazon is asking from you. But the thing is, you know, I've seen accounts that have like 90 products flagged as restricted. And then I see accounts that have one product flagged as restricted. Both accounts are suspended, but like, you know, one product isn't necessarily. I mean, I would understand if it was like, oh, well, this is clearly a worse restricted products to be listing, but it's not. And so that's why I'm just not really sure what their criteria is for just another warning versus suspending the entire account. I mean, I assume there's some internal criteria, whether it's being used correctly or not, but.
[00:05:16] Chris: Some people get the warning, but then they're threatened with a full account suspension. And then they're coming to us saying our account is about to be suspended, or by the way we got this warning. We're not suspended, so don't worry. We don't need to appeal it. And we of course say, well, maybe you do have to appeal it. Let's look at the details.
[00:05:36] Leah: Well, and I think that's what's getting a lot of people in trouble is that they get these notifications and it says that there's no impact on their account. So for a lot of people, they're just like, well this product isn't worth it so I'm just not going to sell it anymore. And they just leave it to fester. And then eventually Amazon comes back and suspends the account. But once again, a lot of the cases that I am seeing, and a lot of the cases that I am working on, these are not restricted products. These are completely compliant products that have been misflagged or miscategorized. And so again, like I said, you're now explaining product compliance to someone who doesn't know the requirements and never will. Right. And in my experience with these teams, when they're not sure their default is to deny reinstatement.
[00:06:26] Chris: Yes.
[00:06:26] Leah: So you're expected to explain this to somebody who doesn't understand it in a way that they will feel confident in reinstating your account. Meanwhile, you know, a lot of the times you're having to refer to quite deep legal areas, and also complicated product testing. Things like that to a team who has no basis for understanding. And as far as they know, you could just be making it up.
[00:06:53] Chris: And you do have to read the fine print. There have been a variety of people contacting us. Some say, well, I got the message that it has no impact on my account health. Some aren't sure if they're supposed to appeal it or not. So you really have to read, you know, the messaging in detail. And unfortunately what you just said, some people are hiring like template mills. And a lot of the template companies, which seem to be multiplying by the month, their stock reserve of generic appeals are mostly POA's. So they're buying a POA with some copy and paste, fill in the blanks, and they're sending the POA in, and Amazon's replying, rejecting, saying, we're not asking you for POA. Why did you send this, or this was being rejected. So they're already guaranteeing a rejection on top of showing Amazon that they have no understanding of what's being flagged, what's being asked for. And then on top of that, they're undercutting their ability to dispute it because the POA is an admission that something was missed, something has to be improved upon. So you're painting yourself in a corner to boot. And that's what I think is creating all these confused situations that we're seeing now.
[00:08:12] Leah: I mean, there's no way you can use a template for product compliance. Every product in every marketplace has different compliance requirements. Not to mention on top of the legal requirements, amazon has their own individual requirements for different products. So any sort of standard template is not going to work here. But what I'm saying is that even when you're submitting the correct information and you are well disputing the claim. The people that are reviewing it don't know if what you're saying is correct or not.
[00:08:44] Chris: So they're guessing. They're guessing.
[00:08:46] Leah: Well, but like I said, they're guessing, but they're also guessing with a bias towards denial. Because they don't want it to come back to them later that they reinstated somebody who shouldn't have been reinstated.
[00:08:57] Chris: Yeah. Newsflash, they have a bias toward denial anyway, not just for this.
[00:09:02] Leah: Well, and I understand why sellers didn't necessarily like appeal some of these individual restrictions, because you have the same loop with the compliance team where they ask you for testing that doesn't exist, or documentation that doesn't exist, or think your product is something completely different from what it is. And so after a few tries at that, if you don't really want to sell the product again, I understand why sellers are just like, eh, it has no impact. I'll just leave it and not sell this again.
[00:09:27] Chris: Right, but in the age of the account health dashboard and account health ratings scores.
[00:09:31] Leah: Right, but it has no impact on that.
[00:09:34] Chris: Right, so set that aside for the moment since we already kind of knocked that one down. In the age of account health monitoring, historically you couldn't ignore demerits on your account, performance notifications. And we've always said just because it's an ASIN you don't care about doesn't mean you don't appeal it, deal with it, resolve it in some way.
[00:09:56] Leah: Right. I'm not saying that they should do this. I'm saying I understand why they have left them because it says that there's no impact and appealing these, unless you're like me doing it all day every day and going a little bit insane about it, it is not exactly a fun thing to waste your time on, when it's something that you don't even plan on selling again.
[00:10:14] Chris: We'll take a step back. One reason Leah's going so insane is because people are sending in so many POA's from cookie cutter template mill companies that they hired, who only have POAs, who A, don't understand compliance and really probably don't intend to understand compliance, and B, you haven't been asked for a POA.
So Leah has to unpack all of that. Burn down everything you've done up till that point. I mean, what would you say on average, the people we're hearing from have sent in two or three of these things. So we have to reorient the entire conversation, if you want to call it a conversation, with compliance teams.
And also it's just hurting your odds to admit to all these things in a situation where you're supposed to be disputing it. And if you call account health, or if you talk to your account manager and a variety of people inside Amazon and outside of Amazon, they will tell you if it's a dispute situation and you've got legitimate backing for that argument, dispute it first. For the love of God, do not send in POA's without knowing why you're doing it. And do not send in admission of guilt and confess to things just because you think Amazon wants a POA, when you should be disputing it, because you're undercutting your ability later on to reverse course and dispute it and have them take it seriously. Is that fair to say?
[00:11:40] Leah: Yeah, I mean, with the compliance team, it's sort of a different story, but I mean, performance is definitely that way.
[00:11:45] Chris: But that's what they're doing. They're mixing and matching performance and compliance now. I mean, that's what worries me the most. Because seller performance, people on my former teams, they are not going to know the nature of the product. Look at the packaging, imaging, look at the FDA rules, the EPA, right? I mean, that's what you're saying essentially is that that's a possibility.
[00:12:11] Leah: Yeah. In the last week, I've had 3 separate cases where the seller has been asked for documentation that doesn't exist. Like, they've been asked for things from the FDA that the FDA does not provide. Or testing for a product that is totally unrelated to the product that has been flagged. And so, and that's from the compliance team. So if the compliance team is asking for stuff that doesn't exist and has no legal basis for, how is the performance team supposed to navigate this particular area?
[00:12:44] Chris: Well, and how are you supposed to navigate reversing course and disputing something, and saying you're asking me for testing that isn't required. It doesn't exist. When you've already sent in a plan of action saying, we'll do a better job of monitoring this in the future. And all those copy and paste, you know. I mean, of course they reject that. They tend to reject anyway.
[00:13:04] Leah: Yes, I get it. Yeah. So yes, people shouldn't send in POA templates. Right. Got it.
[00:13:09] Chris: Well, because Amazon had to create a message saying we don't accept plans of action for this particular issue. They did that because sellers were blanketing them with templates for POA's when they didn't even ask for one. So it's like, you're kind of undercutting your respectability as a seller if you give them things that they don't ask for. It kind of makes it look like you never read the messaging, right?
[00:13:35] Leah: Mm hmm.
[00:13:36] Chris: So read the messaging.
Anything else people need to know in terms of restricted products. We talked about how ASIN level suspensions are turning into account level suspensions. But in the vast world of compliance cases that you handle are there any other trends around RP that you think they need to pay attention to?
[00:14:00] Leah: Yeah. I mean in terms of the sorts of things that compliance are flagging, more and more of the trends within the internal enforcement is around keywords. So if you don't want your products to be incorrectly flagged, you need to be very careful as to how you describe your product. And also quite importantly, you need to make sure that you're not saying anything on the packaging that your type of product isn't allowed to say. Not all of this, but a lot of this internally is automated. And the easiest way to automate restricted product warnings is to highlight keywords with an algorithm and flag listings based on that.
It also unfortunately makes it very rife for abuse for people putting keywords into listings in order to intentionally get them flagged, but that is the way that Amazon has decided to enforce these.
So be very careful about how you describe your product. Be very careful. Certainly words like children. We're seeing more and more products if you mentioned kids in your listing being flagged as a children's product that requires children's product certificate and children's product testing. You need to think about the words that you're using in your listings with compliance in mind.
[00:15:11] Chris: And just as a footnote, one reason I kept mentioning don't submit a plan of action is because often we end up escalating these. And that only hurts the cause when you're trying to escalate these. I mean, don't you handle most of these with escalations, because they're denying them, because they don't understand the nature of the material?
[00:15:31] Leah: Yeah. I mean, unfortunately the people that we're escalating to usually don't understand the material either, but they then eventually get it to somebody who does.
[00:15:40] Chris: But I just think creating additional background noise does not help the situation and kind of hobbles the effort.
[00:15:46] Leah: I mean, you certainly don't want to give them an excuse. And saying that you listed a restricted product when you didn't list a restricted product is giving them an excuse to stop looking at it.
[00:15:57] Chris: Couldn't have ended this episode on a better, more concise note. Thank you very much for that.
[00:16:01] Leah: You're welcome.
[00:16:02] Chris: And thank you for all of your continued patience on all of these compliance cases you're working on. I don't know how you do it, really. But somehow you found a way. Meditation, yoga, occasional trips to Thailand. Something is getting you through compliance work that I don't fully understand. Fighting the good fight. Well, you're also, contributing to product and safety compliance in general on the marketplace, which has been sorely needed for years.
And I think garbage in, garbage out. Confusing Amazon teams just makes them more likely to send you messaging back that confuses you, and it just drags the whole process out. So, anything we can do to shine a light on this for you? Let us know, feel free to ask us questions. We'll be talking more compliance very, very soon. I'm sure. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Leah.
[00:16:53] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:00:45] Chris:aq Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh. We're both with ecommerceChris and we're both looking at some messaging that comes from the seller forums, correct? Some people posting questions that we see all the time too in our support inbox around having your ASIN taken down, being deactivated, and being told that you don't have approval to list and sell your own products, or products within the category, or both? We're seeing both.
[00:00:32] Leah: Yeah I mean, so I'm seeing it more on the compliance side where they're saying the product doesn't comply, but the product does comply. And then once they're like, "Oh yeah, it does comply, but you don't have approval to list it." and it's like, um, it's my product.
[00:00:45] Chris: And there's tons of confusion. I mean, I'll read directly from one of the messages we saw. "You are not approved to list this product. You will need to contact the brand owner to become an authorized seller of this product on Amazon." And of course, you are the brand owner. And there's a steadily increasing, and getting louder chorus of people who are seeing these messages and then they, some of them at least, call into account health services and talk to account health reps who Are either reading from some generic menu, or thinking of a call they had earlier in the day. I'm not sure why they're saying these things.
[00:01:21] Leah: I'm also not sure how much visibility account health have into the tools in terms of like product gating.
[00:01:30] Chris: Right. But shouldn't...
[00:01:30] Leah: so they're just saying something.
[00:01:32] Chris: Shouldn't a quick conversation with the person on the other end of the phone, the seller who says I'm the brand owner, and if necessary proves it quickly. Shouldn't that sort of move the conversation past this. Because some of the account health reps are then saying, "Oh, so you're the brand owner and you got this message. Well, who's the manufacturer?" They just start talking about whether or not you're authorized to sell what the manufacturer is manufacturing for you.
Have you heard that one too?
[00:02:00] Leah: Yeah. Again, cause I mostly see these when there's like an incorrect compliance flag first , but it's the same thing. Accountant health doesn't really have a huge amount of insight into the compliance team. So they are also just giving like general information or wrong information, because they just don't have access to those specific tools, or the people on those teams. And so we're getting people coming back saying like, "Oh well your account doesn't meet the requirements to sell that product." Or that brand. Or "we're not accepting any applications to sell this product, or this brand." But a number of times I've actually had them get a friend with a seller account to test if they're able to list the product. And a lot of times another account that isn't even approved to sell in that category has the ability to request approval, when the brand owner who already has category approval doesn't have the ability to request approval.
Right. So I don't know if this is some very new and somewhat complex form of abuse, I guess it could be. Or if it's just incompetence. And I tend to go that way, but you tend to go the other way. So we'll see.
[00:03:04] Chris: It also gets more confusing because sometimes some of the brand owners say, look, we are the only seller of this product. we are the exclusive seller of this product. And then they start talking about exclusivity. Oh well, you can't nominate yourself, or announce yourself as an exclusive seller of your own brand. It's an open marketplace. Somebody who buys your product legitimately can join the listing, and then it goes down that pathway.
It reminds me of the confusion around resellers constantly being asked if they have a letter of authorization. You can only sell this product on Amazon if you have an LOA, if you have permission from the brand. I can't tell if the people on the other end of the phone are just saying that to try to end the conversation because they know you don't have an LOA, or if these concepts are just being mixed and matched together to the point where what's gated, what's approved, what a brand approval is versus what a category approval is, compliance requirements versus other kinds of approvals. Are they just dropping this all into a, witch's brew, stirring it up, and then pulling out whatever happens to come to mind at that given moment? They're not getting training on these things. I mean, we already know that.
[00:04:22] Leah: Yeah, so my theory is that they maybe moved it to a different team and didn't tell the team that is now responsible for it how to do it.
[00:04:30] Chris: Right.
[00:04:31] Leah: And then the old people who actually know how to do it don't have access to do anything with it anymore. That's my theory. I don't have any proof of this, but that's my theory based on what I've gotten back from Amazon.
[00:04:41] Chris: We've talked about this. And then further confusing things is people are asking us, you know, I've got no ASIN level complaints on this product. I've been selling it for however many years, my account health. And then they want to talk about how clean their account health is.
[00:04:59] Leah: Well because a lot of times they are getting a response back saying that their account doesn't meet the requirements to sell that product. And they do talk about performance, and account health in those emails. And often it's wrong. But I think that is why sellers are talking about it, because that's the way Amazon is pointing them. They don't tell them what the requirements are though, they just tell them that they don't meet the requirements.
[00:05:18] Chris: So it's the deficiencies of the messaging combined with, people follow up and make the call into account health, or try to open a ticket with support. Or even a case with their account manager if you're in the SAS core paid account management program and getting these types of answers back. And in terms of SAS core, a veteran seasoned account manager is probably more likely to read through, and just know from experience what's going on, and how to cut through that. But even then sometimes their cases, their tickets, whatever they internally escalate runs into red tape.
[00:05:53] Leah: I will say that the clients that we work with who have SAS managers, when we use the SAS path to escalate, it takes a lot longer to get a response to an SAS escalation, than to a regular case, or to any other kind of escalation.
[00:06:09] Chris: Oh yeah.
[00:06:10] Leah: Like, I think they hit dead ends and then can't do anything. But they can't just tell you that they hit a dead end, so then they're just like "still waiting for a response."
[00:06:18] Chris: Since with each passing month, we're talking to more and more brands that are paid members of the SAS core program. Let's talk about that for a second, because of the duration of their tickets, but also when they get responses sometimes you wait three, four, or five days for the answer. And then they come back with, I need to resubmit it, or the people I opened the case with don't know the answer.
[00:06:42] Leah: Or the case was just closed without a response. I've heard that from a number of SAS reps.
[00:06:46] Chris: But just the fact that you've got so many people, you, your account manager, and then whoever they contacted internally. And of course, if you come back with any questions like, why didn't they know, or what happened exactly, they're very low on the details.
So it's very binary. Yes or no. They either solved it, and the agony is over, or you have to wait more, or it's just denied. And then you have to spend all this time trying to figure out, why was their case closed? Why was the request denied? And are they ever going to give us more information? Probably not.
They're either going to fix it or they're going to come back to you and say, we need more from you. And they'll ask for things like authorization to sell your own brand. Right. So is that a stall tactic? Is it misinformation? Either way. Our recommendations in terms of how you solve this is escalation paths. But virtuous and reliable escalation paths, not just let's open a case and throw it at the wall and see what sticks.
[00:07:46] Leah: Well, so in my experience with these, the lower level teams just don't have the access to troubleshoot it. All they can do is plug your scenario into their tools and tell you what the tool says. They don't seem to have the ability to troubleshoot past what their tool says, and they also don't seem to have the access to whoever is the team that is making the restrictions. To either ask them, or to transfer it to get it properly reviewed. None of the lower teams seem to have access. They seem to be even more siloed in their tools. Which again is what leads me to believe that this was maybe moved to a different team without trading, and none of the other teams can really access that team because for the most part, we have had to escalate these in order to get them actually taken care of and not just getting the like, "Oh, well, you don't meet the requirements sorry."
[00:08:39] Chris: I think in almost all cases, we've had the email escalations in from the primary email address on the account. There were some people who came to us. Their account managers had been working on it for so long that a lot of the waiting period had passed. So they actually did make some headway after like 14, 15 days. But that was 14, 15 days of a ridiculous ASIN takedown.
[00:09:04] Leah: Well, and the other side of that is that we've had people come to us saying they wait to get the response from their SAS manager. And then they come to us and they're like, "So Amazon's going to remove a hundred thousand units of our inventory in two days. And we need to get this resolved."
[00:09:18] Chris: Yes, that's a great point. We're hearing from a few people that are not our ongoing monthly clients. But come to us very, very late in the game where the inventory is about to be removed or disposed of. And then they're finally ready to escalate, when they should have been escalating it way before their 60 day period was coming down. So do not wait, wait, wait, wait, and then push the panic button within 48 hours of removal and disposal.
[00:09:47] Leah: Well particularly if you're a SAS manager it can extend that deadline
[00:09:52] Chris: to get that out quickly. Sooner than later. Yeah. Any other points we should make on this from your compliance work, your brand registry?
Troubleshooting? Which is a bit different than what I'm working on day to day.
[00:10:06] Leah: I think what I've been finding the most interesting with these restrictions of selling your own products is that they really don't seem to be coming from brand registry. And if you try to bring it up with brand registry, or if your case gets transferred to brand registry, they have no idea what you're talking about. Well, granted, a lot of times brand registry has no idea what you're talking about when it does have to do with their teams, but it doesn't seem like it's coming from the brand or industry team. It seems to be coming from a different internal team. And like I said, it seems like a lot of Amazon employees don't really know which team is in charge of it or how to reach them to troubleshoot it. But it just seems like a lot of this has been moved and has been even more siloed, and it's just making it harder for sellers to troubleshoot.
[00:10:48] Chris: But even still, the concept of you don't need authorization to sell your own brand shouldn't be something you have to spend 10, 15, 20 minutes explaining to really any level of Amazon employee.
[00:11:00] Leah: Well, and I just find it very interesting that other sellers are still able to list the products. Like they don't seem to be getting the same restriction on it. Like we've had that on a number of cases, where the brand owner is restricted from selling their own products, but other people are still actively selling those products in the interim. So when we first started seeing an influx of these, I thought this was maybe the whole vendor contract thing, where you agree that Amazon can stop you from selling your own product. But that actually hasn't been the case. Most of the cases I've worked on has had no relationship with vendors. So I'm just not sure where these are coming from. Which is where we started talking about maybe this is a new abuse tactic but I'm not sure.
[00:11:38] Chris: That's the thing. We can close with that. And maybe that's in defense of some of the Amazon employees who should understand this but don't. Maybe that's part of the reason is they've seen so much abuse at this point.
[00:11:48] Leah: Yeah, of course. They take everything with a grain of salt.
And that's why they make it so hard, because they don't want somebody to abuse the system.
[00:11:55] Chris: Right. Or they think that maybe you're just saying you're the brand owner, but you're not. They don't want to spend the time verifying you as the brand owner. They're somebody trying social engineering, you know.
[00:12:04] Leah: But if it's a brand registered brand, like it clearly identifies in their tools that this account is the brand owner.
[00:12:10] Chris: Is the brand owner. No, I think they believe them when they say it, but they're worried about other kinds of abuse. From past brand registry attacks, misinformation campaigns, or they're just tired of this being such a repeated awful thing. And they're just like, "I don't know, you have to be authorized to sell this brand", and that's just the first thing out of their mouths. We know it's not just our clients coming to us and asking, we're seeing this posted on the forums. I think I saw a few tweets that went to social media teams at Amazon about this. So this is an ongoing issue. Whether or not it's abuse or a glitch or, you know, the ticket was handled by the wrong employee inside Amazon varies.
So, feel free to put examples in front of us so we can kind of help everyone listening figure out what's going on here, because it's been going on for a while. I think.
[00:13:04] Leah: Yeah. I mean, I saw it started seeing the influx in November and December, and we're still getting a good number of them. I mean, we always had sort of outlier cases like this, but I haven't seen a big mass of them in a while. But November through to now, we're still seeing a good amount of people coming in with this issue.
[00:13:23] Chris: Yeah. Follow up with us if you have any examples, questions, or comments on this. And thanks again for listening to seller performance solutions. Thanks, Leah.
[00:13:33] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
PODCAST: When Amazon Sellers Should Be ScaredPODCAST: When Amazon Sellers Should Be Scared Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe. I'm with Leah McHugh, both of us from ecommerceChris. And today we are talking about how we, let's think about the best way to phrase this. Sometimes we scare people that are new. Not just new to selling on Amazon, but sometimes our content. On things that can happen that are not so great when you're selling on Amazon. Those things can frighten you, right? Frighten you away from either expanding your presence if you're already selling, or scare you from selling at all do you think?
[00:00:38] Leah: Yeah, I think a lot of new sellers, when they're getting started, they're sort of in a little bubble of here are all the great things about selling on Amazon; and you can make so much money, and all you have to do is, you know, optimize your keywords, and spend some money on ads. And then we come along and are like, here are all of the bad things that could happen to you, and yeah, they tend to get scared.
[00:01:00] Chris: So is that because their tunnel vision, focused on the happy side, and the sunny side, because they've just been watching YouTube video after YouTube video about how much money you can make. Are they focused just on the financial upside of it? Or is it that they're in groups talking to people, maybe attending events or whatever, where none of this comes up because it's not convenient for those on the marketing and ads and services side. I mean, is that what this is about?
[00:01:34] Leah: Yeah. I mean, there's an entire industry built around convincing people how awesome it is to sell on Amazon.
[00:01:42] Chris: Right. But if you're starting a business. Any kind of business. Typically, you sit down, you write out your business plan, but at some point you think of like, what are the legal ramifications? What are the compliance ramifications? What are the potential pitfalls? What mistakes could I make as a business owner, nevermind being a brand owner or an Amazon seller? What as a business owner could I do wrong simply because I don't know this particular business from A to Z?
[00:02:11] Leah: So, I will say that it is definitely getting better. And I am meeting a lot more new people to the platform that are aware that they need to consider these things. But there are still a lot, and historically there have been a lot of people coming into the industry essentially with blinders on when it comes to that.
[00:02:33] Chris: Thank you for the visual.
[00:02:34] Leah: Well, if you're listening to the podcast, I'm sorry.
[00:02:38] Chris: Good radio good radio right there
[00:02:39] Leah: If, you know, they have their blinders on and are just focusing on how to make as much money as possible. You know. Passive income is a wonderful promise, but it's, it has gotten better. I will say that it has gotten better. There is a lot more awareness around this than there used to be. But I still do have regular conversations of, well, I don't know anybody that's had this problem. And it's like, cool, do you know all of the Amazon sellers?
[00:03:07] Chris: That's a good point, but I do believe that things have swung in the other direction when it comes to even using the phrase passive income, or the other one we love to hear, set it and forget it, or, four hour work week. Any of these concepts I think are coming under more scrutiny and being challenged, number one, because they're kind of ridiculous to start with, number two, Amazon marketplace sales, that is not the place to set something and forget about it. Otherwise, you are going to wake up to a suspension, right? We see this all the time where people are kind of like, well, we weren't paying that much attention to our performance notifications, and all of a sudden our account health score has plummeted. And we want you to help us figure out why. And we ask some questions and do some digging, but we find out early on that they weren't really looking at it, right?
[00:03:55] Leah: Yeah, I mean, I have that conversation a lot where they just were like, Well, I had no idea. I didn't read the policies. So, first of all, please read the policies.
[00:04:03] Chris: Yes, please read the policies. But also, and I brought this up before, start any Amazon business with some rainy day funds or set aside some resources to troubleshoot problems, even if you're new. Amazon will never take an appeal that says, I'm sorry, I was new, I didn't know, I'm learning as I go. The phrase I remember when I was working at Amazon and I was reading appeals was, we were having teething problems. As in, we were in our infancy on Amazon. And that's like the worst thing to say. Don't say you're new. Don't say you're having teething problems. Whatever you do, do not say we're learning as we go, because that'll scare the daylights. We're talking about sellers being scared, that'll scare seller performance into thinking you don't know what you're doing, and that they shouldn't be trusting their buyers with you.
[00:04:52] Leah: Yes.
[00:04:53] Chris: Doesn't bode well for an appeal, because they're not going to accept your appeal, reinstate your listing, or your account if they think you're just saying, well, this was a learning experience so I think we kind of figured it out, but we're new, and we're new, and we're new, and we're naive, and we're new. They don't want to hear that. They want to hear you read all the policies. You studied all the code of conduct.
[00:05:14] Leah: We have a compliance manager. Maybe you are the compliance manager because you're the only person in your company, but Amazon doesn't understand that. So there's a compliance manager, there's an account manager, there's operations. Even if it's all the same person, treat it like it's a big company, and these are all positions and roles. Because eventually, hopefully you grow big enough that they will be real positions and roles. And then you'll have your procedures laid out for that. But when you're explaining this to Amazon, telling them that you're like a one person show, and you're doing your best is not what they want to hear.
[00:05:47] Chris: Right. I mean, just think of it in terms of quality control. I mean, this is not a foreign concept. You don't wait until a bunch of buyers complain about product quality before you do some due diligence, have a quality control manager, pull samples out of your factory, your manufacturers. Inventory, making sure they go to you, so you can open them up and make sure they're meeting your specifications. They're in good condition and so forth. Instead of just blindly sending it all in the FBA and hoping for the best, right? What does Amazon want to see in an appeal? They don't want to see, well, we don't really have quality control, we just kind of had our manufacturers send everything to FBA and then we got a bunch of complaints. Amazon is going to say, okay, why did you approach it that way?
[00:06:30] Leah: Right. Well, and assuming that, you know, they're catching this before it's resulted in an account suspension. My favorite executive game, or executive strategy that I learned from Carlos Alvarez, actually a wizard of ecomm is have team meetings.
If it's just you, you are the team meeting. But have sessions where you brainstorm what could put you out of business. And then make plans for what can put you out of business, so you have contingency plans if something goes wrong. What happens if your shipments can't arrive on time? What happens if you can't ship your orders to Amazon on time? What happens if there's quality control issues? You need to have plans for everything that can go wrong, because one, Amazon expects that of you. And two, they don't give you a lot of leeway to fix issues when they happen. So try to brainstorm ways of avoiding those issues in the first place, but also make sure that you have plan B's in place for if something bad could happen. And I think that's where a lot of new sellers get hung up. They're so very focused, both budget wise, and mental space wise on optimization, and ads, sales rank, and they don't really spend time to think of what could go wrong. And as I've had to tell many sellers, it doesn't matter how optimized your listing is if it's suspended.
[00:07:51] Chris: Of course. And it's not like we're saying that sales rank, and listing optimization, and making your products as searchable as possible in a highly competitive environment doesn't matter. And of course, from our perspective, we see people who completely ignored the compliance piece in the equation and did great work on those promotional, and marketing, and ads spaces. But what is the point if you're not even going to know how to reinstate. If you can reinstate your top selling ASIN, because you've done it before, and it didn't go down for days and weeks. You were able to get it right back up. I can kind of understand why you'd expect to handle that yourself. But, that probably means you designed a contingency plan before it happened. Didn't do it on the fly.
[00:08:41] Leah: It's like estate planning. If you buy a house, and there's a bunch of fire hazards in the house, are you just gonna keep it because you're too busy making it look pretty? Or are you gonna like, solve those problems so your entire house doesn't burn to the ground?
[00:08:53] Chris: Right. Right.
[00:08:54] Leah: Granted, like on a day to day basis, these fire hazards may not be an issue, but in the grand scheme of things, that's a fairly major issue that you will need to address if you plan on keeping that house or selling it later. Whatever the case may be, your Amazon account and your business is an investment, and you want to protect those investments by making sure that you're not doing things that could burn it all to the ground.
[00:09:16] Chris: And a suspension might only happen once, but it can be very damaging when it happens.
[00:09:21] Leah: I'm not even talking about just Amazon suspensions. I'm also talking about legal compliance. I mean, I don't want a six figure fine from the FTC, and I'm sure most sellers don't. So there's legal issues, as well as Amazon issues. And at that point, you're not just talking about your Amazon account, you're talking about your entire business. And depending on how you set up your business, potentially personal liability as well.
[00:09:42] Chris: Yeah, I like how you mentioned the six figure fine because we hear from sellers all the time that say, well, I know it's not compliant, but everyone else is getting away with it. Just because Amazon isn't enforcing something doesn't mean governments and laws don't don't enforce compliance issues, because there might be a government agency out there that sees all kinds of terrible things happening in your category. Or on these listings. And they may not care that amazon doesn't care about these items.
[00:10:12] Leah: Well, and I know for a fact that the CPSC definitely cares about your product being safe.
[00:10:16] Chris: Cpsc is a perfect example
[00:10:19] Leah: And the FTC definitely cares about review manipulation.
[00:10:21] Chris: Yes.
[00:10:21] Leah: And the FDA definitely cares about whether you're selling a drug that hasn't been approved by the FDA.
[00:10:26] Chris: Right. So I know this topic and this type of talk is scary but I think a healthy amount of Concern is a good thing. If it sort of scares you straight in terms of, we're catching something and we're fixing it before it impacts buyers negatively; before it impacts our relationship with Amazon negatively. And of course, it limits your interactions with members of my former team, Seller Performance and Policy Enforcement. And you don't want them looking at your account or your listings any more than absolutely necessary.
[00:10:59] Leah: Right, and the flip side of this, which I think is maybe the more positive way of looking at it, is that if you're selling a highly regulated product, and you're one actually complying with those regulations, you're in a space that has barriers to entry.
You're not in a space that anyone can just go and list another version of that same product. Those barriers to entry mean that there's less competition. And if you're actually fully compliant and a lot of your competitors aren't, that also means that at some point you're probably going to have kind of a blue ocean of your product as the product that is available, and isn't taken down or fined by whomever. So there are benefits to being in highly regulated spaces and one of those benefits is way less competition.
[00:11:40] Chris: Yeah. Excellent way to end this episode. Could not say it better myself. So anyone has any questions about our scary content or the scary things we say, I don't know. Maybe we'll answer those on the Halloween episode much, much later this year.
No, we'll answer those as quickly as they come in. Thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions, and we will catch you next time. Bye.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe with Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris and today we're going to speak briefly, I hope, about the angst around account health services calls. We're hearing from numerous sellers, clients, and otherwise regarding the degree of attitude they're getting. Or unhelpful info, conflicting info. We've done previous episodes about account health reps contradicting each other, giving paradoxically opposite views about things that change from call to call. So that's nothing new. What's kind of new at least in the last month or two, I think is some of the comments, and I guess rude pushback.
[00:00:47] Chris: We had a client recently who said they had a straight up rude call where the person was calling them back. And they called with a chip on their shoulder or a bone to pick, but they weren't there to resolve the issue, right? They were basically just there to call out the seller.
[00:01:01] Leah: Oh, I'm sure they just were told to call them and just did it, you know. They refused to listen to anything they had to say. They refused to look up anything in their system to confirm that what they were saying was correct.
[00:01:13] Chris: And sellers are getting more savvy about calling some of these reps out on things that don't make sense. On things that completely contradict what their colleagues are saying.
[00:01:25] Leah: Which is probably why they're annoyed.
[00:01:27] Chris: Which is why they're annoyed, right? You're supposed to just sort of lay down, listen to it, accept whatever they say is gospel. And sellers, over the last couple of years especially, are better at pointing out discrepancies, incomplete info, misleading info. We've got more people that want to hire us to say, look, account health simply took me down the wrong road, told me to listen to their guidance and all it did was hurt us it didn't help, but just harmed us. And obviously if you follow their advice and then my former teams or seller performance ended up saying, Oh, sorry you followed the wrong advice from our teams, but now we're not going to respond anymore. And now we're going to deny your appeals permanently. That's a really bad look for internal management of Amazon teams.
[00:02:13] Leah: Yeah, I'm sure it would be if they cared. I don't really get any sense that they care about how that looks to their internal teams. What I do find interesting is that sellers are expected to be professional when they speak to Amazon's teams. But apparently the same doesn't apply to themselves.
[00:02:33] Chris: Yeah, I think account health management does care about these complaints because people have been tweeting about it. The number of tweets.
[00:02:40] Leah: Oh, I think account health management care. But I mean, ultimately they're working in this gigantic bureaucratic system where you caring may or may not result in any sort of improvement. And they are in a bad position where they're the point of contact, but they have pretty much no power. So they can't actually do a whole lot to assist the sellers other than just tell them what they think they should do. So I understand the frustration.
[00:03:11] Chris: And we're not talking about seller support. I think everyone in all facets of the ecosystem, including Amazonians, understands that seller support quality jumped the shark a long, long time ago, and that's not going to change. But with account health, they have pointed to that team, whether it's at the Accelerate conference or publicly in blogs or elsewhere as, you asked us for more phone support, more trained employees who could look into your problem and give you some fruitful advice that would help guide you. They're not doing enough quality assurance on not just the quality of the info and the advice that sellers are getting, but what's with the attitude?
[00:03:54] Leah: Yeah.
[00:03:55] Chris: I mean, throwing it back at you, calling you out for, why didn't you read the message? The account health reps know that the messages are completely murky, and opaque, and generic, and have mostly useless content. Anyone with a brain knows that. So that means account health reps know that. So for them to cop an attitude when you can read a message just like they can.
[00:04:18] Leah: Well, right. I guess that's my main thing is if they're going to be like that, what is the point of their teams?
You know, I had another account health rep who was like, "I'm taking over this case. I'm going to see it all the way through." And then a week later, they're like, "yeah, no, sorry." The end. Talk to support.
[00:04:37] Chris: By the way, we will come up with some pointers and ideas on how to try to navigate this we're not just going to rant. But I did have somebody last week who called. It was in response to an escalation that was emailed in from the primary. And the person called and said, look, I'm not your primary point of contact. I'm acknowledging that management, account health management and others have received this escalation. Somebody else is going to call you. I can't tell you exactly who. Somebody else is going to call you, go through everything. All the appeals you've sent, what's been rejected, why it's been rejected. These were false promises. The call that ended up happening was a call that I was added to. What happened? The same generic garbled nonsense and gibberish, right?
So false promises is one problem. I mean if you're going to promise something, don't over promise and under deliver. I mean Amazon should understand that better than anyone, because if your seller account or ASIN appeal over promises and under delivers, they deny it routinely right? So why should they be able to do that?
But secondly, keep track of the names, the dates, the times, maybe even the duration of the call. We've said that before. We're still, almost on a daily basis talking to sellers who are making these calls. Maybe talking about very specific denial reasons or very specific facets to their appeal, and somehow forgetting to capture the name of the person they're talking to. Never do that because you might have to cite that conversation. What better way than to cite it by name. Even if the person is using a made up name, somewhere inside Amazon they should know who's using the name Jennifer, or Frank, or Hank, or whatever it is. That should be recorded somewhere, because they have to at least have some way of backtracking who was on the call with you at that date, and time, if not by name.
[00:06:28] Leah: Well, and I think a lot of sellers are still afraid to push back as well. So even if they know what there being told is wrong, they're worried that if they push too hard that'll count against them. And I mean, obviously don't be rude, don't be inappropriate, but certainly push back. Especially if you know that what they're saying is wrong, because the last thing you want is what we were just talking about, being sent down the completely wrong direction. And also it shows them that you're not going to put up with their crap, for lack of a better word.
If they're giving you nonsensical answers and you push back and question it, it's showing them that they can't just give you some gibberish and then get you off the phone. You need to make it clear to them that you're taking this seriously. They need to be taking it seriously. And you understand what you're talking about, and they can't just give you something they just made up on the spot.
[00:07:20] Chris: You need to be an active participant in that call, not passive, not sitting back and relaxing and just letting their words come at you. You have to be fact checking it. Do some investigating yourself. I mean, think of yourself as an investigative reporter. Remember those old movies with the guy with the hat and it says press on it? And he's got a photographer in tow. It's like that. You have to double check what they're saying. Verify that what they're saying is accurate and squares with the details. The fact that they leave you on hold forever and then say they've dug through everything, doesn't mean they've actually done it.
Quiz them on that.
[00:07:57] Leah: No, they haven't. And I do consistently see escalations get a phone call from somebody who was either not given the information about the case, or who didn't bother to look it up before calling you. Similarly to when you're in hospital, you do need to advocate for yourself because often they get it wrong, or they don't read the chart correctly, or they don't read the chart at all. And you need to make sure that they have the right information, you're getting the right information and you're not just letting them check your call off the list of the things that they have to do that day.
[00:08:27] Chris: Yeah, when you're a patient in the hospital, you need to be involved in your care. You can't just sit back and relax and coast. If you are having somebody call Account Health, make sure it's not the most passive person in your organization.
[00:08:42] Leah: If you have somebody from Boston on your team, I would recommend using them.
[00:08:45] Chris: Make sure it's a listener, and a talker. Especially if the account health rep is taking you completely down the wrong road, or not substantiating anything they're saying, stop them in their tracks. If it's complete, unfounded, unsubstantiated commentary, it's okay to stop them there, even though that seems rude, and say, "look we can't do another 10, 20, 30 minute call with account health reps who are just marking time, and are just checking a box saying they did something without actually doing something."
It has to be a working call, a productive call. If you're not getting anywhere with this person, if they're pushing you back. Like don't interrupt me. What I say is gospel. I know more than you do. You can leave that call and try again with somebody else. I have a theory about your client this week, who got the outbound call from Amazon to them. They didn't call in. If you want to call that a call back for an escalation, you can. I have a theory that there's maybe 5 to 10 people in account health that are like the heavies.
[00:09:50] Leah: No, it is. It's the leadership team that it gets sent to.
[00:09:53] Chris: Right. But are those the people like, this seller is becoming a nuisance. They're asking too many questions, they're calling us out on our BS, they're fact checking things, and we don't like people that ask us these questions.
[00:10:03] Leah: No, because we actually hadn't done anything with account health.
[00:10:06] Chris: I just mean generally speaking, do they have like a heavy. Like, oh we have to go get Carl and send him in on this so he can rough them up a little bit over the phone.
[00:10:16] Leah: I think you're giving them too much credit. I don't think they're that organized.
[00:10:19] Chris: You know what I'm driving at.
[00:10:21] Leah: Yes, but I don't think they're that organized.
[00:10:23] Chris: It goes without saying that none of it's organized. You know, it's like this seller is asking us too many questions. They're too independent thought oriented. So we need to send somebody their way who's going to put them in their place. Right? Partner support. Yeah and it results in rudeness. I've experienced listening in account health reps who are interrupting sellers frequently on the call. And then if the seller interrupts them once, they call them out for being rude.
[00:10:54] Leah: Yeah. I've certainly had that as well. Where they then threatened to hang up if you speak again over them.
[00:11:02] Chris: Yeah. And then they threatened to disconnect the call because they know you know 10 times more about the topic than they do. They've been poorly trained. They're feeling, skittish and unsure of themselves and insecure about even having the conversation. And honestly, there doesn't seem to be any auditing, or quality control, or quality assurance of how these calls are going. I mean, in the beginning, I was able to confirm with somebody at Amazon that they were listening in, but that was in the early training stages.
Are they doing that anymore?
[00:11:31] Leah: I haven't seen anything that would suggest that.
[00:11:34] Chris: Are the QA people, or the listeners just kind of checking their own box? Like, yeah I listened to a few calls, yeah everything sounded okay. Have a nice day. I'm going to lunch. I'm leaving work early today.
[00:11:43] Leah: I mean, all this being said, I have definitely had calls with veteran account health people who genuinely are trying to help you, but they're so exasperated by the processes on their side that, you can hear audible sighs when they start looking into things. And I honestly find them to be the most helpful, because they haven't drunk the Kool Aid that Amazon can do no wrong and they actually are willing to go in and check and see where things went awry.
[00:12:07] Chris: Those people usually acknowledge that they can't see. They don't have access to and they can't see the type of info that would make the call useful, or that would put them in a position to give you any meaningful guidance. So unfortunately, as potentially trained and with it as those people are, they can't help you that much either. I mean, we went through this all through 2023. We're a month into 2024. It's time for management to kind of look in the mirror and see how well these teams are performing. Or are you kind of just telling yourself that they're doing a great job without any evidence to support that?
[00:12:44] Leah: I mean, I'm pretty sure they're just looking at speed metrics and I'm sure they're doing great on those.
[00:12:50] Chris: Same thing I'm saying said differently. Yes.
So certainly don't put up with any rude behavior, number one. I think you understand that pretty well. We all do. Don't be afraid to ask questions. If somebody sounds like they're barking at you or putting you in your place, don't accept that. Make sure you get their name. You can stay on the call, but just say, look this conversation doesn't seem to be going well. Maybe I can talk to a senior member of your team? Likely they'll just hand you off to somebody else, but then get that person's name and figure out what their title and responsibility is. And especially if you're just getting this repeatedly multiple times during the course of a week without getting any useful info back. I mean, it'd be one thing if they bark at you, but actually give you a kernel of information that you can use with an appeal. What I'm hearing from people and a couple of the calls that we've been on, they're not giving anything useful and they're being rude. Which means that they're kind of steadily working to defeat the purpose of the existence of that team to begin with.
So, situations like that, if you want to put it in front of us and let us know or get some advice from us, feel free. Otherwise, even if you never talk to us about it, take control of that call. Make sure you're active, make sure you're not passive, and make sure you're asking questions and fact checking what they're saying. Because, just because it's coming out of their mouth, and they say they see it on your account does not mean It's 100 percent accurate.
[00:14:11] Leah: No, you gotta do what I do. You put your inner Australian to one side, and you let your inner Bostonian come out when you're on those calls. Because it's not rude, it's just assertive. You're being assertive. If somebody's giving you incorrect information, you need to be assertive. That is not the time to lay back and be like, okay, thanks for your help, I know you're trying.
No. That is the time to be assertive and channel your inner Bostonian.
[00:14:33] Chris: Right. And we're not telling you to lose your cool.
[00:14:37] Leah: No, not at all.
[00:14:38] Chris: I'm never going to say it's going to be helpful to scream back at these people. The same as screaming at anyone, anywhere in life, that'll make you feel good for 35 seconds and then you won't come away with any kind of good feeling after that. So, you have to maintain your composure. And I know it's frustrating if you have to roll out the yoga mat before you call account health and maybe while you're calling them. Do that, have a meditative moment before you do it. That's fine. We're not telling you to spout off.
[00:15:08] Leah: I think that might have to be an episode of five minutes before you call account health meditation.
[00:15:12] Chris: Five minutes, yeah, at least. Thanks for listening, everybody. We know it's kind of tough to hear some of this stuff. We know it's frustrating. Maintain your composure, think strategically, and let us know if you have any questions. Bye.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hi everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm with the famous Leah McHugh, wonderfully talented, famous Leah McHugh.
[00:00:16] Leah: In a very niche part of the internet, I am famous.
[00:00:20] Chris: Well this is what we're talking about today where, there are things you -it's funny because I planned this for a different episode, but we'll talk about it briefly now.
Because today instead of just talking about mistakes sellers make and focusing on them, we want to talk a little bit about things we see consultants making, that are mistakes that lead to dollar loss, time loss, maybe even sometimes an increase in difficulty and resolution. And this is something you see, dare I say, even more than me, because you are in a niche where you're working on stuff where you're kind of alone in figuring these things out, doing it quickly, and understanding the mistakes that happened before. Is it just consultants throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and they're not sure what's going on? Maybe we'll just start with you because it's definitely endemic to what you see almost every day, right? Part of your job is reversing the mistakes of a prior consultant and then starting the case over and not really building off of something someone else did that somehow got stuck. Is that fair to say?
[00:01:25] Leah: I mean, I do occasionally build off of something that somebody else did that got stuck. But in general, yeah, I'm either starting from scratch or trying to reverse previous mistakes.
[00:01:36] Chris: Right. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I see when I'm talking to you about client work, and what I hear when you're telling me about this case, that case, this client, whatever is people were hired. They opened cases that went nowhere because the case system wasn't the place to go for it. They had people emailing, I don't know, Jeff and executive seller relations, just hoping it would trigger.
Well, is their approach just like, we don't know what's going on. We haven't figured this out. We haven't researched it. So they either haven't put the time into it or they just don't know. They don't have the expertise. So they just try stuff. Hoping that they'll get an answer back that helps point them in the right direction.
Is that what's happening?
[00:02:17] Leah: I think there is a trend, I guess, in the consulting and the agency space that if a client asks you to do something, you should just do it. And so what's happening is a lot of people are doing work in areas that they aren't actually experts in. You know, they're just like, I'm an Amazon expert, so anything to do with Amazon, I can help.
And what that tends to result in is like, I'm sure there are areas where people are experts in it, but then they end up working in areas that they aren't experts thinking that maybe what they know somewhere else on Amazon will apply to that situation. Whereas, I personally, I love telling people that like, that is not my area of expertise, but I can send you to somebody else that knows what they're doing.
Whereas I think particularly around account management agencies, I think there is this pressure to help their clients with absolutely everything that comes up on their account. And what that results in is mistakes because they aren't necessarily experts in that particular area specifically.
I mean, obviously I see specifically around product compliance, and listing compliance, and brand registry. That's where I see a lot of mistakes because those are the areas that I specialize in and I'm working in every single day.
[00:03:37] Chris: So it's an obligation they feel. So they're pushing themselves out of obligation due to the payment they've received, or because the seller didn't ask them, "Hey, are you guys Amazon experts and everything?" Or, "Hey, can you guys try to help us with this?" Like the seller didn't really understand that the company they've gone to either didn't have prior experience with it, or didn't have the expertise level for it.
[00:04:00] Leah: Yeah, I just think, especially as there's more...
[00:04:02] Chris: everyone wants to help, right? Like everyone, if you ask for help, who wants to say, sorry, can't help you.
[00:04:08] Leah: Right. And so I think there's this pressure, particularly when there's a lot of competitors in the space. I think there's this pressure to be able to work on everything. And what that often results in is subpar work because they don't necessarily know that specific area. I see this a lot with, legal matters as well. Somebody is just like, "well, they're an attorney, so they can help me with this." And I've seen many letters written by attorneys that are citing the wrong FDA policy or citing the wrong product type for the particular product that they're talking about. Because it isn't their area of expertise, but they're just like, yeah, I can write a letter. That's what I do.
[00:04:49] Chris: That's true. That's worth talking about for a second because we do see random emails come in, or contacts from sellers who say, "Oh, by the way, I've already got an attorney working on this. I attached a PDF of the letter they wrote and they didn't tell me where they sent it or they just mailed it to that, Terry Avenue address at Amazon."
And then we'll sit down and read it, and it's like off topic. Or you're like, did they just give the client a template that was copy and paste that they use before because they thought it was a similar situation? Or did they not understand the situation? But then that just makes me think, is the seller just saying it's a lawyer and all I have to do is hand the keys to the lawyer and let them drive because they're a lawyer. And they're not like fact checking the lawyer or they're not getting a second opinion from a second lawyer.
Like if you got sick and your doctor said one thing but it was serious enough, you'd probably get a second opinion, or you'd ask more questions, right?
[00:05:47] Leah: I mean, I think that's both an attorney problem, and an agency problem, and a consulting problem that I see is that people don't really ask questions. And I think a lot of times it's especially on the areas that I work in because they are fairly complex. I think a lot of time the seller Doesn't know what to ask.
[00:06:03] Chris: It's blind trust too, isn't it? Kind of like, you've been anointed.
[00:06:06] Leah: In order to effectively delegate something to someone, you at least have to have some understanding of what it is that you're having them work on. Otherwise you have no way of identifying whether they know what they're doing or whether they're doing it properly.
And so, a lot of the times they don't know. I mean, I've seen people get in trouble as well. I mean, so it's not just like, once they're in trouble they have somebody doing things the wrong way. I also see people getting in trouble because they hired the wrong person to do things. And, an example that I've been seeing a lot lately is, they hired the wrong person to advise them on intellectual property.
And so they either are, one infringing on other people's intellectual property, or two, they're reporting infringement before their trademark is finalized and an attorney is helping them do that. And any IP attorney would know that you can't. You have nothing. There's nothing to infringe upon until it's accepted by the USTPO. But I've seen numerous cases where somebody's had their brand registry revoked because they were reporting infringement before their trademark was finalized, and they were being advised by an attorney to do so.
[00:07:14] Chris: I think we talked about that in a past episode and we're going to have to cover it in a future episode, because we've got large numbers of people getting their brand registry revoked, because there is no due diligence. They're just kind of like, I don't know. I'm not an IP attorney. I'll just ask one to do this for me.
[00:07:29] Leah: Well, and the other side of that is that I see people who are losing it because they hire a service to register their trademark that isn't actually an attorney. And then, that service either uses another attorney to do it who's been sanctioned by the USTPO, or the service itself has been sanctioned by the USPTO. And then they have brand registry revoked because they're the person that filed their trademark has been flagged as abusive by the government. So, you know, there's both sides to it. It's getting in trouble in the first place, and then getting in trouble trying to fix things. I see both of them a lot. And you know, I see it with agency work to. Which is, it's done with the best intentions.
It's just, they don't necessarily know what they're doing. Or we see a lot of people get related to other accounts because of, an employee, or an agency, or a consultant, or a warehouse in common. Because, you know, simple things like not using the same email address for every account that you log into, those steps aren't being taken because they just, you know, they don't know.
[00:08:36] Chris: Yeah. I mean, the key, one of the key takeaways from today is have some familiarity with the source material. If you're the CEO or the business owner or the main investor in an Amazon brand. Because I constantly experience people even asking me. Well, you know, Chris, you used to work there, you know more about this than I do, we just want to hire somebody to do all the thinking for us and do all the decision. I'm not saying they say that, but I'm paraphrasing.
[00:09:01] Leah: Well, that's what I was saying before. If you don't know a little bit yourself, then you have no way of knowing if they're doing a good job. And I used to say this back in the day when I worked with website clients as well. You need to have at least some understanding so you can at least judge other people's work.
[00:09:17] Chris: Right.
[00:09:17] Leah: You know, if you don't have that base level, how are you going to know if somebody's doing a good or a bad job? And, you know, I've had those conversations as well where somebody comes in and, and they've been working with a consultant.
And the consultant isn't even citing the correct government agency. You know, they're like, this is regulated by the EPA. And I'm like, Nope, definitely not. Definitely regulated by the FDA. And so they're sending in appeals and they're doing all this work with like a completely incorrect government agency.
And one, that doesn't exactly show Amazon that you know what you're talking about if you're sending in totally wrong information. And two, obviously you're not going to get anything fixed.
[00:09:52] Chris: And it invites greater scrutiny of your Amazon account and business. What I see in terms of consultant mistakes is, and then I start questioning of course whoever hired them, you know, did this ring true when they sent this document to you to send to Amazon in terms of an appeal? I just see Template mill, copy and paste stuff that's off topic.
[00:10:17] Leah: I mean, I can see that too, but that's just like, that doesn't even register with me anymore.
[00:10:21] Chris: No, I want to put a positive spin on it because some sellers do tell me, you know what, I paid these guys some money. I looked at it. I didn't send it in. I do have those conversations. I want to give those people credit. But there are so many others that are still blindly trusting and blindly sending in appeals. And they're sending things into Andy Jassy, or this executive, or Jeff, or executive seller relations, whoever.
And I take them a step back and say, did you actually read what this says? Or did you really just because you paid somebody assumed well, you work with Amazon every day, so I can just copy and paste this into an email and send it to somebody. Or I can send it through seller central. Because these people I hired are reputed to be good at this, or to send these out every day, they obviously know what's going on. Don't make those assumptions. Do due diligence on the appeals that you paid for, or the people that you've paid. You know, for some unknown reason, I still see people or I hear people telling me, they had such great reviews and like no one seems to take those with a grain of salt. But not even that, they're not looking at the text and the language in the appeal and asking any questions. I mean, are you giving them inline feedback on it. Or let's say you're not making comments because you don't feel sure of yourself, are you asking inline questions about what about this piece? What about that piece?
[00:11:47] Leah: Well, and I think a lot of people in the industry as well, they don't want their clients asking these questions. And so they don't make space for that. So if there are any questions asked of them, they're like, no, this is how it's done. We know what we're doing. Whereas, my approach with our clients is, I don't just send them something with instructions. Like I send them a draft, and they need to read the draft, and they need to confirm that everything is accurate before I send them instructions on where and how to send it in. Because it's a two way street. It's not just you hire somebody and they take care of it. I mean yes, there are services that do that, but I personally think that is a red flag. You need to know what is happening on your account, whether it's an employee, or a consultant, or an agency. Whatever that is. If they're not forthcoming in information, that is a problem. So everything that I do with our clients is a two way street of communication. They tell me what they think. I take a look. I tell them what I think. We compare notes. And if I'm citing any sort of policy, like this is TOS compliant. This isn't TOS compliant. I don't just say that. I give citations. If I'm citing a policy, I give them the policy page. I give them the policy warning. Whereas other agencies are just like, yeah, no this is allowed, it's fine. Like I want to see citations.
[00:13:04] Chris: The two way street's important for us just as much as the seller, of course, for what you could describe as our own selfish reasons.
But we need to know you're reading things that we work with you on, number one. Number two, If there has to be a subsequent appeal, or an escalation, or anything else that we do, we need to know that our communication is solid, we're on the same page.
[00:13:25] Leah: Right.
[00:13:26] Chris: So we like questions because it shows that you're engaged and involved in the process. Because this isn't the type of thing, especially if there's millions of dollars at stake, this isn't the kind of thing you can just roll over, go to sleep, and we come back and knock on your door one day and say, by the way, it's done. You know, like a cake that was baking in the oven,
[00:13:46] Leah: Like within a week, this will be resolved. And it's like, no, that's not how this works.
[00:13:50] Chris: Right?
There has to be some involvement and you should want to be involved. We understand everyone's busy. It's hectic. It's anxious. It's tough times in the industry, but you can't just shut your brain off, shut your ears off and be like, I took a look at it. It's fine. I get emails back from people when I send them work that we do. And they'll say, yeah, I took a look. Looks great. No specific feedback. I mean, you don't have to give inline feedback to everything, but are you really reading it?
Are you really engaged? These are important questions.
[00:14:20] Leah: Well, and I think another way that we differ from some other people in the space as well is, when I'm working on a project with a client, I'm in communication with them, like every 48 hours minimum. There isn't just a like, let me know when you hear back, there's a back and forth every like minimum 48 hours, because I need to know what's happening on their end.
I don't always have insight into what's happening on their end, and they need to know what's happening on our end. So there's this constant checking in with each other. So they're updating me on what they're seeing, and I'm updating them on what I'm seeing and we're adding that into the strategy.
And so the next steps, and if we don't get something back within this period of time, we're going to do this. There's this constant back and forth of communication, which I just don't see or hear from a lot of other people in the space. I mean, certainly we do work with agencies who are like that and are very hands on and are very forthcoming. And they know absolutely everything when they ask a question, and I love working with them. But we also see people that come to us and they're like, well, I don't know, the agency did it. And then they ask the agency and the agency is like, well, I don't know, that employee is not here anymore. And it's like, what?
[00:15:26] Chris: And we at e commerce Chris, love that you follow up with people that way.
Yes. Ownership appreciates your efforts.
[00:15:31] Leah: Snooze function in your email inbox.
[00:15:33] Chris: Yeah, I mean, you and I have talked and we'll do a separate episode on it some other time. We do hear from sellers who hire people that get two appeals in two months.
[00:15:44] Leah: Yeah. Which is like, insane to me.
[00:15:46] Chris: And I, it's like they email once a week and say, have you heard back from Amazon yet? No? Alright let us know when you do. Just like you just said. And that's crazy. I mean, there are things you can be doing. You don't spam them every five minutes, but the idea that you just sit and wait for those of you who have heard this podcast before, or read my articles before, or Leigh's articles, or talk to us in person at conferences, you know that we think that's garbage and we don't understand it. Unless it's just divided attention or people being lazy or whatever it is, but that shouldn't happen because amazon is not a set it and forget it marketplace. It never will be and the appeals process isn't either.
So any questions on this follow up with us we'll be as I've alluded to it, covering this topic a couple more times, at least in the next quarter or two. We understand that there's a lot of confusion and disorganization in the appeals process on both sides.
So thanks, Leah. Talk to you soon.
[00:16:41] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:00:05] Chris: Hello everybody. This is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another fantastic edition of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh. We're both of eCommerce Chris. Happy New Year once again, Leah.
[00:00:18] Leah: Thanks. That feels like forever ago.
[00:00:21] Chris: I was just thinking today, has it been two weeks yet since the year started?
[00:00:24] Leah: Nope.
[00:00:25] Chris: Absolutely not. It's been maybe 10 days, maybe not even that much. So most of that is because I don't know what day today is, which is not encouraging.
[00:00:35] Leah: It is the 9th.
[00:00:36] Chris: We have, however, seen some interesting trends that limped into 2024 from 2023 regarding erroneous bots. Very surprising, of course. Tied to pricing and tied to some examples you've seen. Some examples I've seen where there are bundles or multiple quantity, multi pack situations where the bots that Amazon is using, their algorithms are so inept that they're not even reconciling whether the quantities are the same from one listing to the next. From one website to the next. Is that fair to say?
[00:01:15] Leah: That's one of the issues. In general, I'm just seeing a lot of people losing the buy box because Amazon is matching their product to a competitive external price for the wrong product. So whether it's the wrong quantity, or the wrong product configuration, or sometimes like I don't even know where they're getting their price from because I can't find it. They don't tell you where it comes from. It just says competitive external price, and then it's up to you to find out what exactly they're talking about. So I mean, certainly it's interesting behavior from a company that's currently being investigated for anti competitive behavior regarding pricing. But anyway, I'm pretty sure I've said that before.
[00:01:58] Chris: There's been, there's been friction around pricing and enforcement of the fair pricing policy and of pricing in general for years, right?
[00:02:07] Leah: Yeah, I'm seeing a lot more of it in the last few months and I've had a lot of people asking me about it where, Amazon is removing your buy box because they have found a external competitive price that is lower than the price that you're offering it for, but often they are looking at completely incorrect product or who knows what they're looking at, but it's not the right price. So what ends up happening when we handle it because I handle it for our monthly clients. When we handle it, it takes minimum a day for that team to look at what you sent them and resolve it. Which means you're essentially losing the buy box for at least a day because Amazon has made a mistake
[00:02:50] Chris: Or up to a week. We've heard of some people.
[00:02:52] Leah: I have people reach out to me who don't know how to resolve it. And so obviously that takes longer.
[00:02:57] Chris: Well, they open cases.
[00:02:59] Leah: And it depends how busy the team is at any given moment, right? So in theory, they could reply immediately, but in reality it takes at least 24 hours,
[00:03:06] Chris: but it's crazy that it's happening in the first place.
[00:03:09] Leah: Well, I'm just not sure what they're using. Like they clearly aren't using the UPC to match this to external websites. Like are they just doing keyword searches because of course they're going to get false positives all the time. How many products have very similar descriptions?
[00:03:25] Chris: Right.
Oh, tons. And the quantity thing, I mean, some of the complexity of using bots to chase down bundles.
[00:03:36] Leah: Not bundles, but generally multi packs. So you'll have a product that's listed for like $300 because it's a pack of like thousands of units and they like, they want you to sell it for $10 because they've matched it to like the single unit price.
[00:03:50] Chris: Of course, that's the first basic step. I mean, I'm not a software development engineer, but isn't that kind of the first question you'd ask when you're building these types of online tools.
[00:04:01] Leah: Like again, if you're making a multi pack, a multi pack doesn't have the same UPC as an individual pack. Why aren't they using the product identifier?
[00:04:09] Chris: I don't know. And I've wanted to ask different people. We haven't had a chance yet this year to do it. Current Amazonians, former Amazonians. I've wanted to ask people just on the quantity piece. I get that things get rolled out that are half baked, half finished. I mean, that's the Amazon way. It's been that way for a decade and a half. Why this? I mean, how difficult is this? And it's a real question. It's not being snarky, sarcastic. I don't have that background, but to me, this seems like the lowest hanging of the lowest hanging fruit that you could find.
[00:04:46] Leah: I don't think it's the developers fault.
I think from previous conversations with people on the development side and also on the operational side, those two teams have very limited access to each other. So the development team is just given whatever information that they're given. They don't see it as it works on a day to day basis. So any issues that come up with it, they aren't even really told about until like way later, and then they're supposed to fix it. But they're just given the parameters that they're given, and they have to work on that. It's not like they're actively working with the operational team to make sure that it's rolled out in the most effective manner. And I like to say that Amazon is the king of minimum viable product, particularly when it comes to their own internal processes. There is no plan B. There is no backup. We're just gonna roll it out as soon as it's like, as close to ready to roll out as possible.
[00:05:43] Chris: That goes without saying. We shouldn't even waste our listeners time talking about it because that's a given. Until we find or hear otherwise that they're turning the page on that type of launch. It doesn't matter what time of year anymore. It used to be like, well, things that were supposed to be done by Q4 that weren't, we're just going to roll them out anyway, because we have to. Now it's all four quarters.
[00:06:05] Leah: Yeah, so the quickest way that I have found to resolve this is kind of my old standby. You guys are probably sick of me saying this. But the quickest way that I have found to resolve it is to call and speak to Catalog. And ideally, you can show them the product that you think Amazon is incorrectly matching the price to, and they then transfer the case to the pricing team, who you can't access. And then ideally within 24 hours, your buy back box is back up.
[00:06:35] Chris: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Leah: But I also have seen sellers who come to me with this and then I do a Google search and I do find that they are selling the product somewhere else cheaper. So make sure you're not doing that before you open a case.
[00:06:46] Chris: Of course. You have to do your due diligence, do your checks first.
[00:06:50] Leah: And they are matching eBay. They are matching posh mark. They are matching all sorts of other marketplaces. It's not just Walmart, or other third party websites.
[00:06:59] Chris: That's nothing new.
Yeah. And the
buy box loss is alarming because with each passing day that you're not winning the buy box, you're losing all kinds of things. Sales, sales rank. Lots going on.
[00:07:11] Leah: So that's the thing. We have clients who have tons of these on their account, and every single one of them is incorrectly matching to an incorrect external price.
[00:07:20] Chris: Right . It just reminds me of things like the bots that are used to catch certain keywords. Right? That like are never improved. Those are always flagging the wrong listings. They're always inaccurate and sloppy. No one seems interested in correcting that for years. We've been complaining for three or four years.
[00:07:45] Leah: The development team's given a list of keywords, and then they have nothing else to do with the operations team until the operations team is allowed to come back to them and be like, we need this updated.
[00:07:55] Chris: Right. But for years, three or four. No one seems to have any incentive to even marginally correct this stuff, let alone take it all the way to the finish line.
[00:08:04] Leah: I honestly, I think it's a data issue. And I think it's just kind of funny. Since Amazon is like a data company. But I think the issue is that all of these issues are being corrected at the lower level and so nobody's actually collating the figures of oh, we incorrectly delisted 7, 000 listings because of this keyword that isn't even a problem. Like nobody's pulling that data together to see that, so there's no incentive on their side to correct it because as far as they're concerned there is no problem.
[00:08:32] Chris: Oh, no, they're aware of that. There's no way they wouldn't be aware. No one's figured out how much money they're losing because of it, because they don't want to know how much money sellers are losing, but also how much money they are losing from this. We always have to reconcile ourselves with, why are they still doing XYZ a certain way? Aren't they losing tons of money because of it? Yes, they are. They know they're losing money. They're kind of putting the blinders on. They don't want to know how much money they're losing, nevermind how much sellers might be losing. And nevermind the best buyer experience for our buyers suffering because there's less selection, because of these bots taking these listings down. That should be a given, but they just don't want to know.
[00:09:19] Leah: No, I think to a degree that they know, I just don't think that their answer is to make it better. Their answer is just to automate more of it. So they're not spending as much people, hours, dollars on the problem. It's just automated. And then, you know, on their end, who really cares?
[00:09:37] Chris: Well, they should care if they're losing money. I get that sometimes, but yeah. They don't want to quantify it. They're in denial to the point of if we quantify this, heads are going to roll. We don't want anyone to ask too many questions about how our team performs, how that team performs. At the executive level, the people we report to, we don't want to call them out on the carpet. So we'll just do the usual kind of muddy the water or make some excuses, because no one's going to put our feet in the fire about how much money this is costing the company. It seems like basic math. If Amazon's losing money, why aren't people investigating it internally just for their own selfish reasons? And no one, us included, can really understand why you're not motivated when you're losing money. But what can I tell you? That's part of the Amazon way.
One reason I'm glad that we're going to Camp ECOM in Orlando next week is because we will meet some smaller, newer brands. And we can talk to them about trends. Like, are you really kind of aware of some of these things that are going to hamstring you when you're starting out? And are you going to be surprised by it? Or by now has word gotten out that amazon talks a good game, but they don't really fix things that have failed established sellers and could, inordinately hurt newer sellers who aren't prepared for those types of hurdles.
[00:11:05] Leah: This is why we scare new sellers.
[00:11:08] Chris: Well, a certain amount of fear is good starting out if it makes you prepare in advance for something that could hinder you when you're so focused on sales rank. You're so focused on the manufacturing process panning out the way you wanted it to. You're so focused on packaging and so forth that you're thinking about compliance or potential ASIN restrictions and takedowns before they happen. Right. That's one reason, you know, why we're going next week.
[00:11:36] Leah: This is kind of my pet peeve, I guess, with this particular issue with the competitive external price. When it comes to keywords and when it comes to the way you create your listings, there are certain best practices you can use to reduce the risk there. But from what I can see here, there really isn't a whole lot a seller can do to stop Amazon from incorrectly citing external competitive price for a different product. And so it puts them in this position of they have done nothing wrong, and there is really nothing that they can do to stop this from happening. It's just kind of luck of the draw.
[00:12:16] Chris: Excellent note to close on, any questions on this, if this has happened to you, let us know. Of course, we've seen some examples. We're interested in more examples as needed, or as they happen. Hopefully they don't happen to you, but thanks again for listening to seller performance solutions.
We will catch you next time. Bye Leah. Bye.
Leah: Hey, Amazon sellers. Welcome to the Seller Performance Solutions Podcast. I am Leah McHugh and I am here with Mr. ecommerceChris, Chris McCabe, who hates when I say that, but I'm saying it anyway.
Chris: I love when you say that.
Leah: Oh, you changed your tune. Okay.
Chris: New year, new me.
Leah: Ah, I see. Yeah. So we are in 2024 after a relatively wild ride of 2023. So we thought a good way to kick off 2024 would be to do some updates on some of the most popular topics that we talked about last year. So you can prepare for dealing with these things in the new year.
Chris: So maybe just a quick rundown of what we're going to talk about today before we dive into it. Brand and competitor attacks. That was a popular episode because a lot of brands have experienced that. We're going to talk about compliance issues, right? That's your forte. We're going to dig into some of your top experiences, I guess, with some of the cases you worked on.
Leah: Changes to compliance [00:01:00] as we head into the new year and what we're expecting to see with because there has been a quite a lot of Action with government agencies and Amazon. So what we're expecting to see there.
Chris: What we're expecting to see in 2024 in terms of compliance issues, further explanation around what an escalation is and what it isn't on Amazon. We want to talk about that for a little bit. And then I think we should also get into the extreme ASIN merging issues, as you called it, because we're still seeing a lot of that from last year.
Leah: And correct listing content when you're when your ASIN is blocked because some of that has changed a little bit as we headed to the new year. So let's start with dealing with attacks because that's something that is constantly changing as the attackers get more and more savvy.
So, you know, this last year we saw a good amount of fake negative reviews coming in for people, definitely fake safety complaints and intellectual property complaints. You work on these a lot more than I do. What have you been seeing lately in terms of [00:02:00] attacks?
Chris: The back end keyword abuse still happens three years later, which is kind of sad, but it is, which is somebody's putting illicit words and illicit terms into vacant fields.
Leah: I've also seen it happening a lot more with internal fields, so you can't even see it on your end. It's only visible to Amazon's catalog team, which is always fun to deal with.
Chris: Well, also, hold on. Also, wasn't there more A plus content abuse in 2023 than 2022?
Leah: I didn't see so much attacks through A plus content. I don't think I saw people getting in trouble for what they put in their A plus content. But that's more on the compliance side of things.
Chris: The biggest trend I saw last year, which continues now, was My images have changed, my title has changed,
texts on the detail page has changed. Things have happened that are bad and I don't understand why. And when I contact Amazon teams, they either pretend they know why, and they [00:03:00] clearly don't, or they don't know why either. And that's why this past year rang so many alarm bells within all the brands and all the agencies that we deal with, because when you've got those kinds of unknowns and question marks, you're not sure how to strategize the solution.
Leah: Right. We've also seen a pretty good amount of listing hijacks. Most recently, and I think the biggest change there, which actually sort of leads into correcting listing content is that often it seems that a lot of the teams that used to be able to correct these issues no longer have access to the tools that allow them to do so. And often they don't even know that they don't have the ability to do so. So I've had. I've kind of had it go both ways. I've had emails back saying that they can't fix it, but it's been fixed. And then I've also had emails back saying it's been fixed and nothing has changed on the front end. And I've spoken to a number of people in multiple Amazon teams who have said that they don't have access to the same tools that they used to.
Chris: Right. They lack the [00:04:00] visibility and it's set us up for some odd conversations and email threads where we're informing them of things.
Leah: Right.
Chris: That they should be able to see.
Leah: Well, and it also means that a lot of these things need to be able to be fixed with the lower level teams now almost immediately require an escalation for anything to happen.
Chris: Well, why don't we talk for a minute about listing restrictions and whether or not content has to be corrected by the brand, the user, or whether or not something illicit has come in and altered their brands registry or the content on the listing and created an ASIN suspension because you worked on a lot of that this year.
Leah: Well, so we're still seeing a lot of abuse through vendor central. I still see a number of cases where a listing is flagged because of abusive contributions, but those contributions came from the retail team, which means that they came through vendor central, which even if you're the brand owner can be more difficult to [00:05:00] correct.
And a lot of the times, like I said, the catalog team says that they are fixing it and to wait 24 hours and nothing actually updates, or they just straight up know that their tools can't fix it. And they transfer it to another team, usually the brand registry team and the brand registry team comes back and explains to you how to use a flat file, which doesn't really help because like, that's what you've already tried, right?
Chris: And you have to escalate. I mean, those are escalation only cases, right?
Leah: Right. And I think I mentioned this the other week. I think Amazon is trying to make their support worse because I think they want you to leave them alone. And I could be wrong. I guess I should go back to my, like, assume incompetence rather than, than...
Chris: well, the intention is secondary. I mean, it's a question of how do you fix this stuff? Because Amazon doesn't seem to be that able or interested in fixing it themselves.
Leah: Well it's just things that used to be a lot easier to fix are now a lot harder to fix, and things that used to take one touch [00:06:00] to get resolved now require multiple touches and often require you to sit on hold for 30 to 40 minutes to even reach somebody within account health or support.
So it's a catch 22 where Amazon won't reinstate without the corrections, but then often the corrections won't go through because it's blocked.
Chris: Hence the escalations
Leah: It just seems to be getting worse. And really the only way to resolve is through an escalation. Unfortunately.
Chris: Gives me a good segue to what is and isn't an escalation because we've, I think from this year to now noticed an uptick in the number of sellers who I think the conversation gravitated from, I don't know how to escalate. How do you do an escalation? Where do they go? To more sellers telling us I've already escalated it. I think that increased a lot in the last 12 months.
Leah: I do still see, and we'll see and hear too much importance being placed on [00:07:00] where it should be sent and not enough importance on when and what should be sent. Because it doesn't matter how many internal emails you have, if you're sending a bad escalation or something that isn't even an escalation, it's not going to go anywhere.
Chris: The quality of an appeal has always been paramount, but more sellers are using the words.
Leah: Well and Amazon's using the words more too, they talk about internal escalation a lot more.
Chris: Right, well that's what I'm leading up to. Account health reps started sprinkling this in about a year ago. That they were going to escalate it on your behalf.
Leah: And support says it too now.
Chris: Support says it. I think part of it has to do with that announcement 16 months ago at Amazon Accelerate saying that there was going to be veteran escalations of support cases.
Leah: Which I've still seen. I've seen the escalation button on like maybe two accounts.
Chris: We've seen it. Yeah. Considering that was 15, 16 months ago, we probably should have seen that on more than a couple of accounts. But [00:08:00] the term is being used loosely by sellers, and by Amazon now. Typically people were asking us, you know, you're the escalation experts, how do you do it? What does it mean? We still get those questions.
We always will. But there's much more throw this term around without knowing how significant it is. Or a lot of our clients have account managers, right? They will use it too. I've escalated it internally. I've got an SAS core ticket open for you. That's an internal escalation. Without defining what it is, what it'll do, how quick will it be?
Because a lot of account managers create escalation tickets that don't go anywhere for like seven to 14 days.
Leah: yeah, it's interesting. Cause I've had that on a number of cases where there is a strategic account manager working on the account and they're internally escalating. But they hit a brick wall and the external escalations don't, which is, I always find kind of interesting.
I think a lot of it [00:09:00] again, which we've talked about before has to do with teams being siloed and their internal escalations don't necessarily go to the people that have the ability to do things.
Chris: So one, one big update was sometimes these tickets are created and the account managers themselves don't have visibility in the status. Where it is, what's happening with it. So we've gone from telling a lot of clients to get an internal escalation opened with their account manager, first to see where that goes. And then we could try other things to saying, you know what, your account manager can kick it off with this type of ticket. But from that point beyond, unless it just pops back up fixed, you might have no understanding of where you are in that pipeline.
So we've kind of retreated from that. We don't talk as much with account managers for the brands that we're working with about those internal escalation tickets. We encourage them to escalate externally, a lot earlier, and I think we've seen a lot of success with that. So that was kind [00:10:00] of one of our big ticket news items for this year.
Do you want to get into some of the compliance issues in terms of trends and, I mean, we can talk about the extreme ASIN merging because I just love those three words being thrown together.
Leah: Yeah, let's, let's do the extreme ASIN merging and then we can finish off with compliance because it's not at all a dry topic to end on.
Chris: Right, right. I mean, the compliance issues are going to be a great way to finish because we finished the year, December with so much.
Leah: Lots of compliance cases, yeah.
Chris: With so much and so many things that'll, you know, that I think portend to what we're looking at in 2024.
Leah: So, yeah, well, so the extreme ASIN merges, I mean, we still see it.
I feel like it has slowed down a little bit in terms of doing it for review purposes. Yeah the thing is, Amazon still allows it to be technically possible.
Chris: I don't think it's slowing down. That, that can be our big 2024 disagreement maybe.
Leah: Well, what's [00:11:00] interesting is that I feel like a lot of the changes that Amazon has made to these things makes it more difficult to fix genuine issues. But does not seem to make it more difficult to abuse the system. So we do still see ASIN merges. I haven't really talked to people as much about it. Certainly I get asked weekly, bi weekly about how to correct UPCs on listings. And a lot of people suggest ASIN merges as a way to correct that. Interestingly, this isn't something that we do, but it does seem that the people that do do ASIN merges to correct listing attributes. It seems that they're having a lot more trouble getting that done, which I find interesting because it doesn't seem like it's any harder for people to merge ASINs to hijack reviews.
Chris: Right, right. So you want to go into the FTC part because the FTCs clearly picked up on how consumers are [00:12:00] misled with improper ASIN merges and with the harvesting of reviews from one listing to another, reviews for totally different products. From abandoned listings, because obviously that's very misleading to the public and Amazon just doesn't seem to have an answer or a solution for that.
Leah: Well, so the FTC, it was the, the case, the suit that they, they made against the supplement seller last year. Some of it, I believe, was merging with old abandoned ASINs, but some of it was also just creating variation families of new products with old products that looked like they had more reviews. What I did find interesting is that I haven't really seen a huge uptick in incorrect variation enforcement.
We see it in drips and drabs, but we haven't seen like a very big surge of that in a while. I think part of it is that it's hard for them to find.
Chris: Yeah, but that means they're due. It always cycles around.
Leah: True, that, yeah, it could, and [00:13:00] I, you know, I see it. But it's usually just a warning and it's usually, it doesn't really affect the account health that much. Occasionally I'll see an account suspension for that. I guess I saw a few of those in Q4, but we haven't really seen a large amount of those like we have previously where like thousands of accounts get suspended for that.
Chris: Those are due. The ASIN variation manipulations, reporting it in terms of abuse of conduct, some brands reporting another competitor and enforcement with listing suspensions, warnings, policy violation, messaging in Seller Central. I mean, that is going to cycle back around because it's getting messier and messier.
Leah: Well, and I do think that we are going to see greater enforcement of that once the FTC finalizes its new proposed rules for reviews. I think that's when we will start to see more action on Amazon side because the FTC will probably give them our time.
Chris: Right and when you have a better sense of what that timeline was, I know they had a public call for [00:14:00] comments.
Leah: Yeah I'm, not sure when it actually finalized
Chris: Is that like q1 q2 maybe? Okay.
Leah: I'm not sure. But I do expect to see more of that which actually leads me quite well into the compliance because there's also a number of things happening with other government agencies that I think is going to affect sellers. Interestingly, the FDA made changes to homeopathic drug regulations actually at the end of 2022.
But we are starting to see more enforcement of that on Amazon's side. So just to give a very, very, very concise background on this, homeopathic drugs used to have their own specific type of FDA registration, where they essentially didn't have to go through the same scrutiny as regular drug products, but were still allowed to make drug claims as homeopathic drugs.
The end of 2022, the FDA changed their stance on that, and now homeopathic drugs need to meet the same requirements as any other type of drug [00:15:00] product. So we are seeing more homeopathic products being asked for their FDA registration information from Amazon, which they don't have because their prior registration is no longer valid.
And many, if not most, or all homeopathic drugs won't be able to meet the FDA requirements for regular drug products.
Chris: Well, I have a question. So, have you seen an increase, or has it stayed the same, of enforcement on health claims and non permissible language.
Leah: On homeopathic drugs r just across the board.
Chris: No, not just for homeopathic drugs. I'm seeing a lot of people, they've purged listings before. Are they doing that in waves? I mean, why are we still hearing from so many people getting enforcement around claims, product claims, health claims?
Leah: Yeah, well, so that is very much automated at this point, so we don't really see it in purges, but we just see it all of the time. Their AI is getting [00:16:00] better in some regards where it does at least take context into consideration, most of the time. But yeah, I mean, that's just been consistent throughout the year. People being flagged for making drug claims when they aren't allowed to, or, you know, medical claims that they aren't allowed to, or pesticide claims that they're not allowed to.
Chris: But if they're automating this to the extent that it's, you know, bought, run, algorithmic to this degree at this point, why can't they just stop you from listing it on the way in.
Leah: That is something that I have been asking about a number of things on Amazon for a while.
Chris: I'm asking not just you, but the listening public.
Leah: That's the, that I have questioned for a while now. Because I do still have conversations with people that like, well, I've been saying this for 10 years and it was never flagged.
Chris: That's why I brought it up. Yeah.
That's why I brought it up. And that's almost a great point to close on. We'll revisit some of these issues, of course.
Leah: And I just have one more thing about the FDA. Amazon was just warned by the [00:17:00] FDA for selling a number of supplements and by Amazon selling, I mean, third party sellers selling a number of supplements that contained Viagra. So I expect to see a lot more enforcement around sexual wellness supplement products. I would expect to see a lot of re-verification of compliance documentation and that additional certificate of analysis that's required for sexual wellness products which tests to prove that your products aren't actually Viagra pretending to be herbal supplements.
Chris: That's an excellent point to end on. Improper use of Viagra ingredients and supplements, and other sexual wellness products. I think we're going to get revisit a lot of these issues throughout 2024. We wanted to kind of just take a grab bag of the, the biggest and most listened to episodes that we had this past year, but keep [00:18:00] in mind that while there are some fixes that are rumored to be coming in for some of these problems.
Most of what we talked about today, I think the solutions are months off. Perhaps 9 to 12 months out and maybe longer. So you have to strategize accordingly now for the year ahead considering that 2023 probably had a host of issues that, you know, we thought would have been resolved back in 2022. Right.
So questions on this, let us know. Otherwise we will see you next time at seller performance solutions. Another, another wonderful year of podcasts ahead. Right. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Bye bye.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Happy almost new year. This is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I of course am joined once again by Leah McHugh. How are you?
[00:00:10] Leah: Good. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:12] Chris: Good. We survived most of December, so we're grateful for that. And we've been hearing a lot, I would say over the past couple of months about AI, Amazon's AI incorrectly recategorizing products and creating compliance triggers. You work on the compliance side a lot more than I do. So maybe you can fill in that blank. Example being things being reclassified as medical devices that weren't medical devices. That's something we see a lot, but maybe you've got a couple other hot examples from the top of your head from this Q4, I figure, because these are coming to us as like complaints about Amazon's AI.
I mean, is that new AI that they're using or is this kind of a rehash of a previous complaint?
Yeah, this is one of those things where like somebody posts about this new thing that Amazon's doing and I'm like, oh, are they doing something new? And then I read it and I'm like, oh, that's the same thing they've been doing for the last four years.
Kind of like the other day when somebody talked about a brand new email, which we had been seeing for like three years. But I mean they're just changing the terminology here. So it's now calling AI what people used to call spiders or algorithms.
It's the same thing we've been seeing for years. I would say, we definitely saw a ramp up during COVID, but it's not new. I mean, the reclassification thing. I mean, that's been going on for a decade, I would say.
That's been going on for a long time so you're arguing, just because I heard this from sellers, I heard it from agencies, and I even had a reporter call me and ask me like, what's everyone complaining about with these? Amazon AI foul ups, right?
[00:01:52] Leah: I just mean, I have been consistently working on these cases for the last three to four years. So it's really not a new thing. Perhaps people who weren't experiencing before or experiencing now. And that's why people are suddenly talking about it again. But it's really nothing new.
[00:02:08] Chris: What is it exactly? Why would something be medical device classified when it's not a medical device, for example?
[00:02:14] Leah: For a number of reasons, some of them seller mistakes and some of them competitor attacks. We talk about keyword abuse all of the time. This is another form of keyword abuse where somebody goes into your listing, adds a bunch of words to get it flagged as a medical device or a drug or a pesticide and then you have no idea why it's flagged as that because it has nothing to do with that. Or the other side of it is that people are making claims about their products that they're not allowed to make. I would say 40 percent of the time when somebody comes to me saying that Amazon's misclassified their product as a medical device, turns out their product is actually a medical device.
[00:02:49] Chris: Or as we've talked about a lot, they can't just fix the listing. They've also got claims on their packaging.
[00:02:57] Leah: Well, that's more with supplements. And so that's where you run into the unregistered drug issues. And so, yeah, that's something we've been seeing for a long time too, as well as the pesticide claims, which we've talked about before, if your product claims to kill pests, including bacteria, other than on the human body that's a pesticide. So we've been seeing this for a long time and sometimes Amazon gets it right. Sometimes Amazon doesn't get it right. I think the biggest change that I've seen this year, maybe? it's hard to keep track but I want to say this year, the biggest change I've seen is that it seemed like last year, the compliance team was trending upward, like they were getting better at their job.
So if something was misclassified, you could just be like, this is wrong and this is why it's wrong and this is what my product is and they'd be like, Oh yeah, that makes sense and would reinstate it. Whereas now it seems to be turning in the opposite direction where if they've misidentified your product, getting it reinstated through the regular appeal channel is almost impossible. And I do have a theory on that. I don't think it's just that the people on the team are like half assing it. I think that they one have less access to tools because I've been hearing that from multiple Amazon teams, that they all have way less access to different Amazon tools, and I also think that they aren't being empowered to use a stupid business term and I apologize in advance for that, but, but I don't think that they are. I don't think that that team is empowered anymore to make that call of oh, yeah, you're right. This isn't the device that we think it was, whereas before they did have that ability. So now you essentially have to escalate it in order to get it properly reinstated. If Amazon is wrong.
[00:04:43] Chris: Right, they're just churning through the contacts and answering them however they can answer quickly.
[00:04:47] Leah: I think they just have a decision tree, right? And the decision tree doesn't have a what if we were wrong option. So it's either send the documentation or nothing.
[00:04:58] Chris: I don't think I have the training or the ability anymore to be like, Oh yeah, this, this is wrong. This is not whatever we decided it was before.
[00:05:06] Leah: Well, I'm going to hope for 2024's sake that that's not the case in Q1 and that it's just a multi month pause in training and SOP auditing. It's been like a year. Okay.
[00:05:21] Chris: Yes. In a lot of ways, we have to just kind of turn the page on 2023 because we saw numerous alarming trends and problems and increasing reliance on just no investigation, copy paste responses, which we will address in our year end episode, where we cover some of the 2023 trends.
I, for one, hope that next year will just be better in a lot of ways. But I guess the good news in what you're saying is that there's no, possibly no increased reliance on AI where they take engineers out of the equation. And they're just using bots for absolutely everything tied to listing enforcement.
[00:06:04] Leah: Well, I think at this point, most of these flags are automated. I don't think there is a human reviewing the listing prior to it being blocked. The appeals themselves, I do believe are going to humans, but I know for a fact that a lot of the documentation review is automated. But I think the problem is like, you know, I'm not against automation, but if your system didn't work when humans were doing it, how do you think that you're going to build an efficient automation for that?
Because now it's just the same issues as before. But now there's no way to actually get somebody to be like, Oh, yeah, no, that makes more sense.
[00:06:45] Chris: You're supposed to replace successful manual actions with successful automation.
[00:06:50] Leah: Right, like they were never good at this when humans were doing it. Why do they think that they're going to be able to make good machine learning for it?
[00:06:58] Chris: That's an excellent point. I think we're just seeing increasing complaints, just nonsensical actions taken. What I've seen on my side, since I'm not doing compliance work every day, like you are, is the Amazonian will answer where there's a clear mistake, a clear error with something like, well, you need to get approval to sell this brand.
[00:07:23] Leah: That's actually something we've been seeing a lot more of, the approval thing, and I don't know why people are talking about that.
[00:07:28] Chris: Or you need a letter of authorization to sell your own brand. You need approval, you need to apply for brand approval to sell your own brand.
[00:07:35] Leah: Well, I've had a few recently where, like, the ASIN got gated, and then they were accepting applications, and then later Amazon was like, oh yeah, that was done in error, sorry.
[00:07:44] Chris: They say it's done in error every time, ultimately. But there are some people coming to us with a dozen rejections or case replies or whatever it might be.
[00:07:54] Leah: No, I mean, you just get the same response if you go through the regular cases. It was only an escalation that got them to admit that it was an error.
[00:08:01] Chris: Yeah. And again, we'll kind of pick this apart next week with our end of the year episode, but unfortunately now I hear and see account health representatives mimicking this just because they see it annotated somewhere on the account. And they'll say, oh, you need approval to sell that brand, but you're on a phone call with that person.
So the brand owner can say, why do I need that? I'm the brand owner, and I'm in brand registry. What is it just dead air on the other end?
[00:08:25] Leah: Again, I think this is a tools issue. Each of these teams have very limited access to these tools. And so the only way to get it resolved is to escalate it to somebody that has full access because like I've had, especially with the gating, I've had conversations with catalog who are like, we can see that you're approved for this, but we can also see that there's a restriction, but there's nothing that we can do with our access to these tools. And then they send it to brand registry and brand registry send you a, like, Oh yeah, that's gated you have to apply. And it's like, yeah, we just went through this, like they just don't have. None of these teams, and it's weird because it's cyclical, right? We've gone through this before, where they didn't have any access to tools, and then they got given more access to tools, and then Amazon had some data leak issues, and then they don't have access again, or people messed up and so then they remote the access again.
We're back there, and I've been hearing a lot of misinformation from Amazon's teams lately, a lot more than we had maybe six months ago. And it seems to have just gone right back to like, nobody really knows what's going on, but you're on the phone with them. So they have to say something.
But the only way to resolve a lot of these issues is to escalate it. And it's not necessarily because of incompetence. It's because of a lack of access to those, like for those teams to correct these problems.
That's what I meant. Hopefully in 2024, it swings back to. Giving more access more people than they get into the issue of, you know, people being bought out or doing things they're not supposed to be doing.
And then they go right back to restricting.
[00:09:51] Chris: And we've said, throughout the year that when sellers are baffled, you know, why don't you have access? Why can't you see more of this stuff? And are they're paying five grand a month for an account manager who doesn't have access to things that would be useful.
It all traces back to when people had access to tools that they didn't necessarily need or use every day. They were susceptible to taking money from outsiders to share information that was privileged in private.
[00:10:16] Leah: So just to like kind of go back to the level of competency of the compliance team and again, like, you know, I've dealt with the legal parts of this team and I'm not saying that they are incompetent.
They are highly competent, but they've been using the same templated notification for medical devices when they think your medical device is a class 2 medical device. Oh, I mean, I'm probably not five years, but years, they've been using this for years where they say that it's been identified as a class two medical device, which is professional use only class two medical devices are not professional use only.
So they've been giving this like essentially legal letter to sellers. For years, that's not even the correct information if they were even flagging your product correctly. So, and then if your product is a Class 2 medical device, you're like, yeah, here's my 510K, and then they reinstate it because suddenly it's no longer professional use only.
Like, for years, they've been using that wrong wording on that notification. So, like, this is the level that we are dealing with.
[00:11:25] Chris: There are old templates floating around that, that should
[00:11:30] Leah: But this is the template. They use this template for all things classified as Class 2 medical devices.
[00:11:35] Chris: But what about the template for, you've engaged in illicit, deceptive, or fraudulent behavior? And using that in like 19 different outcomes, circumstances. . I mean, no creation of a second version, third version, fourth version to address all these different things.
[00:11:49] Leah: I'm not even asking for different versions. I'm just asking them to not have misinformation in the one template that they use for this.
[00:11:56] Chris: You're teasing next week's episode, but we're also starting to get into next week's episode, which I'm trying to avoid doing. I just wanted to bring this up today because whether it's reading through LinkedIn or Facebook or different forums posts, everyone's starting to use and misuse the term AI, the way they like to say hijacking in all the wrong contexts.
It's becoming like that. And if they just mean they're just using a different term for Amazon's algorithms, Amazon's bots, and now everyone's going to say AI, that's fine.
[00:12:32] Leah: No, I mean, we can change the terminology, just we probably shouldn't pretend like it's a new thing because it's the same thing, right?
[00:12:38] Chris: Well, the problem is it's creating confusion. And it sounds like, I mean, I haven't addressed it this week yet, but it sounds like now the media is catching on to it, but they think this is new, this is something new that Amazon's doing. They've tweaked their AI because AI is kind of clickbait at this point.
[00:12:54] Leah: I mean if this gets the media interested in these problems that we've been seeing for years, then great. Yeah. Let's call it AI.
[00:13:02] Chris: That's an excellent note to end on. There's nothing I could say more succinct into the point than that. So, are there any last thoughts on this or we pretty much covered it, I think. , do you have any words of warning in terms of people getting listing restriction messaging or something suddenly comes in saying you're selling a restricted drug or a medical device and you're confused?
[00:13:25] Leah: Yeah, well, I mean, 1st of all, maybe check to make sure you aren't selling a restricted drug or medical device. Because, like I said, I do see that a good amount. The after that, you know, you check your listing content, especially if we're talking about if it's being flagged as a drug, or , even a medical device.
It's generally using an algorithm to look for keywords and that's what's causing the flag. So check your listing for anything that could be causing that. That also being said, I mean, there is kind of like an entire little terrifying cottage industry around misclassifying medical devices, so you don't have to do as much with the FDA.
And we have also seen instances where it's not an algorithm, it's the FDA contacted Amazon and told them to get rid of all of these products. So, you know, you need to one, look at your product to look at your listing. And then three,. I would say talk to Catalog and see if they can see anything, because a lot of times the keywords are in attributes that you can't see, which is always fun.
So, yeah. Otherwise, call me.
[00:14:22] Chris: Otherwise, ask Leah. Thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll come back at you next for the kind of end of 2023 barrage of things we've learned, topics we've discussed throughout the year and what we see happening going into next month, 2024.
[00:14:38] Leah: I think we should have a drink the next time we can do that one at the end of 2023.
[00:14:43] Chris: Yes. Sounds good. Bye everybody.
[00:00:05] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. You have a kind of tired Leah McHugh and Chris McCabe looking back out at you if you're watching us.
[00:00:12] Leah: It's just every Q4. It's the evolution of Q4.
[00:00:15] Chris: Happily discussing in mid December some trends we're seeing, problems in terms of listing abuse, things that sellers might not be diagnosing properly. Might not be reporting the abuse properly, and it looks like there's lots of...
[00:00:31] Leah: or inadvertently also committing the abuse themselves.
[00:00:34] Chris: Hopefully that's going to end as of today after listening to this podcast. So bear with us a moment. We're going to take this apart. Maybe Leah, you can just kind of run through these improper ASIN merges. The purpose is harvesting reviews. Well, there's zombie listings, maybe we should define terms here.
[00:00:56] Leah: Oh, so they're not always zombie listings. But I mean, that is a. version of it. So for those who aren't familiar, a zombie listing is a listing on Amazon that hasn't been sold by anyone in a while. And a form of abuse is either hijacking that existing listing so it already has reviews and it already has a fairly old sales rank. So I don't really think the sales ranks really contributes much at that point, but it has a nice cache of reviews. And so one thing that abusers do is update the detail page to represent an entirely different product, and now that product looks like it has tons of reviews. The type of abuse that we're going to be talking about more today is when somebody takes an existing listing and merges it with another listing to essentially achieve the same outcome, but it's just a different version. So merging the two ASINs together to harvest the old reviews, and old sales ranks. So sometimes it's done with zombie listings. Sometimes it's done with actually active listings.
[00:01:58] Chris: Variations, right?
[00:02:00] Leah: Well, variations are different from a merge. You don't merge.
[00:02:03] Chris: They're merging different listings of their own products. It's not that they're acquiring another product that has nothing to do with their product, their detail page at that point.
[00:02:13] Leah: Yeah, and so we also see it when there's an issue with an ASIN, sellers will try to create a new duplicate ASIN and then merge that with the old one that they're trying to correct. Again to keep the existing reviews and keep the existing rank if for whatever reason Amazon is not letting them change something on their listing.
And, you know, while I've seen in the past sellers doing that to correct catalog problems without issue. Now there's a lot more scrutiny of it because of negative press around review hijacking, particularly because the FTC recently sued a supplement manufacturer for doing a similar review merging where they were actually using a variation family to make their new products look like they had more reviews rather than merging it into the same detail page.
[00:03:07] Chris: Review manipulation, review abuse, the FTC has been on this for a long time.
[00:03:11] Leah: Right! And because the FTC has been on it, they've been giving Amazon a hard time about it, which means Amazon will be giving you a hard time about it.
[00:03:18] Chris: Great. Awesome synopsis, by the way. I never could have said that at this moment in time, so I'm so glad.
[00:03:24] Leah: Sounds like you're being facetious, but I don't think you are.
[00:03:27] Chris: I'm being completely honest. It's good after all these years that you can't tell when I'm being facetious and when I'm not after eight years.
So a little bit of background as well. We've, or at least I have, maybe you haven't been to some events lately where this is promoted as a seller hack. I'm using air quotes.
[00:03:47] Leah: Yes.
[00:03:47] Chris: Whatever, New York, New Jersey thing that I went to. This was promoted as a good Q4 seller hack. I'm sure there are other events that are promoting this stuff, other services promoting this stuff.
[00:04:00] Leah: And also seller support or account health, telling people, oh, well this ASIN can't be reinstated, so just make a duplicate ASIN.
[00:04:06] Chris: Yeah.
[00:04:07] Leah: Also, I mean, it wouldn't even work if your listing is blocked and you make a new asin. You can't merge an ASIN with a blocked ASIN. So even if that is your plan, it's not going to work. You still would have to get the first one reinstated, but then if you merged it with a duplicate one, you're now violating two policies.
[00:04:22] Chris: Yes. And
[00:04:25] Leah: I have this conversation a lot with sellers.
[00:04:28] Chris: There's a lot we could say about that. I was mostly going to focus today on the tendency for sellers who identify this, and we've heard from many hundreds at this point. Some of them want to hire us for abuse reporting. Some of them, we just tell them what they can try on their own. But they're just opening seller support cases, or calling catalog, or calling account health or doing all these things, which may or may not result in a quick action and a quick solution that is also quickly undone by the perpetrator. They go back and do it again. Because Amazon's been allowing people to go back and do it again without further punishment.
[00:05:08] Leah: But I think this is where you and I differ, because if I'm reporting somebody for abuse and they re-offend while I'm reporting them, if we keep reporting them, it increases the likelihood that the entire account will be taken down rather than just the listing split. So I actually think it's a good thing when they re-offend, because you can just keep reporting them until their account gets suspended.
[00:05:25] Chris: No, it's a good thing. The bad thing is I would say 75 percent of the people we talk to, maybe more, are just going back and reporting again using basic seller support tools. They're not escalating it. Okay, I'll back up for a second. Escalation is the way to go. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing a million times hoping for a different result. Do not keep doing these seller support reports expecting there to be a magical, you know, they've reoffended a thousand times. Why aren't they being blocked? It's going to be up to you. Unfortunately, Amazon's not taking responsibility for the fact that this happens over and over and over, because if it happens twice, if they're a reoffender, Amazon has all the authority in the world to just block that seller. They can open a ticket if it's a support.
If it's a ignorant account health rep, if it's a lower level support rep and they don't understand what seller performance does, they could flag it. They could open up a ticket. They could do something. And once that gets to, you know, my former team seller performance, that's a blockable offense.
[00:06:33] Leah: Yeah. But I also think it's not just a matter of people not reporting it to the right place. I think a lot of people aren't really laying it out for Amazon. They're just saying like, Hey, they're abusing reviews. Fix it. Like you need to lay it out. Like you need to look at the reviews and be like, these reviews are clearly for a different product. This has clearly been merged with this other ASIN, and this is an abuse of Amazon's policies and also a violation of FTC regulations. Like you need to do their job for them essentially for them to take action.
[00:07:03] Chris: Yes, I agree It's a common mistake to think that you can direct their attention to a whole host of violations and expect them to run with it from there. They should, they never do. Almost never do. So definitely Advice A is to lay it out, but B understand you're not going to keep opening cases, complaining to account health, listening to somebody at account health say, Oh, I've submitted an escalation for you. Don't expect that to work.
[00:07:29] Leah: Does account health even, I've never used account health for abuse reporting.
[00:07:32] Chris: I've heard that they escalate. They like to use this amorphous escalation reference. Sometimes it means something.
[00:07:38] Leah: Yeah, they say that about everything. If they just need to send it to somebody else, it's an escalation.
[00:07:44] Chris: Well, they started this thing, I don't know, last summer where they say somebody will get back to you. You'll get a phone call from a higher level person than I am. I've escalated this to senior leadership when it was within account health. Sometimes that does happen. It's inconsistent. And I would also say it's infrequent.
So when you can't rely on them, or support, or other teams, that's when emails from your primary make all the difference in the world.
[00:08:11] Leah: Oh, I actually have something to tell you that I haven't told you before.
[00:08:15] Chris: This is the best place to have unvetted, unscreened content.
[00:08:19] Leah: Because we don't, you know, edit later.
I have seen on a few accounts now the promised escalation buttons. It only took two years, I think, since Amazon promised an escalation button.
[00:08:35] Chris: Oh, you're talking about the much ballyhooed announcement at last year, 2022
Accelerate
[00:08:41] Leah: yeah, I've now seen it in a couple of accounts. It only took two years to materialize on a couple of accounts.
[00:08:48] Chris: 15 months. Let's be fair.
[00:08:49] Leah: I'm sorry. 15 months.
[00:08:50] Chris: It only took 15 months.
[00:08:51] Leah: And still not a good number of accounts. Like I've seen it a couple of times.
[00:08:55] Chris: Yeah. Actually, anyone hearing this who was at Accelerate 2022? I was not there. Can tell me, tell us if the promise made at Accelerate was that they would have it in Q4 last year, the button. Or in early 2023.
[00:09:09] Leah: I'm pretty sure CNBC covered that announcement. So it's probably in the press.
[00:09:13] Chris: Yes. Dear listener, we will try to follow up on that. But if you already know the answer, feel free to message us. Send a letter into our mailbag, right? Just like David Letterman used to, for those who remember him.
[00:09:27] Leah: I think our listeners are all younger than you think they are.
[00:09:30] Chris: David Letterman's still with us, so you know. Comedian, late night talk show, 25, 30 years.
[00:09:37] Leah: He interviewed Billie Eilish lately, for the younger listeners.
[00:09:41] Chris: Yes, yes, and others. Back to the ASIN merges, I know it's frustrating. I know lots of people have reported this. We've actually Over the last year or two, we've seen a lot of sellers getting better at how they report abuse and three, four years ago, nobody was reporting it. So that's an improvement.
[00:09:59] Leah: Which I just think we should take credit for because people take credit in our space for stuff all the time that they didn't do so. Yeah, good job. Us
[00:10:05] Chris: Kind of the only people out there that are doing real abuse reporting. We will take credit for that. But in all fairness, sellers have gotten better educated and more hip on how to do it. I already said 75 percent are just doing seller support tickets. I think most people who have tried it and see that the seller you're reporting just goes back and does it over and over and over again.
The improvement here, the suggestion here, the fix here is that you have to escalate it meaningfully. And you have to lead with, this is a re-offender.
[00:10:41] Leah: Right
[00:10:41] Chris: We've reported them a couple times. They've already gone back and in bad faith, done it over and over and over again, which means they have no intention of following policy violation. Sorry. Following policy. They're continuing to commit the violation. Why are they selling at all?
[00:11:01] Leah: Right. It's similar to what we were saying before, where you have to lay out the abuse. You have to lay out the repetitive nature of the abuse as well. You basically have to make it so if somebody later reviews that email, it would look bad to the investigator if they had done nothing about it.
[00:11:17] Chris: Yes. Or the manager. Maybe you've gotten it to the manager.
[00:11:19] Leah: You need it to be so strong that somebody ignoring it would look bad if that was reviewed later.
[00:11:27] Chris: Yes, and we can talk in another podcast another day about why has Amazon retreated from blocking re-offenders Into just light slap on the wrist, which of course encourages more and more abuse when they do that.
You start blocking people for it, then you get their attention. Back when I was working at Amazon, we got to the point, I think very quickly in the policy enforcement process where we realized that policy warnings didn't really do anything. Unless they were scared by one warning that they might lose their whole account, maybe they'd change their behavior. And so you started taking things away like ASINs or accounts. No one changed anything because they thought it was basically just a bot, or they thought it was fake, or they thought it was harmless.
[00:12:12] Leah: Or they now think they can just check the check boxes and everything's fine.
[00:12:17] Chris: Well, just for anyone who says why does Amazon suspend me instead of giving me a heads up?
A lot of people tell us that, and then we find a policy violation in their performance notifications. They were told, but they didn't care. They didn't take it seriously.
[00:12:30] Leah: Well, and for those listening who are considering ignoring this stuff and committing this abuse anyway. I mean, it's not just Amazon like we said. It is FTC, and the company that was recently sued by the FTC had to pay a 600, 000 fine. So, if the ire of Amazon doesn't dissuade you from doing this, perhaps a $600, 000 fine would.
[00:12:52] Chris: Or if you don't find a $600, 000 fine to be too harmful to your business.
[00:12:57] Leah: Then have at it, I guess. I don't know.
[00:12:59] Chris: You're still rolling the dice. Well that means you're making millions and millions on Amazon.
[00:13:03] Leah: Which also means it'll hurt a lot more if that gets shut off, you know.
[00:13:06] Chris: It's rolling the dice with your entire Amazon business, which presumably you need if you're making millions per month or per year.
So, make sure you understand that abuse prevention teams exist. Make sure you understand that support may not be delegating these appropriately. Make sure you're following different management, senior management, executives on LinkedIn, their posts. Sometimes you can get a tweet out to their attention.
[00:13:33] Leah: They also love posting about how great they are at finding and stopping abuse. So that's a perfect time to mention the abuse.
[00:13:42] Chris: They constantly talk about their increased headcount for abuse prevention, how much money they spend, which part of that must be salaries, for employees on headcount for abuse prevention.
But this abuse is rampant. Re-offenders are constant. And they're treating the symptom and not the disease. They're kind of taking credit for fighting abuse, but they're not following the problem all the way to the source. Which means that they're taking credit for something that lacks a lot of meaning.
The meaning is elimination of the abuse or greatly reducing it. Instead, what's happening is the offenders are re-offending Because they feel bulletproof. And they feel bulletproof because I think not enough people are reporting it number one. So don't don't be discouraged and do it once and run away. That's what Amazon is kind of hoping you do because they don't want to hear it.
And that's what the abusers want you to do. You have to stick with it. Persevere. But also be ready to complain, and be ready to be aggressive, right?
[00:14:47] Leah: So I have a theory actually on some of this with Amazon. So we already know that they're like intentionally vague in their communication. But I actually think based on their recent improvements of support, and account health, and pretty much any of these processes, I think they're intentionally making it more difficult to try to get more people to give up on contacting them about things. Because even to the point that the hold music, when you call Amazon now is just like an 8 bar part of a song that's just played on repeat for the hour that you're on hold. I think they're just like, we're just gonna drive you nuts until you give up. And I think part of the reason all of these processes are actually getting worse, not better, is because they're just trying to reduce the number of contacts rather than solving the issues. Sorry, Amazon PR, if you're listening, but this is my theory.
[00:15:39] Chris: Yeah, well, it could be a new person listening, so.
[00:15:44] Leah: Even in terms of like the help menu, they've made the help menu more difficult to navigate for sellers. Sellers don't even know how to request a callback from support anymore. Like, I think they are intentionally making all of these processes worse and more of a pain to deal with. So people just give up and don't contact them about it.
[00:16:01] Chris: I think I've already decided this is one of my favorite episodes that we've done. So we need to do these when we're really tired more often is the answer. When we look tired and sound tired. I know I sound tired. You don't necessarily. I agree.
The whole music thankfully I haven't heard lately. But yeah, I mean, you can see. You can see a couple of trends, and this may be useful for next month, you know, 2024, too. In terms of putting things in writing, they seem reluctant to put a lot of their decisions and responses in writing.
They're doing more phone calls.
[00:16:39] Leah: There's a lot more phone calls, yeah. Which doesn't really help because you have no path of getting back in touch with the person that called you.
[00:16:45] Chris: Well that, and nothing's documented.
Right.
So people can change the story later. But it's interesting because like when I was working there and in the years since, they were trying to get away from phone calls because they're so time consuming, it's hard to get people off the phone. Maybe in the age of the account health dashboard and account health reps, they've decided, you know what, the way things are now, we have to kind of commit to having a certain amount of phone time with sellers, but we're going to just throw quantity at the problem and not necessarily quality of phone time.
[00:17:18] Leah: Yeah, I agree.
[00:17:20] Chris: So that's fodder for yet another episode. Yeah, in terms of Amazon PR listening in, I don't know if it's the same person that used to listen to these episodes. If you're new, welcome. We hope to make 2024 cheery and wonderful for you.
[00:17:37] Leah: if you're an intern, sorry, you have to listen to podcasts.
[00:17:41] Chris: You're paying your dues for the mothership. But anyone listening to this, who's familiar with this ASIN merge problem, it's bad for buyers. It's a bad buyer experience to have misinformation on the site, to have detailed pages be misleading, to have products be mislisted and misleading. It's bad for sellers. It's bad for Amazon who has to deal with the blowback from the FTC. And from the media and from others who see it. It's obvious also just in terms of like, easy to understand. Wonderfully, it's one of the things that we don't have to spend eons explaining to people.
[00:18:12] Leah: Right. Well, and because of that, it's also a very popular news story with the press.
[00:18:16] Chris: And it's a popular seller hack, again, with the air quotes.
[00:18:20] Leah: Because it's easy to do, even though you're not supposed to.
[00:18:22] Chris: Yeah. Sarcastically, my favorite two words to see together or hear together are seller hack. Some distant future day, maybe those two words won't go together.
[00:18:31] Leah: My two favorite words are gray hat.
[00:18:34] Chris: Gray hat. Thankfully we don't hear that so much anymore.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening. If you see examples of this, if you're frustrated that you've been reporting it, which a lot of you Have thank God and you're not getting anywhere. There are better ways to do it and We can cover some of those tips in a future episode, but we can also walk you through any emergency abuse reporting because we understand that Amazon's falling behind on these, or collapsing under the weight of all the abuse reports, or just fundamentally not addressing the problem at the source.
So, thanks again. Have a great holiday Thanks, Leah, and I will see you again soon.
[00:19:08] Leah: Thanks, Chris
[00:00:01] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. We are both from ecommerceChris and we're tackling a hot topic, for this hectic, crazy Q4 2023. Immediate resuspension problems, I guess we'd call it after you're reinstated. Is that fair to say?
[00:00:22] Leah: Yeah. Yeah. You got it.
[00:00:23] Chris: Well sometimes I get tongue tied and then you swoop in and say things clearly. We've seen it ASIN level, and account level. So some people get suspended. They have to write back in and say, you just reinstated us. That can work. And in the past it worked better than it does now.
I'm not sure we have a great answer for why that is, but we see it more common on the ASIN level, right? The ASIN gets reinstated. We reviewed what you sent us. Have a nice day. Your listing's back up. You wake up the next day, it's back down right.
[00:00:57] Leah: Yeah, my theory on this and why we're seeing it more now is that I believe that they have changed.
They've made a change to the internal tools because I'm also seeing a lot more people with a policy warning saying that your listing has been removed, and then a few days later you'll get a policy warning for the same ASIN saying it's at risk of removal even though I already removed it a few days ago. So my assumption is that they've made some sort of change in the tools that is allowing these errors to happen that weren't Possible as much before.
[00:01:26] Chris: But the part that's... which is true I think what you're saying, based on our experiences. But what's the same as before is when you start opening cases or calling account health or Emailing through email queues saying, what the heck are you talking about? We just solved this. The copy and paste responses are the same as they've always been.
The generic, we need this. And you know, no recognition that you've just solved it.
[00:01:50] Leah: I mean, I think account health has gotten a little bit better at this. We certainly have had conversations where they can see that it was just reinstated and they escalate it to the internal team for re-review.
Unfortunately, that often could, if you don't push them, just be weeks of them waiting for a response from that team. So they can give you the right information, but they can't really resolve it quickly, generally.
[00:02:13] Chris: And we're going to cover Internal account health based or initiated escalations on another episode, because there's a lot to say about that.
But yes, in brief today, we'll just say, you can't count on this escalation functioning as a real escalation. Number one. Number two, it could take forever. The word escalation gets thrown around loosely, as we've said in many episodes in three years of this podcast by sellers. Now, unfortunately, is being thrown around by account health reps.
And I think it's building up some false hope. Occasionally it does pan out. And things are fixed, right, within 24, 48 hours, but you really have to stay on top of them.
[00:02:53] Leah: Yeah, and also, as with most of Amazon's teams, it is very much the luck of the draw of who you spoke to.
[00:02:59] Chris: Yeah, and be prepared. I'm not saying expect failure, but be prepared to call back and follow up on this and have them say, that wasn't escalated, wasn't supposed to be. Don't know what you're talking about. Don't know who you talked to. Keep the name of the person you talk to noted. Talk about things that we've mentioned in numerous podcasts throughout 2023, keeping the name of account health reps and the date and time you called. I'm not saying that's the be all end all, but it helps because you can quote them back to them, or sometimes you get the same person.
You can say, I spoke to you on the 24th. But short of that, you can say, I spoke to this person, they're an account health rep that we've dealt with in the past, maybe you have, maybe you haven't. But get them to do some research into the notes and annotations on, has it actually been reviewed and appreciated that we've already fixed this, and this ASIN was already reinstated. And one idea I had is maybe point out, hey, you know, look at the dates of our sales. We sold for two days before you took it down again. Or even we sold for two hours, don't you think that would be useful to mention. The amount of sales or the dates of sales, maybe just to get them to go look.
[00:04:09] Leah: Maybe. Again, it depends who you get.
[00:04:11] Chris: Trying to be creative with it, but we're just seeing a lot of retroactive listing suspensions, re-suspensions. Start step one with, this was already fixed. Step two, if they come back to you with the original language of, Oh no, no, no, you need to give us this, this, and this as if they didn't even notice that you've been reinstated, immediately count. Don't just go back into the same cycle that you started with. Immediately say, we gave that information on these dates. This is when it was reinstated. You did an internal escalation or an account health escalation that hasn't been reviewed or adjudicated yet. What are your next steps for us? And if they keep babbling the same nonsense at you, then you have to take other measures and escalate it via your primary email address. You have to start emailing escalations. Fair to say.
[00:05:05] Leah: Yeah. And I think that's usually where most sellers miss the mark they just wait for account health to get back to them, which may or may not ever happen. So you have to consider that to be the first step. And I wouldn't even really wait. I would just immediately then also start doing my own escalations as well. So, there's no reason that they can't be happening simultaneously.
[00:05:27] Chris: Exactly. I would wait. If they say we're calling you in 24 hours...
[00:05:31] Leah: oh, yeah. I mean, 24 hours, sure.
[00:05:33] Chris: Because they have been saying this. Or sometimes they call randomly and say, we will call you within X amount of time. But good news, bad news, as usual. The good news is maybe they will, and sometimes they do, and maybe they'll fix it. And you've already got notes about who you're expecting to call back in 24 hours.
The bad news is if they don't do it, you have to do another escalation, but you're going to at least mention that they promised you the call within 24 hours and they didn't hold up their end. Because that alone is a basis of an escalation beyond the fact that you've already appealed following their protocols.
You already got reinstated and they took you back down with no explanation in the original messaging when they shut you back down. And presumably you called account health already once or twice and you had no explanation there. You can cite both of those things. So you're just building a case. For an escalation, right?
[00:06:30] Leah: Yeah, it's very similar to which we actually don't see as much as we used to, but it's very similar to when they used to send out a notification saying that you had been reinstated, but then forgot to actually reinstate it on there.
[00:06:43] Chris: That too
[00:06:43] Leah: It's a very similar process that we don't actually see as much. But it's really just pushing them to look at their own logs and notes and realize that they have made a mistake. Which usually requires multiple touch points to get it to happen.
[00:07:00] Chris: I think you don't see it with some of your compliance and brand registry cases as much, but we're still seeing it with things that we work on, or things that I work on.
[00:07:08] Leah: But yeah, we don't really get it as much on the compliance side.
[00:07:11] Chris: I've had some situations lately where either account health or the written messaging says, yeah, we got it. We already reinstated you, and they just didn't do it. And then again, you can do the quickie follow up, talk to support, talk to account health, talk to your account manager, talk to whoever and find out, is this just a tool. But sometimes the burden, the onus is on you to say, I think you guys forget to uncheck a box when you do this, and then it clicks and then they get it.
Because up until that point, which sounds ridiculous, I've had between 5 and 10 clients tell me last couple of months, why do we have to tell them how to use their own tools? Why do we have to remind them that they might have missed something? Why don't they just double check? You know, they've seen that situation before, they know the scenario, why doesn't it resonate in their heads? Like, oh, somebody probably just didn't take the action in the tools. Why do we have to say dear Executive Cellular Relations? Why do you even have to go to Executive Cellular Relations to say, I think you guys forgot to take the action in your tools?
[00:08:12] Leah: Well, I have lots of questions about why they do things the way that they do them. So, I've just accepted the fact that I will never get a good answer to any of them.
[00:08:20] Chris: And I know it stinks that you have to often remind them of things you shouldn't have to remind them of. But again, that's the bad news. The good news is often when you do just put this in the first sentence or the second sentence and you do remind them, it'll click, they'll go look, they'll fix it.
Obviously it has to be somebody who understands what the heck you're talking about.
[00:08:40] Leah: And has the ability to actually fix whatever the problem is. Not all of the teams have the ability to uncheck that specific box.
[00:08:47] Chris: Right. But even if they don't have the authority, they can nudge someone, open a case, open a ticket saying, I think what happened here was blank. And maybe they'll take credit for what you told them. And I know it's preposterous and ridiculous that sellers have to do this, but it is fixable. I mean, we're here on this podcast trying to talk about measures that you can employ to resolve some of these things. And we have seen people who don't mention these little reminders for Amazon teams who go seven to 10 extra days without sales. I'm laughing because it's bizarre and unfortunate, not because it's funny of course.
[00:09:21] Leah: Well, and I think part of the problem is, is if it's resolved on Amazon's side, what ends up happening to a lot of those cases is that they automatically get routed to support. And support doesn't have the knowledge or the access to see what's wrong. So their standard response then is like, Oh, you should just try re uploading your listings. Maybe that'll fix it. And so you get stuck in this loop of you're giving the wrong information and they don't have access to the right information.
[00:09:47] Chris: Right. Or as we've seen in umpteen cases, support reps start telling you, well, make a new listing, make a new ASIN.
[00:09:53] Leah: Yeah. Don't do that, by the way. If you're listing is blocked, don't just make a new one to get around the block.
[00:10:00] Chris: Yeah.
[00:10:00] Leah: That will put your entire account at risk. And then you have to explain why you violated yet another policy by creating a duplicate listing.
[00:10:08] Chris: Not only that. You may be prone to saying in the appeal, support told us to do it, which of course somebody in seller performance or enforcement teams will look at that and say, of course they did. They always do that. No one seems interested in stopping them from doing that.
[00:10:22] Leah: I also had to account health for a while telling people to just make a new listing, which was also interesting. They seem to have stopped doing that.
[00:10:30] Chris: Yeah.
[00:10:30] Leah: But yeah, just terrible, terrible advice. Don't do that.
[00:10:33] Chris: Once again, I know we'll do another episode about terrible advice. There's so many pieces to fit into that episode. We're gonna get some specific examples into another episode talking about specific pieces of bad advice that really get sellers in the hot water. I haven't seen as many appeals where sellers blame Amazon for giving them the bad advice because I think everyone understands that bad advice is commonplace now, but it still happens. And, obviously don't say that in your appeal, but I don't know if that's ever going to change. Didn't we see a commonly asked question on the seller forums? Why is seller support? What is it? Why are they so unresponsive? Or why are they so bad? Is that what the question was?
[00:11:11] Leah: People are still asking that?
[00:11:12] Chris: That's what I'm saying. We'll do an episode on why are people still asking that. Because that's not going to change.
[00:11:18] Leah: Sometimes I think it's It's getting worse.
[00:11:22] Chris: Well then if that's how you feel, we're definitely doing a separate episode on that because...
[00:11:26] Leah: yeah, that'll be an easy one.
[00:11:28] Chris: When every member of this system, when every stakeholder in the entire marketplace agrees that it's that bad, including Amazon, and it still doesn't change, then I shouldn't think that there's any expectation that it will ever change.
[00:11:42] Leah: So I actually have a theory on this, but I will save it.
[00:11:45] Chris: Save that for a rainy day or next episode. So if anyone's had one of these re-suspension situations, obviously, if it's account wide, you should probably let us know sooner than later so we can give you some more details on some of these tips. But if it's ASIN level, it's happening a lot. Not just in Q4, it kind of happens on a regular basis at this point. Let us know. We are here to help. We at Seller Performance Solutions are here to offer viable solutions. So, thanks again for listening. Thanks, Leah. Talk to you next time.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, or welcome if this is your first time listening. I'm Chris McCabe and I'm with Leah McHugh, both of ecommerceChris, tackling today's crazy issues and curious decision making I guess we could say today. In terms of some of the hectic haphazard and bizarre Q4 appeals strategies that we've seen.
[00:00:26] Chris: And the types of appeals we see going in were rather alarmed. I know I overused the word alarm, but I think it's worth it today for this particular topic. Because we've lately, not just lately, but especially lately seen an overabundance of legal references in appeals or appeals that aren't legal in nature that an attorney who's been hired recommends you send to legal, which is also a mistake. And the greater concept around when you bring in a lawyer and when you don't. Maybe we can start with your [00:01:00] compliance stuff, your brand registry stuff. Do you just see wacky, brand registry took our IP reporting rights away, or our entire brand registry was revoked, or our product cannot be listed for compliance reasons. We have a lawyer and they did what. What are the common misconceptions and mistakes you're seeing?
[00:01:18] Leah: Well, I think the biggest issue with brand registry is that certain lawyers have been sanctioned by the USTPO.
[00:01:24] Chris: Right.
[00:01:24] Leah: () () For, misrepresenting intellectual property cases to the USTPO and Amazon will actually revoke your brand registry if your lawyer is on that list. So in terms of brand registry, the main thing is like yes you probably should be working with an IP attorney for registering your trademark, or patent, or whatever the intellectual property is, but you should be doing your due diligence on that attorney, and I also would recommend strongly hiring an actual IP attorney to register your IP, not just any attorney who was like, yeah, I can do that too.
Particularly for patents that's a very specific [00:02:00] area of law and not something that you just want to kind of hire any lawyer to handle. But again, the USTPO has a list of sanctioned attorneys. It's publicly available. You can just plug the name of the attorney or their firm into the USTPO's website and it'll tell you if they have been sanctioned by the USTPO.
So that's number one that you want to do because we have had a few people come to us with their brand registry revoked and I looked up their attorney and their attorney had been sanctioned. So definitely want to do that for brand registry. For compliance again, compliance is a pretty law heavy area of Amazon selling.
I think the biggest mistake I see sellers making is one, either not actually speaking to any attorney when it comes to legal matters or two, again, just using a wrong attorneys. They're not using a specialized attorney for very specialized areas of the law. So FDA, EPA, health Canada. You want an attorney that specializes in that area because I have seen appeals where they just hired [00:03:00] an attorney who said that they could do it and the attorney actually referenced the wrong FDA product code in the appeal and I spotted that right away because I work on this every day but the seller is doing this and they aren't working with an attorney that knows what they're talking about they're not going to spot those mistakes, but Amazon definitely will.
[00:03:17] Chris: Yeah i've seen that too. some sellers say well we hired an attorney. And they don't seem to know much about why they hired that attorney. They didn't ask about specialization or they swallowed some story they were told and they turned their brain off and they forgot about it from that point forward. For FDA issues, we're only referring people to one attorney, right? And for EPA?
[00:03:36] Leah: I have a couple that I trust to refer people to.
[00:03:38] Chris: Okay, a couple.
[00:03:41] Leah: Similarly, because there's a whole cottage industry, especially for FDA around misclassifying medical devices, because it's easier to sell a class one device than it is to sell a class two device. So if you can make a class two device look like a class one device, it makes it a lot easier and cheaper to go to market. So there's an entire cottage industry around that. So I have seen cases where [00:04:00] I am like, I'm pretty sure this is a class two device. And they're like, no, our attorney did it as a class one. And then Amazon came back and we're like, we spoke to the FDA and it's class two.
[00:04:09] Chris: Right.
But in those cases, I think the attorney may have known this. They were actively trying to create a workaround. And they wanted the business, right? It's not just that they were ignorant and didn't know. And I see this with appeals.
[00:04:22] Leah: I see both, to be honest.
[00:04:23] Chris: I see it with appeals for account reinstatements, too. I mean, this is the most damaging thing when the entire account, not just an ASIN, is down. And the seller sold a bill of goods, right? The attorney obviously wants their business. They're obviously willing to say whatever they can to convince the person that they've done cases like that in the past successfully. Maybe artfully dodging how often it's been successful. But we're getting streams and streams of sellers saying, well, we started with an attorney, it went nowhere, what can you do now? It's because a lot of the attorneys or let's say dot coms associated with attorneys and law firms are template mills and they're just doing fill in the blank [00:05:00] copy and paste stuff.
And you were talking about the blacklist earlier. There's like a formal blacklist that Amazon has of attorneys, but then there's an informal blacklist. Well, what's the informal one based on our experience? It's the templates. They don't change much. The investigators inside Amazon, which again, we're not talking about your attorney had a direct pipeline to Amazon legal.
Because every brand or seller I've talked to about this, when I quiz them, did your attorney say, I know somebody, I've worked with them, they're in Amazon Legal, they've helped us reinstate? Never. That never comes up. No one ever says, yes, I've written a letter to a person in Amazon Legal. But, the informal blacklist is your template's been viewed a hundred times by other investigators for other sellers. They rejected it.
[00:05:43] Leah: Well, if we can identify the templates and who wrote them, I'm pretty sure Amazon's investigators can.
They usually open with the same sentence. That's what makes it so obvious. They use the same opening sentence every time.
[00:05:53] Chris: Well, yeah. If it starts with, "I am the principal of", you've already shut off half of your audience inside Amazon, [00:06:00] but yeah.
[00:06:00] Leah: First sale doctrine is another one.
[00:06:02] Chris: Yeah, of course. Well, that's anyway, putting that in has, jumped the shark a long time ago. But the only people out there that see more of these rejected template appeals more than us are seller performance investigators, internal compliance team, and policy enforcement people inside Amazon. But they see them constantly. So if it looks like a template, it looks fill in the blank, generic language, how many people have to get the greater details message back from Amazon to understand that fill in the blank templates while cheap are totally worthless.
You're better off doing it yourself, right? And there's no additional or impetus to do anything because it comes from a lawyer and they slap it on like law firm letterhead, if anything, it makes them less likely to take it seriously because there's so many, kind of huckster law firms out there trying to jump into this space.
And they're selling it as amazon will take you more seriously because it's from a lawyer. Totally untrue.
[00:06:59] Leah: I Am very [00:07:00] much a proponent of having an attorney for legal matters. I think the main issue here is kind of similar to in our space of the non legal side of Amazon compliance. Generally when you're hiring an expert, hiring the cheapest one is not the best bet.
[00:07:18] Chris: Or a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician, right?
[00:07:22] Leah: And so I think that's, a large part of the issue is hiring the cheapest one. And I'm sure this comes off that we have, a B& R bonnet about attorneys, and again, like I said, I'm a very strong supporter of having an attorney for legal matters and having a specialized attorney for your specific legal matters, but the issue becomes just, oh, well, they're a lawyer, so it'll be taken seriously, and that's just not the case.
[00:07:47] Chris: Well that's how it's sold.
It's a pre-packaged.
[00:07:50] Leah: We have people come to us who it's already been escalated to legal and nobody else internally to Amazon is going to touch it once it's been escalated to legal. And if you don't get a response from legal, [00:08:00] you're still unlikely to have any other team want to touch it after it's been sent to legal. So then you're stuck, and people come to us, and there's really not a whole lot we can do for them.
[00:08:09] Chris: Yeah, well, I'm planning to get to that piece of this in a second. I just wanted to finish , we refer people to lawyers every day. Experts. Copyright experts. We have one right off the top of our heads, we send people her way.
[00:08:22] Leah: I have a number of cases where I'm like, you don't need to speak to me, you need to speak to a lawyer.
[00:08:26] Chris: Yeah, so it's like, this is not a lawyer, it's definitely a lawyer slam for the incompetent, unprofessional, sales pitchy lawyers who are just trying to reach in your wallet. It's not about lawyers who are competent, who are experts in their field, whether it's, and we refer some people to FDA compliance lawyers, EPA expert lawyers. Like I said a minute ago, copyrights, trademarks. We are not intellectual property attorneys. We understand the central tenets and concepts of intellectual property. We do not compose letters and act like lawyers because [00:09:00] we aren't. So we refer people intelligently to those attorneys. What's unfortunate in the Amazon space is that the attorneys who are screaming the loudest, trying to be seen, standing up, waving their arms the most are there ones that we refer to the least or not at all. Because those aren't the most successful ones and they're also the attorneys who are known for inflating their public persona or making themselves out to be a bit more successful than they are.
[00:09:30] Leah: Well, and a lot of them have like a degree in a completely different part of law than the ones that are the most popular.
[00:09:35] Chris: Right. I mean, what was the one I was looking at this morning? Real estate law? We've seen divorce, personal injury lawyers. I'm personally surprised.
[00:09:44] Leah: I'm also not against having a general counsel, but there's a vast difference between very specific areas of law and just being like, well, I'm a lawyer, it's the same thing is just kind of ridiculous, especially when you speak to those very specialized [00:10:00] attorneys who are like, yeah, that's completely wrong. They don't know what they're talking about.
[00:10:03] Chris: We're seeing a distressing number of people who tell us that their attorneys sales pitch is, well, if I can't get you reinstated, I'll take your arbitration case. And whether or not they're transparent about how that takes a lot more time and a lot more money I have no idea and I don't care because we don't work on arbitration stuff. And if you get reinstated, you get your privileges back, you're selling, you get your money, you get your access to your inventory, so you don't need arbitration, right? So that's in some cases, the cry of the desperate case.
But when they start writing to legal and the other day I saw somebody wrote, I think they called it a pre-arbitration letter and had them send it to legal or to legal's attention.
My former teams and other policy enforcement seller performance teams; you're disincentivizing them. You're discouraging them from even being involved.
[00:10:51] Leah: Well, I imagine that they would get in trouble if they were to say something that disagrees with Amazon's legal team at that point.
[00:10:58] Chris: Once you start throwing the word arbitration [00:11:00] around, you're discouraging them. First of all, they won't care. Second of all, that should be your last resort, not your first resort. So you're killing your opportunities to appeal when you start throwing the A word around before you even get to that point. I think some of the attorneys are putting it out there early because they're trying to justify the fee and they're trying to cover themselves for, well, we probably can't get this guy reinstated. We didn't really tell him that up front, but we probably can't based on all the other failures we've had. So let's start getting the arbitration dialogue going soon. Legal keeps it until you're finished with the arbitration case. You can't do both. You can't put a foot in both boxes. And even if Amazon says, well, okay, you're thinking of doing arbitration, but you haven't actually filed yet and you have submitted an appeal, so fine, we'll take a look at it. They have no incentive to spend a lot of time reading escalations, appeals, POAs, if asked. Because they can see that you're doing arbitration right behind it. So, like, why would they bother?
[00:11:58] Leah: Well, I think that's the biggest thing once you start going [00:12:00] down the Amazon legal route, there is no going back. You can't be like, oh well that didn't work, we'll try doing it this way. The other ways aren't going to work once you've started down the Amazon legals team path. And that is unfortunately, like I said earlier, something that we see a lot of. People come to us after it doesn't work and no other team is going to overturn legals decision.
[00:12:21] Chris: And we tend to see the train wrecks, I admit, where the lawyers had people send in 10 of these things, five of these things, whatever. It's a lot easier to minimize the damage the law firm created by approaching us sooner. But it actually kind of doesn't matter if the entire strategy, which you as the business owner should sign off on what their strategy is, not just hand them the keys to your car and say, go drive this wherever, however you want. If it's just pounding legal, then okay. I mean, then you've decided to do that.
[00:12:50] Leah: Well, and again, there are certain cases where that is the correct strategy. But once again, it's areas where there is a legal component to it, [00:13:00] and legal is the team that needs to make that decision for Amazon, for the other teams to act accordingly. But those situations are rare. And again, they're normally based on specific areas of law.
[00:13:13] Chris: And they'll do it on their timetable. You are no longer a willing partner to how long this takes. People do Jeff letters all the time. They do escalations to Dharmesh all the time just on the basis of escalation saying, we haven't heard it's been this long. Can't make those complaints with legal. If it's been two months legal will say yeah, we're still reviewing it. We hear from people who have lawyers telling them all the time it's in the right place. It's been sent to the right people. So we know we got to the right people and they're still reviewing it. And we can't push them anymore. We can't push them to send it anywhere else. We can't ask for higher level review. They have it. They're going to keep it. They'll get back to you when they get back to you.
Inventory disposal dates, how long you go without the money, how long you go without selling; none of that is open for discussion. And I think a lot of these sellers who commit to that path don't [00:14:00] understand that upfront.
[00:14:00] Leah: Yeah, agreed. I just think there's a lot of confusion over what you need a lawyer for.
[00:14:05] Chris: So I know there's going to be a lot of questions on this. Anyone has them and wants to know, or you're super stuck and not sure what to do, maybe you've sent in some subpar appeals and things are going in the wrong direction. Let us know. We're here seven days a week during Q4 especially. And we know this is the peak week or two right now. Thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. Thanks, Leah. I'll see you next time.
[00:14:27] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
Welcome to the seller performance solution podcast. My name is Leah McHugh, and I am a consultant with ecommerceChris. Today, I am here without Chris McCabe, who is on his way to New York for a conference. Something that we've been seeing a lot of lately, again, that's something that we see in waves, are a lot of products on Amazon being flagged as pesticides.
These are the cases that I primarily work on within our firm, and there's a lot of confusion around the seller community and I think just in the general public about what exactly a pesticide is. So, most people who come to us, if their product is flagged as a pesticide, immediately tell us that their product is not a pesticide and this is incorrect, and then I take a look at their listing and their product is in fact a pesticide. So I wanted to start this episode off by firstly explaining what a pesticide is. I think when most people think of pesticides, what they think of are chemical pesticides, which is a type of pesticide. But the way the EPA regulates pesticides are anything that claims to kill pests.
So whether that is a chemical pesticide, which is the one that most people are most familiar with, or simply a steam application that's used to sanitize things. That is also considered a pesticide, even though essentially it's just water and heat because it claims to sanitize or kill pests. That's considered a pesticide.
And then you also have pesticide devices which are things like fly traps, or anything that's used to trap and kill a pest is considered a pesticide device. The only type of product that can make these sorts of kill claims without being regulated by the EPA are products that claim to kill pests on your body.
So, for example, a hand sanitizer is not considered a pesticide by the EPA. That's actually regulated by the FDA because it's in relation to the human body. So If your product claims to kill pests that aren't on the human body, it is considered a pesticide. Now pesticides and pesticide devices are regulated a little bit differently.
So pesticide devices only require an EPA establishment number. Whereas pesticide products that aren't devices, also require an EPA registration. And so that is what Amazon will ask you for if your product is flagged as pesticides. So if you're making any sort of claims regarding killing pests, that is why your product is being flagged.
Now if those claims are just on the detail page, you do have the option of simply removing those claims from the detail page, and then appealing on that basis that you are no longer making any restricted pesticide kill claims. You would like the ASIN reinstated on those grounds.
Now if you're making the pesticide claims on the product itself or on the product packaging, that is unfortunately not an option. So you would either need to re-do the packaging to remove those pesticide claims, and then create an entirely new ASIN for that product. Or you would need to register your product and your establishment, depending on the type of product, with the EPA as a pesticide, and then you would submit that information to Amazon showing that it is in fact a registered pesticide, which is allowed to make those claims and is allowed to be sold on Amazon. So that's the first place that you should look if you are flagged as selling a pesticide product.
Now if you are selling a product that has absolutely nothing to do with pesticides, and you definitely aren't making any kill claims, but your product is still being flagged as a pesticide, that is generally one of two things.
Either you or somebody on your team has perhaps put in some strange, hidden, keywords that perhaps optimization software has told you would be a useful search term for your product, even though it really has nothing to do with your product, and those are pesticide claims, and that is the reason for your product being flagged.
Or the other option, which is the one that we see the most often when there aren't actual pesticide claims being made by the seller, is an attack. So another seller has come in and they have put some sort of kill claim or hidden keywords into your listing in order to intentionally get it flagged as a pesticide and removed from sale, at least for a few days while you try to sort it out.
And this is something that we see a lot of during any high volume sales period. So especially in Q4, especially around Prime Day. Black Friday, I think I've dealt with some sort of keyword attack every Thanksgiving for the last few years, because it's a very quick and it's a very easy and it's a very effective form of abuse to just take out your competitor's listing for a few days.
Unfortunately it used to be a lot easier to see where this had been added into your listing. A year ago, maybe two years ago. I don't know. It's all a blur at this point. The category listing report used to show sellers what the live information on a listing was in Amazon system. Now that report shows you what your contributions to the listing are in Amazon's system. Which is useful in terms of checking what you've added to the listing, but less useful in terms of finding out if somebody has put bad information into your listing to get it deactivated. So another place that you can look is the back end of the listing. You have that checkbox option that allows you to show the live listing information as well as your contributions.
And so you can take a look in that live listing information to see if there's any weird, incorrect information in there that you haven't added that needs to come out of that listing, to remove the pesticide claims. That being said, a lot of these attackers have gotten a little bit more savvy. They're either adding these terms to attributes that you can't necessarily see in the back end, or they're adding the abusive content just long enough for that listing to be flagged as a pesticide, and then they're removing it. So when you go to look at your own listing to see why this possibly could have been flagged as a pesticide, you can't see any reason why. So, to start with, let's say that you can see the abusive content that is on your listing that's getting it flagged as pesticide. So the easiest place to start is to download a category listing report. Find the attribute where that abusive content is in, whether you've added it and so you can already see it in the listing report, or you didn't add it but you can see it in the back end of your listing. You need to find that corresponding attribute in the category listing report and edit it to remove the restricted claims.
The reason we're doing this with the category listing report is that it saves you the effort of having to fill in a whole blank flat file. Category listing report already has your contributions for that ASIN in a nice handy Excel sheet. So all you need to do is go in and edit the relevant attributes that need to be edited rather than filling in all of the very many attribute fields that need to be filled in if you're restarting it from scratch.
Then you need to upload that flat file in Seller Central, download the processing report and make sure there aren't any errors. Assuming there aren't any errors, you then need to call Catalog to actually confirm the changes are showing on their end.
Because unfortunately, when a listing is blocked, you can't trust what you see in Seller Central. So you may see the changes in Seller Central on your end, but they aren't actually showing in Amazon's tools, or more often, you can't see the changes on your end, but they're showing internally in Amazon's tools.
And ultimately the compliance team are looking at their own internal tools. They're not logging into your Seller Central account to see what you see there. So you need to make sure that the relevant changes are made and pushed all the way through Amazon's tools. And unfortunately, the only way to confirm that change is to call catalogs. Emailing catalog will just result in them sending you a templated response.
You need to call in, give them the batch ID, say, Hey, we edited this attribute. Can you please check this attribute and make sure that our changes have gone through and those restricted claims are no longer there. Once they've confirmed that change, they can actually transfer your case to the PCRP team, or the compliance team, for review and reinstatement.
Now if the abusive content is made on an attribute that you don't have access to edit. Again, you will need to speak to the catalog team and have them make that edit and change for you. And then transfer the case again to the PCRP team. So essentially, and I think this is where a lot of the confusion comes from.
Pesticides are mostly regulated on Amazon, based on whether or not they make kill claims. So you either need to stop making kill claims yourself on products that aren't regulated as pesticides, or you need to make sure that if anybody does add kill claims to your listings, you're getting them removed as quickly as possible in order to get your ASIN reinstated.
And then finally, if your product is actually a pesticide registered with the EPA, which is allowed to make these claims, you need to make sure that you have your relevant EPA registration or establishment number, depending on the kind of product, you need to make sure that you have that in the compliance information of the ASIN.
So if you go to either the compliance tab or you look in a flat file or a category listing report, there is a compliance regulation type and a compliance regulation number field where you need to input establishment number, or EPA registration number, and then fill in your relevant number. So your product doesn't keep getting flagged as an unregistered pesticide if it is in fact a registered pesticide.
A lot of people think that they just have to do the pesticide quiz in Seller Central and then they can list whatever pesticides they want, but that is actually not the case. Essentially the quiz gives you approval to list registered pesticides, but you still have to have that EPA registration and you still have to include that EPA registration or establishment information in the ASIN, otherwise it'll keep being taken down.
A few years ago, when we were seeing a lot of pesticide flags, there was misguided information. I believe it actually initially came from seller support as a short term fix, but then it spawned out into the into the seller world, as this is what you need to do on all of your listings so it doesn't get flagged as a pesticide.
So a few years ago, people were adding "this is a pesticide device or product" into the compliance field and then saying that it was exempt from requiring a pesticide registration or establishment number. Don't put this in your listing unless your listing is in fact a pesticide that is exempt from registration or establishment registration.
And those pesticides are generally considered minimal risk pesticides, which are regulated by the EPA a little bit differently than other pesticides. But if your product has absolutely nothing to do with pesticides, don't fill those fields in saying that it is a pesticide exempt from EPA registration because that's giving Amazon incorrect information. And while it was touted as a way to stop your listing getting flagged as pesticide, it can actually cause your listing to be flagged as a pesticide. Similarly, if you're saying that your product is pesticide free, we still occasionally see that being flagged as a pesticide just because it has the word pesticide in it.
Most of these types of flags are automatic. They're being done by an algorithm searching for keywords. It is getting a little bit better in terms of reading those keywords in context, but ultimately it is still a mostly automated system, not usually being reviewed by an actual person. Or when it is being reviewed by an actual person they are just following their SOP laid out for Amazon, which unfortunately doesn't really seem to take context into consideration. So any words that you're putting in your listing, whether it's fungus or bacteria, pesticide free, like I said, just keep in mind that those words could get you flagged as a pesticide, which could take your listing down for a day or two while you remove that information and get it reviewed by the compliance team. We are seeing an uptick of this. Like I said, some of it is just increased scrutiny by Amazon. They tend to do these in waves, and some of it is also abuse at this time of year. We see so much keyword abuse this time of year, so just make sure that you're checking your listings. Ideally, you're using some sort of alert software, so you're being notified if somebody makes a change to your listing, so you can remove any abusive changes before Amazon flags it.
If you have any questions on this, like always, feel free to reach out to us. We are here seven days a week in Q4. As you can see, I am slowly getting more and more tired looking as we get deeper and deeper into Q4. But any questions on this, any issues, please reach out to us. We work on this all the time.
We're here to help. Thanks for listening, guys.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe here with Leah McHugh. Leah, how's it going today?
[00:00:06] Leah: All right. How are you?
[00:00:08] Chris: I'm fantastic.
[00:00:09] Leah: I know we're just progressively more tired as we get
deeper and deeper.
[00:00:12] Chris: Not true. I had an excellent night's sleep.
[00:00:15] Leah: Oh lucky you.
[00:00:16] Chris: Yeah. After working late in appeals. Anyway, today we are talking about a recent phenomenon, it's an unfortunate time of year for all these damaged, defective, used sold as new type complaints to be coming in. We have had, maybe six or seven people in the last 24 hours asking us about this, showing us the suspension notifications, blaming potential competitor attacks. But also they are finding, in my experience, some buyer complaints of defects, consistent patterns of return comments saying, Hey, this item looks like it may have been opened.
Then we get in that whole, you know, FBA game of, are they putting returns back into resellable inventory that we used to talk about two years ago? But I had questions for you [00:01:00] because I know some people need to update their listing content, either images or detail page bullets, or both? And of course, when the listing is suspended, they cannot just go in there and update it.
They have to update content on their side and then get in touch with catalog teams to update it on Amazon's side. Do you wanna explain that for a couple minutes?
[00:01:19] Leah: Yeah I think I've mentioned it before. When the listing is blocked, it doesn't ' behave correctly. So what you see on your end of the listing isn't necessarily what Amazon sees within their internal tools.
And they're just going to be looking at their internal tools when they're assessing your appeal. They're not looking in your seller central account to see what you see. So manual changes rarely go through when a listing is blocked, you have to upload a flat file. And even if the flat file goes through without any errors, you still need to call the catalog team and just confirm that your changes are actually visible on their end.
Because sometimes it's not visible on your end, but it's visible on their end, or vice versa. Sometimes you can see the changes on your end, but [00:02:00] they can't see them on their end. So you just need to call into catalog, it's really the only way to confirm it. And don't send an email because they'll send back an email telling you how to upload a flat file because they just respond with templates.
[00:02:10] Chris: So what's the best way, what's the best way to get on a call with Catalog?
[00:02:14] Leah: You go through the like ten freaking prompts in Amazon's help menu to connect. You go through the inventory, add a product issue, and then you click through a bunch of options, and then you get an option for a phone call, and half the time that connects you with catalog, and half the time it doesn't connect you with catalog, and then you have to ask to be transferred to catalog.
[00:02:33] Chris: Right.
[00:02:33] Leah: Because Amazon improved their help menu by making it way worse.
[00:02:37] Chris: For those of you who cannot see me, I'm sort of biting my lip or suppressing a smile because it's just so preposterous how many hundreds or thousands of appeals they're getting that use the phrase, I can't fix this, you have to reinstate my listing and then I will fix it.
And those are summarily rejected. And I also see some SAS core or account managers, [00:03:00] which is the paid account management program. I see some account managers who don't understand that either. Who are further creating confusion by misguiding their sellers. So, make sure you do this step before you appeal. I'm reading bunches of appeals that lead with, or somewhere inside, contain the words, We can't do this yet. You keep rejecting us. Why are you denying us? We can't fix the listing. That's because you have to fix it on that side first, before you do all the appealing. And unfortunately, we have people coming to us who have been rejected two, three, five, six times, because they misunderstood this.
And so we're trying to prevent a listing suspension that could go two days going two weeks into Black Friday right now.
[00:03:42] Leah: Yeah, there is also a known issue, at least it's known on my end, I assume it's known internally to Amazon since it's so prevalent. But there is a known issue currently where if your listing is PCRP restricted, if you try to update your listing, the system will block you because it's PCRP restricted.
And then you get into [00:04:00] a fun back and forth with Amazon about how their system will not let you fix the listing, but they will not reinstate it until it is fixed.
[00:04:06] Chris: Right.
So that's the first point we wanted to make. Secondly, consider maybe disputing it isn't the right way to go. I understand that most sellers start with, this is BS, you took us down wrongfully, reinstate our listing, we don't have any buyer complaints. I understand why a lot of people are doing that because maybe they've done it successfully in the past. If that gets rejected, we'll assume in most cases 60, 70, 80 percent of those first appeals will be rejected.
Consider that you could improve your detail page content, your images, The text, the language in the instructions, whatever you need to do to educate buyers before they buy it. Consider that that could be part of the solution, and that maybe you should appeal it saying you're going to clarify the language or improve the text on the detail page because I believe in most cases that's what these teams want to see in the appeal.
[00:04:58] Leah: Also similar. [00:05:00] No, I do. But I would also say similar to what we were talking about last week. A lot of condition complaint appeal forms do give you the check boxes.
[00:05:07] Chris: Yes.
[00:05:07] Leah: Make sure you're reading what they say before you check them off.
[00:05:11] Chris: Right. That's awesome. You gave me a great lead into my next point without us discussing it in advance.
If you've just been randomly checking these boxes and agreeing with everything Amazon says you were doing, or says is wrong with your products, whatever it might be, agreeing that you violated policies. And then you turn around and start disputing all of these ASIN takedowns. You look like you're changing your story every five minutes, and that undermines their confidence in your appeal, right? Fair to say it's not logical to do that. So as Leah was saying a moment ago, think twice before you check all these boxes because they might say, Oh really there's nothing wrong with this product? There are no buyer complaints about defects? A, that's interesting because we just looked at all your checkbox appeals that you went through because you didn't feel like going through any other appeals process.
[00:06:00] So, that's part of what you're committing to when you check all these boxes, right?
[00:06:04] Leah: Yeah, and I would say somewhat basic advice, but the foundations of your account are important as well. Make sure you're not using commingled inventory, so somebody else's bad inventory isn't negatively impacting you.
[00:06:17] Chris: Right.
[00:06:18] Leah: Opt out of Amazon's repackaging service. And I believe you can now opt out of their replenishment service. So you can actually opt out of them deciding whether your returns are resellable or not. Consider opting out of that as well. If you're consistently getting used-sold-as-new or condition complaints on FBA specific items.
[00:06:38] Chris: Yeah. And the next point I wanted to make was do not waste time, especially at this time of year, early to mid November. Do not waste time going round and round in circles with Seller Central. If you have an appeal that's rejected. You need to hound the account health reps, not for their advice or their general suggestions.
I know that varies between one rep and the next. You need to find out [00:07:00] exactly why previous appeals were denied. And if they try to feed you this garbage that we can't, for privacy reasons, tell you are proprietary processes and we can't read to you from the annotations on the account for that investigation. First of all, find out if there are any annotations.
They love to deny appeals with nothing at all annotated, which proves absolutely nothing in terms of an investigator actually looking at your appeal or reading it at all. Number one, let's assume there are some annotations. Find out why they rejected it. Denial notes or rejection reasons. You should not be resubmitting appeals at all or through Seller Central if you can't get quality information. If you can't get a U. S. Rep, call back again. As we always say. But make sure you get a U. S. Rep whose giving you some consistent logical info in terms of why it was rejected. You might not agree with the rejection reasons, but just get the rejection reasons because those will inform your revised appeal.
Maybe it'll tell you something you didn't [00:08:00] think of or know before, and you'll revise the appeal using better quality info that you could have had earlier and just didn't have because you had less info. Or maybe you'll find out it's complete, baseless, erroneous, investigator mishap, which is common, right?
[00:08:17] Leah: Right.
[00:08:17] Chris: And you will escalate it based on the fact that they barely read it or reviewed it, didn't take your appeal seriously from the get go. But that may mean that you're appealing outside of Seller Central. You're taking the primary email associated with your account and emailing management, senior management.
We can all thank the antitrust lawsuit, which is out there making lots of executives. What they do fully public and obvious information at this point. Use that to your advantage because those are people you can send appeals to.
[00:08:48] Leah: To those who have read the 173 page document. Yeah.
[00:08:53] Chris: Which the 172 antitrust lawsuit filing document. While some of it's been redacted and a lot of [00:09:00] it's been redacted, I have conclusively proven that you can read, or at least read through some of it, without spending a week doing it .
[00:09:08] Leah: I read the first one in a day, or less than a day.
[00:09:10] Chris: Yes. Not everyone needs to speed read in the way that Leah did, but you can get to the salient points and the pieces that are relevant to you as a seller and Amazon business owner without reading every passage like it was your last will and testament. What else can we tell people in terms of item defect claims? Obviously, buyers make complaints and competitors can buy from you and make complaints. But, if you can put an acceptable appeal in front of Amazon, whether it's a competitor attack or not, you should get that ASIN reinstated, right?
You can deal later with whether or not it's a competitor attack. If you keep getting attacked right? More than once? You can start saying, look, we appealed it. You reinstated us. Now there's more complaints that are similar? Don't we see this across your compliance cases and the performance issues that I'm working [00:10:00] on?
[00:10:00] Leah: Kind of less so on my side, but I see them on the ones that you're working on. I think it's very easy to just assume it's an attack. If you're getting the same complaints consistently, that doesn't necessarily mean it's an attack. I mean, that could just mean that you have a consistent issue with their product.
But if you do look into it and you do find weird anomalies, or you can actually prove that it is a competitor, that's a different story. But as I always say, you have to start with yourself. You have to look at your own products and your own operations first before you assume malice.
[00:10:30] Chris: Yeah, you could have a bad batch.
And maybe because of the time of year, you were trying to get more product quicker. Your manufacturer rushed some of it. Maybe it's a bad batch.
This is why we always say, when you're having your inventory shipped to FBA get some samples sent to you so you can pop them open and double check. Quality control it. And do some due diligence. Make sure your manufacturer isn't straying from the script in order to get you more product faster, because sometimes there are consistent buyer complaints because there are [00:11:00] item deficiencies or defects that that buyers are legitimately complaining about.
I think if you have a series of buyer complaints, you can't just say, well we had seven buyer complaints in a row all saying the same thing. Clearly, this is a competitor piling on, trying to get as many complaints against us at once. That does happen, but that should not be your assumption.
[00:11:20] Leah: No, and I would say generally when we see an influx of condition complaints, we do also see an influx of authenticity complaints, depending on the product. Because those very often get confused on the buyer side of things.
So again, depending on the product, but just in general, it's good practice to make sure you have all of your invoices organized and ready in case you need them. Because someone often thinks that a bad product is actually a fake product. So worthwhile just having that ready to go so you're not then scrambling while your ASIN is taken down to try to find the right documentation.
[00:11:53] Chris: And that's unfortunate that some brand owners just have slapped together bad looking unprofessional invoices [00:12:00] from their manufacturer. And Amazon just asks for an invoice as a course of, Hey, it's an inauthentic complaint probably means the quality wasn't great, or it might be a condition complaint like you were saying. And the reason the appeal is rejected is that the invoice just looks terrible.
[00:12:15] Leah: Or can't be verified yeah.
[00:12:17] Chris: Right. I mean, what an awful reason to have an appeal denied at the busiest time of year. So any questions on this? Let us know. We're happy that we're working seven days a week. Very popular within ecommerceChris through the end of December. So let us know if you have any questions on this, and if you have seen an ASIN takedown for item defective condition complaints and so forth, there is a recent mountain of these that sellers are reading through and sifting through. So you need help appealing those, put it in front of us, get a quick pair of eyeballs on it and a quick assessment, and then we'll figure out what we do from there.
Thanks, Leah.
[00:12:51] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:12:52] Chris: Bye, guys.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm your wonderful host, Chris McCabe. I'm here with my co host, Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you feeling?
[00:00:10] Leah: Awesome.
[00:00:11] Chris: You've been better. We apologize to our listeners in advance for Leah's congestion today.
[00:00:18] Leah: We will edit out any coughs.
[00:00:19] Chris: Right. We will edit out the sneezes and coughs. She's a trooper. We're here because we see lots of sellers going into these checkbox appeals and just not reading what is written there. Not understanding what they're acknowledging, just checking a bunch of boxes and passing through to resolve the issue. And Leah's here to tell you why maybe that's not the best thing in the world to do.
[00:00:45] Leah: Well, you know, there's different kinds of these appeal forms. So it really depends on which one, but I have been seeing on the compliance side. One, they're using different forms for the same issue. So sometimes the checkbox just says that you've acknowledged it and you've fixed the detail page. And sometimes it says that you acknowledge it, and by checking this box, you understand that the ASIN will not be reinstated. And I've had a number of sellers check these boxes without actually reading it, and then that removes it from the account health dashboard, but naturally when it says it won't be reinstated, it doesn't reinstate the listing. What it does do, and I haven't seen this on all of them, I've only seen this on some listings. Sometimes it doesn't really do anything and they can still appeal and it's fine. But sometimes what it does is it tombstones the listing. So it basically makes that listing deactivated. So when you contact the catalog team because you think it's still PCRP restricted, the catalog team comes back saying, no it's Tombstone, you need to delete it and re list it. However, anytime you try to make a change to that ASIN, you get an error message back saying that it has restricted claims that need to be removed, but you can't remove them because you can't edit the listing.
[00:02:01] Chris: I think one reason people aren't reading these is they're afraid of something worse happening. And they believe that simply because they're seeing, it means they have to admit to it because that's how Amazon works. Nothing goes forward until you admit that you've done something wrong, which of course you and I have no such belief. We think that you never admit to something, especially since Amazon makes lots of mistakes, and takes down lots of ASINs for the wrong reasons. Sometimes the wrong message is sent.
[00:02:30] Leah: Well, I think the format of the form as well. So, there are these very prominent checkboxes and then way down the bottom of the screen, a little link, not a button just to hyperlink says, "If this was an error, appeal it here."
And so a lot of people don't even notice that they just think that the only appeal path is to submit those checkboxes. And I also think a lot of people are hypersensitive about just getting it removed from their account health. Like, Amazon has told sellers now that you just need it off of your account health so you don't lose the entire account. And so they're not really reading it or they're not seeing the whole thing. They just see the checkboxes and they're just like, "ah, I just need to get rid of it." And there are use sold as new cases where they do just check the checkbox and that gets rid of it. Still, if you keep getting those checkboxes and you keep admitting that you have condition issues, eventually Amazon is not going to just let you continue to check off checkboxes.
They're going to say "you have ongoing issues, you've admitted to that. We're suspending that ASIN."
[00:03:28] Chris: That's the counterintuitive part. If you keep doing the checkboxes thinking that's how you'll maintain your account health, they're eventually going to say, "we've had to contact you about this too many times. Where's your plan of action just to keep selling?" So, you're working against yourself if you just capitulate every single time and turn your brain off and just think, they got me, so I just have to admit it, just to get rid of it and the stress of it. I suppose that seller psychology 101 is, if I don't do this right now and admit to this, I'm going to have to be worried about having my account suspended for the rest of today, this week, this month.
[00:04:08] Leah: Yeah, I've had a lot of sellers say that they think that it's intentionally misleading. I tend to err on, assume it's incompetence and not malice. So I just think, similar to the email templates that you get back from support or catalog, somebody dashed them off and that just became the official templates and nobody really reviewed it again, and no one really cares if it's user friendly. Because we are seeing them using different messaging for the exact same issue. So it looks like they have multiple templates internally, but there doesn't seem to be clear rules as to when one is used rather than the other. But again, not having that appeal at an error thing being prominently displayed, I assume that's just poor design rather than intentional malice on Amazon's part.
[00:04:55] Chris: Right. The best example being we've seen way overuse of the temp template that says you've engaged in illicit deceptive or fraudulent practices.
[00:05:04] Leah: Abusive, they love the word abusive.
[00:05:07] Chris: Just kind of how they were putting everything under code of conduct violation whether or not it had anything to do with that. Abuse, the word abuse gets used in multiple contexts, often misused by Amazonians themselves.
Message number one, don't just click through these things without considering the consequences. Another point I wanted to bring up, number two would be, sometimes if you admit to certain product compliance or product safety issues, they'll say, great, this will be resolved in your account health, but now your inventory is unsellable.
You got to pull it all out of FBA. I don't think sellers understand that they're putting themselves in position to perhaps give Amazon what they want to resolve the account health issue, but render their inventory a hundred percent unsellable.
[00:05:55] Leah: Right, we are seeing that as well. So it either gets all of your inventory marked as defective, or like I said, it deactivates that ASIN. And then, you know, catalog, they're like, "oh, you just have to create a new ASIN for that listing", which seems to be their, like, favorite phrase at the moment, which is driving me a little bit nuts. Similarly, you know, I've heard from sellers who are like account health just told me to check off the boxes, so I checked off the boxes, and now I can't get my listing back.
So again, read it yourself. Please read.
[00:06:22] Chris: In fairness to some of the catalog, and support, and occasional account health reps, we have been to conferences where people who worked at Amazon said from the stage, go ahead and create a new ASIN.
[00:06:34] Leah: Yeah, no, I mean, I hear it all the time.
[00:06:35] Chris: We also see agencies, various consultants, and third party services out there sometimes telling sellers we'll get your listing reinstated or we'll get your listing back up quote on quote.
What they mean is they're not going to help you appeal the ASIN suspension. They're going to find a creative workaround to get your product relisted under a different guise.
[00:06:56] Leah: What will be interesting is when Amazon decides to enforce its duplicate product policy again, because we do see them enforcing that every so often.
And all of a sudden you're going to have all of these people who were told to just make a new ASIN suddenly get flagged for duplicate listing creation.
[00:07:12] Chris: Then they'll just do a merge, right?
[00:07:15] Leah: Well, you can't do a merge if the other one's deactivated.
[00:07:19] Chris: Amazon loves merging listings that don't belong merged, even if you're just trying to get a bunch of reviews out of it, right?
So, yeah, I can imagine a creative solution to that. That'll be a giant mess that we'll deal with maybe next year or down the road. Not during Q4.
[00:07:37] Leah: Maybe.
[00:07:38] Chris: We'll see. Any other thoughts, tips, or advice for people who are experiencing this checkbox phenomenon? Because there are different templates, I suppose. Do they vary between whether you check one box or several?
[00:07:54] Leah: Yeah, they do. But then there are also ones that have the same number of check boxes, but the wording is slightly different.
[00:07:59] Chris: Right.
[00:08:00] Leah: So very important to read it. Even if you just look at it and are like, Oh I know this form. Make sure you actually comprehensively read it because a lot of them do look very much the same, but they just have slightly different wording. And also look out for that link to appeal an error, particularly if it is an error. And I also understand that with restricted claims, it does seem counterintuitive to appeal an error if you are making restricted claims and you've then removed those claims. But you need to appeal it in error. You need to remove the restricted claims and then appeal it as an error because now the listing is fully compliant.
[00:08:35] Chris: I think the main problem is sellers are disputing it poorly in error. And it's getting rejected because they just write some basic thing. Saying, "you guys screwed up. This is a mistake. We want to dispute this in error." And there's no real text and somebody just reads it and says, "what the hell is this?" and rejects it. And that starts all these other wheels turning. So some people are disputing it properly, in terms of disputing it as a mistake, but they're writing garbled, jumbled, poorly written text. And Amazonians are so used to seeing badly written appeals and just rejecting them and throwing them away because they're unintelligible or they're badly written and not considering whether or not it's a mistake. Do you think that's possible?
[00:09:26] Leah: I mean, it's less of a writing thing with compliance and it's more, you have to actually correct. Especially like PCRP. So when it's specifically around restricted claims on your listing, the main thing that they want is those restricted claims removed. So your appeal is essentially that there aren't any more restricted claims. But the main thing is getting them removed, and we've talked about this before, when a listing is blocked, what you see in Seller Central isn't necessarily what Amazon's team see in their tools. So you not only need to edit the listing, and for supplements in particular, you need to add photos of all sides of the packaging, but you need to confirm with the catalog team over the phone. Don't do an email, you will just get a template.
Call the catalog team and confirm that they can see the changes in their tools because the compliance team are going to be looking in their tools, they're not going to be looking at what you see in Seller Central.
[00:10:20] Chris: Right
[00:10:20] Leah: And that's very important because even if you do a flat file upload and it goes through without errors, it still may not push through to their tools while it's blocked. So that's really the most important step of that appeal process. And then submitting the appeal itself, you're not really writing a plan of action there.
[00:10:35] Chris: No.
[00:10:36] Leah: You're just saying, "Hey, we made the changes, the photos are up, check it, should be good." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing.
[00:10:42] Chris: And I think that's one reason why people contact us saying we've been rejected six times. They're not following any of these steps. They're just appealing and saying "we can't change the listing until it's reinstated, but this is what we'll change it to." They automatically reject that because you're not following the process that we had just outlined.
[00:11:01] Leah: Well, and like I said, if you've already checked off the check boxes and then you try to edit your listing, it won't accept your edits and the catalog team can also not push through those edits with their tools.
So you're making their life harder by checking those boxes before you remove the restricted claims. So, remove the restricted claims, don't check the boxes, appeal in error.
[00:11:19] Chris: Exactly. You're making their life harder and your own life harder. And what you just mentioned is the key part of this whole episode, which is they have to do it with their tools.
If you've checked through, you've sealed yourself off from making those changes. You cannot just appeal saying, "well, once you reinstate us, then we'll fix this." Doesn't work. That'll be an automated rejection.
[00:11:43] Leah: And also, catalog have less access to their own tools than they used to. So where they used to be able to relist items for you, or put things back into your catalog when you weren't able to. They don't have access to those tools anymore. So, don't expect to be able to rely on catalog to make the changes. You still have to make the changes, ideally by flat file, because then they can access that information in their system.
But, you just need to confirm with them that the changes have gone through. And if they're already in the system, then they can push them, but they can't just do it themselves without you putting some of that information into the system. They no longer have those tools because of issues.
[00:12:26] Chris: Exactly. Exactly. Words to live by. Very well said. Well, thanks for joining me during your illness. Thanks everyone for listening. Questions on this, of course during Q4, you want to ask us sooner than later. Thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. We will see you next time.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hi everybody. This is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here once again with Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris, how are you Leah?
[00:00:11] Leah: Good. Thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:12] Chris: I'm wonderful. Just like this episode. It's wonderful. We're here talking about what's all the rage right now. The...
[00:00:22] Leah: Supply chain by Amazon?
[00:00:23] Chris: Let's just start over. Yeah. Let's just start over.
No countdown. Let's just recording. Just go. Okay. Hey everybody, welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, here with Leah McHugh, also of ecommerceChris. Sorry for stuttering on your name.
[00:00:48] Leah: It's been nine years and you've forgotten my name.
[00:00:51] Chris: I forgot your last name. Interesting way to begin. Let's talk about what's all the rage right now in the Amazon selling space around freight forwarding, right? And logistics. And they're calling it, you know more about this than me.
[00:01:05] Leah: Oh, Amazon supply chain by Amazon. Yeah.
[00:01:07] Chris: Supply chain by Amazon. That's what I wanted to say. Yes. I guess we could start with the fact that there's a lot of interest about this among sellers asking us about it. Service providers are talking about it. We've even fielded a few calls from media, from reporters about it. So clearly, this is a big topic right now.
And of course we see a lot of LinkedIn posts about it. Anytime there's a hot topic. So breaking this down essentially into, you know, defining it easy, easy bites of information. Is this just Amazon making another move into logistics and offering something that'll be quicker, easier, better than what other people independently offer? How would you summarize it if you had two sentences?
[00:01:50] Leah: Essentially, Amazon is extending their fulfillment offering to more in depth warehousing and multi channel fulfillment for sellers if they opt in to supply chain by Amazon, which they were previously doing multi channel fulfillment. It was an offering that they had, I guess, this is just expanding on that offering. I think it's been big in the media because I believe Dharmesh announced it at Accelerate as their like big move. And I think there's multiple reasons behind it. I'm sure the FTC suit specifically citing prime as an anti-competitive program was part of the decision. But I also think part of the decision was because they opened too many warehouses during COVID, and they've been trying to figure out how to make that profitable ever since.
[00:02:44] Chris: Right. They've clearly had this in the works for a while. Anticipating the lawsuit or not withstanding the lawsuit because they're trying to make bigger plays in logistics, and just be one stop shopping for everyone. And in a conversation I had with the reporter the other day, I brought up the all eggs in one basket problem when it comes to selling on Amazon and having all of your inventory with Amazon.
[00:03:05] Leah: Yeah, there's multiple concerns. And just for clarity, I used to manage supply chain for companies before I started working with Chris. So I've worked with a lot of third party logistic companies. I've moved operations between logistic companies. My concerns with Amazon 3PL, the biggest one really is that Amazon has never treated sellers like customers.
And if you're using a third party warehouse to fulfill all of your orders who are controlling all of your inventory, you definitely need two-way communication. Like when I was managing logistics, I was speaking to our account manager at least once a day. Previously, Amazon didn't even offer an account manager for multi-channel fulfillment. I'm not even sure if the new program offers an account manager. So that's my first concern, is that you don't have that communication method or that relationship where you are the customer. Amazon has never viewed sellers as their customers, which also leads into, is there any sort of agreement that Amazon will actually abide by in terms of KPIs?
So if they make mistakes, whose paying for those mistakes? If they ship late, which consistently with their third party logistics we would see them not maintain their own KPIs for off Amazon orders, like Amazon orders would ship almost immediately if it was for a third party channel. It would just ship whenever FBA felt like sending it out.
So that's another question of will they actually maintain their own KPIs if it's an off Amazon sale? Because they haven't previously. And then my last one, which is the one that you touched on was putting it all in one basket. Amazon does explicitly state that they'll continue to fulfill third party orders if your Amazon account is suspended, but we have seen and practiced that not be the case.
Not only do they stop fulfilling third party orders, they also sometimes will hold all of your inventory hostage. So then you're looking at not just your Amazon inventory being held hostage, but all channels inventory now being held by Amazon until you resolve a suspension with them.
[00:05:26] Chris: Not only that, but people try to do this method of I'll take a huge loan with Amazon and maybe that'll protect me from a suspension.
[00:05:34] Leah: Right. It doesn't. None of this is going to protect you from a suspension.
[00:05:36] Chris: Reading the agreement language, you're responsible for repaying that loan, whether you're suspended or not. The hidden idea that Amazon will have an incentive to protect you more, talk to you more. I mean, did that really play out with lending? I don't think so.
[00:05:50] Leah: No, it never did. Another thing that I've also seen other people in the space mention is you're giving Amazon a whole lot of sales data of your off-Amazon sales. If they're now fulfilling all of your orders, and do you really want Amazon to have all of that data on your products and off Amazon sales?
[00:06:11] Chris: A lot of trust there and let's get back to the communication. I think that's in some ways the most interesting piece. Not the most interesting to you, somebody who's an expert in logistics, whose been through it in all shapes and sizes. But the communication of not having an account manager. Knowing how communication with my former teams, seller performance already is.
[00:06:33] Leah: Right
[00:06:33] Chris: copy and paste
[00:06:35] Leah: Yeah
[00:06:35] Chris: It looks like it's auto generated and even when, for example, you talk to support, or account health and you get that auto generated looking sounding message after you hang up.
[00:06:46] Leah: Yeah, or just not getting a response for days at a time. If you're doing any sort of volume on these channels, a lot of these issues can't wait for days to be resolved.
You're looking at like huge costs and huge issues if it takes days for somebody to get back to you.
[00:07:03] Chris: And think about their KPIs. Like you said, a lot of these teams that you deal with in other contexts.
[00:07:08] Leah: They never maintain their own KPIs.
[00:07:10] Chris: The reason they follow up with you with that message, because the message itself says nothing.
[00:07:14] Leah: Right. It's just gibberish.
[00:07:16] Chris: It just says, I'm confirming we talked. I'm confirming it's still under review. We'll get back to you when we're done. Essentially for all different teams and all different types of messages, they boil down to those three components. Why would you expect that this would be any different? But as you know from managing logistics for multiple companies, and startups, and online sales and so forth, some answers you need now, not two days from now, right?
[00:07:40] Leah: Well, especially if there's an error. If they're making a mistake and you're looking at thousands of pending orders where they are potentially going to make that same mistake thousands of times, you really can't just wait for them to decide to get back to you. And again, If you're using a third party warehouse, they have contractual metrics that they need to meet, and if they don't meet them, they pay that cost. You don't pay that cost. And I just historically have not really seen that happen so much with Amazon. And I would just be very hesitant to use this service. For the day to day stuff, but also because at any point they could just hold all of your inventory hostage.
[00:08:26] Chris: At least just ask a lot of questions. Get some information. What is the reply time? Who are you going to be dealing with? Who are they accountable to? Because what you're saying is a really big deal. How much auditing of errors and mistakes really happens at Amazon across the board? All of these themes that we hear of and deal with; doesn't seem like it's significant or valuable if it is happening.
[00:08:48] Leah: You also lack control.
[00:08:50] Chris: You're making a huge investment here, right? It's not just a leap of faith.
[00:08:53] Leah: Well, you already can see with FBA, you lack control. They can move your inventory between distribution centers. They can move your inventory to different warehouses whenever they feel like it. So, during those times, that inventory is unavailable. And also... You don't have any control of when or why they do this. So one, are you paying every time they decide to move this inventory? And two, what if they decide to move the inventory at a peak sales season, and then it takes them a month to check in the inventory? Which we see with FBA all the time.
Your inventory is just stranded due to no fault of your own.
[00:09:33] Chris: For those of you just hearing my voice and not seeing the video, I'm nodding, which is really good radio slash audio.
[00:09:40] Leah: Yep.
[00:09:41] Chris: The risks are real. It's a new program. In theory Amazon can bring something to the logistics table that other parties cannot. So we understand that there's some upside here. But it's unproven if they can do this in a functional, efficient, reliable way; Where the risk is shared between you and Amazon, right? Isn't that fair to say?
[00:10:03] Leah: If I was going to use a third party warehouse, I would use a third party warehouse. There are tons of them now that specialize in ecommerce.
When I was setting these up, they were still specializing in infomercials. So, third party warehouses have come a long way. I also historically have found that third party warehouses for off-Amazon fulfillment were significantly cheaper than what Amazon charged for off-Amazon fulfillment.
So, as much as Amazon tells you that they are the cheapest, it's definitely worth shopping around because I looked at their rates and they are not affordable. Even, like if you ship to Hawaii or Puerto Rico it's a 100 percent markup on the fees. Definitely shop around, definitely speak to other third party logistic companies, and also really consider your needs. If you are going to need hands-on, and if you're selling to big box stores or you're drop shipping to big box stores, marketplaces, or you're selling to retailers, even the smaller ones, chances are you're going to need a lot more interaction with the people that are managing your fulfillment than Amazon is going to provide you with.
[00:11:11] Chris: Words to live by. Any other pointers you want to throw out there while we're on this topic? I'm sure we'll revisit this topic as people start doing it and experiencing it. Seeing the upside, the downsides. I mean, this is kind of a crazy time of year to be talking about logistics stuff that might be implemented soon.
[00:11:31] Leah: And another question that I haven't seen answered is Amazon FBA increases their fees every Q4. Is Amazon Freight going to increase their fees every Q4? Because that's also something that I've never experienced with a third party distribution company. Right.
[00:11:46] Chris: They're afraid of losing your business. That's why they don't want to increase fees once a year. But does Amazon think you'll give them a pass because you're in bed with them on everything else you do?
[00:11:58] Leah: So again, worth shopping around and getting other rates, not just taking Amazon's word for it, that they're super affordable.
[00:12:05] Chris: And the reporters we talked to, were they saying that they think Amazon's offering will be cheaper and that's why they think they're promoting it so much right now?
[00:12:14] Leah: I've seen people discussing, you're taking advantage of Amazon shipping rates, and yeah they do have great shipping rates, but you also have to take into consideration their pick and pack fee. And they charge that fee per unit on top of shipping, which most third party companies do. When I was looking at different warehouses for my clients.
It's not just looking at one rate and you make your decision based on that. You're having to make fairly in depth spreadsheets to figure out, this is the type of fulfillment we're going to be doing. This is the cost for this. This is the type of shipping we're going to be doing. This is the cost for that. And actually breaking it down and working out which is the best option for you financially. It's not just, well the shipping is cheaper, so they're going to be cheaper. The pick and pack rate is a huge cost center and is worth reviewing. Sometimes you're even better off going somewhere with a more expensive shipping rate, but a better pick and pack fee.
[00:13:11] Chris: Right. So as you can tell by listening to Leah, who knows everything about this more or less, the devil's in the details, pay attention to this stuff. I suppose the devil's advocate view would be, well, the experience with FBA hasn't been universally horrible. Some people have had good experiences with FBA where shipments aren't lost as often as they think, or the fee increases aren't as much as they expected. Things like that. They still do FBA. It's not just because they're held hostage. Some people are having a good experience with FBA. Is there a chance that they'll have a similarly good experience with this, where not every nightmare scenario will play out?
[00:13:47] Leah: Yeah, I'm not saying it's definitely going to be bad, but I will say that I have historically seen Amazon not treat their third party fulfillment the same way they treat FBA orders.
[00:14:00] Chris: Right. Another key point to keep an eye on. So I guess we'll see how many people join the program, and what their feedback is.
How many months do you think it would take to figure out whether this is as promised, or succeeding, or not so great, or failing, or what?
[00:14:18] Leah: Again there are so many different types of fulfillment. It really depends on your requirement, and it also depends on how long it takes for there to be a problem. You really aren't going to know until there is some kind of a problem. Whether that's, you're suspended and now they won't fulfill any of your other channels orders, or whether that's, they've made a mistake and you're now struggling to fix it across all channels.
There isn't a specific timeline. It depends on what kind of fulfillment you're doing and what kind of issues come up.
[00:14:48] Chris: So don't blindly trust. Dig into the details. Some of it is wait and see, but some of it you can evaluate in advance and compare and contrast with other 3PLs, right?
[00:15:00] Leah: Yeah, I would also consider if there's a product recall. If you're getting it out of your 3PL, I imagine that would be a lot easier than getting it out of Amazon because getting recalls out of FBA is also a headache for sellers, and that's with their actual FBA program. So who knows what it'll be like with all of your inventory in there.
[00:15:20] Chris: Good note to end on, good point.
[00:15:22] Leah: Nice high note.
[00:15:23] Chris: Nice high note. Well, we like to caution people and to tell them to scrutinize and thoroughly evaluate these things before diving headlong into it. You know, look at the quality of the communication you're getting. Of course, Amazon is hot and heavy in the beginning when they're selling you on something.
Once you've committed to it and embraced it, are they still communicating with you as in as detailed a fashion or as feverishly as they did when they were in the sales period? Historically, no, hopefully yes, but share your experience with us and we'll probably talk about this on a future episode as well.
I'm sure we will. Thank you again, Leah, for your wonderful logistics expertise.
[00:16:03] Leah: You're welcome.
[00:16:03] Chris: I'll talk to you next time. Take care.
[00:16:07] Leah: All right.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our illustrious podcast here at eCommerce Chris. I'm Chris and Leah McHugh is with me talking today about a lot of interesting policy enforcement trends we've identified on an ASIN level and account level suspension. So this is big stuff. Heavy material. It's Q4, people are heading into that six week peak or maybe already in it, and they're getting cut down because of a variety of policy violations. But it's not just listing violations, like the type of stuff that you see, and it's not just reviews abuse, which I think a lot of people, when they hear code of conduct, think,
"oh, that's for people who are inflating their reviews artificially", or they hired some idiot company so that's not me. It's showing up in a wide variety of ways, but the most important piece we want to confront today is that Amazon just continually says you need to successfully dispute this with examples that you never did anything wrong, or we're not even going to read the appeal. We're not going to talk to you.
So are you seeing that on the compliance side when it comes to brand registry abuse, which I know you're in the thick of that. To the eyeballs so much that you don't even have time to tell me some of these things. That's the great thing about this podcast, sometimes I get to learn new stuff from you.
[00:01:20] Leah: So product compliance. No, I'm not seeing that messaging. I am seeing it on ASIN misuse cases. And I am not really seeing it on brand registry. Brand registry still doesn't really give any kind of appeal path. The appeal form is just where you resubmit documentation that shows that you're the trademark owner.
So still not really seeing it on the brand registry side. They just like to send your abusive messaging rather than asking for anything. But I have been seeing it on the listing compliance side of things, which is seller performance, so that makes sense that I would be seeing it there.
[00:01:53] Chris: People are getting that you've engaged in illicit, fraudulent, or abusive behavior, but they still have to appeal it. They still have to submit something. Amazon must understand that they're going to keep calling in, and keep submitting things. So, in terms of disputing the illicit or fraudulent behavior, what do they tell you they're doing since that message, of course, tells you nothing. Probably by design.
[00:02:18] Leah: You mean the brand registry?
[00:02:19] Chris: For brand registry, there are some people who have abused IP reporting tools and they have those pulled away. We see less of that now.
[00:02:27] Leah: I see more of just the entire account being removed, or the entire brand registry account being removed.
But they still aren't giving a proper appeal path. You're given one form to fill out, that is your appeal path, and that's it. The only way that we've been able to successfully appeal these is through escalations. There is no appeal process outside of that form for brand registry.
[00:02:49] Chris: Right, but the appeal process mandates that they prove they never violated any policies, correct?
I'm doing the account suspension stuff where it's not just the brand registry revoked, the entire account is gone. Clearly there's a memo circulating, or they've been retrained to tell everybody you can never sell again. And of course you can poke holes in that because they are reinstating some people who do violate policies.
[00:03:15] Leah: Well, and we still, we always have and we still do get the, this account has been marked as do not reinstate and then we get it reinstated. So it's same as abusive. They love to say that you're abusive.
[00:03:26] Chris: Yeah. If you failed a video verification call, you're abusive. If you have a documentation snafu that you can later correct, that's considered abusive.
If you have a suspended account in another marketplace that you don't even use simply because of failed verification, that's abusive.
[00:03:42] Leah: Right.
[00:03:42] Chris: So Amazon's creating confusion and misunderstandings by overusing these terms out of context. But what else is new, right? They've been doing that the whole time we've been consulting.
So the real question becomes for what types of offenses. Is it just code of conduct where they say you have to dispute it successfully by proving you never did something wrong, or is it most types of policy violations, or is it you've been warned for this in the past, you continued to do it, now we're suspending you, and the only path forward is to successfully dispute it.
They never tell you what a dispute looks like, by the way. All they tell you is... Give us examples that you never violated this policy. That's their favorite line.
[00:04:27] Leah: How do you give examples of something that never happened? That reminds me of that meme where somebody never received their package and customer service asked them for proof, so they just sent them a picture of their hands being empty.
Yeah. Like, how do you prove that something never happened?
[00:04:39] Chris: That's funnier than what I was going to say. The example I liked from the past was how do you prove you've never been to Kentucky?
[00:04:47] Leah: Right.
[00:04:47] Chris: Do you just show documented proof of which state you were in every day of your life and show there's no evidence that I was ever in Kentucky and all of this information. It's a ridiculous thing to say. Maybe some of them know it's ridiculous, but I think the clumsy point they're trying to make is that you need to successfully dispute this to our satisfaction. And the point I wanted to make about that is that I've seen a lot of people appealing it with non dispute material. So, sometimes they're just blaming a service.
Like, we're not guilty. We didn't do this. We hired somebody who did this for us.
[00:05:28] Leah: Yeah or my employee did it without my knowledge.
[00:05:30] Chris: Right.
[00:05:31] Leah: Never worked before. Probably not gonna work now.
[00:05:34] Chris: I've seen tons of these, and this is the wrong approach. I don't know who's peddling this. I don't know if it says this on the forums, I don't know where this comes from. Or they say that and then they attach the document. Finally, people got the message on show documentation that you've terminated a service or terminated an employee. That word finally penetrated, but that's not enough. That's like a starting point showing that you fired an employee.
[00:06:00] Leah: That's effective if you're showing that your accounts aren't related to each other. But I mean, just because you fired somebody doesn't dispute the fact that they did, on your behalf, break these policies.
[00:06:13] Chris: Right, right. The policy violation did occur, and you can't throw employees under the bus.
I think account health reps are also confusing sellers even more by saying, document the termination of the employee or the service and use that as the basis for your dispute that you violated the policy. That's not what a dispute is. A dispute is you've been falsely accused of violating somebody's trademark and you can prove that you didn't.
[00:06:38] Leah: Well, so I guess my question to you is if they did violate the policy, what do you suggest that they do?
[00:06:44] Chris: Yeah. People are still getting reinstated that have been suspended for policy violations. The first step is to determine if you violated what they consider to fall under their code of conduct or not.
Code of conduct suspensions are treated much more harshly than minor league policy violations or listing violations. Don't start blaming the service that you hired. I think people got into this knee jerk, I have to dispute it by blaming someone, which is the opposite of what we used to tell them when writing a plan of action.
And also people are writing and submitting plans of action when they haven't been asked for. Either disputing things that way or admitting guilt that way.
[00:07:26] Leah: Yeah, I've seen people submit plans of action through support for brand registry revocation and that's just not going to work. And I also see it for compliance, like compliance, aren't looking for a plan of action. They very literally just want to see if the product is compliant or not. They don't need your five step plan to ensure that it will be compliant.
[00:07:45] Chris: There's an over POA trend. That's creating still more confusion. I think it's also, not just seller created. I think some agencies and consultants are telling people that because they really have no strategy and they have no ideas and they have no idea what to do, but they've been paid to help. So they say let's write a POA. You know, they have no other solution.
[00:08:05] Leah: Well, I mean, for compliance, if somebody's telling you to write a POA, then the person writing your appeal doesn't probably know that it's a different team than Seller Performance.
[00:08:13] Chris: Right. So your cases, the compliance stuff, that's a, that's a red flag when they see a plan of action, come back to them.
It means that they've hired somebody that doesn't even understand compliance any more than they do.
[00:08:25] Leah: Right.
[00:08:26] Chris: But, we're still hashing out some of the strategies in terms of escalations around, you know, what you admit to doing. The problem is, if you start out front by admitting to something, it's going to be ten times harder to then dispute it.
[00:08:43] Leah: Right.
[00:08:43] Chris: And that was one of the big points I wanted to make today because I'm seeing three, four, five appeals that typically they write a couple themselves, they hire somebody to write a couple others. Some of them admit it, some of them dispute it. When seller performance teams, when my former teams see these, they can look in the account annotations. They can see your prior appeals. They can see that you're changing your mind every five minutes. It undermines their faith. Number one, that you're telling them anything accurate, which you probably need to provide accurate info to get reinstated anyway. But you're not telling the truth. You're shifting your weight from your left foot to your right. You're just digging, you know, grab a shovel, you're just digging a deeper hole. So you have to decide and build that strategy out before you begin. This is something we've preached for a long time, haven't we?
[00:09:36] Leah: Yeah, and just a side note on this as well, because I think a lot of sellers have gotten into the habit of if the appeal is just a couple of check boxes, they just check them off and don't really read it and don't really think about it.
Some of those checkboxes, you're admitting to violating that policy, and you're also acknowledging that Amazon will not reinstate your ASIN. So you need to make sure you actually read what those checkboxes say before you check them off. Sometimes it is just checking it off to acknowledge, sometimes it's saying that you won't get that ASIN reinstated. So make sure you read those, because I've seen a few sellers check those off, not realizing that they're, one, admitting fault, and two, giving away that ASIN forever.
[00:10:13] Chris: This concept circulated that writing a POA or appealing in general means you have to admit fault because they won't do anything. They won't listen until you admit fault.
You don't admit something that didn't happen just to get the issue resolved. I understand the appeals process is painful. It sucks. You get stuck. It's terrible. That doesn't mean that you get tired of it and you start making bad decisions by just admitting to stuff and checking the boxes. And by the way, we're not saying don't dispute it because it doesn't work. We're saying dispute it with evidence, with proof, with a strategy. Because if they don't see the strategy and they see you guessing, what are the odds? I mean, how many people do we hear from who, we used to hear from a few people that would say, "I don't know, I put something together, I was just kind of making it up and it sailed through and I got reinstated."
We don't hear that anymore.
[00:11:06] Leah: I still occasionally hear it and it always annoys me. Like we put so much work into crafting proper appeals and then somebody just doesn't review one properly and it gets put through.
[00:11:17] Chris: I started referring to that as a streetcar named desire strategy, which is, we depended on the kindness of strangers.
That's essentially what that was. Or you depended on the laziness of a seller performance investigator who took a quick look at it. You know, looked at your appeal, looked at their watch. It's two minutes to lunchtime. They said, what the hell? They read through it. You seem like a nice guy or woman. I'll give you another chance. Let's reinstate.
That doesn't really happen anymore. You can tell with the rejection reasons. I understand a lot of sellers still say Amazon won't tell us why we got rejected. If you dig deep enough and If you get to the account health reps or the right kinds of reps and push them a little bit, they will tell you.
[00:12:03] Leah: Assuming there are actually notes as to the request.
[00:12:06] Chris: The caveat is sometimes it's blank and they're making stuff up because there's nothing there because there probably was no investigation or appeal review to begin with. But all other things being equal, they will tell you this was too weak and here's where you were weak. And also I think in terms of credibility, I sort of wanted to do another whole podcast on, is this even believable?
You know, you have to convince somebody. It's not just like, say all the right, nice things.
[00:12:34] Leah: Yeah. Well, my favorite are the POAs that are submitted, less than six hours after the suspension occurred. And according to the plan of action, they have like re- hauled the entire business and everything now functions completely differently than it did six hours ago.
So yeah, it needs to be believable. These investigators do look at these all day, every day. They've got a pretty good sense of it.
[00:12:55] Chris: We'll save that for next, for the next one. We won't go into the credibility factor, but you have to be convincing. One good way to not convince anyone is you sound like you're making stuff up.
You sound like you're just throwing people under the bus, either at your company or the service you hired. They definitely want info. They seem to be really interested in the services you hire, and that's still yet another podcast about trading info in order to get reinstated. Because Amazon seems intent on creating confidential informants out of the sellers they suspend. But, to get info on the services, a lot of times it seems like they're more interested in the service you hired than in you. But you know, that's not the basis of a dispute.
It's not, we didn't do something because we hired somebody. That still reflects on you, right? The key piece here being anticipate that you might have to dispute or relate a suspension for an ASIN or an account. Anticipate that in advance. I know people don't like to think about avoiding suspensions in advance, but anticipate that and have your reasoning for why you hired that service ready.
[00:14:05] Leah: Yeah.
[00:14:05] Chris: Before you even do business with them.
[00:14:07] Leah: Right.
[00:14:08] Chris: Otherwise, I mean, who takes the fall for a third party service screwing you over? You take the fall. They only take the fall if there's a mass number of suspensions from a mass number of sellers falling for those gimmicks.
And then Amazon becomes interested in all of these sellers hired the same people. What the hell is going on here?
[00:14:28] Leah: Then we get the Fiverr lawsuit scenario again.
[00:14:32] Chris: Right. But I mean, don't you see this on the compliance side too, where the same name names keep coming up? Well, obviously they weren't compliant at all.
[00:14:41] Leah: We really don't cause it generally doesn't come down to hiring the wrong service. In my experience.
[00:14:47] Chris: So the brand owners are just making their own independent decisions that result in a suspension. Let's for listing policy, talk about listing optimization.
Aren't there listing optimization strategies that get people, get their ASIN suspended?
[00:15:02] Leah: Oh, yeah. I mean, that one all the time. I mean, we've talked about that before, I've been repeating myself for the last five years that you need to know the policy yourself and you need to know what's happening on your account.
And then similarly with the compliance, you need to know the laws yourself.
[00:15:16] Chris: Well, that's why I mentioned both listing compliance and product and safety compliance. Because on the product and safety side, we've heard from and worked with some people who hadn't hired like an FDA attorney before they went ahead and did what they did, right?
[00:15:29] Leah: Yeah. And also something to keep in mind if you're importing regulated products is if you're the importer of record, you are the one that is legally liable for those products in this country. So, that's also something where I've seen people maybe not buying from the most scrupulous manufacturers overseas who don't have the compliance in this country.
Sometimes they know that they don't have the compliance in this country. And they're still selling it to people to import into the United States. Which again, just ultimately comes down to you need to know this stuff yourself. You can't assume that whoever you're working with is doing the right thing.
[00:16:06] Chris: I've seen people try to appeal blaming their manufacturer. I have seen that as part of an appeal that is a dispute.
[00:16:13] Leah: Just one quick note on the brand registry thing, since we are talking about disputing. Even though they don't give you the opportunity to really dispute it, we are still seeing a lot of false or incorrect brand registry restrictions. I'm certainly seeing a lot more correct ones, too. So we're seeing a lot just in general, but I'm still seeing a good number of accounts that there's just no legitimate reason as to why it is being rejected. And when we push, we do eventually get to that point.
But it seems like there's a lot of confusion internally as well, because when you push, we tend to get back the, "yeah, we don't really know why this was rejected. We're going to have to dig into this," and then eventually it comes back. So we are still seeing a good number of false positives, but also a good number of people breaking policy.
[00:17:04] Chris: Right. If you're accused of illicit, fraudulent, deceptive activity, don't admit that right out of the gate. If none of that's true and if Amazon is wrong, dispute it. You know, not to go back into the don't write a POA that doesn't belong, but some people sent me appeals where they said, " these are the things we may have done wrong that may have gotten you thinking that we may have done something illicit or fraudulent or deceptive."
No, a lot of those people weren't doing anything. Amazon messed up. So in conclusion, I understand that a lot of this low quality material or information is floating around in the forums, or I don't know if I still use Facebook, maybe I would see some of it on Facebook, but you get the idea. Don't have kind of this copy and paste mentality of, I want to get this over with, I want to just tell them what they want to hear.
Because that's not what this is. You're just digging a deeper hole. If you're going to dispute it, have grounds, have proof. And if you're apologizing and accepting responsibility and writing misguided POAs just hoping that admitting something will get you through it, consider the nature of the violation. Does it fall under seller code of conduct? Are there other issues at play? Other policy enforcement actions that were left unresolved? I see a lot of that too. Run it by me, and run it by Leah. We're happy to talk to you 24/7, midnight, 1am, during Q4
[00:18:36] Leah: I will not make that promise, but you can message Chris at 2 am.
[00:18:39] Chris: 2 am European time, Central European time. We will be available.
[00:18:43] Leah: Sure, yes.
[00:18:45] Chris: Okay. Thanks for listening everybody. We know it's a tough time of year, busy time of year. But also hectic and a little scary with some of these suspension trends going around. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our wonderful podcast. I'm Chris McCabe with Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you doing? You're basking in the post prime day afterglow right now. I think we all are, it's been an interesting week. We've got some ideas about future episodes that'll be coming up lickety split. Today we wanted to focus on misinformation, interesting guidance we've seen from inside Amazon and we're talking sometimes about account managers, paid account managers, SAS core. Sometimes we're talking about account health. Which is one of our frequent go back to's on this podcast, but also support.
[00:00:39] Chris: And what concerns us isn't the teams, because we've seen misinformation coming out from different teams for years. It's how widespread across how many topics, multiple account policy, ASIN and variation creation policy, sometimes even reviews abuse. That's a hot topic again, right now. Whether or not you acknowledge that you've done something wrong or whether you have to dispute it in order to resolve it.
There's lots of curious guidance and suggestions and advice coming out of account management and support and all of these other teams lately. You've got some examples. I've got some examples. Why don't we start? With the the multiple account policy note that you saw.
[00:01:21] Leah: Yeah, so it's just interesting with people internal to Amazon quoting a policy that changed, was it three years ago? I want to say it was three years ago that the multiple account policy changed.
[00:01:33] Chris: More recent than that.
[00:01:35] Leah: Well, when did the aggregators start about three years ago and that's around when it changed.
So, you know, a conversation about how sellers aren't allowed to have more than one account, which is not true. But interesting that something that has changed such a long time ago is something that was being quoted as a potential reason as to why the seller was dealing with a certain issue.
[00:02:02] Chris: I think multiple account got confusing a couple of years ago when a bunch of people blocked for being related to an account that they probably weren't even actually related to.
When they called to complain or when they tried to appeal, all the messaging that came back and some account health reps would say this on calls, said, Oh, you violated our multiple account policy. So, their own internal people were mixing and matching between what a related account block is and what having multiple accounts and then within that, they didn't understand the policy.
[00:02:34] Leah: I think that's because when they did update the policy, they did actually put the related account policy is now part of that multiple account policy down the bottom. It says that, you know, you're allowed to have multiple accounts as long as there is a legitimate business reason. However, if one of your accounts get suspended, all of them will get suspended for being related to that suspended account.
So I think that's why it got confused internally because they decided to Jam those two things together in the messaging.
[00:03:01] Chris: Yeah, but those are two distinct concepts that all of these people, I guess the frightening thing is you would expect all these people to be trained or retrained on this before giving advice that could impact your appeal, impact your account structure, impact your relationship with your account manager. It could impact so many different things. And sellers did misunderstand the multiple account policy back then. And now this misinformation is creating more misunderstandings.
[00:03:31] Leah: Yeah. And I think, I mean, of a bigger concern to me than that sort of misinformation is misinformation that I've seen people get from account managers that would actually get the seller in trouble. So most sellers at this point know that Amazon has internal AI tools that SAM's used to make recommendations to improve your listing optimization.
And I've seen multiple sellers get recommendations to add things to their listing that would absolutely get the listing flagged and suspended.
It doesn't seem like Amazon's internal tools took compliance into account when they started recommending things being added to the listing, but I've also heard from multiple sellers that if they don't take the exact advice that their SAM gives them, then their SAM has A little bit of like a hissy fit of like, oh, well, then none of this will work. Nevermind. So if they don't do exactly what they say, then the SAM no longer wants to help them, even though the advice that they're giving them will actually get them into trouble.
[00:04:35] Chris: It could be grounds to kick them out of the program to something that they're paying into. Maybe they can unplug.
Well so that's the thing if your suspended you do lose access to your account manager so they're recommending things that will get them into trouble. And then when they do get into trouble. They can't help or won't help. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize, this could be another episode, a lot of people don't realize if it's code of conduct related, your account manager can just stop representing you and dump you out of the program even before your account gets suspended.
Usually that's a sign that your suspension's imminent. But a lot of sellers who are paying into that program are paying in for an additional layer of protection and we see so many people, very large accounts often as well, not just a smaller ones that are thrown out unceremoniously just based on the perception that they're doing something wrong. It hasn't even gotten to the suspension stage yet.
[00:05:31] Leah: Right? I also heard an account manager on a call that I was sitting in on recommend, well not recommend because they're already in the process of enrolling their brand in brand registry but the account manager said that once they're enrolled in brand registry, then they can start working on removing unauthorized sellers through brand registry.
And that is absolutely not what brand registry is for and will absolutely get you in trouble. So even just these Fairly basic concepts at this point in terms of Amazon, I've been seeing quite bad information and I think the problem is not so much that they're giving bad information because there's tons of bad information about Amazon, it's the fact that these are considered managers and so sellers think, oh, well, if the manager said it's fine, it must be fine and then they're following this advice that again can potentially get them into trouble and it's not like seller performance or the compliance team are going to be like, Oh, your manager said it was okay. Oh, okay.
[00:06:35] Chris: And review harvesting by merging listings. This is another one we've seen mostly support reps giving the advice. I mean, support over the years, we've become numb to this concept that support gives terrible advice and inaccurate advice almost all the time.
Right. Which is why it's funny in a strange way to me when higher level Amazonians. Advise sellers in emails or on calls to, Oh, well, this issue go to support for that. I mean, they know support could give you advice that could get you suspended. Why do they, if they're higher level at Amazon, they should know that steering you that way could get your whole account taken down.
[00:07:15] Leah: I hear it from account health too. I've had both account health and support tell sellers, Oh, your listing is blocked. Just make a new ASIN for that product. Right. It's like, Oh, cool. So your entire account can get suspended.
[00:07:26] Chris: The old standby. I mean, we see service providers doing this as well, but the old standby, of course, being just make a new listing, anyone who can't figure something out.
We saw a lot of people kind of like copycat appeal services who couldn't figure out how to do a proper reinstatement appeal, just work on getting the listing back up, however, any means possible. And of course that's a doubling down on the violation.
[00:07:54] Leah: Yeah, you're actually making like multiple violations by doing that.
[00:07:59] Chris: So then you're just multiplying the types of violations which could lead to an account wide review or an account wide deactivation or restrictions, not just these individual ASINs, but bad advice outside the company is different from bad advice coming from inside the company because people tend to take it as gospel and to follow it.
And then you and I have to spend time, here's our selfish beef, we have to spend time telling people that they shouldn't listen to internal teams because the information's wrong. Puts us in an extremely awkward place and I don't think we need to be there. I think this could be corrected.
[00:08:36] Leah: Well, I mean, at this point, it's not just the lower level teams that I'm getting this from.
I've seen cases where Amazon's legal team has completely misquoted an act that has zero relevance to the product. They've just quoted what compliance mentioned previously without actually reviewing the case. So it's not even that it's just these lower level teams. It's going all the way up to the point where we're literally having to fight in these email threads, being like, no, you haven't reviewed this properly. That has absolutely nothing to do with what we are talking about here.
[00:09:13] Chris: Yeah. Especially with legal issues. Some people are making judgments on legal issues within Amazon that aren't legally trained.
[00:09:22] Leah: Right. Well, the compliance team, for the most part, is not legally trained.
[00:09:27] Chris: And well, the compliance team we've been talking about. For two years, I guess, how they kind of slapped it together. It looks like they just grabbed whoever was available and threw them into compliance. And they didn't have compliance training or experience. Isn't that what you've more or less been telling brands for two years?
[00:09:45] Leah: So that was at least a few years ago, but then they've taken what already was a broken process and have tried to automate more of it. So now it's just you get stuck in an automated Hell loop, where how can you automate a process that didn't work in the first place? So now you're just getting more ridiculousness because no one's actually reviewing it.
So if they misidentify something, there is no way to get someone to actually be like, Oh yeah, that is not what this is. Unless you escalate it up the chain. And I think, you know, we see the same thing on documentation review as well. A lot of that is being automated too. And again, it was already an imperfect process that they've now tried to automate and have automated poorly.
[00:10:34] Chris: I think I figured some of this out because we have so many hundreds to thousands of examples over the years where. They kept telling the brand, you're wrong. You're wrong. You're wrong. You're wrong. You're wrong. Okay. We made a mistake on the 18th message maybe that makes them more willing to give bad or incorrect information early on because they consciously or not know in the back of their minds they can later say oh, I guess you were right Oh, I guess this is a mistake. Oh, I guess we didn't quite understand the situation, here you go there's your ASIN back because we see that so many times And so there's no consequences for all of the incorrect decision making along the way.
[00:11:17] Leah: Right. We still only really see any indication that any of these teams internal metrics are about speed.
I still don't really see any indication that anything to do with quality of the work is being reviewed or, again, like you said, when they do actually get called out for doing things incorrectly. We don't really see any indication that there's any consequences to it being done badly. And part of that is because we do this so often that I recognize some people's names.
And some of them I'm like, Oh no, it's this person. You get that feeling of dread. I mean, some people are great. Some people, I see the name and I'm like, awesome. But sometimes I see the name and it's like, I have been having the exact same issue with this person over and over again. They're still working these cases, they're still making the same mistakes over and over again. But they do respond quickly.
[00:12:13] Chris: Because it's just the institutional attitude is onto the next thing, right? There's no, let's take a moment to reflect and learn on why so and so has done the same mistake eight times in a row. And this is one reason why, I mean, I don't hear people coming out of the Amazon accelerate conference in Seattle telling me that investigative auditing or quality is ever measured or ever comes up. Like if things like that were addressed, because they go on for years, not months, and they go on in different teams. So if things like that were addressed meaningfully, then I'd be in the first flight to Seattle for that. But those are the things that are convenient, that they're very important.
They're crucial to the operation of the marketplace, but they're conveniently left out and it's never mentioned why that's not important.
[00:13:06] Leah: I don't think it's being tracked or measured. And Amazon is the kind of company that if it's not being tracked or measured. It doesn't exist.
[00:13:15] Chris: I don't know. I think it's being measured on some level.
[00:13:19] Leah: Speed is, but I've seen no indication that anybody is ever being checked for quality. The fact that you still can get a template that absolutely has nothing to do with anything you've been talking about through the entire thread. Indicates that nobody is reviewing quality and the fact that the templates have gotten worse.
I mean, half the time with support, it's just a word salad and you have to find the sentence that actually applies to what it is you're talking about. So clearly nobody is looking at the quality of that.
[00:13:48] Chris: Yeah. If they're just mixing and matching blurbs and messages together, then you're going to get that. What did you just say after reading five paragraphs?
[00:13:55] Leah: No, half the time I have to read it like three times to figure out what the hell they're actually saying.
[00:14:00] Chris: Cause it's convoluted and it doesn't make sense, but you would think that for their own selfish reasons, they'd want to retrain, get everyone on the same page, learn from mistakes.
When I was working there, we would start our weekly meetings with like, here were a couple of things we could have done better. That has fallen away. Quality assurance, internal review. If it exists, and if they are doing it, the results aren't changing. So that has to completely improve. Otherwise, sellers are going to have to keep getting this inconsistent, I mean, sometimes the advice is at best inconsistent, at worst inaccurate. And we're the ones out there translating and interpreting. As the middleman of knowledge for teams and tools and policies that Amazon employees should have cold before they even talk to any seller. Right? Do they test them in the training process in any meaningful way?
Are they just checking a bunch of boxes? I don't know, but that's why we are so famous for saying take what Amazon tells you with a grain of salt. And sometimes you say big grain of salt. Because we can see the messaging, we can read the situation, and the two are not congruent.
[00:15:15] Leah: Well, and I think that just comes down to what I've been hammering for however many years.
And I know it's not something that anybody wants to do, but you need to be familiar with the policies yourself, because you can't trust looking at what other sellers are doing, because as I famously say, I can do two clicks on amazon. com and find a policy violation. So you can't go off what other people are doing and you really can't go off what Amazon tells you either.
So you are ultimately are the one that will be held responsible if anything goes wrong, which means that you need to be familiar with Amazon's policies yourself, because like we've said, if somebody steers you the wrong way from inside of Amazon, you can't use that as your defense later.
No one will care. There will be no backlash for the person that gave you the bad advice. You won't get a get out of jail free card. Amazon will just hold you responsible for not knowing the policies yourself. So you need to know the policies yourself. You need to make sure your team knows the policies.
You need to make sure that you have manual checks. So whoever's doing it is then being checked by somebody who is like a compliance expert on your team and making sure that nothing incorrect is happening on your account because the buck will stop with you as far as Amazon is concerned. Boring and annoying advice. I know.
[00:16:41] Chris: Especially from support because they already know that support. Everyone knows everyone with any stakeholder in this whole system knows support gives either vague advice or incomplete advice or inaccurate advice. Sometimes made up advice. Everyone inside and outside of Amazon knows this at this point.
So they would just quote the policy back to you and they would disregard whatever you said you were told in a case. I can't tell you how many plans of action I've read. Where the root causes were all about, your team's told us this, your team told us that. We believed it because your team's told us.
Unfortunately, the people reading your appeal don't appreciate that. And yet another episode we should do just on that. Because those never work for a reason.
[00:17:31] Leah: Well, and other sellers are doing it also never works for a reason. Because they're so numb to that defense at this point. That they just immediately tune it out as soon as it's mentioned.
[00:17:43] Chris: The problem is you're right that you got the bad advice, but the seller performance people reading the appeal and making or compliance or policy people making the appeal for an ASIN or account read statement. They're numb to that fact that support might give terrible advice, but they're also never accepting that as an excuse. So, maybe that actually is the root cause of the problem. And maybe it was an acceptable excuse. The audience who makes the decision doesn't care because to them that's not relevant. I'm not saying I agree with that.
[00:18:17] Leah: Well, and that's what I'm saying is that they consider you responsible for knowing the policy. If you were given bad advice, Amazon holds you responsible for not knowing better. So it really does come down to you knowing what you are and are not allowed to do. Which leads me to my final piece of advice on this, which is just because Amazon's system will allow you to technically do something does not mean that it is within Amazon policy. Because that is another conversation that we regularly have, or I see in appeals, is that the catalog system let them do it, so it must be fine. Or they were able to do it in Seller Central, therefore it must be fine. Or people are offering it as a service, so it is technically possible to do, therefore it must be within policy.
And that's just absolutely not true. Obviously, there's always going to be loopholes that people find and try to exploit. That doesn't mean that that is allowed, it just means somebody found a break in the system.
[00:19:18] Chris: Right? Like the review harvesting by merging listings happens every day, all the time, completely against policy, changing the brand attribute, definitely against policy, even though technically possible to get done in the system.
And we sometimes talk to sellers who think we don't know what we're talking about because they can see other people getting away with murder. Just because you can get away with murder doesn't mean it's policy compliant. And of course, you have to make your decision whether or not you want to break policies and whether you want to risk your whole account. That's fine. That's up to you. Most people we work with are in it for the long haul. And they are policy compliant because they want to stay selling on Amazon. It's not rocket science. We give the advice we do because we've seen the consequences and the outcomes that those people don't see yet because they see other people getting away with it, or perhaps they've gotten away with it themselves for a while, but today's enforcement and tomorrow's enforcement can be 2 totally different things.
Most of 2023 we've seen very few people getting suspended for reviews abuse practices now all of a sudden in September it came roaring back.
[00:20:27] Leah: Variations misuse, I haven't seen account suspensions for that in ages and now they're everywhere.
[00:20:33] Chris: That changes month to month, it's a seasonal thing too, especially right on the cusp of Q4, now we're in Q4, they didn't want to suspend everyone right on Prime Day, they wanted to do it a month before Prime day.
[00:20:47] Leah: Again, some of these aren't just Amazon policies, some of these are laws. That you're potentially breaking and a conversation that I have way too often with sellers is, well, we've been doing this for 10 years and I'm like, well, you've been breaking the law for 10 years then. So, again, I get that. Some people are like, oh, it's just an Amazon policy. It's not that important. Some of these policies are based on laws. So keep that in mind that it's not just Amazon that you could be upsetting with your behavior, you could be upsetting other people who now have grounds to sue you, or you could be upsetting other government bodies like the FDA or the FTC or the EPA.
So these are all things to keep in mind as you are navigating what you should be doing when you're looking at other people's behavior. So don't look at other people's behavior.
[00:21:33] Chris: Simple. We'll close with that. Don't agitate or upset federal agencies by breaking the law. Just in general. Good, good rule of thumb.
And definitely don't break the law consistently for 10 years. That's another good tidbit from that last comment. Or even five or even two.
[00:21:48] Leah: Just generally try to avoid that.
[00:21:51] Chris: So we'll be talking about this and other wonderful topics throughout Q4. Any questions on it? Let us know.
Thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. Bye bye. Bye.
Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe here with Leah McHugh in person. Live and in person. Not quite live. Sort of live. We're here with Emma Schirmer Tamir of Marketing by Emma. Hello, Emma.
[00:00:12] Emma: Hello, Chris and Leah.
[00:00:15] Chris: How have you been this wonderful summer into fall? It still feels like summer here. It's 80 something degrees in Boston today.
[00:00:22] Emma: Wow. It's warmer in Boston than it is in Las Vegas.
[00:00:26] Chris: Very interesting.
[00:00:27] Emma: We're having a little bit of a cold snap at the moment. I will say I was freezing this morning when I took the dog out and it was like 55 degrees.
[00:00:39] Chris: Oh, it was 55 this morning here when I got up, but it quickly went up to like 85 in a few hours.
So, 82.
[00:00:47] Emma: What is this world we live in?
[00:00:48] Chris: It's a warming planet, apparently. So, I guess we have to get used to it, since no one's interested in changing their behavior. Anyway, Back to Amazon. You've been a guest, I think, two or three times in the past on our podcast. We've introduced you to numerous brand owners, we've helped people get the right resources, the right knowledge, the right info on listing optimization, which is your forte. Obviously there's other marketing, and promotional, and detail page work that you do. Can you give everyone just a quick rundown, not only of your background and what you guys handle, but what your focus is heading into Prime Day.
[00:01:26] Emma: Absolutely. Prime Day is literally around the corner. So we have specialized in helping brands really connect with who they are and who their ideal customers are to be able to compel people to want to choose them over all of the other options that are out there.
We all know that Amazon is Incredibly competitive and so it's really key to figure out how to position yourself in a way to make your product the obvious choice. So that's what we really specialize in both from the SEO side of things as well as the creative positioning. When it comes to preparing for prime day we really treat it like preparing for any other time of year. You need to be thinking about ways that you can stand out, that you can communicate your value proposition, that you can win over as many customers or the right customers as possible.
And so for prime day, I think one of the main things, of course, that changes is you're going to have more aggressive deals and all of those types of things. You might even be spending more on PPC. Well, you probably are. And so if you want to be pulling all of those levers and really maximizing that spend, and still remaining profitable despite steep discounts, then having a really locked and loaded, optimized listing is a critical piece of that because otherwise you could very quickly get yourself into a position where you're spending way more, you're cutting down your margins, and then you're actually left without any profit at all Which is I don't think what any business is looking to achieve. It would be you know, a huge lost opportunity and just a loss overall trying to go into and establish as a strong start to the Q4 holiday shopping season.
[00:03:15] Chris: Yeah. Do you hear from people long before I assume the prime dates are announced because Amazon loves to give them to you last minute, but do you hear from people two months early and they want drastic changes on their detail pages? Piecemeal kind of minor tweaks. I mean, what's the general average?
[00:03:33] Emma: I would say a lot of times the way the people come to us is less of,
"Hey, I want to get this ready for prime day due with X, Y, and Z", but more of
"we know prime day, we know Q four, we know these big spending periods are coming, we feel like there's opportunity here that we're not fully capitalizing on. What do you see as opportunities here and is this something that you can help with?" So it normally starts more as a question or from a point of we know we need to change this. But I would say it's pretty rare that people are coming to us with a fully thought through concept of all the things that they need to do. Of course we value that when it happens, but a lot of times it's more of, we know that there's something that can be done here, but we don't know exactly what it is and how can you help us fix that. So then we get to put our investigative hats on to figure out what can we do to allow this product to be successful, and it becomes more and more challenging because we are just seeing so much competition in almost every category, so you're needing to get much more focused with how you're positioning your products in a way that you were not having to do, even just a few years ago.
[00:04:57] Leah: This time of year on our end, actually, like last month. September and October is when we see a lot of listing policy enforcement and compliance enforcement. And part of that is, Amazon cleaning up the catalog before the busy season, but I think another part of it is a lot of people having bad ideas when updating their listings for Q4. So, adding words that are restricted or just misrepresenting their product, in an attempt to try to compete in an ever more competitive marketplace.
[00:05:28] Chris: I figured some of this out. I think a lot of people we've talked to, I don't know if this has been going on for years or more like months. They see a post on LinkedIn or Facebook or something saying, "Hey, you can double, or triple blank" , and they just assume that it's TOS compliant because the service says it is.
[00:05:45] Leah: There's also a lot of tools that recommend keywords without considering compliance. Even Amazon's own tools.
I've heard from a few sellers who SAS rep recommended that they add words to their listing and I'm like, that'll get it suspended. Right.
[00:05:59] Chris: Because they don't have compliance training or knowledge, but also, on the service provider side that gap is there and it could create an ASIN suspension, right? Which is the opposite effect of doubling or tripling your sales. How do you thread that needle? Do they ask you about these things or do they just say, look, do you give me TOS compliant methods and you say yes and then you move on.
[00:06:19] Leah: They're like, we're going to use this word no matter what you say.
[00:06:21] Chris: Yeah or do they just reject what your advice is.
[00:06:25] Emma: It's always a tricky balancing act to play. So we, from the very beginning have always taken approach of you're hiring us because we're experts. And so it is our responsibility to arm you with as much information as we can, and to try to encourage you to make a decision that's going to be in your best interest. Ultimately, they are the business owners, and so at the end of the day, if they really want to do something and we're telling them that's not advised, we have no say over whether they do it or not, so we just try to at least provide as much, both insight and also practical real life examples to demonstrate why this may or may not be a good idea and what the risks associated with it might be. And some people are very, what's the opposite of risk averse?
[00:07:22] Chris: Risk embrace?
[00:07:24] Emma: And so they're like well, you know, I mean why not see if I can make a boatload of money. And others aren't. So I think I'm very much of the approach of play it safe because ultimately, if something goes wrong with Amazon, you don't know how long it's going to take to fix it. And you don't know sometimes even if you're going to be able to fix it. And then when you add in the holiday season on top of it, and there's all of that intensity, and there's so much riding on it, and you've probably invested a lot into additional inventory, and you have this whole plan It can very quickly spiral, and then if you're already making risky choices, and then you're now panicking to try to fix it, that's also when you're more likely to make even more bad choices that just escalate the problem and make it even worse. But that's also why we recommend not preparing for the holidays right on the precipice of the holidays. Allowing that time because there's sometimes even that you're not doing anything wrong and Amazon flags things just for whatever weird reason. And so allowing some of that buffer room that if something weird happens, you are not with your back up against the wall and you have time to consider decisions about how resolve this in the most effective way possible instead of freaking out. I mean, you guys obviously can speak way more to that then I can.
[00:08:52] Chris: No well said. I agree with everything you said.
[00:08:56] Leah: We do get a lot of people coming to us freaking out.
[00:08:58] Emma: Understandably. I mean, I would freak out if it was the eve of Prime Day or Black Friday,
[00:09:07] Chris: A certain amount of it isn't avoidable. It could be a glitch, could be technical stuff on Amazon's side, could be competitor attacks, but we are trying to get people in the right frame of mind where you button up everything on your side as much as possible so that you at least cut that out of the equation so that you know, it's not a stumble, a mistake, an error on your side.
And the quicker you can narrow the possibilities, the quicker you can address it with the appeals process.
[00:09:36] Emma: That's such an interesting way of putting it that I never thought about, but that the value and making sure that you're crossing your T's and dotting your I's and doing everything exactly how it needs to be.
So then you can directly kind of limit your pool to it's most likely X, Y, or Z because we know that A through F has all been done.
[00:09:58] Leah: Particularly with listings, I recommend that everybody uses flat files because it gives you a paper trail.
[00:10:03] Emma: Yeah.
[00:10:03] Leah: And it gives you a paper trail that Amazon can also follow.
Whereas if you're doing it manually or if you're doing it using the API, it's a lot more difficult. You will have the paper trail on your side with the API, but the catalog team can't see it. So that way, if somebody does put in keywords that aren't supposed to be there, you can very clearly show them that it wasn't you.
And you can also, if you're familiar with flat files, it's a lot easier to correct the listing, whereas when it's blocked, sometimes manual changes just don't go through.
[00:10:32] Emma: Right. It's important to remember that it's not just about Amazon's rules, but also being mindful if you're selling anything that might be under FDA regulation and things like that. To ensure that you're following any rules and regulations to make sure that you're marketing your product in the correct way. So, you know anything that's topical, anything that's ingestible, you're going to need to be mindful of the types of claims that you're making and how you're stating certain certain things. But that can even extend to products for children.
It's a very wide range of things and understanding where your liabilities are and then how to maneuver around that when you are marketing your product, but not in a way that's going to open yourself up to really big lawsuits. Because then it's kind of like with taking a big risk and then getting suspended right around the holidays.
It's like, okay, you can make a bunch of sales, but then if you end up getting tied up in some... huge litigation you're at a much bigger loss than you were that temporary gain and saying what you shouldn't have
[00:11:42] Leah: Yeah, and we are seeing a lot more enforcement by government agencies. And we're also seeing a lot more sellers versus sellers or brands versus seller lawsuits as well In the last few years.
The lawsuit thing is something that doesn't get talked about a lot but is definitely something that sellers should be aware of.
[00:11:59] Chris: A lot of people, their listings get taken down, but they've been through that before and they got it reinstated in the past. So they assume, well they make a couple of assumptions.
One, that their overall account health won't be impacted because it wasn't in the past, which actually they've kind of changed that now where account health reps might call you and say, you've got an unresolved ASIN issue or two or three, and it could threaten the entire account. But a lot of people are assuming, well, I had this flag the same time last year for the same reason. I'm sure they're going to flag me every year for this, and it'll take about two or three days to fix or two hours to fix. So they go ahead and do it again, and I just think that's the wrong way of approaching it. This year isn't necessarily last year, and the global impact on your entire account might be different now than it was in the past, especially if they consider you a repeat offender.
And appeal strategies don't stay stagnant. They change from month to month, not just year to year. And I don't hear a lot of brands talking about that. And that's something that you might hear about when they're trying to massage some of the content on the detail page. And I'm sure you kind of give them the idea that maybe they need to think about that again.
[00:13:12] Emma: Yeah. I think sometimes, you know, we're like the spoilsport that's like "you want to do that?" And I would say along the same lines as maybe people seeing that they get away with something in the past. So taking that as permission, I think the same thing applies to taking what you see other sellers doing as legitimizing whatever strategies as something that you can also safely do.
And the fact of the matter is, is that that's just not how Amazon functions, and it is responsive rather than checking everything from the get go. So, somebody might be getting away with something now, but it doesn't mean that it's not something that they won't be penalized for in the future.
And so, that extends to everything from what you see on the product page to what you see in the inserts, and how they're communicating around reviews. If it feels like it's too good to be true, or if it's making these like crazy promises and you're starting to get all googly eyed and drooling over the potential, those are the times when you need to really take a step back and ask yourself if this is something that is legitimate, and worth putting your business on the line for.
[00:14:32] Leah: Yeah. These are all conversations I have with sellers every single day. And they usually don't like what I have to say about it.
[00:14:40] Chris: You guys, before we go, you guys have a audit that you offer. Is it a checklist? Is there something that you can summarize quickly for people and then we'll link to it, of course, so they can reach out to you directly.
[00:14:52] Emma: Yeah, so we are always happy to take a look at your listing or storefront, and all of this is done manually by a real life human taking a look at your listing. They have a lot of experience reviewing hundreds and thousands of listings. They understand what works and what doesn't. So taking a look at it and providing some key takeaways of things that either you can take and do yourself, or if you'd like to work with us, we can implement all of those changes and help you take your listing to the next level.
So that's at marketingbyemma.com/freeanalysis. We're also happy to look at a product page off Amazon if you're so inclined. But we're always happy to provide some insights and give you those tips that you can use to hopefully not only prepare for a strong Q4, but also always keeping in mind the long game and really prepare for a solid future for your business. Whether that's an exit or generational wealth or just continuing to, to grow and figure out this wild and crazy world of Amazon.
[00:16:05] Chris: Terrific. All right. Thanks. So we'll link that down below. Thank you again for your insights. I'm sure you're helping a lot of people get ready for Prime Day and of course, Black Friday is just behind that, right? So peak holiday coming up pretty quickly here and I'm sure you have many, many people that you need to talk to so we'll let you go. Thanks again for joining us, everybody. We're with Emma Schermer Tamir of Marketing by Emma, and if you have any questions for her, they can reach you best at marketingbyemma.com correct?
Marketingbyemma.com, whether you want WhatsApp, or phone, or contact form, what have you, it all lives there.
[00:16:44] Leah: Awesome.
[00:16:44] Chris: Awesome. We'll talk to you again soon.
[00:00:00] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Seller Performance Solutions podcast. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. And we're recording on the day that the FTC announced their antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
[00:00:13] Leah: And 17 other states.
And 17 other states, not against 17 other states, with 17 other states.
The FTC, in addition to 17 other states announced the lawsuit that Leah has spent most of the last few hours reading, most of it's redacted.
[00:00:26] Leah: Yeah, every time it gets juicy, it's just black bars.
[00:00:28] chris: Right, and it's blacked out text in very convenient, and interesting, and almost in a way humorous spaces. If you read through the entire hundred and four page...
[00:00:39] Leah: 172 page document.
[00:00:40] chris: Sorry, 172 page document.
[00:00:42] Leah: I'm not all the way through yet.
[00:00:43] chris: Right. We're still reading through it. We will include the link to the FTC lawsuit announcement, and also maybe some articles that have already showed up in the national media about it. But the gist of it seems to be, my quick take, is that they're very focused [00:01:00] on pricing issues.
[00:01:02] Leah: Which we had predicted based on previous information from the FTC.
[00:01:07] chris: Right. Fair pricing issues. Bugging sellers about, are you pricing your items the same on Amazon as you are on other platforms? What that means for pricing across the internet and e commerce sales in general, number one. The second thing was, is Amazon making it an unfair, uneven playing field by making sure that the people who pay the most in fees have the best product placement and have the best chance of winning a sale. Is that fair to say?
[00:01:35] Leah: Well I think that's what some of it is getting at in the redacted portions. Certainly there's a lot of focus on the fact that Amazon has increased their fees to sellers by about 30 percent in the last few years and how that hasn't reduced the number of sellers on Amazon. And also how Amazon advertising has essentially made [00:02:00] it more expensive to sellers to sell on Amazon while simultaneously making it worse for consumers who aren't necessarily seeing the best results when they search, they're seeing the results from people that pay the most for advertising. So yeah, the focus is very much around cost and price on both the seller and the consumer side.
Also interesting again, they go into pretty good detail about how amazon is tracking prices across the internet, but again, every time it gets good, it's just like a page of black bars.
[00:02:35] chris: Yeah. So the pricing one. I think there'll be more coming out in the days to follow. We can maybe focus for a few minutes just on the idea that unless you're an FBA, you're paying those fees. It'll hurt you in terms of the algorithm, in terms of which products are selected to be featured. Do you have to spend more and more and more in ads just to stay current, just to compete?
[00:02:57] Leah: And this is saying that yes, you do. And it's actually [00:03:00] using internal Amazon communications, which also are basically saying "you're dead in the water unless you're spending on advertising."
[00:03:08] chris: So essentially a lot of the blacked out portions, you would say are from emails. Internal emails where they're talking about how are sellers going to compete if they don't do this and then maybe somebody else says, yeah, they won't.
[00:03:19] Leah: Yeah, it seems like most of the blacked out sections are either internal communications from Amazon, or parts that would be considered proprietary information. So anytime the percentage of sales or any sort of monetary amount is mentioned, it's blacked out, which I assume is because Amazon said that was proprietary information that can't be shared.
[00:03:40] chris: And I'm curious when we get into the details of it, if things like paid account management.
[00:03:46] Leah: I haven't seen that mentioned yet, but I'm not finished.
[00:03:48] chris: Yeah, I mean, we're still reading it, but the overall sense seems to be all the different ways you would be asked to pay more. Impacting your ability to compete would be a key portion of the [00:04:00] lawsuit. And we've been talking about that for years because there are people who pay.
I think most of our clients pay 5, 000 a month for the account manager. And some of them love their account manager, and what they do, and their knowledge base, and some of them don't like it. Some of them think it's mediocre or in between and they dump it. When they're on the fence, they choose not to continue with it.
Just the other day, I can't remember if it was LinkedIn or elsewhere. I saw a post where it was just a litany of people complaining, you know, we paid for an account manager for six months on a trial basis or for a year or whatever. And they can't do this and they can't do this and they won't help with this and they kick us to another team for that.
[00:04:36] Leah: Right.
[00:04:36] chris: And it's like, what are you paying for? And is it like a sense that is that you have to keep paying otherwise you'll be somehow algorithmically or otherwise punished, right?
[00:04:46] Leah: Yeah. Again, they haven't gotten into quite that level of detail. It's mostly focusing on the cost of regular seller fees, um, and, and essentially that Amazon is taking, well, they say of every 2 dollars a [00:05:00] seller makes on Amazon, Amazon is taking 1 dollar.
[00:05:03] chris: And just pulling it back a second, in terms of paying for ads, and the fees up 30 percent over the last two years, is it?
[00:05:14] Leah: I think in the last few years
[00:05:16] chris: And no one left. So it's like, that'll just encourage Amazon to say, you know what, we can kind of do whatever we want with fees because no one can afford to leave because that's the stranglehold we have on e commerce sales, at least in the United States today. If that is true, and if that's the way Amazon sees it, whether they're publicly acknowledging that or not, how can they say in their defense we have such a thin slice of e commerce versus all of retail.
[00:05:44] Leah: That is essentially what this is saying. It's saying that Amazon is only able to get away with raising prices on sellers without seeing any drastic impact on Amazon side of the business, because it's a monopoly and sellers don't have a choice [00:06:00] to leave the marketplace and sell somewhere else.
One thing that it did mention that I thought was particularly interesting, and unfortunately it is proceeded and then followed by a whole bunch of black bars, but there is a line there that talks about how Amazon hikes its fees, even after it failed to adequately protect sellers, commercially sensitive data. So it does, in fact, mention the many data breaches and the huge amount of data that's available on the black market currently, which is negatively affecting sellers.
I'm hoping that they come back to that because again, like I said, everything around it is blacked out, but I thought that that line was particularly interesting to be included.
[00:06:38] chris: More will unfold as the lawsuit gets unpacked. I've written a lot. I wrote some comments for the Prosper newsletter, The Prosper Show, the other day.
There will be national media stories, of course, the rest of the week about this. But in terms of can Amazon effectively manage this marketplace, can they do it efficiently? Can they do it fairly? Are there unfair business practices? That [00:07:00] sprouted up or evolved over the years that no one really had the incentive to assess or review or eliminate because they have such a stranglehold on e commerce sales.
Those are all questions. There's so many questions that'll be answered, I suppose, over the course of months and years.
[00:07:15] Leah: Yeah, and of course, this is just one side of this suit, because Amazon obviously hasn't had an opportunity to respond yet. But I think what I find interesting is that the tone isn't saying that Amazon isn't able to do these things, it's saying that Amazon is intentionally not effectively and fairly managing their marketplace. That it is by design, that it's not being managed fairly because they are trying to stranglehold the marketplace, and that's how you do it.
[00:07:44] chris: They'll probably say it's an unfair burden to them to request that they essentially burn down everything they built and used so far and rebuild from the ground up.
In a much more, you know, equitable, fair system that would appease all parties. They're probably going to say [00:08:00] something like we shouldn't have to create all new technology just to appease all the complainants and all the terms of this filing, because no business owner and no company in America has really been asked.
[00:08:14] Leah: I don't get the sense that they're asking them to do that. From what I've read so far, my sense is that they're asking them to stop doing some of the things that they're doing. Such as requiring the lowest prices to only be on Amazon, otherwise you get penalized. It seems like it's less of an ask to do more things, than it is an ask to stop doing the anti competitive things that they're doing.
[00:08:36] chris: Right. And then obviously some of it's proprietary. Will Amazon have to acknowledge anything about favoritism. Like if you use FBA, what slice of the algorithm is that? If you're spending a certain amount on ads, does that contribute to search rank, and sales algorithms? That is proprietary, algorithmic information. I mean, is that something you can squeeze out in a lawsuit like this?
[00:08:58] Leah: I think it is in [00:09:00] there. I think that's part of what is blacked out. Because they do talk quite a bit about FBA fees and how FBA is a large part of their anti-competitive advantage. So I think that will be included and I think a lot of it is internal information because that was just pages of redacted information for that section.
[00:09:18] chris: Right. And I got the sense that there wasn't anything in there yet that you've seen about breaking the company up into different parts.
[00:09:24] Leah: No. But I haven't gotten to the recommendations yet, so.
[00:09:26] chris: Right. It could be in there.
[00:09:28] Leah: Sorry guys, this only came out a few hours ago. I'm getting through it as quickly as I can.
[00:09:31] chris: As of today, September 26th. Perhaps was considered in the final phase of writing this up, putting it together, too radical and just too big an ask.
[00:09:42] Leah: Well, this is also just the initial filing. This isn't the entire suit. This is just the beginning. This is something that's going to most likely take years to come to fruition. So, you know, this is the beginning of a process. It's not the whole thing. So who knows what it'll end up actually being, but it is interesting that they do [00:10:00] mention the price parity wording coming out of Amazon's policy, but then they have internal communications within Amazon saying that the policy hasn't changed. It's just not there anymore. So they're still enforcing it as they always were, if not more, they just removed it from the T O S after the monopoly issue in the EU. I forget which senator, after a senator complained to the F T C about it.
[00:10:26] chris: We're in Massachusetts, so we had a seller send us the Elizabeth Warren statement about it.
If anyone has anything else to share, whether it's articles, or comments by political figures, members of Congress, even local members of state and local governments. Feel free to share that.
[00:10:46] Leah: I do want to say also, it's interesting to me that neither California nor Washington state were one of the states named in this suit. That's sort of interesting to me. I thought California for sure would be one [00:11:00] of the states involved in this, but Washington not being involved is kind of strange since that is where Amazon is.
[00:11:05] chris: That's one of the shocking pieces to this. We'll try to get some info and word of mouth on that. This is kind of our initial reaction podcast. There'll be more to come. We're going to share relevant articles, posts from people with different takes on it, I'll be interviewing some thought leaders and industry leaders in terms of their take on how this will impact Amazon business owners, brands, Amazon sellers. Diffferent stakeholders in this entire process.
Of course, this is a year's long process, but presumably there'll be little dribs and drabs being analyzed and assessed and coming out as we go. Our focus of course will be on how it impacts business owners, but also consumers, right?
[00:11:47] Leah: Yeah, not necessarily professionally, but ethically, how this stuff impacts consumers is always something that is forefront in my mind, particularly, I guess, because I deal with product compliance [00:12:00] and safety.
Even though it doesn't necessarily affect us professionally, I think as human beings, the effect on consumers affects us. So that is always interesting.
[00:12:09] chris: Yeah. This should impact anyone who buys anything on Amazon. So, maybe the wider conversation around e commerce marketplaces and, how they're managed, how they're regulated by the U S government.
[00:12:21] Leah: They do make a big part. There's a very big part of the filing that goes into the difference between an online superstore versus just an online store, and how they need to be regulated differently because they behave very differently. So that was quite interesting to read.
It's very well written. As somebody who has read many legal things about Amazon that totally didn't understand how Amazon works. So far, this knows how Amazon works.
[00:12:49] chris: This is not one of those. So Leah is saving and will be sharing her favorite snippets/ passages. Hopefully not just one of those documents where [00:13:00] there's one sentence in the middle sandwiched by two giant chunks of black boxes.
[00:13:03] Leah: There is a lot of, Amazon says black box, black box, black box. Yes. According to Amazon, black box, black box, black box.
[00:13:09] chris: So if you're just opening this up and starting to read it, you can savor that and we'll be getting back to this topic very soon. More to come. Thanks for listening. Questions? Let us know.
[00:00:03 Leah: Welcome to Seller Performance Solutions. I am Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris. And today I am here with Piotr of Uncapped, who is here today to talk about accessing funds. Particularly this time of year, as everybody is rushing into Q4 with the recent announcement for Prime Day.
[00:00:22] Leah: I think a lot of sellers are Looking at their liquidity and trying to figure out what they can do right now. Pietro, I'm sure you've had many people reach out to you already.
[00:00:33] Piotr: We did, we did. Yeah, I think it's a busy season ahead of us. So we are looking forward and helping the merchants stock up ahead of the biggest quarter of the year.
[00:00:44] Leah: Yeah, especially, you know, 23 days to go until prime day. By the time this publishes, it'll be 20 days until prime day. So a lot of people are suddenly reassessing their inventory needs and trying to figure out how they can get everything that they need into FBA in time for all of these busy seasons.
So in terms of accessing funding with you guys, what does that process look like and how long does it take?
[00:01:09] Piotr: It really depends on the size of the merchant. So for the smaller merchants, the ones doing up to a million revenue per year, we actually try to do it probably within, within the same day, to be honest.
You go, you connect your data. And what we really need from a smaller merchant is just access to their Amazon accounts, and access to their bank accounts either through the plot connection, so, you know, just keep us very don't read on the access to the account. Or we ask for a bank statements from a larger merchants, you know, those doing more than a million revenue per year. If we have a seven, eight, nine figure merchant, we're also asking for some accounting data. So you know, we want to understand more about the debt and a few other aspects of the books. And I think then you should expect one more day when it comes to a decision making process.
[00:02:13] Leah: That makes sense.
[00:02:14] Piotr: Yeah. Usually if you apply by Monday, by Wednesday you should have money on your bank account.
[00:02:20] Leah: Okay. Wow. Yeah. That's great. So besides speed, because obviously that's a lot faster than a traditional loan, why should sellers look for your type of seller funding as opposed to say a more traditional type of business funding?
[00:02:35] Piotr: I think speed of course is number one, but secondly, it's about the security. We don't take personal guarantee. Basically, it's a completely unsecured loan which means that you don't have to be too stressed about the impacts taking it can have on your personal life. If something were to go wrong.
I also think we're very, very competitive on pricing. Frankly, like we've seen what some competitors are charging and, I've seen some posts in one of the groups that we are, you know, half price versus, versus our competitor.
I have to say we are fairly selective. So, our strategy has always been we want to work with, good quality merchants, good quality sellers, but for them, we offer the best product available.
[00:03:31] Leah: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's just a volatile marketplace in general, so
[00:03:38] Piotr: Exactly, exactly.
[00:03:40] Leah: It makes sense that you would want to work with good quality sellers for sure. But it's great, I didn't realize you guys were so affordable. So that's good to know. And then in terms of repayment structure, how does that work? Cause I know everybody does it a little bit differently.
[00:03:55] Piotr: So I've actually created a LinkedIn post recently, about how we moved away from so called revenue based financing some time ago. And we offer a fixed term repayment products to our merchants. So we agree with the merchant upfront on the repayment schedule of the loan. And I would say on average, for a smaller merchant, usually every payment is over four or five, six months.
And for the highest quality merchants, it's 12 to 18 months. For the larger merchants what we also offer is a product we call line of credit, where we actually give you a facility from which you can draw the money up to the limit at any time you want. And as you repay the money, you can top it up.
So our best merchants always have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 million borrowed from us at any time and, whatever is repaid when they need it, they borrow again.
[00:04:53] Leah: Nice. So you're like the American Express of seller funding basically.
[00:04:58] Piotr: Exactly. Exactly that. Yeah. This was kind of the idea, you take the money as you need. Because you know, I speak with hundreds of merchants every month. They're always telling me, I want two things.
I want the certainty of funding and we give it to them. This is the contract we sign and we fully commit to the amount. And I want the flexibility of the money. Some other companies are forcing you to take all money up front and even though the fee might be lower, but you are paying for money you don't need.
Sometimes it's better to pay slightly more, but use much less or use much more effectively. And this is what we're trying to offer.
[00:05:40] Leah: Yeah, I know. That makes a lot of sense. Why pay for funding that you don't need at that time. No, that's great. It's actually quite perfect. Cause I mean, dealing with cashflow, particularly on Amazon, I mean, e commerce in general is difficult with cashflow, but with Amazon, where at any point they can decide to hold some of your funds for a while, or, you know, account compromises, stops your, your payout for a few weeks. It's definitely something that a lot of sellers run into. Particularly this time of year when everybody's building, building, building, getting into the Q4 season. Which leads me to my next question, which isn't exactly funding based, but as we are heading into the busiest time of year for a lot of sellers, what is your number one tip as somebody who is talking to a lot of Amazon sellers every day?
[00:06:27] Piotr: My number one tip is really plan the inventory management very well. I see, you know, the merchants. I think, first of all, it might be surprising, but I think it's better to understock than overstock. My fiance, she's also a entrepreneur and she runs a business, and I've seen in our family the pitfall of overstocking and how draining it is to have hundreds of thousands or millions stock in the inventory you can't move and you can't sell and you're thinking, gosh, I could have turned around this money so many times and now I have this inventory. And sometimes you have to either liquidate it or you have to wait a year to sell it.
It's very, very expensive. So I would say be careful. Learn to walk before you learn how to run.
[00:07:20] Leah: Yes.
[00:07:21] Piotr: Because I think this is probably the number one mistake that the seller can do.
[00:07:25] Leah: Yeah, no, that's great. I like that because that's actually the opposite of what people usually say. People are usually like "get as much inventory as you can because you never know what Q4 is going to be like". I like yours a lot better because I think a lot of people do get in trouble and they get stuck with a lot of inventory that they then have to try to offload in Q1.
[00:07:41] Piotr: Yeah, and I think like, we still don't know how strong the economy will be. We don't know about Q4 this year, how strong will it be?
What will be the mood of the shoppers? How much free money will they have to buy gifts for everyone? So, I think you can make up this money next year, but if you overstock, like you can really shoot yourself in the foot, and you'll have a problem. So you will have a problem with paying your suppliers, and paying the debt.
Like, it's a spiral that you don't want to fall into.
[00:08:14] Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And then if it's an FBA, you have to pay to get it out of FBA so they don't charge you over stock fees. Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally, I totally agree with you. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. That was perfect. And then last question, if people wanted to reach you or reach uncapped, what is the best way for them to do that?
[00:08:32] Piotr: Our website is weareuncapped. com and if you want to speak to me personally, my email is P I O T R @ weareuncapped.com. I'm also very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and I love to talk to the merchants clients. So feel free to drop me an email as well.
[00:08:49] Leah: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Have a happy Q4. I hope it's busy for you guys. I'm sure it will be.
[00:08:55] Piotr: It will be, and good luck to all the, all the listeners. I hope you know, you help yourself through everything and Happy Prime Day to Zero.
[00:09:02] Leah: Yeah, exactly. Happy Prime Day, everyone. Looking forward to a busy Q4.
[00:09:08] Piotr: Thank you.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe, your co- host here with Leah McHugh, and we're coming back from a mini hiatus where we didn't record a podcast. Coming back in force, talking Q4, talking about things to keep an eye out for, things to avoid, things to prevent in terms of sabotage from competitors and black hat sellers.
Unfortunately, we're still, six, seven, eight years after our first conversation about this, we're still talking about it, but in a different way, which is unscrupulous sellers using various tactics to undermine their competition. Could be fake negative reviews, could be fake safety complaints, intellectual property or infringement claims, you name it, it happens in Q4.
And I'd like to kind of just run through some, I guess you'd say, tips for things to keep an eye out for, and things to know how to report, right? Because we're still seeing sellers just opening cases with seller support and hoping for the best, right? [00:01:00]
Leah: Well, yeah, and there's kind of two issues there. One, support can't really do anything. So, not really useful to the seller. But two, when you're reporting it to support, it doesn't actually get to the abuse teams. And I've actually had conversations with other teams at Amazon where they're not even aware of the prevalence of some of these abuse tactics because they never get to the teams that are actually responsible for enforcing it.
People just open support cases and then just give up. And so the team's responsible for trying to even combat this don't even necessarily know that it's a problem if nobody's reporting it correctly.
Chris: They don't see it and most sellers still don't understand that there are worth worthwhile ways of reporting abuse and there are worthless ways.
So if you get nothing out of today's podcast. Worthwhile, worthless. Don't do the worthless. Amazon won't even notice it. Right?
Leah: Yeah, although sometimes I do like to start with the worthless just to be able to reference it in the worthwhile [00:02:00] avenues because a lot of times the worthless avenues are actually the ones that Amazon are telling you to take.
So I like to be able to be like, I did what you told me to do and it didn't work. So
Chris: I know. We used to advise that.
Leah: I mean, I don't like wait around for it to work, but just like to have it there so I can reference it. Because also you can be like still haven't had anything on that case that you told me to open up.
Chris: That's like, that's probably not going to, in this day and age, even people at Amazon know if they have a candid conversation with you, that that's not going to work, or that no one will see it, or that no one will care about it. And anyone saying differently is not facing the reality. So, what's the starting point?
Leah: No, I just like to give them those metrics, because Amazon is metric focused and if anybody at any point looks into the KPIs and they're like "Hey, this doesn't work 98% of the times" then maybe, I still have optimism that maybe one day it will be improved.
Chris: Right. well stop being optimistic. [00:03:00] Let's focus on what you do first.
Leah: Got it.
Chris: Right. Let's start with the starting point, I suppose. Documentation. Document everything that's going on from an early stage. Don't make assumptions. Don't make guesses. Don't cast about on the seller forums looking for an identical situation, which may or may not compare with yours.
Treat yourself like you're being Attacked or manipulated or in some way abused in a unique case. It's good to know trends. I'm not saying ignore trends, but understand that you need to document everything that's happening to you and only you before you start making blanket assumptions about
"this is happening to all these other people I've seen". Amazon may not agree that your situation is analogous to theirs, right?
Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And also, I mean, these attackers do change up their tactics, so.
Chris: Yeah, of course.
Leah: It just may not, even be the same thing. And I [00:04:00] think that is where a lot of sellers struggle, is it abuse, or did the seller make a mistake, or is there a technical glitch? It can be difficult to tell. And actually that's where documenting all of this stuff can also come in handy. Not just in what you're reporting, but also to be able to see trends. So if you're consistently having weird things happen the first time, maybe it's technical glitch, but the second time or the third time, maybe that requires a deeper investigation. And if you're documenting it from the beginning, it's a lot easier to see those patterns.
Chris: Honestly, if you think it's a trend, just ask us. We can tell you very quickly whether or not we've seen 10 or 12 or 20 or 30 of them in a row over the course of a weekend or a week. Seller forums asking support. Calling and asking account health. Sometimes they'll deny that something's happening when they know what's happening. Again, you know take with a grain of salt anything they tell you. They might actually tell you [00:05:00] that they've had six, seven, eight conversations in a row about the same thing. I don't think it's likely. I think you want to keep track of any strange looking orders, obvious fake reviews, tracking the reviewers themselves, any private messaging you get as well. Anything you can use as a thread that they could potentially pull on, you might have to motivate them to pull on the thread, but you can't just make an allegation of sabotage. You have to start them off, give them a little kickstart without using your feet, and get them on the right path because you don't want to give Amazon investigators, even abuse prevention teams, an excuse to say, "Oh, I don't need to pay attention to this.",
"Oh, I don't need to work on this.",
"I don't need to read this.",
"It's too long.",
"I have a headache.",
"I'm tired."
Don't give them any excuses like that. And again, don't open cases with support thinking that you've taken care of the problem. Don't call account health reps saying, "We need to escalate this.",
"We [00:06:00] need you to contact the abuse prevention teams for us.",
I mean, do that if you have lots of extra spare time. Do not count on that.
Leah: Well, yeah, because also, usually they can't, and even when they say they can, often it doesn't actually happen.
Chris: Now, you're the brand registry. I hate using the term guru, but an expert is such an abused term in the Amazon space.
So, you're fluent in brand registry to the point that you could give some tips in terms of, do you go there for a second or third? And if so, what do you say?
Leah: Yeah. So I think the issue with brand registry is that a lot of brand owners just go to brand registry for everything, and brand registry isn't everything.
And to be honest, I actually try to avoid going through brand registry as much as possible because generally they are kind of a black hole when you do send them this information. There are certain things that only brand registry can fix, but I find that particularly if it's a [00:07:00] keyword abuse issue and you're trying to remove the abusive keywords, You actually have a much greater chance of success if somebody in the catalog team transfers the issue to brand registry, rather than you trying to email brand registry directly.
You tend to get faster responses and you tend to get better responses when it's done through an internal transfer, rather than you sending brand registry information. I think the main issue though is that sometimes when sellers are trying to report abuse, what they actually end up doing is submitting everything as an infringement claim, when it isn't an infringement and they're essentially combating abuse with their own abuse, and that can get them to get caught. They're not going to get taken seriously. And two, they can then get into trouble because they are reporting infringement that isn't infringement, and you don't want to risk losing access to your brand registry account, which, can happen if you incorrectly report [00:08:00] infringement. Also you are forever banned from ever enrolling a brand in brand registry if you misuse those tools.
So if you are going that route, and I mean, obviously there are legitimate cases of infringement and those should be reported via the notice claim of infringement tools, but everything that happens to your brand is an infringement. And that's a very important distinction to make when you're when you're reporting this.
So, yes, I do use brand registry occasionally, but I generally try to avoid it as much as possible. And like I said, if you can get your issue transferred to brand registry from another team, it tends to work a lot better than when you just reach out to brand registry directly.
Chris: And let's talk a little bit about monitoring listings in terms of crazy changes to the content on detail page. We've talked about that a lot in this podcast. Any other indicators of sabotage? Should you be asking for category listing reports, generating those yourself? Should you be reporting it to catalog? Should you report it to catalog and abuse prevention teams? What are you telling the brands in terms of compliance [00:09:00] side when it comes to listing changes?
Leah: Yeah. So, I mean, you can use the category listing reports. The only trouble with category listing reports is that, God, is it two years ago now? A while ago, Amazon changed the category listing report. So where it used to show the live information in the catalog. Now it only shows your contributions. So in terms of looking at abusive changes, the category listing report isn't that useful, other than showing you that the changes didn't happen from your account.
Chris: I think that was only a year ago.
Leah: Was it a year ago? Yeah, I can't remember how long. It was pretty much as soon as I wrote an article about how to use the category listing report, they changed how it worked. But yeah, so it's useful in showing yourself that those changes weren't done by somebody within your own account, but I am recommending most people install listing alert software, so they get an alert whenever a change is made to [00:10:00] their listing. So they can see if somebody else is trying to attack their listing quickly, rather than once Amazon brings it to their attention or somebody on their team happens to stumble across the strange content, because often you don't see it necessarily immediately on your end until it's too late. So it's useful having that alert software. And you can change it so you don't get alert every single time cause that can get quite exhausting, but you can have, you know, just like a daily digest where it's tracking all of your ASINs and it tells you when a change is made. So you can see somebody is trying to attack those listings because they usually do like a test run where they do a small range before they really attack.
Chris: Like back in keyword abuse, right? They they try a few before they come in with the 40 terms.
Leah: Right! Or they try to change a category on something that you maybe wouldn't have otherwise noticed. So it's useful having that alert software so you can see right away if something weird is happening. And yeah, you do want to work with catalog to correct the change, but you also do want to make sure that you're reporting it to the [00:11:00] abuse teams, because like I said, otherwise they don't even know that it's happening. And you want to report it to also hopefully have action taken against whoever did try to attack your listing.
And if the catalog team tell you that the change was made by Amazon retail, that is most likely an attack unless you're selling through Vendor Central because that is a known way that people attack listings, using the Vendor Central platform. But Amazon refers to it as the retail team.
Chris: So throughout Q4, we'll be returning, especially during the peak holiday, we'll be returning to the topic of black hat abuse, common attacks, trends in abuse that we're seeing and black hat behavior.
But to close this conversation out, we know that a lot of people say, "This is an attack. I know who it is", or "I can prove it's an attack. I've got evidence. I'm going to sue. I'm going to get a lawyer. Lawyers are going to fly to Seattle, talk to Amazon on my behalf, or I'm going to email people in Amazon Legal, so on and so forth."
[00:12:00] If the sabotage is severe enough to warrant legal action in terms of your lawyers are writing to attorneys in Amazon legal. You have to, first of all, if it's intellectual property in nature, make sure you're working with an IP attorney, not just somebody who's, you know, spinning their wheels, making suggestions to make it sound like they know what they're talking about.
Lots of attorneys plaguing the space doing that. But, if you have a proper legal approach and strategy, Amazon legal does have some precedent for looking at things and taking some action. What we've seen in our experience is that the attorneys have past contacts in Amazon legal that they've dealt with before on similar issues, or on issues of a similar gravity. So there's already a relationship there. The last three or four or five brand owners that approached us that said they were going to Amazon legal told us which attorneys they were working with, and of course, my first question was, okay, did they do this before? Do [00:13:00] they have specific people that they're writing to directly in Amazon legal?
And the answer was no, they were just going to write a letter and send it to an address that they found for Amazon legal, or send it to a generic email address. So as you can imagine, my first words of caution are don't do that.
Leah: Yeah. I mean, well, one, it can actually take a lot longer to resolve this via the legal teams. And two, I've said this to people before and particularly with the type of cases that I work on, once it's been tagged as somebody in legal has been contacted, it can be a lot harder to get any other team to take action.
Chris: Exactly. And also, if it's poorly phrased, if there's a wrong letter sent to the wrong person, potentially you could have done something within Amazon Legal, but you had the wrong lawyer working on it the wrong way, and you've completely sidelined the effort for months or a year. We hear from people, brand owners that have been attacked numerous times who didn't [00:14:00] understand what strategy was, or they just kind of fell for their lawyer's sales pitch about what a strategy was and it was worthless, right? And nothing happened.
Leah: Yeah.
Chris: And they actually could have made some headway. Especially if they proposed a potential arbitration case where they could argue that they had certain amount of damages, they've been attacked a certain number of times by the same Attacker or competitor, whoever it was the black hat seller and Amazon knew it and didn't take enough action on it. There is a right way to do it, but unfortunately the situation is that we're hearing from a lot of brand owners who have taken the worst absolute approach to fixing it.
Leah: Yeah, and unfortunately, if you do contact the legal team without any solid legal basis, often the response you get back, if you get any response back, if they are emailing those generic cues, often the response back is this is a final decision from our legal department. And often that decision is not the decision that you're looking for.
So, [00:15:00] and again, like I said, once you have that. It's difficult to get any other team within Amazon to overrule what legal has now told you.
Chris: Yeah and it may not even be final because Amazon loves to say this is the final decision at the bottom without meaning it,
Leah: we get those changed all the time, but...
Chris: But, well, with a final but before we wrap here, when it comes from Amazon Legal, it can be a little bit more final than from other teams.
And a lot of people... Trying to force through IP claims the wrong way, or reporting abuse the wrong way, lobbying for brand gating, whatever it might be, don't seem to understand that yet. And we're coming to the end of 2023. And I want to make sure that after years and years of seeing these nightmares from people and brands who are self sabotaging, we want to make sure that you are not one of those brands and that you're not going to take one of these approaches because, I won't say it's a road to ruin, but it's a road to being very unhappy during the worst time of the year to be unhappy.
Is that [00:16:00] fair to say?
Leah: Yeah. It's sort of a roundabout way of saying it, but yeah.
Chris: I love roundabout ways of saying things. So perfect for this podcast. Well, thanks again for listening. Seller Performance Solutions we'll have another wonderful podcast in the very near future. And yes, Q4 is right around the corner.
So keep an eye on things. If anything weird, strange, or hard to explain is happening and you want to show us feel free, otherwise we will talk to you then. Thanks, Leah.
Leah: Thanks, Chris.
Leah: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Leah McHugh from ecommerceChris, and today I'm here with Michelle Covey of GS1 US. Hey Michelle. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Michelle: Hi, Leah. Nice to be with you again today.
Leah: Yeah. So first off, let's just get started. For those who aren't familiar what is GS1 and why is that something that Amazon should know about?
Michelle: Sure. So GS1 is a global standards organization. We are best known For the UPC barcode we do manage a lot of other global standards, but especially as it's relates to Amazon, most of the members come to us to get their product identification to list on Amazon. And that's the main reason for Amazon sellers to engage with GS1, but we are known as a global standards organization.
We manage a lot of other business standards to help businesses transact and have supply chain efficiencies through automation of barcoding [00:01:00] and warehouse processes too.
Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so I think, you know, for most of our listeners, maybe their first experience with you guys was for Amazon.
But certainly as they start selling in other places and particularly physical retailers they come to realize that you guys do a little bit more than just that barcode on the product.
Michelle: Yes, we do. We could spend a whole time talking about all that, but it's very complex. So we'll just talk to how Amazon sellers engage with GS1 pretty much around that product identifier, but we help Amazon sellers on many ways in the listing process too.
So we can chat about how GS1 is here to help out.
Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And so maybe we can start with what are some of the things that sellers often have issues with when they first get started with GS1 on Amazon.
Michelle: Well, first of all one of the first things Amazon asks for is for sellers to identify their product.
And again, that's where sellers will engage with GS1. They will come to us to get their bar, we'll call it barcode. It's also used [00:02:00] interchangeably with GTIN, the global trade item number or UPC or EAN if you're in Europe they're all kind of used interchangeably, but really it's that number that is associated to your product.
You'll see that number also at the bottom of a barcode that gets scanned, it goes beep at the checkout stand when you're at the grocery store. But that is really why members will come to us, get their identification need Uniquely identify their products to be able to list on Amazon.
And I think the importance of coming to GS1 is we do ensure that that product identifier is genuine. It is associated to the company and Amazon claims on their seller support that they do verify those through the GS1 database. So we want to make sure that we're getting sellers started off on the right foot.
Coming to GS1, getting their identifiers instead of going elsewhere because there are other you know, places that they can get identification. But Amazon doesn't have that verification in place for [00:03:00] other sources. They come to GS1 to verify that the GTIN came from GS1.
Leah: Actually, one of the issues that we regularly see sellers come across is if they have a parent company and then multiple brands underneath the company. Basically, you need to get your UPCs whitelisted and so they're regularly asking for either, GS1 certificate, and then also the relationship between the parent company and the brand names.
We're seeing that more and more, actually, Amazon requesting that documentation from GS1.
Michelle: Well, you bring that up that they ask it from GS1, the brand name that is associated to the company is actually managed by the brand owner. So we do provide the data that associates that item number to that company, but that brand name is actually something that the brand owner or the seller would have to provide.
So there is a little misconception. We do get a lot of those calls saying that GS1 has to provide that brand name authorization. When it's really on the brand and it is a misconception a lot of times because our members will [00:04:00] come to us and ask to change their company name to their brand name because they want the brand name in the database.
And I always give the example. Coca Cola would never change their company name to Sprite. Sprite's brand in their portfolio, but they would never change their company name to Sprite. So, we don't have our members do the same. What the seller would have to do is actually provide that proof to Amazon that they are the rightful owner of that brand or they are a legitimate authorized seller of that brand.
Whether they show a picture of the brand on their product or a website there's a couple of different things that Amazon might ask for in order to prove that brand name association the company.
Leah: Yeah, well, ideally you can use your trademark registration because ideally the trademark is owned by the company that also owns the UPCs.
So we usually find that a combination of the GS1 certificate showing that their company owns UPCs and then the trademark registration. Assuming it's under the same company name, hopefully it's under the same company name. That [00:05:00] tends to be the most sure bet way of getting those approved. And then once it's approved, you know, they can list their branded products.
It's not like on a per product basis, which is good because sometimes Amazon does make you come back every single time to do things. So this one, you're good to go with your brand. Once you get that approved, which is nice. Another issue that we see pretty regularly with sellers is they go to list their products with their freshly minted GS1 UPCs, and then Amazon Systems tells them that there's another product being sold under that UPC and that they can't list their new product. Is this something that you guys hear about a lot, I imagine?
Michelle: Yes we call that a GTIN hijacking scenario where if you are the legitimate owner of that UPC and it seems that some other seller has used it on the platform You could prove that you're the owner.
So you have that GS1 company certificate that shows that you're the owner. What we suggest to do, and Amazon did [00:06:00] update their standard operating procedure, their SOP, to handle such scenarios. When you send in the case to selling partner support, reference GTIN hijacking in your case, and that way it will actually be routed to the right queue in order for the Amazon selling partner support team to help get your product listed with your rightful barcode or your UPC, and then take down the invalid listing.
And so put the words GTIN hijack or GTIN hijacking in your case. And again, it'll get routed to the right queue, but provide your GS1 certificate and that will also prove that you are the owner of that GTIN.
Leah: Right. That's really great because previously just going through regular seller support.
One, they didn't really know what you were talking about half the time. And two, they didn't necessarily have the tools to help you there. So that's really great because I'm not sure how many sellers would naturally use the term GTIN hijacking. So that's a really great tip for a lot of people.
Michelle: Exactly. [00:07:00] And again, it's a term we've kind of dubbed but it is something that Amazon has also in talking with them and helping out them kind of create this sOP that was kind of the terminology that we decided on. So trying to get the word out and we tell our members when they come to us and have that issue.
Leah: That's really great. Cause I think most sellers will just say barcode or UPC, you know, GTIN isn't necessarily part of their regular template.
Michelle: And even providing the error, the listed error code. I think that also helps too.
Leah: So another way that we've also been seeing the GS1 certificate come in handy for sellers is abuse on the marketplace is pretty rife. And so often if your listing is hijacked you can use... Well, so one, you can use product images to show that it's your product as well.
But if somebody changes the brand's name and Amazon pushes back saying that, well, no, they own this product the GS1 certificate [00:08:00] is also quite useful in proving that it is your product and that you do own it. And it isn't whatever the brand has been changed to. But we also are seeing more and more sellers looking at that data of their competitors and using it to help identify review hijacking and reporting that sort of abuse because you often see products that are associated with multiple UPCs in Amazon's backend, often completely unrelated to completely different companies that have then been either merged or put together as ASIN variation families with everything out of stock.
So it looks like a brand new product has 5, 000 reviews, 50, 000 reviews when it's a newly launched product. And what I find interesting in this is that the FTC is also paying a lot more attention to this as well. And again, like using that data from GS1 and from Amazon, you can also report that sort of abuse to the FTC.
And that's something that we're talking to sellers quite a lot [00:09:00] about recently, because there is renewed interest from the FTC and within Amazon, because the FTC is interested in it. So it's interesting because we've gone from however many years ago that Amazon changed their UPC policy.
What was that? Five or six? Where most people didn't even know what GS1 was for Amazon. And now it's like, we're using the GS1 certificate more and more with sellers.
Michelle: Yeah. And it's really fascinating too, because I think Amazon starting to understand the value of all of the GS1 system of standards too.
So not just on product identification, but, you know, starting to look at other areas of some of the GS1 standards. Product information and images, things like that, that like you said, all are very important on product listings and as we're talking more and more with them, the product certification claims, like the climate pledge friendly work that Amazon has been really advocating for, they've [00:10:00] engaged us to, to determine how to link those sort of certifications to actual GTINs to make sure that they are actual verified certifications to prove that they are associated to that product. I think it's amazing just the value of how product identity is really helping with a lot of their other initiatives at Amazon too.
Leah: Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, a large portion of their operations are logistic. So it's actually kind of surprising to me that it took this long for them to start using universal standards because surely on their end as well, It's more difficult when, when there are duplicates and when there is incorrect information in their system.
So it's nice to see that moving forward, it's more standardized because I think that it makes it easier for Amazon, but it also makes it easier for sellers as well. Not having to troubleshoot quite as often incorrect data in the system.
Thank you so much for joining us, Michelle. It's, as always, been very educational. And if sellers have any questions who should they reach out to at GS1?
Michelle: So we have [00:11:00] our member support team is awesome. They really are great at helping answer questions.
You can reach out to them at info@gs1us.org. We also have some great resources. We have a GS1US YouTube channel that has a lot of short videos and informational videos to help sellers understand GS1, GS1 standards, understand what problems they might encounter if they don't start with the GS1 barcode as well.
And so we have a lot of resources there. And then of course if anybody is interested in learning more about just supply chain, we have our Next Level Supply Chain podcast, which always has some very fascinating topics. If anybody's interested in and listens to podcasts.
Leah: Yeah. I was a guest on that podcast. I very much enjoyed joining you guys. So perfect. Thank you so much, Michelle and I look forward to speaking with you soon.
Michelle: Sounds good. Thank you.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh, also of ecommercechris, how are you doing, Leah?
Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
Chris: Good. I know you're oceans and worlds away right now, but no matter how far you go, how many miles you travel, one thing doesn't change, right?
We still hear from people who are telling us, Hey, we got our listing back up, but now it's suspended again. Oh, but the original listing was suspended too, right? We find out that they didn't actually get their listing back up. They somehow hired an agency or a service or a consultant or a service provider who just created the listing newly and ignored the fact that it was suspended, right?
We've seen this a handful of times and it seems to be growing. Is that fair to say?
Leah: Yeah, and sometimes the seller themselves, just rather than trying to get the original ASIN reinstated. We'll just create a new ASIN. And in all fairness, I have had account health reps and seller support people tell people to do this.
Chris: Oh, yeah, for sure. [00:01:00] I should have started with that. Amazonians themselves are erroneously giving terrible advice. Yeah. For whatever reason, they probably don't know, they don't care, they're not trained, no one's watching them, listening to them on these calls or in writing, they're saying, go ahead and relist it, you know, I have a theory that possibly they see that there's a note on the account that says, do not reinstate this listing no matter what.
And so they don't know what to tell the seller, except I don't know, try to put it somewhere else, try to change the listing, somehow, try to make a new one. They never tell the seller that they could lose their entire account to a suspension for doing this.
Leah: No, and I'm assuming it's because they don't know that or they don't care, I'm not sure which. I assume, but they don't know it.
Chris: I think they know it because per policy, if you're going to evade a suspension. It's the same thing as you can't just open another seller account when your first seller account is suspended and just hit the do over button. It's the same thing on the ASIN level.
Leah: [00:02:00] Yeah, it's also against the listing policy. Even if your ASIN isn't suspended, if for whatever reason you want to create a new ASIN for the same product, that is also against Amazon policy, unless it's materially different for some reason, like a brand rebrands a product or something like that.
Chris: The reason I mentioned, you know, working with an agency or a consultant who either didn't know what the policy was themselves, didn't care was because we saw this on LinkedIn, right? Somebody said, well, if Amazon's against this, why didn't they just pull the second listing down right away?
It must be within policy to do this. And then, of course, an Amazon person jumped on the LinkedIn thread to say, no, this is against policy. What the hell?
Leah: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I have that conversation with people every day. Well, if this is against policy, how come my other listings are fine? And it's like, oh, because Amazon's bad at consistently enforcing it, but it's still a policy.
Chris: Well, it's not even that. First of all, it wouldn't necessarily happen right away. It might be found later. Don't give Amazon too much credit for assuming they've got the best teams, the [00:03:00] best tools, the best technology, as soon as you screw something up, they don't immediately pounce on you and say, we found your violation.
We're taking that listing down. And you have to appeal on the first one and also we're taking your account down too or reviewing your account for a suspension. Amazon is not nearly that organized that sophisticated in their technology. So, of course, you found an evasive way to relist the item. What I was talking about originally was somebody said, oh, we got our listing back up, which to me meant their appeal was accepted for reinstatement. Not oh, we found a circuitous way of somehow getting our product relisted.
Leah: Yeah, well, I have had conversations with people who hired someone and they're like, yeah, they got it reinstated, but we lost all of our reviews and we had to assign a new UPC to it.
And I was like, oh that wasn't reinstated. They just made a new listing for the same product. And so then they want to get their old reviews and their old sales history back. And it's like, well, you can't do that in any way. And then also now your whole [00:04:00] account is a risk. So, sorry.
Chris: Well, and then the more they try and some of them, some brand owners, I guess, are being duped by services who don't tell them, they just say I'll get your listing back up. They don't say I'll do it breaking the rules, breaking policies, and I'll risk your whole account.
Leah: Well, and it's also not really getting your listing back up, but yeah.
Chris: But that's the phrase they use. And then some of the brand owners say, okay, well, they got my listing back up, but they couldn't harvest the reviews for us. So we want to hire you, meaning us, to take over and to lead that effort. We've tried to do it several times on our own and we failed. So they've been jumping up and waving and screaming at Amazon teams enforcement teams to take another look at their account every time they've appealed this every time they've tried to do it themselves. They had no idea they were risking their whole account because the service they hired deceptively told them that they had gotten the listing back up and didn't tell them it broke policies.
So, actually, they've been increasing their odds of an account [00:05:00] suspension, right?
Leah: Also if you try to merge the reviews by creating a variation family or something like that. That's yet another policy violation. So the more that you try to merge the listings and merge the reviews for this erroneous duplicate listing with the original listing, the more policies you violate in that process.
Chris: You compound the problems. A seller last week asked me if this is true, if my relisting this product under a different ASIN in after the 1st listing was suspended. If that was against policy, I went through all my performance notifications. Amazon never sent me a message saying that I couldn't create a duplicate. That was her logic.
Leah: Right, but it's in their written policy. They just didn't look at the policy page. Amazon's not going to tell you every time you might be about to violate their policy and be like, oh, hey, you might want to look at this.
Chris: Again I think she's assuming that they're all knowing all seeing, top of their [00:06:00] game.
And then as soon as you color outside the lines, there's somebody there watching you, like, some sort of overseer to slap your wrist and to send you the warning. I said, of course, you don't have any performance notifications. They don't know that you did this.
Leah: Well, and I think we have had the conversation before of like, well, why does Amazon allow this to happen?
And from a technical standpoint, it is very difficult for them to stop it before it happens. They're having to rely on product identifiers to differentiate between products because so many products are very much the same on paper. So they can't really look at keywords or descriptions.
They really do have to rely on that product identifier, because it could be the exact same product, but maybe it has a different brand name on it and that that makes it a materially different product. It really isn't technically feasible at this point for them to block it from happening.
So they really only have the choice at this point to enforce after it does happen.
Chris: Exactly. That's the [00:07:00] logic. I think a lot of sellers and brand owners don't understand that Amazon's logic doesn't necessarily square with ordinary logic. It might work for their purposes based on their resources, their tools, and their people, and how their SOPs, their standard operating procedures work.
It won't make sense to us really ever.
Leah: No, see, I disagree here. I think Amazon's logic is actually sound here. I think Seller's logic here is flawed.
Chris: Their logic, it suits their purposes and their interests for what's convenient for them.
Leah: Right. But I mean, what are they supposed to do? Every time someone goes to create a listing, they're like, hold on. Let me cross reference that against all the billions of listings we have in our catalog. I think that's a duplicate, that doesn't make sense.
Chris: I mean, in terms of seeing this play out in real time or not.
Leah: That's what I mean I don't think it's possible for them to like, do this in real time.
Chris: But I think the expectation is built out there in people's minds that Amazon can react and take action and pursue things real time and if they don't do it right away or within a [00:08:00] small amount of time, it means you've like gotten away with it.
Leah: Well, to those people I say, have you ever talked to seller support? Cause not in real time, right?
Chris: Our new comedy hour. Don't worry, everyone. This episode will not go on for an hour. We're going to keep this one short because we really don't need to go that far into it.
Whether you're doing it yourself or you're examining the claims made by a service that you might be onboarding to help you with something, examine their language. If they say, we're going to get this listing back up for you, say, okay, do you mean you're going to help me appeal for reinstatement and solve the problem at its source?
Or you're going to try to create some sort of masquerade of we'll get your listing back up, but we're going to find a creative, tricky way to do it. Well, that doesn't help your listing because any competitor can report you for this and get that new listing knocked down anytime they want to.
Leah: Well, also generally you're not fixing whatever [00:09:00] caused the original suspension in the first place.
Chris: Right if the same issues were never addressed or safety or compliance, whatever the case may be.
If you're selling anything that has any value to you or takes any valuable sales away from your competition, and I mean, even low amounts of money, they can easily report it.
They'll figure out if they have any brains at all, they'll figure out what you did and report it. And they can get Amazon to act on it. Unless they have no idea how to report things, I suppose. But also, consider before you, again, bring in a service to get your listing back up, quote unquote, consider what can happen to your account health.
Can you flag yourself in ways that you never would have before for an account review, which could take down the whole account, right?
Leah: Well, and I think as something I've said before, I'm sure is just because something is technically possible to do in Amazon system doesn't mean that you're allowed to do it.
However, if it is technically possible to do, there will be a service provider who will be happy to take your money to do it. So, just because it's [00:10:00] possible, and just because somebody offers it as a service doesn't mean you should be doing it. It doesn't mean it's within Amazon's policies and. Because I regularly have that conversation with people where well, it like, it's technically possible to do so what what's the problem or catalog will do that for me. So, what's the problem? Just because you can get around the controls and the system doesn't mean that you're allowed to do that.
Chris: Just because your account gets suspended, your whole account gets suspended. You somehow find a way to create a 2nd seller account. And they don't suspend it right away. It doesn't mean that's going to last forever. Number one, it's the same principle. But you know, that doesn't mean just because you can do it doesn't mean that it's within policy. The claims made on LinkedIn are becoming increasingly disturbing. So I want to caution everybody from just because it's posted publicly and a couple of people in the comments, are like great idea. Fire. A hundred percent. What a wonderful hack. And it might be LinkedIn. It might be at a conference somebody might. Say, oh, seller hacks, seller hacks. This is great.[00:11:00] The good thing about LinkedIn is we know that Amazon enforcement team people are paying more attention to those posts and sometimes they're commenting on them.
Leah: Which I actually really enjoy when they comment on them. It's pretty entertaining, right?
Chris: Completely just deflates the balloon, right? Everyone's excited. I can't believe this is a great hack. I can't believe you're sharing this for no money, no money, blinking lights. Obviously Amazonians are on there looking at these posts because they know there's tons of terrible advice.
They know that some of these consultants or whoever's posting it, agencies are getting dozens or hundreds of people to follow them Pied Piper style off the cliff.
Leah: Well, and that's not to mention the people that they're probably doing it for as their clients.
Chris: And if you took those clients or those types of paid customers away, then those agencies probably wouldn't even exist.
It's probably they're, not to go into French on you, but they're raison d'etre as people say would be. Yeah, I wanted to weave that in .
Leah: Chris is like, I know French guys.
Chris: Yes. I used to work on Amazon France. Everybody just outing myself [00:12:00] now, former French speaker. Definitely need to go back to France soon.
Thank you for joining me from the other side of the world. I can see that it's still dark there. It is very much light outside here. Trying to shine a light as always on compliance with Amazon policies, keeping you out of trouble. We understand that people are looking for new ways to get better sales rank, sell more items.
We're heading into Q4, this is going to be a recurring theme. You have any questions on should I do this, should I not? I was advised to do this, should I do it or not? Feel free to ask us, and especially ask Leah since she's our compliance person. Happy to go over things and answer any questions.
So thanks for joining me. Bye. Bye.
Chris: [00:00:00]
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe. I'm here with my colleague, Leah McHugh. How are you doing Leah?
Leah: I'm doing good thanks, how are you going Chris?
Chris: Doing good. I'm doing better now than after reading a few disconcerting emails we got from people who said that they had already escalated something.
We've seen, I think an increase in the last month or so. Maybe it was because of Prime Day and some additional desperation that people had to resolve problems quickly. We're hearing more and more from sellers telling us we've escalated this already, but we might need your help to escalate it further.
Then we look. Some of your cases are like this, just like mine, we look at the details and we see that there's no escalation, right? They just called support or somebody in account health told them that they were escalating it. I think maybe account health reps are starting to use this term escalation more than they were earlier this year.
And it's just like this has to be defined. Otherwise, people are going to think they've escalated something and it [00:01:00] really hasn't changed what they did before. Isn't that fair to say?
Leah: Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to the term hijacking, which we see used incorrectly. Pretty. I mean, part of it is amazon jargon that does get used pretty freely. So catalog team will often say that they're escalating something for you. Or like you said, account health, or I also see just sellers and support cases saying, please escalate this. And I mean, yes, that is an escalation, but that's escalating it to the shift manager.
Whereas when we're talking about escalations, we're talking about the VP+ type of escalations.
Chris: Right? Well, and people automatically assume and in the old days, you could write to Jeff and it would go to executive seller relations and it would be treated like a proper escalation that email queue has been so overused and so overplayed for years that now you tend to get a message from whoever happened to be hanging around who saw it, who had [00:02:00] the message or the email delegated to them.
So you can still write to Jeff, of course. You might even still get a reply from executive seller relations, but not what it used to be, right? You kind of get the same copy and paste lower level response that you got when you were emailing seller performance cues back in the day. So I think some of it is the confusion over, we wrote to Jeff.
We know that's an escalation. It went to executives, our relations. We confirmed that it went there. Yes. But was it treated like a proper escalation and reviewed by somebody manager level or higher? Probably not.
Leah: Yeah. And also some sellers. When they say escalation, they just mean that they emailed their appeal to as many people as they could find an email address for, and that's not really an escalation either.
It needs to have an actual escalation letter in there in order to be escalated. Otherwise, you're just spamming people, essentially.
Yeah,
Chris: There has to be an escalation language in there. Not just we want to escalate this. That's the other kind of mistake I've [00:03:00] seen lately. One sentence. This has gone on long enough.
We're getting no response or bogus responses from your internal teams. We want to escalate this. And that's exactly how they leave it. Requesting an escalation without comments. Justifying it without backing it up with facts and figures without saying why it has to be escalated. I think this is the big underappreciated piece to the equation.
You have to say why they need to look at it. Why that person should be devoting time to reviewing it, right?
Leah: Yeah, and I think that escalations are sold to a lot of people as well this is just what you do when you want Amazon to do what you want. And you need to have a basis of escalation. That basis generally needs to be that Amazon is not doing what Amazon is supposed to be doing. And you need somebody that knows what they're doing to look at it. Otherwise, you're just spamming people. We don't like it. Fix it. Isn't a basis for escalation.
Chris: Right. And there's Weak [00:04:00] reasons and strong reasons for saying you guys aren't doing the right thing, fix it. If you get an appeal denied and they don't tell you why, well, it's because their messaging is murky and opaque and of course they don't tell you why. Almost every message from Amazon doesn't provide real information.
But a better escalation would be we call it account health and we confirm that there are no annotations justifying the denial of an appeal. Therefore, we'd like to escalate this for proper managerial level or VP level review. That's one way to go. The other way to go is we called account health, they couldn't tell us anything.
The message doesn't tell us anything. So we just want to escalate it. Wrong way to go and there's a huge divide between those two different approaches, right?
Leah: Yeah. And of course there's a huge divide in how successful those approaches are. Because again, one is showing Amazon that there are gaps in their processes and their processes aren't working. The other one is just complaining.
Chris: Yeah. And one of my pet peeves lately were again, in the emails we got, I think it was last week or the week before, we've already escalated this. And they're [00:05:00] just denying it, or they're just sending us the same message over and over. How would you escalate it differently from us?
Well, number one, we wouldn't even be in business if we couldn't escalate it differently than some of the sellers who approach us. Number two, you can't just say we've escalated it without even pausing to think, did I escalate it well? Did I escalate it mediocre mid range or did I escalate it poorly? There's a scale for this stuff.
A bad escalation and a good escalation have totally different odds of success. Stop and think about that before you even send something in. We're not necessarily saying that you need us to do every escalation you do between now and the rest of your life. But you have to at least consider or get a second opinion on whether or not what you've put together has a snowball's chance in hell of even being read, let alone accepted.
That's one of the big gaps in education about escalations right now.
Leah: I also very rarely will immediately escalate a case. Generally speaking, I review everything that's been submitted prior to us taking over. If, if there has been anything submitted prior to us [00:06:00] taking over and then I usually will still have them submit some sort of an appeal that we have written because, generally speaking I can see that there are gaps in the appeals that have already been submitted. So it's not ready to be escalated yet. And I think that's also key, I mean, you can escalate and you can escalate, but if the initial appeal is already missing key information, it doesn't matter how good your escalation is if the appeal isn't there. So sometimes the appeal is solid and I can escalate it, but it's very rare that I can escalate something as soon as we receive the case. Generally speaking, I still will take them through the correct processes first, even if they have already escalated it on their side.
Chris: It's the same thing with a plan of action. A lot of people say, well, I did a plan of action and I had it in the appeal and they didn't take it. So I escalated it. Okay. Once again, same concept. Did you think about how good the POA was? Because when you're escalating a plan of action and you think it's complete and you think your account should be reinstated based on that [00:07:00] POA or your ASIN, in the escalation itself, you're highlighting the merits of the plan of action, the strengths of that plan, why it should be enough to convince them, why it should work to improve your operations to make sure the same problem doesn't crop up again.
Don't assume you have a great plan of action and that they rejected it simply because they didn't read it. If you need a second opinion on the quality of your POA, we can give one to you.
But, again, there's nothing to escalate with. You're supposed to be quoting from the POA with the highlights of the strengths and why you've improved things. Why you fix the problem, why they should accept it. And that forms the basis of the escalation language, right? Not just, Hey, here's my POA again.
We got rejected. We don't know why. Escalate this and reinstate us. Right?
Leah: Yeah. I think the main thing that sellers need to know is that you can't just send these in willy nilly, because you essentially burn bridges if you send in a bad escalation, it means that if, if you do [00:08:00] hire somebody to take it over later, or you come back with a second pass to do it better.
It's much more difficult to get people to pay attention to you that second time around. So you want to make sure that. What you are sending in is as high quality as possible from the beginning. So you're not having to try to correct those mistakes further down the line. Cause ultimately sometimes things are just too far gone for us to fix when people come to us sometimes.
So you really need to make sure that you're doing it right and not creating too much damage for somebody else to take over later.
Chris: And of course, you know, for selfish reasons, we like to say, my God, don't come to us after you've already written to Jassy. And all these different executives and complain to them.
That's what we mean by burning the bridges. I mean, if you've burned down all your escalation paths and you expect to be rescued later, sometimes when we're contacted, I just say, look, it's too far along. You've already created too much damage for anyone to come along and help you.
Not just us. I mean, anybody, unless your next door neighbor works at Amazon, you live in [00:09:00] Seattle, you have a great relationship, and also they review escalations and reinstate accounts. It's probably not going to happen at that point. One last thought before we close this topic, which of course, there'll be an article I'm putting together, there'll be other times we're touching on this during summer, during Q4.
The silly subject lines. This is something you and I have talked about quite a bit. People writing at Jassy, or Dharmash, or whoever they might be writing to, high level executives, senior VP, whoever it is, and expecting to get their attention with the same document, the same appeal that's already been rejected just because you put quotes from Shakespeare in the subject lines or something silly or ridiculous.
Like, hey, if this is a joke, this isn't funny.
Leah: I think it's like the clickbait theory, like, they'll be so intrigued by it that they'll have to click through to read the email. That doesn't really work with Amazon.
Chris: Well, you might actually get their attention.
Leah: Sure, but it's just not in the way that you want it to be.
Chris: Right. For the wrong reasons. It's like how there's good publicity and there's [00:10:00] bad publicity. This is the same concept. And I don't know who started this trend. It's pretty unprofessional. It's also just not effective. Don't really expect to get anywhere if you're going to kind of insult your audience or insult their intelligence with the clickbait theory or just, hey, let's do something eye grabbing and then hope the rest will sort itself out.
You know what's eye grabbing? A well thought out POA and a well reasoned appeal.
Leah: Well, I also, if you don't have enough hard hitting reasons to put into the subject line for them to actually open it, then you probably shouldn't be escalating. You're not ready to escalate at that point if you can't create a good headline based on what you are escalating for.
Chris: Right. It's just like anything else in life. If you're trying to get somebody's attention and impress people by being really flashy and you buy a new sports car and you drive around town with the top down, but you're kind of an insubstantial shallow person on the inside, then you might [00:11:00] not attract the right kind of attention from people.
Same thing. You're not going to impress any executives in Amazon just because wow, that's a funny line in the subject line. Half the time, they're not even looking at the subject line. They're looking at the guts of the appeal. We saw a couple of these come in, we understand that sellers don't necessarily think of these.
Usually it's like a service that's trying to make themselves or keep themselves relevant. Question these things if you see it, because you're hurting your chances. You're not helping your chances, but ultimately it's not the service that's on the hook for a denied appeal. I mean, they might be on the hook because you paid them some money, but your seller account is what's going to pay the price.
And so those are our final words of wisdom for today. Any questions on this? Obviously, Leah and I do different types of escalations for different types of cases. So we're happy to answer questions for you as you have them. Just don't push things too far along until they go over the cliff and then call out for help.
We appreciate it if you get to us a bit, a bit earlier in the process. Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you again soon.
Recording with YoniRecording with YoniLeah: [00:00:00] Hey, Amazon sellers. We are here today with Yoni Mazor of GETIDA.com. Very excited that they are sponsoring Seller Velocity for, I think the fourth year in a row, possibly fifth year in a row. When was the beginning? , I think we started in the beginning.
Chris: We did New York. You were not there for that, but you've been there for every year since.
Yoni: I believe. Hold on. So Velocity 2018 was in the basement of Abigail's? We were there, definitely. We were there with Ezra from my team. Ezra from my team was the speaker there. I remember that. So we were there. We were definitely there. We sponsored it. We spoke and the whole thing.
Chris: Yeah, Abigail's isn't there anymore. Things have changed.
Yoni: Well, that was like a landmark place. But, I was there. But I wasn't famous enough or, or dignified enough for you to know me, meaning you were up there and I was, I was catching up to Chris.
Chris: We know you enough now. That's what matters.
Leah: So we're back in New York for the first time since that first year. It's very exciting and this year we are focusing on optimizing your processes [00:01:00] for brand growth because, It's great to expand and spend money on things, but isn't it better to make a little bit more money on what you're already doing?
Yoni: A hundred percent. If we compare it back to 2018 or 2019, a lot of the more back then was the hack, the shortcuts of how to generate sales. Okay. Now a different evolution of the sales it's okay, but how do we create sales that are lucrative? Because we're branded and we can really control our destiny.
It's much more holistic. So, obviously COVID we had the whole story of COVID in between that gave a whole lift to the whole e commerce industry. So yeah, I think this is the most exciting time because it's so really valuable. It's not the shortcuts. It's the long, long road to really resonate with consumers out there and create something that is special, unique, differentiated, and this environment, you know, Seller Velocity and all the content around it and the activities will nourish that enhance that with, you know, the industry leaders. So that's exciting times to be in the business, but it's even more exciting time to come to New York [00:02:00] and hit up the event.
Chris: Yeah, everyone's looking for any additional value, right? Isn't this one reason why you guys have thrived in the last couple of years beyond the last four or five years, but in the last couple of years, any additional value is appreciated and people understand where those areas of additional value are better now than even two years ago, I would think. Right?
Yoni: Yeah. Yeah. Because if I had to kind of give commentary, what happened, especially since COVID is that so many players got thrown into this industry. And a lot of these pillars are really professionals or real brands, right? So all of a sudden they have this edge, they have this advantage and being a brand.
So they're already being looked for. So the sellers who are just Amazon native or hack native. I had to level up their game or get out and that's where we are today and so they have to kind of layer it in. It's not just one hit and you're good, right? Layer after layer.
You know, traffic from outside. There's many sources. There's TikTok. There's Facebook. There's Instagram. Twitter. Each one has its own science. It's own art form, right? Threads. We've got [00:03:00] threads now. You see, in the past, I've waited another two minutes on something else. Things are dynamic, they change. So you got to figure that out.
There's email marketing posts, post email marketing, elements. Of course, packaging, it just starts with the whole journey. So a lot of the sellers are thinking about the whole journey of their avatar, their target audience and consumer, and crafting a whole experience from top to bottom.
And that is much more professional. It takes much more time, much more resources, much more know how. So you got to be much more connected to the industry, much more than ever.
Leah: Yeah, that's what's been fun about doing this conference for the last five years is that we've got to grow the content with the industry growing.
So, you know, a few years ago, the focus was how to get omnichannel and not just on Amazon. Now we're to the next level where everybody's pretty omnichannel at this point. So now it's well, how do you do this the best way that you possibly can. And so you're using your resources wisely. So it's nice to get to change the content as things progress.
Chris: Yeah. We witnessed the evolution. [00:04:00]
Yoni: So yeah, there's an old saying that I learned back in my university days, it just stuck with me and it's so true. And this, this little topic we're touching on now kind of illustrates that the only thing that doesn't change, is change. It's a paradox. So you know, things are changing again. But really, I think honestly, it's special. This is a special time. This is a special moment and sellers really have to understand that they have to gear up. They have to buckle up. And make a switch, instead of a side hustle, lifestyle business, they have to realize that the switches, you gotta have to professionalize in this, you don't go to med school, just, to do it as a side gig.
You're not going to invest all these resources just to then do it on the side. It's just not going to work. So you're entering into that moment. Oh, you're in that moment, but. Hopefully with this New York event you're going to elevate that moment and continue the journey.
Chris: You've done different things with Seller Velocity every year. We keep it fresh. We don't always have the same [00:05:00] speakers, we don't always have the same content. So we're evolving within the conference, the same way sellers have had to evolve and the way brands have had to evolve. And Amazon evolves really slowly, I think in a lot of ways, but they evolve too.
Yoni: Not really slowly. Amazon it's like dog years, one day is like a whole year. But Yeah, I think it's special times.
Leah: Yeah. And last year we added the VIP day because networking is incredibly important, particularly in this industry.
And we always wanted to make a priority with these conferences to make it intimate and make it, so you leave at the end of the day with friends rather than people that you just met at a conference. So we added that VIP day to give a little bit extra time for people to really get to know each other and do it around an activity, because everybody likes activities and we try to get people to get offline for a day, right?
So they can actually focus on their business, focus on who they're talking to, rather than answering emails and calls like we all have to do all day every day.
Chris: Networking requires focus too, by the way. If you're constantly looking at your [00:06:00] phone or making calls outside of an event, then you might lose an hour that you could have spent productively networking at the event itself. I mean, I hope people don't do that too much when they pay to attend, but some people do sometimes you see them, even outside, like you were mentioning Las Vegas a minute ago. Sometimes you see people outside the Prosper show who aren't really taking advantage of networking there, which is a much larger event.
Leah: They're not taking it in. They're not making that switch that I'm going to professionalize that I'm I'm in the university or whatnot. And I got to hone in on my educational elements and it's important to make that switch.
GETIDA have always been very good at that. You guys always have a very good booth for hanging out and networking.
Yoni: Yeah, we like to create a kind of usually the lounge effect where you sit down because it can be overwhelming, sensational, Vegas, which is sensational. Then the show, all the booths, all the swag and all the kind of right in a moment, in a moment.
So we try to create those moments of okay, I can take a breath, but I want to [00:07:00] touch, to what you said earlier, Chris, where people have to kind of make that switch. It reminds me of the Matrix, the movie, we have to kind of pull them out of the Matrix into the real world, right? I have to go to you know, heading into Zion.
I think that was Jerusalem or something like that over there. The other Zion. Yes. The other Zion in the Matrix movie. So you got to unplug yourself, put your phone on fly mode. Once you're in the session, once you're in the zone, five minute session, an hour session. I'm setting the obvious.
But it's not so obvious anymore because we're so wired in. So I think that's important that sellers to get out of their comfort zone, travel, zoom out. Of the regular stuff and zoom into educational, then you absorb this, you soak it in, but also people soaking it with you, you, the natural bonding will happen and then one good relationship or one good connection with one seller, they give the one advice that one can make a big difference for you and that's always a super valuable. Now the first day is going to be New York city, Manhattan, right? Yes. The second day is not going to be there, correct?
Leah: It is not. And I'll tell you a secret, which we have not actually posted anywhere publicly yet. The venue on the second day. It does not have [00:08:00] phone reception, so people will not have a choice. They are offline.
Chris: You are going to be networking. I like what you said about their booth though, because I can give you a testimonial in terms of a GETIDA booth at the average conference, which is you guys are friendly, you're engaging, you show up ready to talk to people about a variety of issues. You have a sense of humor. And also I think sometimes sellers forget that you can network even within a booth because you can meet other people that have a shared or similar problem. And they're waiting to talk to you just like they are. Right. And they can share some notes too. So interacting with sponsors results in networking that's worthwhile as well.
Leah: Yeah. We also, in the last couple of years, I know of at least five major business deals that have happened at our conference that either resulted in a merger or an acquisition or some sort of partnership going forward. So, we try to make an environment for that to work for everybody and yeah, this year for the VIP day, people will not be able to be on their phones. Because we [00:09:00] are transporting everybody out in the middle of nowhere.
Yoni: But I love it.
Chris: It's not just a field trip for fun and to rent a kayak and splish splash on the water. It's to get you away from your day to day grind so that you can focus on these concepts. Otherwise, what are you doing here and will you get the most out of the conference?
Probably not.
Yoni: Yeah, the beautiful thing is you get a double dip. You get the New York City, Manhattan vibe. Yeah, exactly. And you get the outside. I don't want to say where we're going to go. But it's outside and just a beautiful region, beautiful air. So it's a thing, maybe once in a lifetime opportunity to see what's around.
Cause you'll ask many Manhattan New Yorkers. They never go to the Statue of Liberty. They never go anywhere. They just go to a few blocks. They go too much north, it's a nosebleed. If you go too south, they need some oxygen.
Chris: And by the way, we're not taking everyone into the Australian outback or the wilderness.
We're talking about an hour and change from the city. So it's not a ridiculous amount of time to get there and distance, but who knows in the future we'll do something in Australia.
Yoni: I'm [00:10:00] looking forward to that. I've never been there.
Leah: Next time. No promises.
Chris: All right. Well, thanks for joining us for this. We will see you of course, October 11th and 12th for Seller Velocity, hopefully before then too. Any words of wisdom you would like to leave people for in terms of what you would like to talk to them about when you get to Seller Velocity in october.
Yoni: I'm a sponge, whatever they're really experiencing. I just want to hear it. I want to soak it in. And of course, if I'm, I've heard somebody else experiencing that and they found the way out, I was happy to share that in, in a variety of issues and topics. But of course, on the Amazon app, on the Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursements, bring it on.
As they say, just always looking to learn something new or solve something new, a new challenge. So bring your challenges, really bring, flush it out. We're here for you guys, you know, as GETIDA. As Leah and Chris and Seller Velocity is just really, we're very passionate about solving problems.
I feel [00:11:00] fulfilled. I'm sure you guys feel the same way because your specialty is even more fulfilling you're saving businesses, which is like, we're just nourishing businesses with cash. They never imagined that they can have. But you're saving them. That's like talking about med school, you guys are brain surgeons and taking tumors left and right.
So the passion is here. We're ready for you guys. We're looking forward to see you and let's also have a little fun with this. It'll be great.
Chris: Absolutely. We'll see you in the matrix. All right. Take care,
Leah: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Leah McHugh from ecommerceChris, and I am here with Mr. ecommerceChris, Chris McCabe.
So this week we're talking about where you get your merchandise from, and it's something that we've talked about a lot. But this week we're specifically talking about sellers who have accidentally sold stolen merchandise. There was an article in CNBC a couple weeks ago about multiple sellers being flagged for selling stolen goods.
Turned out most, if not all of them were sourcing from either the same supplier or suppliers that were all related to each other. And it brings up an interesting point because most of the sellers weren't aware that they were selling stolen goods, of course. And second of all, Amazon never actually told them which of the goods that they were selling were considered to be stolen or which ASINs had been flagged as stolen.
And Chris actually spoke to CNBC. He was quoted in the article about how Amazon handles these sorts [00:01:00] of cases.
Chris: Yeah. They use the line that I say sometimes where you're guilty until proven innocent. We know from our suspension and reinstatement appeal experience that that's quite common. In this case, it looks like some of these sellers bought from suppliers who were on some sort of blacklist that is private, not public, and there's no real way to know if you're buying from a vendor or supplier who's on that blacklist.
And the fact that you bought from them was enough for them to assume that the items were stolen. There was a warehouse raid, a California highway patrol found the warehouse in California. It seems I'm talking to a lot of these sellers that a lot of the sellers bought from that warehouse, but within that warehouse, it's still unclear whether everything there was legitimately sourced or some of them.
Or some listings that those sellers had in question, but others were considered legit. None of that was specified in the suspension messaging. That's what created a lot of confusion and [00:02:00] misunderstanding. And potentially they cast a wide net as they often do, reeled in all the fish. And then later, maybe, maybe not figured out which fish were good and threw them back in the water and which ones were bad that they kept in the net.
That's one big problem with their process and with the way they executed these suspensions. But the good news, I guess, is I'm trying to create this KYS know your supplier movement because Amazon is so hip to know your customer in terms of they want to know their sellers and their buyers, of course, in the marketplace.
Backwards and forwards before anyone does any transacting through the marketplace sellers have to create a unique little version of this for themselves before you do business with any supplier of any kind. You need to research them and vet them and know as much about them as possible.
Leah: Well, and I think that was the most interesting part of that article were all of the quotes from the people that had purchased from these suppliers essentially saying that they had done absolutely no vetting, there was a telegram group.[00:03:00]
And they would get these hot deals and you had to act fast and they would just act fast without doing any research. We see similar things with people coming to us saying, I don't know, I just hired somebody off Instagram. I don't even know who they are. And I found that interesting because these are, one, I'm assuming fairly large purchases that they're making from somebody that they don't really know who they are.
And two, it's a very, very risky business model. You're essentially, potentially buying things off the back of a truck, to use an old phrase. Not really thinking about where they're coming from.
Chris: This is the new version of the New York based sellers telling us, Oh, we got it from a guy in the back of a truck and we don't know where he got it. This is the new version of it, but it's on Instagram, Telegram, Signal, god knows where else, you have to vet these people. You should already know that you need to vet them because Amazon's demanding all sorts of supply chain documentation from you as a reseller.
But even beyond Amazon, just for your own lawful business practices, you need to know who you're doing business with and what their [00:04:00] tactics and methods are the same way, not just for vendors and suppliers, the same way for third party services and consultants in the Amazon space, you're supposed to know more about them too, before you hand them your money, right?
Leah: Yeah, and not saying that this is all of the vetting that people should be doing, but when these cases first started coming in to us, I did a cursory Google search and within a pretty short period of time, I found that all of the suppliers seemed to have at least one person in common across all of the different companies that they were registered as they were all registered as different companies.
What did I find? Like nine different companies that were all registered and related to the same person. And so that's within less than five minutes. You can see that something isn't quite right there. And again, not saying that that should be the extent of knowing your customer, knowing your supplier, but even just doing a cursory search is a lot better than just trusting them because they're on Instagram or in a telegram group.
Chris: Some of the sellers I talked to [00:05:00] did fly up to California, go to the warehouse. And their main focus, I mean, to be fair, their main focus was, are these items counterfeit or not? So they did whatever they did on site inspection to determine that the items weren't counterfeit, the problem is, stolen items are legitimate and aren't counterfeit.
But they're stolen. So the real issue is, they didn't have the ability to or didn't take the time to research it enough to know the provenance of those items. Well, going to Amazon and saying, how can you expect us to do all that? How are we supposed to know that, we were duped by these people?
Sometimes this happens in business. Give us a pass and let us off. We all know what Amazon's answers is going to be. Answer will be, which is you're the seller of record. This is your responsibility. We're not here to tell you the best way to do it. That's not our role. We're a marketplace in a platform.
You have to find out a way to do that. And yes, if stolen inventory shows up on our site. Because of mistakes or [00:06:00] gaps or problems you had, you are the one who's going to take the blame.
Leah: Well, and that's another thing that I find interesting in these sorts of conversations, is so many people in our industry do want to put it on Amazon.
Oh, well, Amazon should teach sellers this stuff. Amazon needs to have an onboarding process so sellers know how to do this. And, I mean, I am the first person to say when Amazon should be doing something, but there has to be a line. When you're in business and you are a business owner, It is your responsibility to make sure that you are complying with laws.
And yes, it is Amazon's responsibility to make sure that you know their policies, but at a certain point, it has to be your responsibility to know that what you're doing in business is legal and I don't think it's fair to put that on Amazon. I think it's fair to put it on Amazon to police it when it happens on their platform, but I don't think it should be put on Amazon to train their sellers how to source inventory.
Chris: Not even the burden being Amazon's to teach you [00:07:00] the laws and how to make sure you comply with laws. I don't think it's Amazon's responsibility to teach basic business skills
I mean, this is common sense. Would it be Amazon's obligation to teach basic street smarts? Because some people are just more gullible than the average person. And if you're going to fall for a sales pitch, we hear about this all the time with people who hire some wacky service we've never heard of to do all these things for them.
Leah: Right. Or the give us $40,000 and we'll create a turnkey Amazon account for you. That's all managed without you having to do anything.
Chris: Yeah. Fully automated. You don't even have to know what we're doing.
Leah: Just give us money and we'll make tons of money.
Chris: Right. And we're not trying to pile on for people who fell for some of this stuff. We just think it's not really our responsibility and it's not Amazon's responsibility to teach basic business skills that already should have happened or been taken care of before the Amazon [00:08:00] seller account was opened.
Because an Amazon expects you to have certain key skills if you're going to be a business on their platform or anywhere, right? I mean, Amazon is the right to determine, you know, you can't just wing it from the get go and learn as you go on the fly. And you can't just assume you're going to learn everything from zero just by opening a seller account and reading seller policy pages or seller university courses and that sort of thing.
Leah: I do think that there is a responsibility as members of the seller community, though, if you do have any sort of experience with somebody sketchy, for lack of a better word ,to tell people, it's amazing to me often how reticent sellers are to talk about these sorts of scam experiences that they've had. And what happens is it just becomes this closed loop. And so other people fall for it because they had no idea that it was going on. And so I do think that there is a responsibility within the community [00:09:00] and again, not putting it on Amazon, but I mean, Amazon would be the best person to broadcast this because they have the greatest reach, but I do think there is just this reticence in the community to talk about things like this happening, and I think that that creates an environment for this to just keep happening over and over again.
Chris: Yeah, I think there's some of this shows up in the forums. And there are some various mentions of things, but it's the shame of being duped. And it's just like, you can go listen to some podcast where there's a con artist or a fraudster who takes a bunch of people for a ride and takes their money. Those people don't typically share info publicly either because they're afraid that it'll keep happening and they'll be attacked and abused again and again. But also they don't want to wear the scarlet letter of shame that they fell for something like this. Maybe it would deter future investors in their business. Maybe it would be harmful if they have partnerships that are depending on their business.
So I can understand that, but we have seen it [00:10:00] propagate to ridiculous degrees. And of course, The attackers and the fraudsters know that no one's going to call them out for this publicly. In this case, there was a CNBC article. We'll include it in the notes. You can, you can read all about it. But tell somebody if you don't want to post it in the forums, at least tell people like us.
So we are aware of what's going on and we can bring it to groups we belong to, or we can post it on our own, or we can somehow share the information to prevent other people from getting scammed because the more you prevent, it's not just that you're helping a neighbor or helping a buddy. You might be helping yourself too because you might be closing the door on other scams that never get off the ground because they aren't as hopeful that they'll get away with it.
Leah: Exactly. I think creating an environment where it isn't easy for stuff like this to grow and become a bigger problem is, is the best thing that you could do kind of across the board, really because it's getting a little bit better now, but a few years ago, there was this whole thing of like, well, everybody has to break the rules. That's the only way to succeed [00:11:00] on Amazon. And so I think if you do just keep not saying anything and let it happen that fosters that sort of culture within the space, which isn't good for anybody because it just kind of pushes us all into a race to the bottom, which none of us should want.
Chris: it's not good for Amazon. It's not good for service providers, sellers or buyers. It's a toxic environment when all of this stays behind the scenes because fraudsters and black hats depend, I mean criminals, let's face it, anyone who steals is a thief and a criminal. They're depending on gullibility of people to shatter their business world and profit from it.
If you're apprehensive about sharing the info, not sure what to do with it, let us know. We might have some ideas that we might be able to share it for you. And thanks again, Leah. Talk to you soon.
New Rules For ReviewsNew Rules For ReviewsChris: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you?
Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
Chris: I'm good. We're talking about the FTC announcement June 30th, I believe, trying to eliminate deceptive reviews, practices, online marketplaces, online reviews, and some of their proposed rule changes. Open for public comment, we should note.
Leah: So you have 60 days from the day that they posted the notice of proposed changes. That being said, we're not really changing it so much as just further clarifying their stance in regards to product reviews.
Chris: I'm hoping this brings to an end the conversations we keep having over and over with. Well, am I just violating Amazon policies or am I violating laws? Is this illegal or am I just breaking a [00:01:00] few gray area rules?
And some of this, I'm gonna read from the FTCs announcements, but they say, for example, some of these proposed rules would prohibit selling or obtaining fake consumer reviews and testimonials. I think that sounds pretty straightforward. Review hijacking, we hear that term quite a bit now.
Obviously the FTC is starting to sue people based on that specific sellers, and that's been announced already, buying positive or negative reviews. Buying a negative review, of course, would be paying somebody to leave a negative review for your competitor. Insider reviews and consumer testimonials, company controlled review websites.
This is essentially padding your reviews with five stars from friendly accounts or from friendly sources. We've seen that not just with product reviews on Amazon, but with service providers as well, correct? Illegal review, suppression, and finally selling fake social media indicators. So maybe we should start with [00:02:00] that first.
How would you define social media indicators and what they mean by that?
Leah: Well, they're talking about likes and followers, which I don't know how they're going to retroactively start enforcing that cause that is Widespread. Good that they are starting to.
Chris: Illegal review suppression, I'm assuming that means they come up with some fake story about why they were left a negative review and they try to prove it with fake info in order to get it removed from a website.
Leah: No, I believe that's when you only show your positive reviews and filter out the negative without indicating that that's what you're doing.
Chris: In terms of padding your positive reviews with fake accounts, , everyone is familiar with that. I don't know how many people have been punished for that. Amazon punishes you for doing it, but outside of Amazon product review systems, how many people have been busted for that? Let's say on Google My Business or things like that, I haven't heard a lot about it. Maybe you have.
Leah: Not any major cases that I'm aware of. But it's [00:03:00] also a matter of, they do have to prove it before they can file a case. I think the most recent case that is the most relevant probably to our listeners because I think at this point, even if they're still doing it, I think most people know at this point that buying reviews, getting fake reviews, leaving fake reviews, messing with your competitors reviews, those are all not looked upon kindly by the FTC. I think we're all aware of that. I think the area that I see the most confusion or maybe intentional confusion, I'm not sure around this is in regards to the review hijacking, because that is the one that we do still see the most I would say. It's something that I actively get questions about how to do from sellers which I then have to refer to them that is illegal and also against Amazon's policy.
It's very easy to see on Amazon's website too. If you look at a product's reviews and you look at the images that are associated with reviews, often they're for a completely different product or if you [00:04:00] read the reviews, they talk about product features that have absolutely nothing to do with the current product. Or maybe were on a previous version of it, that is no longer available for sale. So I think that is where we're still seeing the most confusion or maybe intentional unawareness around this.
And, and I think it's also because it is very easy to do. All you have to do in order to merge those reviews. You don't even have to merge the ASINs in order to get an old product listed on the same ASIN as a new product. All you have to do, you don't even have to hijack the ASIN. All you have to do is create a variation family with products that are out of stock and then they don't show up anywhere on the detail page, but all of their reviews do.
So one, it's very easy to do. And two, of course there's an incentive to do it because you can take a product that has no reviews and all of a sudden it has 500 reviews from your previous products. And I also understand where some sellers are coming from when they're well, but it's the same [00:05:00] product but for one reason or another, I had to create a new ASIN, whether it's a brand change or one of the many reasons that you do have to create a new ASIN so they don't wanna lose all of their reviews, so they think it's fine to just merge it as a child to keep those reviews, which yes, I understand the incentive, but what I don't understand, and this is on Amazon side, it would be very easy for them to just make it so products that are out of stock, those reviews aren't included on the variation family. That would probably take an engineer not that long to implement.
Chris: That's one easy first step, right?
Leah: If the FTC is already doing all of the scrutiny, at the very least they could do it so out of stock products don't show up. That does not address the problem of people adding unrelated products to variation families when they're active in order to try to sell more.
So that would still be a problem, but in terms of making it look like this product has all of these reviews, which actually belong to other [00:06:00] products that you can't even see on the detail page. All Amazon needs to do is make it so that out of stock products reviews don't show up within the variation family.
And I'm sure a lot of sellers are swearing at me right now for saying this because I'm sure they would like their reviews to stay on the detail page, but it would be a very easy fix to this and it would get rid of a lot of abuse.
Chris: Beyond that though, Amazon already knows this is a huge strategy. The FTC knows about it. The FTCs been studying reviews on Amazon for I think 28 teams when they first announced an investigation into fake product reviews on Amazon. So these are all well known concepts. How hard is it really to marshal the resources just to figure out, there's a bunch of reviews for an unrelated product on this page.
A bunch of these at least have to be deleted, or the merge has to be undone, or the listing needs to be suspended or even the seller needs to be suspended, right? Because we have had people work with us to report it, and a lot of times, It looks like Amazon [00:07:00] doesn't even care. And it's kind of strange when they've locked horns at the FTC lately that they're not even interested in some of the easier stuff to fix, to at least show consumers the world, the media, whoever the FTC, that they're willing to make some changes, as opposed to, I think the other day we got a message back, oh, we looked at these variation families.
We didn't see anything wrong. Everything was correct. Obviously the person who read that at Amazon had no interest in fixing it, or they didn't look at it to begin with. They were just saying they did.
Leah: I do find it interesting how hard we do have to push to get Amazon to take this seriously when we are reporting it as abuse for clients because the FTC has been very clear that they're paying attention to this. Not even just in their announcement on the 30th. They filed suit against that supplement seller previously this year, and they've also brought it up multiple times in the last couple of years. So I had actually expected after that initial lawsuit that we would see a slew of suspensions regarding review hijacking [00:08:00] and that never came and again, it seems like we have to push a lot harder when reporting this sort of abuse as opposed to other kinds of abuse that we report. So I'm not sure where the disconnect is there, unless Amazon's just under scrutiny from so many government agencies at this point that it's on the list. I'm not sure.
Chris: Well, the FTC at the top of the list, FTC should be at the top of the list and is at the top of the list. And even just to clarify, even people that aren't clients, We hear about them writing emails to Andy Jassy, writing to the Jeff at Amazon, or the executive seller relations. Teams writing to Dharmesh, whoever they're doing it because they're being universally ignored by teams that just don't feel like looking at it or doing the work to enforce their own policies.
That's why that's happening, right? But why should you have to write to Andy Jasi just to get Amazon to enforce their own policies and their own rules? No one ever explains this, and it is kind of low hanging fruit. If Amazon was pressed about this publicly, they'd probably come back with some [00:09:00] fancy PR statement saying, oh, our engineers are working on this stuff all the time.
We have to develop sophisticated tools for this. Teams have to be, we have to add to their headcount to review these cases one by one to make sure we're taking the right action. I think people are looking at some of it, they just don't feel like doing anything about it, and no one's looking over their shoulder to evaluate the quality of that investigation.
Leah: Well, and again, if we can see it ourselves without their internal tools it must be so obvious if they were to look at it with their tools, I can go to a listing. And without any additional information from a seller other than the detail page.
Obviously if I have additional information, it is easier to find, but it's very easy to see on the detail page and that's just on the front end. That is not even using the tools and their tools would be able to see the 30 or 40 ASINs that are out of stock but are still part of that [00:10:00] variation family.
Even though they're unrelated, it's not like they can't see this, and it's not like it isn't automateable and we've already seen them automate parts of this. We just haven't really seen them push the enforcement that much, and I'm not sure why.
Chris: Well, what happened to protecting buyer experience? That's supposed to be the number one. And how is this good for buyer experience to have people make a purchase based on a product that has a bunch of reviews for something totally unrelated. This should be the most logical, easy to explain thing that anyone, whether it's a consumer or a seller, has to explain to the company.
To anyone who's on marketplace enforcement teams. Why are they so disinterested in this? I don't know. Because it's just drawing a giant target on their back and we already know the FTC is extremely interested in this topic. So it begs the question from me to you, is this just they're thumbing their nose.
Hey, we [00:11:00] know you guys are interested in this topic, but we'll get to it when we get to it. We'll care when we want to care. And we're not gonna let the FTC tell us what to do. Is that what this is about?
Leah: Maybe, maybe it also just needs to get to the point where the FTC is fining them $50,000 per fake review that they find.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you look at millions of fake reviews, that $50,000 goes up pretty quick.
Chris: It's a loaded question. I know, but it's a serious question because I can't understand it any other way, the lack of motivation, and let's just say they do incur a bunch of fines and they keep things exactly status quo as they are.
What's the motivation for that?
Leah: Well, I also think we'll see them pass those fines onto the sellers. We've seen that happen before where Amazon has had a lawsuit or a federal fine levied against them, they then send a letter to that, to whoever was selling that product, saying that that's going to be deducted from their fees.
So Fines aren't that important when someone [00:12:00] else is paying them for you.
Chris: And I want to briefly touch on this. I don't wanna make this a 20-25 minute podcast because we haven't had one of those in a while, but in another episode we can talk about the inconsistency of enforcement in terms of some of the people doing this, the sellers, whether we've reported them or sellers report them themselves. Why are those sellers still selling? Why are they just giving them a slap on the wrist? Some people get banned permanently for reviews of abuse and they never come back. We've seen that in spades. Other people, maybe a couple of reviews get deleted. Maybe the ASIN gets suspended, but not the account.
Maybe the account gets suspended for like a day. Then they go back to doing it again.
Leah: I was thinking about this the other day actually, when I was working on a case like this because we can see the front end, but we can't necessarily see which seller did it.
And I was wondering if surely there are services because anybody can update a listing. I'm wondering if a lot of these sellers are using services to make these updates to their [00:13:00] listing. So those updates aren't on their account and then now I feel like I'm giving black hat people ideas, so I should stop talking.
Chris: But what about my original point in terms of there are sellers who have been caught doing different types of review manipulation, whether it's patting their own five stars or leaving negatives for somebody else or doing any of the things I listed at the beginning of this episode, they've been caught multiple times.
They're not banned. They're still on Amazon. And Amazon never explains why one seller will do something wrong once and get a permanent ban out of it. Or they get suspended and the appeals process is exceptionally difficult for them to recover from. While there are other sellers who get maybe a warning email, maybe nothing.
Maybe somebody reviews what they were doing and doesn't even give them a slap on the wrist and just passes it. Why are those people allowed to operate with impunity while other sellers are treated so harshly? That's never been explained.
Leah: You should listen to our podcast episode called Amazon Is Inconsistent.[00:14:00]
Chris: I've thought about that, but there are some sellers. That have hired us to report abuse maybe 12 months ago, and we do it and we know that there's a result. We know the seller lost some listings. The seller were reporting, not the seller that hired us, to be clear. The sellers are hiring us to report an abusive seller.
We do this all the time. I'm not even sure how many other people do it to the extent that we do it. Pretty much nobody, but they come back a year later, oh, they're at it again. Can I hire you again? They shouldn't have to hire us again because if they're at it again, that seller that's been reported already as a track record of abuse, and if they're a two-time loser or second go round, they should just be suspended and that should be it.
No one ever adequately explains. Even some account managers that I speak to who are working with some of our clients, we ask them. We're reporting the seller again, but why are they even allowed to sell at all at this point? Oh, hang on. Each case [00:15:00] is different and I don't know, I don't work with those guys and I can't look at the annotations and I can't tell you.
So that's another episode for another day. But lately, everyone's afraid to have that conversation on I can't explain why a two or a three time loser is still on the site. And by the way, don't ask questions like that because Amazon doesn't wanna have to answer to that and it's just the lack of fairness on the platform underscored a thousand times to me.
Leah: Agreed.
Chris: So anyone who has examples of this, let me know. Let Leah know. We're happy to take a look.
Leah: And I just wanna mention again that you do have, well now less than 60 days, but approximately 60 days since the 30th to comment on the FTC proposed rule making. And I encourage sellers to do that because ultimately you are the ones that are going to be most affected by these FTC changes. And we'll include a link in the show notes, so that's easy for you to find. But absolutely use the process to give your [00:16:00] input. As somebody who is dealing with this all of the time, the FTC might not answer you, but I'm sure they'll appreciate it.
Chris: Definitely. Thanks again for listening. Talk to you next time.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome back to another wonderful edition of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommercechris, I'm with Leah Mchugh here to talk about Prime Day of course. It's coming up very, very soon, not just what you need to focus on in terms of competitor attacks.
We talked about that quite a bit all throughout 2023, and Leah posted about this on LinkedIn yesterday. We've had a lot of interesting comments and a lot of clickthroughs on that. But we also want to talk about things you might be doing to get your listings restricted by Amazon itself. Not competitor attack related, but things that aren't compliant.
And these are things that Leah, you see constantly, whether it's prime day or not. So I thought you could kind of talk about the restricted product part first.
Leah: Yeah. Well we tend to see an upswing in restricted products being flagged. I think partly, Because a lot of people are making changes to their listings around peak holiday periods or [00:01:00] peak sales periods, I should say.
I guess Prime Day is not an official holiday. I think at this point it's a holiday. Partly because people are making changes to their listings, which they maybe shouldn't make. So we've talked before about adding keywords to your listing, which implies a disease claim, or implies that your product is a pesticide or implies that your product is for children when maybe you don't have the testing for it to be a children's product.
So we tend to see a lot of flags around that. But I don't think it's just Amazon's algorithm and sellers and overdrive. I think it is also that a lot of sellers start reporting each other more. Leading up to peaks holiday periods because , it's in their interest to remove competition where they can.
And so sometimes we'll see that in the form of an attack, but we also see a lot more sellers reporting other sellers for policy violations. So again, I think it's important to prepare yourself for an attack, but it's also important to look at yourself and look at your own account and your own practices, and make sure you're not giving anybody any excuse to get you shut [00:02:00] down before a peak sales period.
Chris: And I think some people are getting an email from an agency or a marketing company saying, Hey, we're getting you in position to sell more on Prime Day. We know how to enhance your listings. We know how to modify your listings. And then everyone starts thinking, oh yeah, I gotta do something to make sure I really kick it into high gear on Prime Day.
So they're really just kind of responding to a special offer that they got in an email.
Leah: Well, I think it's just everybody goes into optimization overdrive. So it's not even just listing content, it's also things like let's put these together as a variation, because then it looks like you have more reviews and then that'll boost sales for both products.
So we see a lot of anything around listing optimization that can get people into trouble is what we tend to be seeing people being suspended or flagged for around peak sales periods.
Chris: And it makes sense that Amazon would do this because they're selling more of everything during prime day.
So of course there's more scrutiny, of course there's more [00:03:00] enforcement of policies when there are things that maybe have been ignored in the past, but there's also more scrutiny by your competitors, like you said. So It makes more sense that they're going to get more reports of listing violations.
We're constantly reporting listing violations to Amazon, and we've noticed that they take a little bit longer to respond or to review things around this time period simply because of the volume of reports going in. So, Consider that on both sides. One, you might not get flagged until right before prime day because you've been reported already, perhaps, and haven't taken action on it yet because they didn't get to it.
And also, if you are looking to report competitors, they might not respond right away. They might not review it correctly. You might have to send it in two, three times. Just because they get easily backlogged and things are misplaced, misunderstood all the time these days.
Leah: Well, enlisting violations are also one of the easier things to report people for.
All you have to do is look on the website. You don't have to do a test by, you don't have to go through any sales [00:04:00] funnel. You can just see it. It also makes it a lot easier to report it to Amazon because you aren't really having to provide a whole lot of proof other than just explaining to them, this is against this policy because of this, as opposed to potential review manipulation or anything like that.
You have to do a lot more investigating on your side before you can report somebody for that. So I think also we see a lot more reports like this around peak sales periods because it's quick and it's easy to report people for.
Chris: And I love to refer to my favorite LinkedIn example, that thread where there was an agency or a service promoting all these changes you can make to images, right? They said it was the best user experience. And then there was an Amazonian on there saying, by the way, this is a hundred percent wrong.
Leah: Well not wrong. A hundred percent against terms of service.
Chris: And the idea, we talked about this in a prior podcast, but the idea that because you see people getting away with stuff means that you should be getting away with it too. Or means that Amazon's okay with it and it's policy compliant simply [00:05:00] because you can see it and it's live on the site.
That idea is one that needs to go away as quickly as possible. And also people are picking up on trends that they see posted on LinkedIn, posted on Facebook, posted anywhere with these special offers. Consider the source of the information. Are they compliance experts or are they just trying to milk something like prime day.
Leah: Well, and I think people get kind of focused on the reward rather than the risk in peak sales period so they see other people doing it. They're like, oh, it might be against policy, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. Because it is a higher sales period. But they're not really considering the the risk that your entire account could be shut down for that peak sales period.
So I think it's a combination of multiple factors, but part of it is also more risky behavior on sellers side. Maybe not doing as much research as they would normally as they're preparing to sales optimize everything for prime day. [00:06:00]
Chris: Speaking of great segue point, speaking of not doing enough research, let's talk about abuse reporting and attacks and make sure you research.
Don't just assume you're being attacked by a competitor who's just trying to take you down and using any means to do it. Research things you might have done yourself to get your listing suspended before you start pointing fingers.
Leah: That's something else I wanted to talk about, if something happens to your listings at this time of year or any time of year really it's nice to assume that you did nothing wrong and it must be an attack, but really the first thing that you need to do before any action is taken on your side is to make sure that you were actually not violating a policy yourself. Because we do get that quite a lot where sellers come to us and they're like, I'm being attacked and we're like, no, this was a correct action by Amazon.
Chris: It's a knee-jerk reaction. So let's run through a quick list of the typical types of attacks we see during peak periods, right? Backend keyword abuse is a good place to start.
Leah: Yeah. keyword abuse is [00:07:00] consistently a popular form of attack.
What I'm seeing more in the keyword abuse area , is well actually sort of gone full circle at this point because we saw this years ago and now we're seeing it again, but seeing a lot more keyword abuse where when you talk to catalog, they say it's a retail contribution, which a lot of sellers tend to think means that Amazon put that information on their listing, but what it actually means is that somebody used Vendor Central to attack your listing. That's a good point. It's a popular form of abuse because if it's a retail contribution, it is a little bit harder to correct.
So it does have a tendency to get you taken out for a little bit longer than if they were just putting in incorrect keywords from an international marketplace or via the API.
Chris: Well, there's many forms of ASIN contribution abuse. Right? I think a lot of brands still assume that because they're in brand registry and they're the brand owner, that they hundred percent control any contribution to a listing.
Leah: Sadly, no. But it's also again, it's similar but different category abuse. So [00:08:00] people getting products moved into a different category or moved into an unbuyable category one that we saw a few years ago, which I'm still kind of impressed with, but if only they use this for good instead of evil.
They moved a product into the mobile app category, so then the product was only purchasable from a phone. You couldn't buy it from the desktop site. So we see a lot of stuff like that during holiday periods because again, It just reduces your sales and knocks out their competition from their category.
And it's also quick and easy for them to do.
Chris: Right. And of course, sometimes we see detailed page abuse. We see people having their titles rearranged.
Leah: Hijacking. We see a lot of listing hijacking this time of year too. Particularly if you have a very good selling product with lots of reviews.
Chris: And then of course, people using some illicit service to buy from you and try to pump those keywords into their [00:09:00] complaint in terms of this is unsafe, this is hazardous. I went to the hospital. My whole neighborhood was in the hospital because they were all sick or they were all injured.
You just have to really prepare. This is counterfeit, even though it's a branded product and only being sold by the brand. These are things you have to prepare for and expect to have to appeal, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it's irrational. You do have to appeal it.
Even when you're disputing it, you're not necessarily writing a plan of action of course, you might be asked for one, but you're essentially appealing this as an error saying these are clearly time to tax for prime day. You wanna look for patterns in the buying history of course, if you've had attacks previously from a particular party, you wanna do some research and really kind of comprehensively go through any details you can provide.
Because if you're very vague, if you're generic, and if you just throw it at Amazon and say, we're being attacked, you guys figure it out. We don't know exactly what's going on. They're not likely to do anything about it.
Leah: Yeah. And then [00:10:00] another one that we see pretty much every major holiday sales period are listings being flagged as adult, that aren't adult products.
And a few that I'm seeing this year, which is sort of a newer one because it wasn't really a thing a few years ago was getting products flagged as meltable. They're planning for your inventory to get removed from FBA because it isn't allowed to be an FBA during the summertime.
Chris: That's true. Things that haven't have no capability of melting are being flagged as meltable.
Leah: Right. And we always see expiration complaints on products that can't expire. My favorite was the plastic containers that were flagged as expired.
Chris: Yep. The Tupperware containers. That were not capable of expiration. That's what I mean. Things that don't make any sense. And you would think that Amazon would anticipate that and would flag fewer listings that they could at least lift out the easy ones. Things that don't even expire, for example.
Leah: Or just maybe have a person look at it before they send [00:11:00] out the complaint.
Chris: Yeah, they're just marching through dozens or hundreds of these in one go, I think.
Leah: Oh. I just don't think they're even being reviewed at this point. it's just automated.
Chris: Yeah. A lot of what we're talking about today is unfortunate because they've been seen before. These aren't novel forms of attack.
These are things that came up Black Friday, cyber Monday last year, maybe Prime Day last year, maybe all of last year.
Leah: I wanna say I was working on this stuff on Thanksgiving the year before last. So yeah, we see it pretty much every year, every sales peak.
Chris: We want to, at some point, we've got a plan to send calendars to people at Amazon. Circle the year, ,\ it's not 2022 anymore. Pretty sure it's not 2021 either. And see if they can start learning from some of these mistakes instead of just rushing through and slapping it together. Copy and paste last minute ends up being a bad user experience for both sellers and buyers, of course, because buyers end up being [00:12:00] exposed to fewer quality listings than they could be when you're genuine listing is taken down in favor of somebody else. Anyone who's willing to attack you in some sort of black hat fashion probably is willing to mess with the quality of their own products and maybe not have the right ingredients in their product, right? If they can do it cheaper. And just put some info on the label and not expect anyone to care, right? We've seen that too. So yeah, it's weird .
Leah: I do assume that the people doing me attacks have not very good products. I don't actually have any evidence to suggest that, but I do assume that for whatever reason.
Chris: Yeah, that's not something we spend a lot of time talking about. I'm not even sure if the media spends a lot of time talking about it.
Leah: But if you're willing to cut corners in an anti-competitive behavior I assume you're willing to cut corners when it comes to product quality and safety. I didn't realize I made this connection until you just said this.
Chris: If you're willing to cheat in terms of policies and even laws, you're probably willing to cheat in terms of other [00:13:00] things tied to your own products, and you're probably just not selling as well as you could be if you had a better product.
All right, thanks everybody. Let us know if you have any questions on anything we touched on today. The closer we get to prime day, the more likely strange and unusual things are likely to occur. And of course, some of them aren't unusual. That's the problem. That's the point. Flag those early and get them in front of our eyes or in front of competent eyes if you need to report anything to Amazon, because if something's going wrong now, The sooner the better.
Give them as much lead time as possible to fix the problem when you report it. Thanks, Leah.
Leah: Thanks Chris.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions.
I'm once again with Leah McHugh. How are you?
Leah: Good. How are you?
Chris: Good. I'm all fired up today. I don't know if I look or sound fired up, but--
Leah: You can be fired up today. I think I was the fired up one last week.
Chris: Right. You've been more fired up lately. I've heard so many sellers, either via consults or just email exchanges, whatever it might be, talking about Amazon telling them to wait and I wanna dissect this. What do you do when Amazon says, just wait. Don't do anything. Get into this a little bit because too many people are waiting too long and I think sometimes they're waiting in vain for nothing or they do eventually get a response around the time it was promised.
Maybe a couple days, maybe, 10 days later, it seems like there's a wide range of days that you're being asked to wait. But the answer could be exactly what you were getting before, so why would you wait just to get the same answer.
Leah: Yeah. And I think that is kind of the risk of waiting is that, Well, [00:01:00] one, you're waiting for nothing.
Which does sometimes happen. Or two, you're waiting for just the same answer and now you've wasted an additional, however many days when you could have been doing something else. So, it's interesting because I feel like for a while the compliance team was very into the like, 10 days, we'll get back to you in 10 days.
I actually haven't seen that as much lately. But then I think, I think it was brand registry? Someone in brand registry the other day was like, oh, this will be resolved within 14 days. And I was like, two weeks. Where did that number come from? And it was something to do with the listing. It was like making a change to a listing.
And they were like, oh, it'll take 14 days. And it's like, why? Why would that take 14 days, first of all, and where did you pull that number from?
Chris: That's a good place to start because I think some of it is the internal team is trying to estimate based on the last time they transferred a ticket or a case somewhere.
They're trying to guesstimate based on what it, what the average time is or for that particular team that they're sending it over to. Maybe they've even been told by reps on that [00:02:00] team. Well, this is taking us 11 days lately. So it might not be just pulled out of the air. There might be some validity to it, but no one seems to notice that these are extremely long periods of time to wait for issues that an impacted ASIN, I mean, that seller could be losing 10 or 20 or 30K a day or a week.
Leah: Right. And a lot of times I'll get those sorts of timeframes when Amazon is the one at fault. Like it's an error on Amazon side and they're just apparently are no hurry to correct it and so my concern there is if you do just continue to wait for these arbitrary amounts of time.
You're essentially telling whoever this has been delegated to that they can put it on the back burner and you'll just wait. I mean it's a fine line because you also don't wanna like harass the teams or course scam the queues, but also just waiting over and over again. Just tells them like, oh, well I can take my time on this they're not going to give me a hard time.
Chris: Right. They want to see who's willing to wait. So you don't wanna be willing to wait just to [00:03:00] sound cooperative but not solve the problem. You of course don't wanna antagonize them with spam, like you were just saying, we would never recommend that, but you may have to go to a different team and say, the team that deals with this issue just makes us wait, or just sends us the same generic template over and over and over.
And bottom line, the problem isn't solved and we're not even convinced it's being thoroughly reviewed. It'd be one thing if you knew they were researching it for real. And if you waited five to seven days, you were actually going to get a quality answer at the end of that period. If there were track record of that or precedent for that, if you had been through it before and you knew you got a positive outcome, or at least a well researched mm-hmm you know, comprehensively reviewed outcome at the end of that seven days, then, then maybe you are willing to wait because you know, the waiting has a purpose but if you're not even sure, and if the Amazonians talking to you on the phone or messaging you in writing are dubious [00:04:00] that they're even sure that there's going to be a real outcome there. Why would you wait in the first place you just cost yourself? Time, angst, money, energy.
Leah: Yeah. Well, and we've also seen people dealing with the strategic account services team, who, all they ever got back in response to their escalation request was, oh, we're working on it. We'll get back to you. This has been delegated. The team will get back to you. 30 days pass you ask for a follow up and they're like, oh, it's been more than 30 days. You have to open a new case now.
Chris: Yeah. And I've got two good recent client examples, that are totally different from each other.
One was people trying to jump on a listing, trying to hijack the buy box, brand new sellers. Sellers that did not have any track record at all on Amazon and also did not source test buys later showed that they did not source legitimate product of this brand. Amazon sat on it for, this was an SAS, this was an account manager opening a ticket, through the SAS core program. Many, many days went by maybe 10, 11, 12 days. And then the answer came [00:05:00] back, oh, we found the problem. It's because you're not authorized to sell this product. And they sent this to the brand owner. So they were just answering.
Leah: Well, that's another thing as well. You can also wait to then get a completely nonsensical answer again, another case that I worked on recently, they got a call back from somebody saying, oh, great news, ASIN blah, blah blah has been reinstated and it's fully active. The ASIN that they had reinstated and was fully active, had absolutely nothing to do with that seller.
That seller had no idea what product that they were referring to, they had just completely confused the cases. That they had them waiting for a response for and then had absolutely no idea about their actual product that they were trying to get fixed.
Chris: So if you're the brand owner and you're being asked to get permission from the brand owner to sell the item, or even to submit a rights owner infringement, which is what happened in this case, the rights owner submitted a rights owner infringement claim.
Completely botched and this was somebody who had the paid account management program. So very, very disconcerting. The [00:06:00] other case I was going to, mention that I was thinking about was abuse reporting, right? So there's listing violations, there's harm being committed to the buyer experience on the site.
There could be something illegal happening. There could be something illicit that breaks Amazon policies, that's deliberate, that's malicious, and they're just telling people, oh, it's still being reviewed.
Leah: Or they just don't respond at all. You submit a abuse report and just you never really hear anything.
Chris: I mean, people start calling into account health teams, and I understand account health reps aren't necessarily in the poll position to resolve the issue, but they can get insights into the issue and tell you what's going on. And they kept calling in not every day, maybe every other day.
And the account health reps just kept saying, yep, we can see it's being reviewed, but it's still being reviewed. You just have to wait until they continue to review it. Right? So like 21 days later, you could have called into account health again, and they would've just given you the same answer over and over without any trace of irony of, well, it's actually not being reviewed. If you keep telling me it's being reviewed, right?
Leah: Yeah. Just because it says under review, doesn't mean it's actually [00:07:00] being reviewed.
Chris: Or again, just to offer some insights on how things work on the inside. The ticket could have been assigned to a particular person or investigator.
It could be locked to that person. And that person could be buried under hundreds of tickets and they're going to get to it when they get to it, which could be next month. It could be next six months or they're on vacation and it's locked to them until they get back from vacation.
I mean, you don't know any of that. And the person who transferred it that might not have even known that it was going to stay locked to that person for a while. So unless somebody goes in there and takes that ticket away from that employee, I mean, we could go on and on. The bottom line is don't sit there patiently waiting just because you're told to wait.
Cast a skeptical eye on the patience is best advice that they give you, because it could be self-serving advice.
Leah: Yeah, absolutely, and particularly because the people that you are able to speak to on the phone often can't see the details once a case is locked to somebody. So they can see that it's been assigned and they can see the status, but they usually can't access the actual [00:08:00] information within the case once it's been assigned to somebody else.
So any information that they're giving you is usually an educated guess.
Chris: And I like that you brought up the 10 days compliance. You do all the compliance stuff.
Leah: Well, they stopped saying that, thankfully.
Chris: Right. But what about the fact that you were supposed to be able to call into account health reps and get some answers on compliance cases. Now, wasn't that like a Early in 2023 thing that came up.
Leah: It wasn't something that they ever announced. It was just something that I had noticed that account health does appear to have a little bit more information when it comes to compliance cases, but still not a ton. And I think that's intentional. I mean, it is a legal team. It's very similar to Amazon's just general legal team. You can't really call into account health and get information on that. So I really don't spend a lot of time with account health for compliance, even though they do have a little bit more information than they did before.
Chris: Right. And we can kind of close with full account suspensions because some people are being told to wait, when they submitted a subsequent appeal through Seller Central, maybe they emailed it in. [00:09:00] And those sellers haven't received responses for a while in some of those suspension cases. And it looks like Amazon may have just kind of closed the door on them, but account health reps are still telling people to wait for a reply that's not coming.
If your entire account is suspended, you already can't afford to wait because you've probably been suspended for a certain number of days or weeks, maybe even months. So cast a skeptical eye as well on the well, they're just backed up. You're going to have to wait because they're going through a huge pile of these that might not be true.
You might not be expecting an answer, or they might just send the same answer, which doesn't tell you anything. One of those, you haven't given us enough details. You haven't, provided sufficient information. So what if you wait and wait, and wait, and you get an answer that is so vague and so opaque.
That doesn't help you understand anyway and you're calling account health reps anyway, after you get the response right, to find out why you got that denial, right?
So the ever-growing pile of suspended full account [00:10:00] suspension situations, it's not just that there's a backlog. Yes. Is there a backlog? Of course there is. There always is. But it's really interesting to have all these conversations with suspended sellers. Some of them get answers within 10 or 11 minutes. Which shows that, I mean, it would've taken longer than that to read the POA.
Leah: Well, it's the same with compliance. My general rule is if you get an answer within less than 24 hours, it hasn't actually been transferred to compliance.
Chris: Right, you're looking for the happy medium. Not to get an answer too fast. Don't answer me so right away that you clearly didn't read anything I sent you, just send me denial messaging, but also you can't wait forever and internal Amazon teams know what other teams are like in terms of the communication, in terms of the backlogs, in terms of the very watered down, opaque messaging they send out, so they understand, don't be afraid to pester some other people about the team that you haven't heard from, because those other teams do understand [00:11:00] from their own experiences what it might be like to deal with them as a seller.
So, Keep that in mind as well. You won't be shocking anyone at the company by referring seller performance matter to them and expressing some frustration. Not too much, but factual frustration, I like to call it. Because you don't wanna wait. You know, everyone hates waiting. Of course. You don't wanna wait in vain, there might not be anything coming.
Leah: There's a tendency to get stuck in a loop, and I feel like that's where a lot of people are when they reach out to us, right? They're stuck in a loop of they submit information, they wait. They get either the same response back that they got before or they get asked for something completely unrelated that doesn't really make any sense.
So they submit that, they wait, they wait some more, they get another nonsensical response, and they just kind of get stuck in this cycle. And that's what you don't want to do. And that's usually where people come to us at when they are stuck and they don't really know what the next step should be.
Chris: Hopefully before that point. when you're in the vicious cycle, it's often because you've appealed. It got [00:12:00] rejected. You called Account Health. They didn't tell you exactly why it was denied. They just gave you their opinion or suggestions based on their training, in terms of what they think you need to send in next, which might be opinion and not factual.
So if it gets rejected again, you kind of know why, if you're just following their general advice or opinions, because obviously the person evaluating the appeal didn't agree with the person who gave you the advice. So another episode for another time. If you've been waiting too long and you're trying to figure out what to do next and you're stuck, feel free to reach out to us.
We talk to people about this, I would say every day at this point.
Leah: Multiple times a day. Yeah.
Chris: Multiple times a day. So we're no strangers to this. And we'll listen to your story and give you some advice. Thanks again for listening. Thanks again, Leah. Talk to you again soon.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris here with Leah McHugh.
We had an interesting question come in from one of our listeners about sharing manufacturer info with Amazon.
I think the bigger question is there's some confusion over how much information you have to give Amazon about your manufacturer or your factory. Some people say, oh, you have to share all this stuff, supply chain documentation, phone numbers, contact info, links to websites, and then other people might argue, you know, actually you don't have to share everything about your manufacturing partners.
So, I thought we could start there based on that question. What do people really need to show Amazon?
Leah: Yeah. I mean also it depends what regional marketplace and also in what context is that information being provided in.
So in terms of the manufacturer attribute on the product listing, generally speaking, you would just input, like if it's your branded product that you have contract [00:01:00] manufactured for you, you can just put your brand there as the manufacturer for those purposes. You are essentially the manufacturer, much like, you know, apple is the manufacturer of Apple products, even though Apple doesn't actually own any factories that does the manufacturing.
So for those purposes, for the forward facing information on Amazon, unless you have a different type of agreement with your manufacturer, which is sometimes the case, generally speaking, you would just put yourself down as a manufacturer. But when Amazon is asking for specific supply chain information, that's a different story.
You can't just say like, it's us. And that's the end of it.
Chris: That's where it comes up a lot. Yeah. All the confusion over, I need a verifiable supplier website. Amazon didn't take my invoice for whatever reason they rejected the invoice. But we're our own private label brand or we make our own products.
That's the context that we usually hear. I think within brand registry and some intellectual property issues that comes up in other ways, other contexts.
Leah: Yeah. Well, and [00:02:00] also even on the compliance side of things, if you're selling a medical device, and you're the manufacturer is registered with the FDA, particularly for 5 10 Ks, you would then need to show the relationship between the person that owns the pre-market approval for that product and your brand that is selling that product under the brand.
So again, it really does depend on the context, but you do need to be able to show. The relationship, I guess, for lack of a better term, between whatever that person is and you, who is the final brand on the product.
Chris: Those are compliance teams, right? The ones that you're dealing with consistently as our compliance consultant extraordinaire because obviously I'm seeing it in another context where it's just, Somebody questioned the authenticity of the product, even though it's your product. Send us the invoice, those copy and paste emails that everybody gets. Who's the supplier, who's the invoice? And as we've seen lately, lots of rejection of invoices and rejection of suppliers.
Even if the original complaint was inauthentic, [00:03:00] right? Or the original complaint was item condition, this wasn't new. This wasn't authentic, but they're private label brands, right? In the old days, these were let's say a lot easier for investigators to pass through. Once they understood they were dealing with the brand, all you had to really do was send the invoice, oh, this is who we get it from.
Oh, supplier of a private label product. Great. They'd check it off and take it. These days we see everything under the sun in terms of rejections, unexplained rejections. Brands are calling into account health. Trying to figure out why was my multi-year invoice that was always accepted, suddenly not acceptable.
And there's never really been a great explanation from the Amazon side on that.
Leah: I mean, I think it's just tightening things up over the years as a lot of their loopholes were maybe exploited. And they tend to either tighten up too far sometimes, or sometimes they just tighten up the wrong things that weren't really an issue to begin with.
But yeah in terms of who is providing that information to Amazon, I think a lot of sellers [00:04:00] are concerned about providing their manufacturer information to Amazon because rumors still abound about how Amazon is going to take your manufacturer and steal your market share and create a duplicate of your product, and like, yes, they have done that in the past.
I'm not gonna say that that didn't happen, but I think Amazon has figured out pretty well at this point that they make a lot more money from you as a third party seller than they do when they try to sell your products themselves. We see that kind of across the board really in terms of their own private label brands and also even the vendor central side of things.
I mean, that's certainly not getting the attention that it once was from it.
Chris: I don't even know if I know why that is, because if they're actually co-opted your supplier, your manufacturer, why would they have a much harder time than you would.
Leah: Oh, I know why they make less money, because when things go wrong, as with a third party seller, [00:05:00] if something needs to be returned or customers aren't happy, the seller eats the cost, not Amazon. So when they're selling the product themselves, suddenly they're eating all of these costs that they had previously passed on to the third party seller. That is why they make less money.
Chris: Not that part so much. Just in terms of are they having trouble with the co-op, the factory and the manufacturer, and then all of a sudden they realize that the factory is copying the product and competing with the seller, the manufacturer.
Leah: That may have happened as well. And also Amazon isn't really a seller, so a seasoned seller is probably going to do a lot better at promoting. I mean, if you look at Amazon's own private label detail pages, they're not great. So I think sellers are better at selling the products on Amazon than Amazon is.
And also, Amazon could just pass on all the little costs that they don't wanna deal with to the seller, which they can't do when they're selling it themselves. So it is very unlikely that Amazon is going to try to steal your manufacturer to sell your product. Also, it's a different team. And [00:06:00] again, I'm not saying this hasn't happened, you know, they did testify at Congress and there was a whole bunch of documentation that was given to Congress about this, and yes, they have definitely done it in the past.
But the likelihood of the seller performance team or the compliance team, having that conversation with the retail buying team about who manufactures your product is pretty low. And I think it's even lower now than it was in the past. So in terms of providing that information to Amazon, I think that shouldn't be so much of a concern to sellers.
Chris: So what else should people think about, what other confusions exist out there, do you think, on this topic? In terms of manufacturer, supplier info, what Amazon's likely to ask for, what they have been asking for, what they shouldn't be asking for and in terms of rejections of appeals or rejections of any documentation?
Leah: Yeah. Well, the last episode we did talk about supply chain documentation. I guess we didn't explicitly state that it was [00:07:00] for private label brands. But I think maybe some private label brands, because they are the brand, don't think that they need to have all of the same information as a reseller necessarily would on an invoice.
And that is, not the case. You still need to have all of your contact information that matches seller central, all of your suppliers contact information. You still need to have the product identifiers and that is something I see a lot with private label brands. It just will say like their brand name, and then a part number or something like that.
You still need to have those universal product identifiers. Even though they're your product identifiers. You still just need to make it easy for Amazon to connect those dots. We also briefly touched on this in the last episode, but if you are actually manufacturing the product yourself, you need to maintain a separate entity for the manufacturing that's separate from the entity that sells on Amazon, because Amazon won't accept what they call self issued invoices.
Where you just would basically write an invoice to yourself within the same company, which doesn't actually make sense. So you need to have that separate entity in order to invoice [00:08:00] the selling entity for the products that they purchase to sell on Amazon, for Amazon to accept those invoices and that's another area where we see a lot of sellers who manufacture the product themselves.
They don't really think that they would need to have invoices for that, or they have invoices for maybe the raw parts or the raw ingredients of the product rather than the manufacture product itself. The invoice requirements and the documentation requirements for private label brands are as strict as the requirements for resellers. So you need to make sure that you have that information. Even if Amazon needs you to write a letter of authorization to yourself. I've seen it.
Chris: Well, that's kind of a sidebar how they ask brands for, do you have a letter of authorization?
I mean, those are Stupid things that account health reps throw out there, which I think aren't really required to complete that review or investigation.
Leah: Even on the brand registry side of things, I've [00:09:00] seen requests for letters of authorization.
Chris: But some of the seller performance messaging, and I think a lot of account health reps are getting mixed up when they suggest I think they're kind of not even aware if they're talking to the brand owner on some of these calls. So that did create some confusion, but The creating a separate entity and what you were just talking about, I feel like people have come a long way and they understand that concept a lot better. Now than they did, let's say in 2020.
Leah: Yeah. I think just if you're getting started manufacturing your own product, this isn't something that you really think of. And what often happens is that if you don't really think of it at the start, five or ten years pass and you're still operating the same way and it doesn't really come up until there's a problem.
And then you can't really backtrack and create a separate entity to invoice yourself in the past. So it is something that I do still see come up. I think the main thing is just you need to be able to document all of the relationships. And that's something that we've definitely talked [00:10:00] about before.
Anything that doesn't exactly match or anything that where there's a gap, you need to be able to document how they relate to each other. And that again, is where we see a lot of private labelers run into issues because like it's their company and it's their operations and they just don't really think about having those legal documents to show it.
Chris: So don't take anything for granted. That's good. Closing words of advice and anyone has any questions on these related topics, especially what manufacturer supplier info needs to be shared with Amazon, in what context and what doesn't. Let us know. We're always happy to answer questions and thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. We're talking today about all of the conversations we've had. Leah finds these particularly fascinating, around letters of authorization, supply chain documentation. I'm gonna go ahead and guess Unverifiable suppliers, right? Because we've had a couple cases where even when Amazon asked for the supplier's supplier, we were actually able to provide that information and they still said no. So maybe that's the best place to start.
Leah: Or you're giving them the manufacturer information and they're asking for the manufacturer's supplier and it's like they're the manufacturer.
Chris: It is kind of crazy that they have such knee-jerk reactions. They just say No, kind of no matter what you send, which makes us think that they're not bothering to take a look at any of this stuff.
Leah: They may be automating some of it. I know that they're automating a lot of the compliance documentation review, so it could just be badly written AI.
Chris: I mean, we're over assuming the AI is taking over, I [00:01:00] think Amazon will do that, but not yet.
Leah: I have it confirmed from Amazon employees that they are using automation to review client's docs, so it's not that much of a stretch to assume they're using some sort of automation to review supply chain docs.
Chris: There's still a person who's responsible for reviewing the documentation and making a yay or nay decision. The problem is there's no yay, it's always nay. Well, why is that? Well, they're either not looking at it or they're trying to pick it apart and find an excuse not to have to read an appeal or look at other documents.
The excuse must be they either think the invoice has been massaged, edited, manipulated, fabricated, which I know they love to over accuse on that. But also sometimes they just say, well, the format doesn't look right. And it's just very vague and sellers have to try to call into account health to find out why this is, but a lot of the answers coming back are not a lot of annotations here that explain why they didn't like it.
When there's a dearth of information like that they obviously didn't take the time to look at that [00:02:00] documentation, especially like you said, when it's from the manufacturer and they just say, we couldn't verify your supplier. Oh, that's interesting. Those are the people who make the stuff for us.
Leah: Right, here's their website. Here's a direct contact person, their phone number, what wasn't verifiable? I think what I find most interesting about this is Amazon is pretty inconsistent just across the board, but I feel like in this area in particular, all of these conspiracy theories abound around the seller community of like, oh, well, if you send it as a pdf, it won't be accepted. You have to take a picture of the invoice on a surface and then it'll get accepted. Like there are all these urban legends around invoice verification. And so that's why I find it interesting because like I said, Amazon's inconsistent across the board, but I feel like this is the one that sellers really have a whole theory around what to do to get it accepted and what not to do. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. But I find it really interesting because I guess this is one of the areas where all sellers are likely [00:03:00] going to be required to present some of this information at some point. So I enjoy the conspiracy theories.
Chris: We're looking at a universe where they're going to ask every type of seller to justify with documentation just about everything they source, just about anywhere. Private label reseller, buying from authorized distributors, not buying from authorized distributors. A lot of this is about to blur together with the increases in KYC scrutiny.
We've got the INFORM Consumers Act coming our way, but this is probably the first of many procedures because the days of hey just create a detail page and throw it up there, and maybe you've got an invoice, maybe you don't. Maybe you have info in your supplier, maybe you don't.
Those days they're over. Everyone should recognize that if they haven't ended for them in particular, they will soon.
Leah: Yeah. Well, if you are sourcing in a way that doesn't give you the right documentation, you just have to know that it is a risky business model. And at any point, Amazon could ask you for a documentation that you don't have, [00:04:00] and when you don't have it, they're not gonna let you sell that again.
So as long as you go into it knowing that, which unfortunately, I feel like a lot of new sellers in particular go into not knowing that because a course or something tells them that they could just buy stuff at CVS and list it on Amazon. As long as you know what you're getting into.
Just keep in mind it's not a great long-term business strategy on Amazon. But I did wanna talk about what you should have on your invoices because that is something that we still have people come to us saying Amazon keeps rejecting documentation and then we take a look at it and it's slack and that's why.
Chris: Written on a napkin invoice?
Leah: Right, Excel invoicesaren't great either. Word docs. Also, I still see a lot of people submitting commercial invoices or pro forma invoices. Those will not be accepted by Amazon. It needs to be an actual invoice where the inventory has been fulfilled to you and payment has been made, or is at least like net 30, [00:05:00] whatever the case may be.
They won't accept a commercial invoice, which is really for shipping purposes or pro forma invoice, which is essentially just your ordering the inventory doesn't actually confirm that you actually got the inventory from that person.
Chris: Right. It's like a pre invoice. And of course we've heard from a lot of sellers who said, well, there are services out there that will make an invoice for you. This is still happening.
Leah: That's another thing that I wanted to talk about because I see a lot of them marketing it as like it's a real invoice for somebody, we're just making it so it's made out to you. That's not a real invoice. It was a real invoice for whoever purchased the actual product.
Chris: At one time it was a real invoice.
Leah: It was, but once they changed the information on it to reflect something that didn't happen, it is no longer a real invoice and it is fraudulent documentation. And at that point you are risking permanent deactivation if Amazon catches you doing that. So yeah, that's something to keep in mind because there are still a lot of services that we see, or people come to us saying that they got a real invoice [00:06:00] from a service and it is not a real invoice. So make sure your invoices are real and you know that they're real if you are purchasing those products from the people that the invoices says that it's from. If you're not purchasing the products from the person that's issuing the invoice, that is not a real invoice.
Chris: You probably didn't buy all those items from a supplier and forget that you bought those items and then you hired a service to help you remember it. These are extremely dated tactics that probably didn't work that well in the first place, but it's no very amateur level stuff. I understand that desperate times breed desperate measures. But, Amazon's hip to all this stuff, they've been going through this crap for years. So think about that before you start saying, well, I don't have a letter of authorization so actually I really had no choice but to manipulate or fabricate documentation. Well, the choice was not to do it in the first place. I understand that there are a lot of low value courses out there that don't address this [00:07:00] stuff. And when you're new, you just kind of glom onto what they've suggested that you do, but fact check that stuff and question the source.
Leah: Yeah. And then a second area that I regularly see sellers running into issues with is their invoices being made out to a company or to an address that doesn't exactly match the information that they have in their Seller Central. You need to make sure that the invoice is made out to the right person, to the right company, and has all of the same information as your account. Otherwise, Amazon's not going to try to connect the dots for you. They're just going to reject that invoice. And then of course, on top of that, you wanna have the contact information for your supplier. Ideally you are including contact information for a specific person, not just like their regular support, phone number or email address, website address. And then ideally you wanna have product identifiers.
I prefer GTINS, so UPCs or EANs generally in this country. JANs you're in Japan. just [00:08:00] because those are universal identifiers, whereas an ASIN is just an Amazon specific identifier that those GTINs will be on the listing. So again, it just makes it that much easier for the investigator to match your documents to the products in question.
A lot of Chinese invoices just have pictures of the products, that's not enough. You need the actual identifier on there. And we are actually seeing more and more that the invoice is being rejected because it doesn't have a product identifier, it just has like the name or description. Make it easy for the investigator, make sure it has the identifier, and this is all stuff that your supplier shouldn't have any issue with adding to the invoices. Don't add this information to the invoices yourself. Go back to your supplier and say, I need these invoices updated to reflect this information, by the actual supplier. You don't wanna me make those changes.
Chris: And we understand, by the way, the insanity of some of the requests from Amazon. There was somebody the other day that said, oh, your invoice was rejected because [00:09:00] the ASIN wasn't on it. I think that person actually expected the Amazon ASIN to appear on the invoice.
Leah: Yeah, but that was somebody in account health. So like, Eh.
Chris: But the account health reps are sometimes reviewing account annotations and passing along some of that info, and I could totally see that being a reason for rejection.
There are nonsensical gibberish reasons, even when you drill down into what was annotated on this ASIN on my account, you will see some crazy stuff. We're not saying that if you follow every thing that we tell you, you'll never get a rejection for no apparent reason, an insane illogical rejection because we hear and see those all the time.
We're trying to get you to the point where the reduces the likelihood that that will happen because some people go 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 rounds with these guys. Even calling into account health each time it gets rejected and account health reps, when you're on the phone with these people, hopefully you're only talking to US reps, you can tell in their voice sometimes that [00:10:00] they see how idiotic some of this is, and how nonsensical it is.
Leah: I actually appreciate when you can hear in their voice that they're just like, sigh it says this. You know that they're just like, oh, this is stupid. and I feel stupid saying this.
Chris: Or they just say well, this is what I found, there's mannerisms they use. You can tell that they basically agree with you but they have zero authority to fix something absolutely ridiculous that never should have happened in the first place.
But you need that information because for all you know, you're basing your next escalation on. By the way, account health told me, insert nonsensical phrase here. that's gonna keep happening. There's gonna be more of that. So prepare mentally for it. Don't let it frustrate you, but also understand that sometimes those mistakes, and they are plentiful and they're regular on the Amazon side, could become the fruit of your next escalation.
Leah: Yeah. And then I just wanna talk really quickly about your relationship with your supplier, because [00:11:00] ultimately you want to be as close to the brand owner as possible. You either want to be the brand owner. If you are the brand owner though, and you are manufacturing the products yourself, you need to have a separate entity from your selling account for the manufacturing, and you need to invoice your selling entity for those products because Amazon won't accept self issued invoices so you need to have those two separate businesses to show that supply chain for the products that you manufacture yourself. If you are a reseller, ideally you are buying directly from the brand. If not directly from the brand, you want to be buying from an authorized distributor. Because again, as a reseller, one Amazon might ask for a letter of authorization.
And if you're buying the products very far down the supply chain, it's unlikely that you'd be able to get a letter of authorization from the brand owner and also Amazon might ask for your supplier's supplier. And again, if you're too far down the chain, one your supplier is unlikely to wanna give you [00:12:00] that information.
And even if you give your supplier's supplier information, if that's someone that has no real apparent relationship to the brand, Amazon still won't accept that. So you want to be as close to the brand owner as possible when it comes to the supply chain information that you have. And you wanna be able to make sure that you can verify it all the way up to the brand owner and that you can get those letters of authorization if requested.
Chris: Well said. And on that note. We both had some long winded passages on this one.
Leah: We've been doing this for a long time.
Chris: It's good when it comes to supply chain documentation because sometimes even to our surprise, we're still getting some questions that aren't from new sellers about, I don't understand why they rejected this invoice.
I completely get that. You can submit an invoice, which is identical to something they accepted 17 times in the past, and they're suddenly rejecting it now. But that's just Amazon being fickle. And Amazon changing their mind from one month to the next on what they wanna accept. We're not justifying that, but it's not [00:13:00] unusual.
Amazon likes to change their minds a lot about what's acceptable and what's not. It's also very dependent on the eyeballs that are looking at that invoice. There might be somebody else that will accept it.
Leah: But I mean, beyond the outliers, I think the general requirements that Amazon has for the documentation really hasn't changed that much in the last few years and so again, when you're figuring out your sourcing, keep these in mind. Have a checklist for when you're bringing on a new supplier for does their invoice match all of the required information? If not, are they willing to include that in the invoices to you?
If they're not, you shouldn't be purchasing from them. And also again, are you able to verify the supply chain from your supplier all the way up to the brand owner. Again, if not, Move on to another supplier.
Chris: Even for your own knowledge. It's not even just to show Amazon because we've had people coming to us saying they've been accused by Amazon of selling stolen inventory.
All they did was look at some inventory at a warehouse. [00:14:00] They didn't really know where it came from. So this is where that can bite you as well. That's not just Amazon being pushy about invoices. You need to know this for your own knowledge because your entire business could be at stake.
Leah: Yeah. And it's not just stolen, could unknowingly be purchasing counterfeit items or gray market items that maybe aren't even approved to be sold in the country that you're selling them in for whatever compliance reasons, labeling, whatever. So for your own business and for your own peace of mind and for your own legal protection, it's good to have this information yourself, not just in case Amazon asks, but also in case Amazon asks.
Chris: And in terms of the ultimate, why? Why are they doing this? I mean, there's a lot of reasons. Their KYC procedures are tightening across the board, and this is one of them. The other reason why is, generally speaking, Amazon's just not interested in hosting sales of arbitrage sellers, people buying from liquidators, people buying gray market that might have thrived six, seven years ago.
That's not the world we live in today. Amazon doesn't really care if those reseller accounts, especially liquidations, where you're buying [00:15:00] pallets, you're getting no line item invoices. I mean, basic, basic stuff where you know before you even buy the product, you know they're not gonna take the invoice.
I mean, why put yourself in that position in the first place, right?
Leah: Yeah, exactly. Again, you're not just risking that listing, you're potentially risking your entire account. So risk versus reward analysis, that's up to you guys.
Chris: Well, thanks for listening everybody. The wind is picking up a little bit here, so this outdoor podcast experiment will come to an end for today.
Feel free to ask us any questions about this. This is something that comes up constantly. Sometimes Amazon investigators ask for letters of authorization out of the blue to brand owners, private label brand owners. So there's interesting stuff going on all the time around this topic. Listen again to Seller Performance Solutions and have a nice day.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to another podcast episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. We're both of ecommerceChris, and we're here today talking about, just because you can do something on Amazon doesn't mean you should do something on Amazon. What does that mean? Very fun topic, what does that mean exactly? It means, long story short, we see loads and loads of people embracing loopholes, tricks, gaps in processes, tools left behind when they were created, that shouldn't be happening. They're definitely not compliant with policy. Leah's seeing these examples all the time.
The point I wanted to make initially was, whether it's something you see posted in some group somewhere, Hey, this works. You should try it or you're actually hiring an agency or a service who says, oh, I have a solution for that. Pay us something so we can do this for you. Always ask yourself or ask that service or consultant, is this compliant with Amazon [00:01:00] policy?
Leah: Yeah. Also ask possibly another service or consultant if it's compliant because a, a lot of times, They will say, yeah, it's totally compliant when it's not. Because I have had that conversation with sellers too where they were told that it was compliant and it definitely was not.
Chris: Right. Just because you're told that something is compliant, whether this is by a representative of Amazon, which we've experienced unfortunately, members of seller support, members of account health. But also people that used to work at Amazon who go work at an agency, we've heard people say, oh, your listing got suspended, just make another one.
Leah: Or where they don't tell them that they made another one and they're just like, oh, I got your ASIN reinstated, it just doesn't have any sales history or review history. And also it has a new UPC.
Chris: First of all, that's not a reinstatement. That's just creating a new listing. But the first thing you need to do then is merge those two listings together.
Leah: You can't do that if one of them is blocked.
Chris: No, but harvesting the reviews, right? That's one of the things that people have been asking us and [00:02:00] asking around for, hacks around. Well, I have another listing now I just need to get the reviews moved over there, right?
Leah: Yeah, right. Which yes, ASIN merges are possible, but they're also under a fair amount of scrutiny, particularly when it is about harvesting the reviews, because the FTC recently sued a supplement seller for doing exactly that.
Chris: Well the cat's out of the bag on this ASIN merge stuff, right? Clearly people were abusing it like crazy for years.
Leah: I will say I see less of that than I used to. I do recall a few years ago having to like beautiful mind create graphs of how people had merged ASINs together to try to figure out what exactly they did in order to get them reinstated. I don't get that as much as we used to.
Chris: Was the chart beautiful?
Leah: It was not, I just looked insane.
Chris: I don't think you see it as much anymore because people understand that they're finally keeping an eye out for [00:03:00] it. And it's true that there are trends where you can get away with murder for years, and that doesn't mean you'll always be able to get away with it. It also doesn't mean it won't be rolled back once Amazon finally wakes up and pays attention to something, I think that's the part that's forgotten. A short-term gain might first of all risk your whole account. Second of all, it might be rolled back anyway. So what good is it? I mean, are you just trying to sell through a few units or are you trying to sell an ASIN long term?
Leah: Yeah. Well, and I think that is where the disconnect tends to happen. There's a very large focus on the short term improvement versus the the long term risk, and also potential drop when it does eventually go away. A lot of these hacks don't really take into consideration that if something does get rolled back, you would essentially be starting from scratch. Where perhaps it's a much better business decision to go for the slow burn in terms of growth because you are doing it [00:04:00] within TOS, but then you have long-term growth as opposed to having to start all over again when something gets taken down.
Chris: And what kind of sellers does Amazon want? They want long-term thinking sellers. They don't want, oh, we're just going to employ one trick, hack, loophole, exploitation after another until we sell a little bit more of this asin, a little bit more of that ASIN. If they're consistently flagging your listings or reviewing your account, you're making yourself into a pain in the neck or a headache to them, and this is why the conversation comes up.
Why is Amazon so punitive against sellers? Well some sellers, consistently jump up and down and say, Hey, look at me. I'm not interested in what the rules are or I hired an agency to do this for me and I never asked them if they understood what compliance was or if they even had a compliance person. I'm just looking for short term gaming the system.
I mean, do you think Amazon wants those types of headaches?
Leah: I think what I'm seeing more so [00:05:00] now is less gaming the system and more trying to fix things and things that Amazon don't make easy to fix compliantly, but for whatever reason are quite easy to fix non- compliantly because they haven't tightened up their tools.
That's what I'm seeing more now, where a quick fix is actually a lot easier to do non-compliantly than it is compliantly, which is quite frustrating for me because I'm having to do it the hard way compliantly. And then I see other sellers come who are like, oh yeah, they just did this. And I'm like, well, that's totally non-compliant, but glad it was done quickly I guess.
Chris: They do it quickly. We know that these case system reps and support whichever teams you're dealing with, love to take you in a circle and that's frustrating. You lose time, you lose money. The problem doesn't initially get fixed. Consider as well, who else, aside from Amazon, has their eyes on you and your listing because if they think you employed, some illicit hack and their [00:06:00] competitors of yours, then that's a valid abuse complaint that they can submit to Amazon internal teams.
Leah: Right, and we are getting a lot more people coming to us saying, hey, my competitors are making invalid variations, how can I report them? That is something that we're seeing more and more. So your competitors are watching you, of course. And they are keeping track of these things because also if they can find a pattern in what you're doing, that also makes it a lot easier for them to report you to Amazon. So yeah, I mean, everything that you're doing, just keep in mind that it is somewhat public and I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, but one of my favorite FTC stories is when somebody bought something from Amazon and he worked for the FTC and he got an insert offering to incentivize reviews. People from the FTC buy from Amazon too.
Chris: Not just your competitors buying from you and by the way, you can't just say this is abuse, this is a competitor, if it's a completely valid report, right? Where it comes from doesn't actually matter that much, and it doesn't negate the fact that you were [00:07:00] violating a policy or depending on how misrepresented the product might be on the detail page, violating laws.
Leah and I have also seen cases that were flagged by product safety and compliance teams where the product itself has been misrepresented just to evade existing detection teams.
Leah: Just like removing the certain words that would actually identify it for what it is. Which is something that I actually see a lot of people pushing as a strategy and please, please don't do that. That's a terrible strategy. Again, short-term gains, but you're putting your entire account at risk doing that, and also, you know, potentially committing fraud depending on what you're doing.
Chris: Well, I'm not saying that brands don't ask consultants or agencies, is this compliant with policy?
I think nowadays they ask that question more before some of these things happen, but study the answer that comes back. If the answer is, we've been doing this for nine months and nobody's slapped our wrist yet, that's not a satisfying answer. That just means maybe it [00:08:00] hasn't been reported. Maybe Amazon didn't catch it.
Guess what? Amazon doesn't catch a lot of stuff and that's why people employ these tricks. But, is that long term healthy for your brand or your business to use one of these hacks or tricks? I get that there's conferences or people huddle in a room and share these ideas and maybe you're not even planning on doing it forever, but do they ever talk about the consequences? That's the issue.
Leah: Yeah, of course not. They're just talking about those sweet, sweet revenues. Not actually mentioning profits ever. I would just like to add that, it is very important for you yourself to know the policies. I have had a few situations with the catalog team where I am trying to get them to do something compliantly and it's actually easier for them to do it non- compliantly and their tools as well. So they try to start pushing us down that path, and I have to be the one to tell them to stop and not do that because it would put the entire account at risk. And ultimately, Amazon is not going to accept the fact that catalog did it for you [00:09:00] as a reason as to why you should be reinstated. So it's important that you know the policies as well because Amazon's own teams will often push you in the wrong direction. Particularly lately, I don't know if they have a whole new batch of people in catalog who haven't been trained as well or what, but lately I have just been getting so much bad information from them trying to send us in the wrong direction and so make sure that you, yourself know what can and cannot be done. Don't just be like, well, support said it was fine and then they did it.
Chris: Right. Or you ask somebody who deals with compliance on a consistent basis, not somebody who dabbles in it once a year.
Leah: Yeah. I'm not even talking about compliance, I'm talking about like Amazon policy.
Chris: Reading the policy pages and double checking what they tell you, I think people don't understand that you can't take everything they say on these calls as gospel. Just because they work there doesn't mean they understand their own policies. Leah and I have both [00:10:00] been on calls either with account health reps, catalog reps, different people, different teams of Amazon, and we've had to kind of say, go over the policy with me now I have it in front of me. Which part of what's on this page reflects what you're saying. And then they start to backpedal.
Leah: Right. Or, conversation I had recently where I was like, so what you're saying is that Amazon will not take action against this clear infringement on our intellectual property.
And it's your specific policy that it's the other seller who's infringing on us that has to correct it and suddenly they were backpedaling pretty quickly.
Chris: And also keep in mind, it's a lot easier for Amazon instead of just send you warnings over and over into flag listings for review over and over.
It's much easier these days for them to just shove it over to account health and say, you know what? We're sizing these people up for a suspension, so give them their 24 hours, call them up, tell them that they have to address this now. Otherwise, we're suspending the account. But take it from Amazon's perspective for a second.
Is it easier for them to go into all this minutia [00:11:00] every other day? Delete listings, send you warnings, give you a chance to appeal them individually in Seller central and your account health dashboard, or is it just easier to drop the bomb and suspend the whole account? I mean, what's feasible, what makes sense from their perspective?
Leah: Right, exactly. And like I said, they're not going to go back and see if it was support's fault or not. They're holding you responsible unfortunately.
Chris: Yeah. In a bizarre way. They expect you to ignore half of what support says because they expect you to know that support doesn't have the knowledge, the training, the ability to, to give you an accurate answer.
Same thing with the account health teams. Why do you get seven different answers when you talk to seven different account health reps? Some of them know what they're talking about and some of them don't and I think that's understood Amazon wide.
Leah: And they have to tell you something because they're stuck with you on the phone.
Chris: They're stuck with you on the phone. So usually we talk to people with that, buyer's remorse as it were. They hire a service, he does some of this stuff. They don't double [00:12:00] check any of it. They're looking for revenue boost. And what happens? They regret it afterwards once they get in trouble because the amount of money they've lost.
When their account is suspended or when other things happen that result in suspensions and lost revenue, that amount far exceeds whatever they would've made just by selling through the products. Any questions on this, let me know. Let Leah know. We're happy to talk about this because we're seeing it over and over.
We're kind of alarmed at how often we're seeing things that really didn't make sense from the get-go, happening without the brand owner understanding what the risks and consequences were.
Leah: And I have been saying this for years, but I'm gonna say it again. Just because other sellers are doing it doesn't mean that it's okay. I can find policy violations in about three clicks if I go to amazon.com.
Chris: Maybe we should say that more often. You could throw a rock in the Amazon marketplace and hit two or three or four completely non-compliant listings. Easy to do ,what's live on the site doesn't make it right.
So we'll catch you next time. Thanks for [00:13:00] listening to Seller Performance Solutions.
Chris: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, I'm here with Leah McHugh, also of ecommerceChris. How are you doing, Leah?
Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
Chris: Great as always. Today's hot, hot, hot topic is the INFORM Consumers Act.
Heard a lot about this lately. Amazon sent out some messaging recently about June 27th being the red letter day for when they're going to start enforcement. I've heard that they've done enforcement already. They've already started re-verifying accounts. It looks like there's already some identity verification changes in the offing.
Do you want to just give a quick overview for people based on your reading of the act and its potential impact on Amazon? Sellers are really sellers of any online marketplace.
Leah: Sure. Well, so June 27th is actually the day that the act comes into effect. It's not the a day that Amazon decides to start enforcing it.
Chris: I thought those were one and the same, no? [00:01:00]
Leah: Well, I mean, in theory they should probably have it already started before June 27th, because that's the deadline for having that information.
Chris: For those of you unfamiliar Amazon with four weeks lead time, A project of this complexity and magnitude, very difficult to accomplish across the board.
Leah: Well, so I mean, a lot of this information Amazon already has on sellers. But I'm getting ahead of myself anyway, so the act basically means that Marketplaces have the legal obligation to collect certain information from high volume sellers. It's kind of funny because in Amazon's notification they say that it obliges the seller to provide information, which technically it does, but the act itself specifies that the marketplace is obligated to obtain that information. So before we even get into that, what does high volume seller mean? Because what you think of as a high volume seller on Amazon isn't necessarily what Congress thinks is a high volume seller. So according to the Congressional [00:02:00] Act, a high volume seller is 200 or more transactions a year with revenues of $5,000 or more in a 12 month period.
Chris: So basically everybody.
Leah: Yeah, not really what I would call high volume, but sure. Congress, they're not selling on Amazon.
Chris: They're talking about all online marketplaces. They can't give one number for Amazon, one number for Walmart. Maybe they should, but they probably can't do that for whatever reason.
Leah: So it requires that the marketplaces obtain bank account information, which obviously they already have government issued identification, which at this point Amazon, I would think has from most sellers since they've been doing verification.
Tax identification numbers and contact information. it also obliges the online marketplaces to make that information available to consumers if requested and also on the product listing itself. So a lot of this stuff we've already been seeing Amazon doing.
Chris: Yeah. The good news is they've already been asking for [00:03:00] this. They've already kind of done some prep by pushing people to review this stuff, correct it, make sure it matches. That's the good news. Of course, the bad news is we've seen implementation all over the map in terms of how Amazon verifies a seller account, what they consider verifiable.
And then when it comes to invoices, of course, you go down another rabbit hole with why are they rejecting my invoice? Why are they rejecting my supplier? But then there's the video calls confirming your identity and they're already behind on those.
Leah: Backing that up a little bit.
So those sellers have already gone through this process at this point. What sellers should be doing right now though is just double checking the account information that they have inside Seller Central. Make sure that it's all up to date. Make sure that it hasn't been rolled back at some point.
Maybe if you needed to have your account sanitized or to go rolled back and you didn't notice at the time, which I think we talked about a few weeks ago. We did make, make sure that all of the information on your account is correct and then also make sure that you have. [00:04:00] Documentation that matches the information on your account.
Because we have already seen Amazon start re-verifying accounts that have already been through the verification process since they sent the email a few weeks ago. So that's the most proactive things that sellers can be doing right now is checking the information on the account, making sure it's accurate, making sure that they have all of the documentation requested.
Chris: Many sellers who have already been verified by Amazon, will have to do it again. They might wonder why they have to do it again. They might wonder why they're mixed in with newer sellers who are going through this identity verification process.
Why they have to show invoices for things they've sold for years. Tip number two today, is don't waste time wondering why. Just understand that there's the INFORM Consumers Act. Amazon has to do this stuff. Understand in advance that Amazon won't necessarily be consistent in how they implement this.
There'll be mistakes. They might schedule video verification calls with [00:05:00] people and then not show up for them, we've heard about that happening quite a bit. Sometimes they'll reschedule with you when their rep doesn't show up, and they'll miss that one too. Not telling you this to panic. Just be ready for things not exactly going down the way they advise you to prepare for them, or they're not going down the way they promise that they'll fulfill their obligations on their side.
Leah: Yeah, I mean, realistically, there's no way they're going to be able to re-verify all sellers by June 27th. So, I'm not really assuming that that's going to be consistent in the next month or so, and I don't get the sense that they're trying to re-verify all sellers. That being said, the notification that they did send out did mention that they may require you to do this annually now to confirm that all details.
Chris: So this may not happen to you, but be prepared for it in case it does happen to you because we've tried to predict which sellers they'll throw into which buckets for however long in the past. We usually have a [00:06:00] pretty good yard stick based on experience for that sort of thing, but no one's going to be right a hundred percent of the time, and Amazon sometimes changes things up, not even just for us, for their own internal people.
In terms of how they do it. Sometimes it's going too slowly. Sometimes there are too many errors. Sometimes they learn by doing so it can change even after this process begins. Good things to keep in the back of your mind while you prep for this, whether or not you actually get a message saying, Hey, today's the day.
Yeah, and again, all of the information that they're asking me for is pretty basic business information that you should have anyway. I mean, government issued ID, I assume everybody has at this point a business address, your bank account information, a working email address, and a working phone number. I mean, these are all pretty basic. Oh, and a tax identification number. These are all things that you needed to open your account anyway. So it's just making sure that all of your information matches the documentation that you have.
Oh, sure. In theory, [00:07:00] It's a piece of cake. It should be a piece of cake.
It should be straightforward. But this is Amazon we're talking about, right? They're always bringing a guy outta the bullpen to throw curve balls. So that's what they need to prepare for because just on the face of it, bank account statements address, while everyone has a bank account, so it seems straightforward.
Leah: But we've also seen many, many sellers put bank account information on their account and then don't have a bank account statement that matches the rest of the information on their account. So that's the main prep preparation point that I would like sellers to check before, before they get requested for this information.
Chris: And some people, it's been fixable, it's solvable, but some people would just update an address. Obviously some of what we're talking about today is make sure everything's updated. In the past, we've seen some people update credit card info, bank account info, street address, whatever, and then they were temporarily deactivated.
That wasn't that unusual, fixable, but sometimes there'd be a gap or [00:08:00] an interruption in selling. Clearly some of this we will find out throughout the month of June as this comes into effect, I'm sure we'll see certain changes. Amazon will be getting themselves ready for it, not just getting sellers ready for it.
One thing to keep in mind, if you show up for your video verification call, the Amazon rep isn't there, or they even tell you that they won't be there and they reschedule you and then they don't show up for that. Make sure you're not forgotten. Make sure you're not just waiting to hear back from them with the threat of a deactivation hanging over you or God forbid you've already been deactivated, because waiting is not always the best thing to do, even if it's something they tell you to do and you're trying to follow their instructions.
If you have to call into account health reps and find out, Hey, how do I get this rescheduled? Do that. If you're really getting desperate because that's not working either check with us in terms of who you could potentially think about emailing and how you can try to get it rescheduled. But we've heard from some sellers who have been rescheduled a couple of times.
Obviously, if they're piling on [00:09:00] thousands and thousands of these all within four weeks, people are going to be missed, mistakes will be made. So just don't sit back passively and wait for Amazon to come to you. Be proactive and make sure if they're the ones who aren't showing up. Or if for some reason you have trouble on your side and you don't show up, make sure you're proactively following up and rescheduling those.
Leah: Also, make sure that the person whose government ID you're using is the person on the verification call. That is also an error that we've seen sellers make. Don't have your employee present your ID. You need to be the one on the call.
Chris: And obviously we're heading into Prime Day very soon. This is happening on the cusp of it, right before it. Craziness will ensue. Right? So we'll be covering this again, this won't be our last podcast on the INFORM Consumers Act but just keep in mind that things tend to be disruptive very quickly.
Sometimes Amazon tries to preempt confusion and disorganize behavior and it creates more of it. They're trying to get out in front of it as best they can, but it's a [00:10:00] large organization. Lots of different teams that don't have a great history of talking to each other, that are siloed from each other.
So just keep us informed. If you want to put anything in front of us, get our opinion on it, feel free. Otherwise do your best to keep all your information ready to go. Documentation on your suppliers invoices ready at a moment's notice in case they come asking for it. Because you might not necessarily get tons of notice from Amazon if they are delayed, if they are behind on things.
Per the usual. And as Leah said, make sure the right person is ready for that call and they're not on a beach somewhere sipping pina coladas and not available for the verification call.
Leah: I mean, if the beach has wifi, go for it.
Chris: Maybe, not a lot of sand you can plug into these days, but yeah, we've heard of some people trying workarounds, illicit means of
faking, who's on the call, misrepresenting, who's there to verify the account. This is not something that you should be doing. Amazon is doing a lot better on [00:11:00] this than they have in the past on verifying which documents have been fabricated or edited or manipulated. You don't want to be caught in all of that because then you'll start getting suspension notices that cite the code of conduct, calling you a bad actor saying you don't belong in the marketplace.
That would be a terrible way for you to experience. The suffering involved in an account suspension, especially if you're an established seller with big time losses that you could be facing.
Leah: Yeah. And they're also using facial verification software on the call. Yes. So, makes it even harder to pretend someone else is you.
Chris: We are not facial software recognition experts by any means but we've already heard some horror stories. Do not believe anyone who tells you that you can fake this and slide this past them. Don't even try it, is my closing words of advice.
Leah: Yeah. And my closing words of advice is that faking it as fraud.
Chris: And it's also illegal, not just against policy, which we will never say that you should try. Any questions [00:12:00] on this obviously an evolving topic. There'll be more episodes on it. Feel free to let us know. And thanks again for joining us for another episode of Seller Performance Solutions.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hello Amazon Sellers, welcome to the Seller Performance Solutions Podcast. I am Leah McHugh, and with me as always is Mr.ecommerceChris, Chris McCabe.
[00:00:18] Chris: Hello.
[00:00:19] Leah: Hello. So, today we wanted to talk about documenting your relationships, which is something that I feel like I touch on in pretty much every podcast that we record, but I don't think we've ever actually done a full episode on it.
I don't think we have. We should probably clarify what we mean by relationships in terms of do we mean relationships with your business partners or with third party services, or with agencies who are managing your brand and so forth.
I mean, all of those things. So the reason we were discussing this before we started recording, a lot of times we see sellers get suspended for being related to a suspended account and really the only way to get reinstated from that is to either get the original account reinstated that you may or may not be related to or document to Amazon.
Why they would maybe think that you are related, but how you are actually a completely separate business that maybe just has some point of relation at some point in your time as a seller.
[00:01:21] Chris: Typically there's Appeal this as an error so you'd essentially be taking that choice, documenting this is a mistake, it only looks like we're related, but we're not actually related, here's why.
[00:01:33] Leah: Yeah. And so normally we see related accounts come up because of a mutual employee or a past business partner, a service provider, sometimes we even see it where , a third party warehouse causes a relation between sellers and so really that's where having documentation as to the nature of your relationship comes in very important because that is the easiest way to document to Amazon. Like, we are not the same business. This is why you think we're related, we aren't actually related. So what does that look like? That looks like things like contracts, which in general you should probably have anyway with, with anybody that you are working with.
[00:02:12] Chris: No handshake agreements. No I sent you an email when we started and no one sent an email when we stopped working together. We mean contracts, written contracts.
Dates and signatures, and not sending Amazon something that's dated today. That should have been from 2020 or 2019.
[00:02:31] Leah: Yeah. And so the contract would differ based on the nature of the relationship. You would have employment contracts with your employees, you would have service contracts with service providers, like a third party warehouse you would have some sort of service contract. But the main thing to keep in mind is that at this point, most people that are working with this in this industry have probably worked on another Amazon account at some point. And most likely will work on other ones in the future. So you need to have that documentation as to the nature of your relationship, because you don't wanna be held responsible for something that they may have done in the past, made you in the future, or even just somebody who they may work with in the past or the future who did some bad stuff that could cause relation.
[00:03:13] Chris: As soon as that relationship ends, remove those permissions. Save the date, get the documentation ready, which would be sending a termination letter and also just generally speaking, as a quick sidebar, not everyone under the sun needs access to your Amazon account is just to look at stuff, just to look at things.
We can't tell you how many people every day, every other day are trying to give us access to their account, they send us their credentials, really not the way to go. Not best practices, design SOPs that are hey, access to our account is need to know only. Unless they're really managing the entire account for you.
There's a lot of services that don't need to go into Seller Central and poke around just for the sake of it.
[00:04:01] Leah: Yeah, and so in our case, we only really do account access for our monthly clients. We don't for any of the project clients, we don't access their account because honestly, we don't need account access.
You can usually get the information you need either by asking for it or doing a quick screen share where you see the information needed, unless somebody is regularly working on things in your account. There really is no need for account access, and it's also worth regularly auditing who has account access.
Like Chris says we see accounts sometimes where there's like 40 users on the account and it's like, who even are these people, half of them, that don't even work there anymore or aren't people that you work with.
[00:04:38] Chris: That's the thing. A lot of these brands we work with have former employees that go off and start seller accounts.
Sometimes they were using their own computer, so the IP address is the same. They go off, they create an account that gets suspended. It's the same IP address that previously signed in during their job. Amazon doesn't always have visibility into these things. They don't always know exactly what happened.
And as we all know, sometimes they are likely to suspend first, ask questions later, and that's when the appeals process comes in.
[00:05:07] Leah: Yeah, absolutely and further to documenting your relationships, it's also worthwhile having documentation that shows your relationship with your suppliers or whether you are getting a manufacturer to make your products or you are buying products from a brand and reselling them.
It's worth having that documentation that shows either your wholesale agreement or your manufacturing agreement handy in case there is ever any issues around authenticity, or again, related accounts. We are seeing, not necessarily related accounts, but we are seeing a number of sellers who are using the same suppliers all getting action taken against them at the same time. So again, worth having proper documentation that shows that relationship on top of your regular invoices and proof of authenticity.
[00:05:55] Chris: Sometimes the factory or manufacturer goes into business for themselves, right? Lots of brands have complained. Oh, now we have a competitor. And it's the factory we used to use or the manufacturer, and then they get suspended because they probably don't know that much about Amazon. They just know that you're selling your brand really well on there and then there's a relationship already there.
So if you're not working with these guys anymore, get that in writing. Don't have phone calls. Phone calls aren't paper trails that won't help you. Don't have random emails. Something that is in writing, if it has to be translated. Get it in writing, get that translated very quickly. So that you have it ready to go in case Amazon ever questions the nature of that relationship.
[00:06:35] Leah: And then the other area that we're seeing this more so in the last few years as there's been more buying and selling of businesses within the Amazon space, is documenting when the business entity changes, whether that is a change in partnership or complete change in ownership.
You need to have that very well documented. You need to update the information on the account as soon as possible because we have been seeing a lot of sellers run into issues where Amazon wants to re-verify a previous owner of the account who they now have no contact with because they haven't owned that account in few years.
So having that documentation that this account or this business was sold to you on X date, that other person has absolutely nothing to do with the business anymore, will help you get around those issues instead of trying to find somebody that you bought a business from however many years ago, to do a call with Amazon to verify their identity.
[00:07:26] Chris: We've had a lot of people contact us recently for sure who said that they could not reach the other party. Amazon said, this isn't sufficient documentation, they couldn't even reach or find or locate this other party, that person was gone. Sometimes they even disappear before they transfer all the assets like they're supposed to and then you're stuck. And if you're being asked for documented proof and you don't have it, You might stay stuck. And that's a terrible thing, especially after money has already changed hands.
[00:07:59] Leah: Well, and sometimes it's years later. So how are you supposed to track down a person that you no longer have a business relationship with from years ago?
[00:08:07] Chris: Well, Amazon's re-verifying accounts. They're redoing some of the video verifications. I think what happened in some of the cases, based on my conversations this month, last month, what happened was the seller did one video verification that passed initially, and then they part ways. And they don't know where those people are.
And then Amazon says, by the way, we went over this again, and it's like six months later they wanna re-verify and that person can't contribute, can't show up for the video verification call. And they consider that a fail, right? And if they think you failed these verifications, they move you from active to deactivated and in a way that you can't necessarily recover.
[00:08:46] Leah: So change in ownership, change in company structure is kind of a twofold one, because you do run the risk of being related to somebody that used to earn the account or you used to be a business partner with and then you also have potentially verification issues.
Again, very important to document those changes to update the account. As soon as possible. And also revoke their access to your account. It's actually kind of amazing to me how many people have had business partners who they parted ways with years ago, who they still have as a user on their seller account, that that should be part of the offboarding process, is that they should not have any access to your account. Just in general, again, legally, you probably want to document the change in business ownership but from an Amazon standpoint as well, you need this very, very carefully and specifically documented so you don't run into these issues.
[00:09:34] Chris: A dissolution of a partnership, you're documenting that legally already, so this isn't necessarily something that different or new in terms of what if your former partner ends up suing you? You've got like the agreement all spelled out. You need it for that, and in case they go start an Amazon account, that gets suspended, right? So this isn't really that groundbreaking, hopefully.
[00:09:59] Leah: And then just a final note, if you do ever have to get your account sanitized, if there is any sort of security breach, make sure you check that business information hasn't been reverted back to previous ownership, because that is also something that we have seen where they just didn't check after an account was sanitized and then Amazon started asking them about previous business information that was from years ago.
[00:10:19] Chris: And in some cases, Amazon changed it back to that info themselves. The seller performance guys had done that.
[00:10:26] Leah: Right, that's what I mean. If they sanitize the account, they changed that information, they could change that information back.
If there's any account compromise where your account needs to be sanitized, just make sure you are double checking, not just your bank account, because you should be checking that if there's any account compromise anyway. But also check the business information and the user permissions just to make sure that nothing has been added back that shouldn't be there.
[00:10:49] Chris: Also what I was referring to is sometimes when they sanitize an account, they don't take the step of getting rid of the fake business info. They leave it in there and give you instructions to restore your password access so double checking it for that because we have had people call us and say, Oh, randomly this happened three weeks ago and I happened to look in my settings and find all sorts of crazy bogus info. Assuming that Amazon's going to remove that for you, bad idea.
[00:11:18] Leah: Yeah, exactly. And same with user permissions, they don't always necessarily restore the correct user permissions, so worth checking if the account does get sanitized for any reason.
[00:11:28] Chris: I do not miss spending hours of my life in individual days sanitizing accounts and sending password reset instructions to sellers. That's one of the things about my time at Amazon I will never miss.
[00:11:41] Leah: Everything else you miss all the time?
[00:11:44] Chris: Repetitive emails to sellers who had sent in really weak or subpar appeals or plans of action. Not the greatest, but over and over, going through an entire bucket of account compromises repeatedly for hours, not enjoyable.
[00:12:00] Leah: And so this is just kind of an extension of what I feel like I've been saying for years now, which is document everything. Everything that you do on your account should have some sort of legally binding or can hold up legally documentation as proof. Again, not just for Amazon, but also because this is a very competitive space and we are seeing a lot more legal action being taken against sellers, brands, whomever. So worth having that documentation to protect yourself legally and also protect yourself against Amazon making mistakes.
[00:12:34] Chris: And hopefully the days are coming to a close soon where sellers say, well, we kind of didn't do that right, hopefully it'll never come back to bite us or if we ever do have a problem, we'll just email Amazon, explain it, and everything will be sorted out.
You can't assume any of that stuff because sometimes Amazon just says, I don't know what you did. You don't seem able to explain it. Why should we spend time on it if you haven't taken these steps the way an established proper business should. So you can't really just say, well, we're new, we made mistakes, we didn't know. They really don't care about those stories.
[00:13:08] Leah: Right. And that's also where it becomes a lot more important to have very clear documentation. So rather than having 10 different documents that, this connects to this, connects to this, connects to this, having that one document that shows how everything was connected or is connected and how it is no longer the case, makes it a lot easier for you to keep track of and also makes it much more likely that the investigator will actually read it and review it.
[00:13:34] Chris: Yeah. If the whole thing's a jigsaw puzzle, they're not gonna spend the time on it, they're not going to understand it. They might put it on you to re-explain it again, but how many of them are willing to sit there and read through all of that?
[00:13:45] Leah: Right. If you can send one document instead of ten, always do that.
[00:13:50] Chris: Yes, always do that. Well, thanks for listening everybody. We understand there could be a lot of questions on this type of problem, so shoot them over to us, let us know and thanks again.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here once again with Leah McHugh, our expert consultant extraordinaire when it comes to listing misuses and things that sellers do or fail to do when they're trying to correct mistakes on their listings. Some are opening cases with civil support, but not correcting their flat files. That's one scenario. And others do correct the flat files, but never call in and talk to catalog.
[00:00:37] Leah: Yeah. Or some people just don't do any of that and just send email appeals that aren't gonna go anywhere because they're not correcting the issue.
[00:00:44] Chris: That goes without saying, some people will always write to Jeff before they do anything else, even though Jeff left a long time ago.
So, you think it's one way or the other. Do you think they don't take the action in the flat files, they just open a case with support, hoping that they can explain what they were trying to do or what they didn't do. Or do you think it's not a lack of working on the flat files, it's the failure to call catalog?
[00:01:12] Leah: Well, I think Amazon doesn't make any of this clear. So I know this because I work on it every day. So what Chris is talking about is if your agent is suspended for a restricted product claims, the only path to reinstatement is to remove those product claims, which Amazon does tell you.
But what they don't tell you is that when a listing is blocked, changes that you make to the listing in Seller Central, don't push through to Amazon's internal system meaning what you see on your listing isn't necessarily what Amazon sees on their side and people that are looking at the listing to reinstate it are only looking at their tools.
They're not logging into your account to see what the backend of the listing looks like on your end. So the only way generally to get changes pushed through on a listing when it's suspended is to upload the changes via a flat file. And then once that flat file has processed, use the batch ID and call into catalog and make sure that they can see the changes that you've made on their end and if they can't manually process those changes for you. Amazon tells you none of this. They just tell you to correct the listing and let them know when that's done.
[00:02:28] Chris: They don't say that. They don't even say that. They say, create a case with seller support and go from there.
[00:02:34] Leah: Well, they do say to remove the restricted claims usually, but they also don't tell you what the restricted claims are most of the time. Or where they are. So that's specifically if the claims are in the detail page, like regular content.
If the claims are in the A+ content, again, what they don't tell you is that your changes aren't going to go through while the listing is blocked. So what you have to do is make those changes, then remove it from the ASIN, and then save it as a draft. And again, you need to confirm with catalog that has actually been removed from the listing, because sometimes it'll still stay attached on their side, even though on your side it's not attached to the ASIN at all. So everything that you're doing with contents, when your listing is restricted, you need to confirm with the catalog team because you can't trust what you see on your side. You can't even trust the category listing report. Unfortunately, when the listing is blocked, you can only go off of what catalog can see internally in their system.
And usually that means more than one phone call to catalog because not everybody has the same level of training or understanding of their job within Amazon. So I like to do other things while I'm on hold with catalog. Because you may be spending a good amount of time on the phone.
[00:03:49] Chris: That was a lot of info. People might get pieces of that process, but very few will get all of that consecutively in a row correct. So what are people doing who don't follow that? They're just opening cases with support, making random calls, not understanding why the listing's coming back live. How would they eventually figure that out, let's just say if they missed one of those steps?
[00:04:14] Leah: Yeah, I see a lot of people that struggle with it. Eventually they'll get someone in support that can make the changes for them. But generally speaking, general support, don't know how to do this. Generally speaking, general support don't have access to the compliance team. So you do need to speak to catalog, but again, you need to be making those changes, particularly if you are the brand registered owner catalog can't necessarily make those changes for you without a flat file.
Also, if you do make the changes and then call into catalog, catalog may be like, oh, we can't do it. Brand registry has to do it. And then brand registry comes back with instructions on how you can like upload a flat file and it's like, yep, that's what we did.
So again, that's where you often have to call catalog more than once to get somebody that knows what they're doing to actually push those changes through for you.
[00:05:03] Chris: I've noticed lately brand registry is pointing fingers at catalog and catalog is pointing fingers at brand registry a lot more than last year. it's about the same for you?
It seems to me like there's more people just saying, why are you asking us how to do this? We don't do this stuff. Those guys do. If they told you to come to us, go back to them.
[00:05:26] Leah: Well the thing is catalog isn't saying go to Brand Registry Catalog is actually transferring your case to brand registry with all of their notes and with all of your information that you've already given to catalog.
And then brand registry just sends you a template of how to upload a flat file. So that's pretty much consistent with my experience with Brand Registry for the last three or four years.
[00:05:46] Chris: Yeah, I understand. Brand registry used to have value everybody. There used to be some degree of competency.
There used to be some professional skill level or value or insight into what's going on with your brand. Those days unfortunately are long behind us.
[00:06:02] Leah: Well, and I do think a big part of that is because there isn't phone support for brand registry, because when you email catalog, nine times out of ten, you get the same kind of response from catalog where you ask them a very specific question or you're trying to fix a very specific issue and they send you just a general template of instructions, stuff that you've, half the time have already told them that you've already done and it didn't work.
So I think part of the issue is that when it's email support, They have a very limited amount of time that they're allowed to spend on your case, whereas when you have them on a phone call, they can spend as much time as you are willing to stay on that call. And brand registry doesn't have phone support, so you don't have the option of actually working with brand registry to work through the issue.
They just have to respond to you as quickly as they possibly can. I think that's why we consistently see just templated answers that aren't even necessarily relevant half the time from brand registry. Because they're only being audited on speed and you have no way of getting them out of that KPI hell that Amazon has put them in. Whereas with catalog, you can call and you can have them spend an hour if necessary on the call with you, assuming the call doesn't drop or get disconnected, or maybe they hang up on you, I'm not sure which, because that happens a lot too. But you don't have that option of working through the scenario with them where they aren't on the clock, where Amazon's like, you're taking too long. Come on, answer it. Answer it, get it off your desk.
[00:07:22] Chris: Well, it's the same with account health reps, right? They seem to have all day. They can put you on hold as many times as they want. Even if they come back, the answers they give you don't show that they really researched anything while you've been on hold. But the amount of time can range to hours.
[00:07:37] Leah: And I've also been told by both account health reps and catalog reps, because I've said to them, things like what we discuss on a call often doesn't really have anything to do with what you email me after we've had the call, they send some other messaging that is like, okay, well this is not what we discussed.
And I've had multiple people tell me that they are actually very restricted in what they're able to email you. So they have to choose from a certain number of options when emailing.
Whereas with a call they can actually discuss it with you. So again, I feel like that's probably why we're consistently seeing this issue with brand registry because they have no option of calling you.
[00:08:16] Chris: Right, exactly. Any other words of wisdom for our now petrified audience in terms of how to navigate this. I'm sure you've seen escalations that really haven't contributed to change internally in terms of how catalog operates or what brand registry teams do. So do they need to escalate a certain way? In order to break through and push past some of these barriers, or is it really just calling back and getting the right catalog person?
[00:08:46] Leah: So I like to do a little bit of both at the same time. Specifically with restricted product claims, I do generally find that you can get it resolved a lot faster if catalog transfers the case for you to compliance as opposed to you emailing compliance directly. Also, because half the time when you try to email compliance directly, it gets routed to the wrong team and then seller support sends you a nonsensical answer.
Whereas when it's actually transferred by catalog, it actually does get sent to the correct team for review. Catalog also has the ability of requesting a manual review of compliance issues, whereas when you're emailing into compliance, sometimes those are just like AI looking at your information probably and sending you a response.
[00:09:26] Chris: Wait for the future when it's all AI.
[00:09:30] Leah: Yeah, I'd like to do a little bit of both, but I do like to continue to work with the catalog team while also potentially escalating it externally, because in my experience, most people within Amazon that don't work in catalog don't actually understand how the catalog works.
So you can escalate it and they're like, oh, that sounds messed up. But they don't under actually know what to do. So I like to do a little bit of both because it also allows whoever I'm escalating it to, to refer to whoever was working on the case previously. And you're likely to get a quicker resolution that way.
[00:10:10] Chris: Very logical. Yes. I think that's good strategy to navigate. Some of these twists and turns. We understand that all of the wonderful many things that Leah just said might be overwhelming. If you have any questions on these, feel free to ask us. We're going to be doing more episodes like this.
Covering what the heck do you do with catalog? What the hell do you do with brand registry? I don't know what to do, I don't know how to escalate. We're getting these questions every other hour. We're probably getting a couple while I'm talking right now.
[00:10:40] Leah: I'm surprised you said ask us. I thought this was definitely one of the situations where you'd be like, ask Leah.
[00:10:45] Chris: Don't ask me, ask Leah. But I say that every time. So I had to say, ask us this time. Um, and I've been talking about stuff like this all day, as you can hear in my voice, starting to fail. So, Thank you for listening to my My hoarse voice and to Leah's wisdom. We will catch you next time on Seller Performance Solutions.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you?
[00:00:13] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you Chris?
[00:00:15] Chris: I'm doing okay. Today we're talking about some of the negative effects we've seen from brands who are, what would you say, over-reporting or erroneously reporting IP claims and submitting false IP infringement claims and committing abuses that lead to, in some cases, revocation of their brand registry. We've heard from some people saying, we lost our brand registry. Brand registry tickets aren't getting answered in any meaningful way. We're not sure what's going on.
And then when we probe, I think you and I both talked to people about this recently, when we probe a bit, then they say, either we reported ourselves and some of those were counterfeit complaints without test buys or some of it's just bogus IP claims. Is that fair to say?
[00:01:01] Leah: Yeah. And you know, it's either them, like you said, or they're maybe hiring a service who's says that it's not automated, and then turns out it's automated and a few thousand false claims have been submitted on your behalf.
[00:01:14] Chris: Right. That was the recent one we talked about.
[00:01:16] Leah: Yeah.
[00:01:17] Chris: That was the 6,000 IP claims were submitted.
[00:01:19] Leah: Was the 6,000? I don't remember. I just remember it was in the thousands.
[00:01:22] Chris: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, we're in 2023 and we still talk to people who don't understand that just because a reseller or someone on your listing is considered not authorized to sell your brand on Amazon, doesn't mean you can use any and all tactics to get them removed. We understand it's a proliferation of videos and articles and strange tweets and blog posts saying you can kind of do whatever you want to knock off anyone who's not authorized.
I believe some of those people are offering that kind of advice because they understand that when, when their target has their listing or their whole account suspended and they contact Amazon, Amazon is likely to say something along the lines of, well, you have to show a letter of authorization to sell a brand, right?
Amazon's part of the problem. They're asking everyone for this, and they're missing the fact that it might be a counterfeit complaint that has no basis or no proof.
[00:02:14] Leah: Yeah. Well, it's a combination of the two, right? I mean, trademark infringement isn't necessarily counterfeit, but I think sellers are kind of using those interchangeably, I mean like obviously if somebody's actually infringing on your trademark or actually selling counterfeits absolutely you should be reporting them. I think the issue is that counterfeit reporting and IP infringement reporting is just getting used to get rid of people that you don't want selling your product. And unauthorized sellers is not IP infringement, nor is it counterfeit products. And yeah, it probably seems like a quick fix, but one, there's repercussions with Amazon.
And two, there are potential legal repercussions as well, which is also something that we've been seeing more and more often.
[00:02:56] Chris: More and more potential resellers suing a brand for making a false accusation. So that's not necessarily losing brand registry, but you could be accused of damaging another business.
And I like that you said that people are using it interchangeably because I think Amazon teams are using those terms interchangeably as well. And that's one reason why it's kind of circular. Right? That's another reason why brands are doing it, because they realize that Amazon's using these terms interchangeably.
[00:03:26] Leah: Right? Well, and it's the same, we hear people saying that their listing has been hijacked and hijacked listing means that somebody took your listing and is changing the information on it. Hijacked listing does not mean that somebody that you don't want selling the product is selling the product on the same ASIN.
Which again is something that I see a lot of sellers use incorrectly or interchangeably, when what they actually mean is that they don't want somebody else selling the product. And I think the issue for a lot of sellers. I also think there are probably sellers who know exactly what they're doing, and they know that they're reporting it incorrectly.
It just seems like a quick and easy way for them to get rid of sellers that they don't want selling their products.
[00:04:03] Chris: Yeah, and this goes back to even some of the law firms that were pitching these services just to kind of collect fees, to exploit the ambiguity or the misnomers and the jargon around these terms.
And the way Amazon teams are known to mishandle some of these cases by just saying, we'll get rid of these unauthorized sellers for you by helping you submit infringement claims or even fake counterfeit. They wouldn't say fake. Of course, they're pitching for purpose.
[00:04:31] Leah: But I've also seen people talk about using AI to write IP infringement claims and counterfeit claims. So you know that's gonna be a mess. I look forward to seeing.
[00:04:42] Chris: That'll add to the mess. Auto reporting automation around IP claims and infringements. I had a seller contact me the other day that was trying to cook up some scheme of like, well, what if I accuse all these people of copyrights because they haven't copyrighted their images and I'm gonna copyright, you know, sellers who are looking for these angles to play will find receptive audiences out there, whether they're pitching a service or whether they're trying to use another service to report competitors. This is where Amazon kind of needs to get up to speed and wake up a little bit in terms of, this is a very well known, well trod path of abuse. So what are they prepared to do to up their game on reviewing IP claims instead of just rubber stamping them?
[00:05:29] Leah: Yeah. Well, and so I have three bad outcomes for doing this that I think most sellers don't know about, which I would like to share with the sellers who are listening right now. So one we've actually talked about before, but I'm assuming not everybody listening has listened to every podcast episode. If you have, thank you. But one that we see most common is that your brand registry will get revoked if you report false infringement often enough. And Amazon realizes that. So you no longer get access to any of the brand registry tools as the brand owner. And there's kind of an appeal path, but there isn't really an appeal path.
And it's not the kind of appeal path where you explain how you're gonna make sure it never happens again. And then Amazon reinstates it. The appeal path is really just for like, well, this was incorrect and this is why, and maybe that'll get reviewed, but there isn't really an appeal path with Amazon in terms of like right now, it doesn't really seem like they have plans on giving you access back to brand registry once they revoke brand registry.
Which brings me to number two. That most sellers don't know about, which is once one brand registry that you're associated with gets revoked, you can never enroll another brand again. Amazon's now associated you with abusive conduct, and next time you try to enroll a brand, it's going to be denied because you're going to be related to abusive conduct.
[00:06:51] Chris: So for sellers that create a new brand and wanna launch a new brand, that brand won't have brand registry access.
[00:06:59] Leah: The likely the likelihood that any of your future brands will get access to brand registry is fairly low, and I'm not going to say it will never happen because we all know that Amazon is inconsistent and maybe they'll just miss it, but, We see a lot of brands who then who had a brand registry revoked or had an account suspended, whatever the case may be. When they try to enroll an entirely new brand that has nothing to do with that, it gets denied for being related to abusive conduct.
So it's not like you can start a new brand and it's like starting from scratch. You're still related to the bad reporting and Amazon doesn't wanna give you access to those tools again.
[00:07:37] Chris: Right, or just because it doesn't happen right away doesn't mean you won't lose access later. If you have a competitor that reports you for something, they might discover it then and then take it away.
[00:07:48] Leah: Yeah, I mean, more and more it seems like it's just automated. They've already flagged your account as abusive and you get almost an immediate denial when you submit a brand registry application going forward. So you're not only putting your current brand at risk in terms of brand registry tool access, you're also putting any potential future brands at risk.
And this brings me to two and a half point, two and a half, which, which is that if you're using a service that's have access to your brand registry account and they're reporting false infringement claims on other accounts, their abusive conduct can also get you flagged and potentially result in the loss of your brand registry access because anybody related to your brand registry account doing any sort of abuse, has the potential of putting your brand registry account at risk, which is also something we've seen a lot where it wasn't even necessarily the person, their brand owner itself.
It was someone that they hired and whether they did it on that account or they did it on another account, Purely the relation between them is what caused them to lose their brand registry, or not be able to get brand registry on new brands.
[00:08:56] Chris: Truth be told, I wanted to do a whole separate episode just on that, but more broadly, talking about if you hire a service that does a bunch of things that you don't know about, even on accounts that aren't tied to your brand or listings that aren't tied to your brand, you could face the consequences for it. Because I don't know, I've been doing a lot of interviews lately on who ultimately pays the price when a service does something on your behalf.
And you and I have also talked about all the questions we've gotten from sellers who are worried, we don't even work with these people anymore. But they did all these things on our behalf. And rights ownership claims these days are clogging up the queues at Amazon.
They're concerned about it. You should be concerned about contributing unsubstantiated claims to those cues because as we've seen in the past, when Amazon gets grumpy about something that's making life uncomfortable for them, what do they do historically? They take it out on sellers.
[00:09:57] Leah: Well, and particularly in the extreme cases like we mentioned, where something's automated and submitting thousands and thousands of incorrect claims, they're just gonna shut all of that down as quickly as they possibly can.
[00:10:09] Chris: Yeah, it's a code of conduct violation at that point.
[00:10:12] Leah: Yeah, so whether it's on your account or another account that they're working on, the likelihood is that you will be flagged for being related to that abuse. So something that a lot of sellers don't realize and something that they should probably know.
And number three that a lot of sellers are not realizing is, You can get sued. You can get sued for damages for submitting false IP claims. And it's not just, well, they're not authorized, like that's not gonna hold up in court if you're claiming counterfeit or you're claiming trademark infringement.
Again, these are legal claims that you're making and if you're making them knowingly, falsely, You could end up paying the reseller or even wholesaler, whoever it may be, you could end up paying them damages because of your actions, which probably didn't seem that consequential at the time, but you know, later on it could be a problem.
[00:11:05] Chris: Some of the legal cases, I've been doing more expert witness testimony in these, you know, writing preliminary reports and some of these lawsuits, but some of these cases are due to the company or the seller signed an agreement saying that they wouldn't sell the items on Amazon, and then they did.
And that's constituting a breach and that's where the lawsuit comes in. So there is more that we can dissect on that topic.
[00:11:32] Leah: Sure. If they're in breach of contract, then you know, feel free to counter sue on that. But that doesn't mean that your false IP claims are suddenly like mute.
[00:11:42] Chris: And a lot of people don't understand who's handling infringement claims at Amazon. Hopefully we're at the point where you understand that there's many thousands and tens of thousands of these floating around any given hour of the day for Amazon. You don't have paralegals and lawyers studying these.
Who actually understand trademark laws or understand design and patent the way you think, you think that they would based on the messaging they send back to you. That's not really how Amazon works.
[00:12:12] Leah: Well, patent, they at least have some process now.
[00:12:14] Chris: Yeah, the Apex process is here with us now, so I should have actually exempted that from, but in terms of, Copyright and trademark. We've had sellers tell us that they've called into, let's say, account health reps and asked to review, hey, I got this infringement. We've seen language and messages, and we've heard sellers talking about calls they've had where the concepts of trademark weren't even well understood.
Sometimes they even said, well, you violated this brand's trademark, and that wasn't even what the suspension notification said. So there's a lot of kind of mixing and matching with these things if you really need good IP attorney advice. Leah and I have talked to a few different IP attorneys in this space over the last several years that we can refer you to.
We can't give you IP advice since we're not attorneys, but, we do understand that even some of the attorneys advising some brands don't understand, this is scary I know, don't understand the concepts of you can't just report stuff to Amazon without consequences.
[00:13:18] Leah: Well, and I think generally speaking in my experience, The attorneys that we've seen work on this stuff who are maybe not giving good advice aren't actually IP attorneys. So if you're looking for intellectual property advice, speak to an IP attorney. I cannot stress this enough because yes, I have seen sellers have brand registry revoked due to poor advice from their attorney who was not an IP attorney. So keep that in mind when you are reporting these things that maybe it's worthwhile speaking to an IP attorney before you start submitting infringement complaints.
[00:13:51] Chris: Which is, by the way, awkward for us when the brand owner shows us the letter from the lawyer and it's like, well, this is wrong and we're not lawyers, and we have to say, well, this is obviously somebody making an unlawful claim on your behalf who happens to be an attorney. Not shocking that there's lawyers out there running around that aren't really worth their fee. I think we all know, at least in the United States, that we're kind of drowning in attorneys, but story for another time. The focus here is really just you need a second opinion. Get it. But make sure you're not making any unsubstantiated IP claims. And don't just kind of set it and forget it when it comes to reporting. Just because you think somebody unauthorized, you're just because you're assuming that somebody unauthorized is selling counterfeit or is violating any of either your intellectual property rights.
I wouldn't make that assumption unless you think you're on the right side of the law.
[00:14:42] Leah: Yeah. And final note as well, just on the legal side of things is, I know a lot of sellers or a lot of services that do this their first step is sending a cease and desist where you are threatening to submit in an infringement claim and again, that can have legal repercussions even though it isn't through Amazon's system. A cease and desist letter is a legal document. You are making legal threats if you are threatening to then report them for infringement, which is an actually infringement. So something to keep in mind. I know again, this is something I have recently seen people talking about just use chat gpt to write a cease desist letter. Like maybe consultant attorney is all I'm saying.
[00:15:19] Chris: Well, and also, I don't know if we've heard from a lot of people who were sending cease and desist, who lost brand registry because of it. There's kind of a disconnect between those two.
[00:15:28] Leah: Well, because it's not going through Amazon's system, right? It's going directly to the seller. I'm not saying that that seller couldn't then report you to Amazon, they probably could. But I haven't personally seen that, but I have personally seen people take legal action for baseless, cease and desist letters. Yeah, so keep it in mind.
[00:15:45] Chris: We've seen what you just said, legal action that results from making those claims inappropriately. But we've also seen brand registry damage. Typically people show up in our inboxes saying, Hey, I don't have access to A+ content anymore.
Or, Hey, I got a message from Amazon saying, I'm guilty of illicit, fraudulent, abusive behavior, and I don't know what they're talking about. When Leah and I dig deeper into these, which we don't have to dig that deep, typically two questions in, we start finding out that there's been some behaviors, some activities that aren't compliant or that result in fake IP claims or unsubstantiated IP claims going in.
Amazon didn't really do this in 2021 as much as 2022. And now in terms of taking it out on you, and you don't want that to happen if you're a thriving brand on Amazon. Any questions on this? As I always say, contact Leah, not me. She's got all the answers.
[00:16:36] Leah: I will send you to an IP attorney.
[00:16:38] Chris: You can send them to an a good IP attorney, of course. Thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. We know they'll be questions about this. We know people are struggling to understand some of the messaging they get from Amazon and some of the consequences of these types of decisions, so feel free to ask away and we'll catch you next time.
Thank you.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, former Amazonian, current Amazon seller and brand owner consultant. I'm here with Lee McHugh, also ecommerceChris Leah, wonderful to have you back on our program today.
[00:00:23] Leah: Thanks, Chris. It's always a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:25] Chris: Today we're talking about account health services again, a topic we've covered a couple of times, but recently they've gone back to this blinking red light here. They've gone back to the 72 hour warning where they say, we need a plan of action within 72 hours, or We need you to suddenly clean up all these demerits and marks against your account health on the dashboard within 72 hours. Or there could be potentially damaging repercussions, right?
And the first question we get is, is it a real 72 hours? Will it be less? No one knows when these teams are going to strike. Would it be 48 hours and they're looking to get the POA, the plan of action from you right away? And others of course don't even see the message until it's been after 72 hours and nothing has happened by the time they read it.
[00:01:17] Leah: Well, sometimes they call as well, right? They call and tell you that you have 72 hours.
[00:01:22] Chris: Or they send a message saying, you get a call from us within 24 hours, right? And then once the call happens, then they put you on the 72 hour clock. But point being, it's very kind of confusing and they don't really stick to their own deadlines.
They never have truth to be told.
[00:01:39] Leah: No. often they just don't even respond. And you're like, I guess I'm not going to get suspended since it's been more than 72 hours .
[00:01:46] Chris: Well, right, but especially for people who consult with us or hire us, they're on edge. So they ask us, should we call back? Should we clarify?
And of course, every time you call account health, you get a different answer, right? But sometimes they actually tell you, no, you don't need to submit another plan of action. This one hasn't been rejected. It just hasn't been reviewed yet and of course, this was somebody last week or the week before that hired us to do work on something like this.
It's been a week, it's been 10 days. They called again I think today or yesterday, and the answer was, oh, you don't have to do anything else. We see that you're in your account health. We see that you're taking it seriously, but it hasn't been reviewed yet. Begging the question, why do they blast all these out?
I know this is a rhetorical question, but why would they blast all these messages out, arrange for all these phone calls, tell you that they're going to call so that you're waiting every second of the day for that all important account health call that could determine the feature of your account.
And then you send this thing in after toiling over it for a day, a week, whatever it was, and then they don't review it for three weeks, four weeks.
[00:02:56] Leah: Well, I mean, , at least they're giving you a heads up. Compliance have gone the opposite way, where when they ask for documentation to do a documentation review, they don't even give you a like grace period in which to submit it anymore.
They suspend your listing and then ask for the documentation. So at least there's a heads up.
[00:03:12] Chris: But is this an artificial grace period? Is this kind of a smoke screen where they've taken so much criticism from so many angles about their lack of compassion for sellers, their lack of communication with sellers, their lack of transparency with sellers.
Is this really just so that they can tell somebody far down the line or maybe a few months from now, congressional hearing or whatever it might be, some media article. Are they really just going to count how many people were given 72 hours to appeal and maintain their seller status just so they can give a hard count number?
Well, we did send 711 sellers last month a message indicating that they had the better part of a week to appeal this.
[00:03:58] Leah: Well, so I know we've seen them doing this on and off before, but isn't this also part of their whole, if your account health is in good status, we'll warn you before we suspend your entire account?
Remember, a few months ago they announced that they won't just suspend your account if you maintain a certain level of health, you get a warning. I assumed that this new kick of the 72 hours is part of that. But we have seen them do this on and off throughout the years .
[00:04:21] Chris: They do but not everyone is part of that new initiative or program, which is called Laughingly enough, aHA, Account Health Assurance.
[00:04:30] Leah: Right. That's it, I couldn't think of the name assurance.
[00:04:31] Chris: But some people got an actual message saying, you are now part of Account Health Assurance. And of course, last fall, I think when we heard from people they were definitely reassured that they got this message because they thought that automatically put them in the winner's circle of I will not be suspended randomly or in a lightning strike or without warning.
[00:04:50] Leah: Which I think I said this at the time, and maybe I didn't say it publicly, but I find it very hard to believe if they think that there's fraud being committed or like a massive safety issue, that they're gonna just like wait and not suspend you immediately because you're part of Account Health Assurance.
[00:05:04] Chris: Well they reserve the right to suspend in what they would consider to be an urgent situation or an emergency. So those sellers aside, first of all, we haven't heard much about this AHA.
[00:05:16] Leah: Well, I think you just get the heads up. So it's a 72 hour thing. I have yet to see messaging that specifically said, because you're part of account Health Assurance, you're getting a pre-warning. But I mean, we have been seeing more pre-warnings.
[00:05:28] Chris: We've seen more pre-warning, but a lot of the people contacting us now weren't even part of this AHA thing, so.
[00:05:36] Leah: Maybe Amazon just was like, maybe you should just do this across the board. I have stopped trying to make sense of this particular thing because like I said, the 72 hour thing we have seen on and off for what, the last five years.
[00:05:48] Chris: So it's definitely confusing. Traditionally their communication skills not really up to snuff, what you should do about it. So we'll move the conversation away from the madness because it is kind of crazy. As a brief aside to cattle prod somebody into, this is an emergency, write something quickly, but make a good, you might only have one shot at the pre-POA before we suspend the account then all the rest of the dominoes could fall and you might be tossed on the pile of account suspensions. Oh, by the way, we didn't mean the whole 72 hour thing, right? We meant 572 hours, which is god knows how many days because you were probably changing the course of your day and week. You're scrambling your teams, you're going over your operations. you could be pulling inventory out of FBA to inspect it, just so you have a removal order cooking that you can put in front of them, Hey, we're taking this quality control issue seriously.
[00:06:45] Leah: Well, I think when they say the 72 hours, I always just assumed that that meant that if you didn't have a POA in by that time that you would be suspended. I mean, granted, maybe Amazon is implying that they're gonna get back to you within 72 hours, but I just never thought that that was gonna happen because they're not great at their own timelines.
[00:07:02] Chris: They used to make the decision shortly thereafter, so what you're saying is maybe you just have to get the damn thing in there within that time and then they'll get to it when they get to it.
[00:07:13] Leah: Yeah. I mean, well, that just seems to be how they're treating them.
[00:07:16] Chris: This go round?
[00:07:17] Leah: Yeah.
[00:07:17] Chris: Which is kind of interesting because maybe it means they sent them to too many sellers. If they over sent it, then they're raising anxiety levels and stressing people out for no reason. If this was the right number of people to send it to, then why wouldn't they grab some people from other teams, get some headcount behind it so that people wouldn't keep calling them and creating more work for account health reps.
Did you read it yet? Call tomorrow. Did you read it yet? Because nobody wants to just take off for the weekend. How many people contact us on weekends who have been suspended? Nobody wants to work on this all week. Take off for the weekend, come back Monday, suspended. Right? Everyone knows this, including Amazon.
[00:07:58] Leah: Yeah, I just think I'm just getting too cynical after doing this for so long, when they say that they're gonna get back to you with a certain timeframe, I always just kind of take that with a grain of salt at this point because half the time they're like, we'll get back to you in 10 business days. And it's like, I'm sorry, what?
[00:08:11] Chris: For your compliance cases that you're working on?
[00:08:13] Leah: Not just compliance. I've seen brand registry come back with that as well. But in general, at this point, I just timeframes with a grain of salt on the Amazon side, whereas if Amazon gives you a timeframe, you definitely need to do your part of it by that time.
But in terms of like the 72 hours, I've just started expecting that if you have to have it in by then, if you don't have it in by then, then you're definitely getting suspended. Amazon may get back to you within the 72 hours, but chances are they probably won't.
[00:08:40] Chris: And just as a warning to everyone, when I mentioned that we had heard from people who had been sent this message and missed it for a series of days. That's very atypical. Most of the time, if they haven't heard from you at all, the 72 hours shows you know that they're willing to give you some time to do a POA, but if you don't show any signs of life, you have to expect a suspension at that point if you haven't submitted anything. On the other hand, if you hastily slap something together, as we often see and you submit it right away, you're kind of wasting some of those 72 hours because you could have put a better quality document in front of them and you didn't simply because you wanted to get it off your plate or you thought the sooner you respond the better.
We love to say haste makes waste around here. No more so true than with this because I think you saw those POAs that I was sent the other day where it kind of looked like something scribbled on a napkin had been typed up.
[00:09:39] Leah: Well, that's always been my concern with the 72 hour notice since the first time we saw this, was one, it's going to incite sellers to rush their plan of action which is almost never a good idea. And two, I mean, certainly previously, maybe not so much now because people are a little bit more concerned about getting suspended. But I remember the first time around that we saw this, a lot of sellers didn't really take it that seriously.
They're like, but they didn't suspend me. It's just a warning, so I'll just send them something and it'll be fine. That's kind of always been my concern here, is that people are rushing it and people aren't really taking it as seriously as a normal suspension notice. And yeah, certainly having that timeframe in there doesn't help with that.
[00:10:20] Chris: I think at this point, historically enough, 72 hour message people have ultimately been suspended, that people do take it more seriously.
[00:10:26] Leah: But they still are rushing to send something in which, generally speaking, it kind of reinforces the behavior of, oh, we'll submit this and fix the actual problem later, and I mean, that's another thing is that Amazon expects you to fully implement your plan of action before you even submit it. So they're giving you 72 hours to fully start doing the things that you're promising to do in the plan of action and write it up and submit it to them for them to review.
They're asking for that to not work well.
[00:10:58] Chris: That's why I kind of overly kindly refer to this as like cruel and unusual punishment.
[00:11:05] Leah: Wasn't there a case in the EU where they decided that Amazon had to give sellers notice before suspending them?
I think that's where the messaging originally came from, however many years ago.
[00:11:14] Chris: Germany, yeah, that was Germany. But that was years ago and I haven't heard about that since.
[00:11:19] Leah: I'm just saying I don't think it was like a well-planned thought out process when they started doing this, it was just, oh, well we have to give notice now, 72 hours.
[00:11:26] Chris: We've talked to some sellers who have gotten on the phone with account health reps multiple times to go over multiple versions of their plan of action. So it seems like the account health reps are around. I mean, some of them at least have been well trained and they're around to help you write a plan of action, which is kind of the biggest thing they're there to do.
[00:11:45] Leah: And as account health likes to tell you every time you call them, they are available 24 hours a day. Two days a week.
[00:11:50] Chris: That's right. The only problem is if you've already submitted one and you're looking for like, where is it in the pipeline? That's when they start drawing blanks and that might be what you need a lot more than hey, another pair of eyes on another POA. Some people have actually been alarmed because they went over everything with a previous account health services rep. They thought they had a pretty tight, well composed document together. They send it in, they're waiting, and then when they call back to check on it, the new rep is like, oh, I don't agree with anything that rep told you. I mean that's very unnerving. It's also just extremely inconsistent and poor management.
[00:12:27] Leah: Well, and half the time account health sends you on a wild grease chase about something that has nothing to do with the reason for the warning and not what seller performance is looking for anyway.
[00:12:38] Chris: Take it with a grain of salt. My favorite one this week was the account health rep told our client, maybe you should change categories. Which had absolutely nothing to do with the suspension case. I'm not sure why you would say something like that.
[00:12:50] Leah: Our frequent listeners are very familiar with this. If you aren't a frequent listener, we have many episodes where we talk about dealing with account health. Check them out.
[00:12:58] Chris: Yes, but if this is new to you, make sure you're not spending hours and hours and hours a day calling just to hear what everybody's different opinion is, as if they're just going around the circle and saying, Hey, think of something else to say to this person because that is the experience of numerous sellers. We haven't heard much about the account health services teams in terms of we're gonna tighten up the training, or we're gonna audit these calls and make sure that there's no bad information being handed around.
It's kind of just sitting there left to its own.
[00:13:31] Leah: And what's funny is I've had actual calls with Account Health and people who did know what they were talking about. And when I've mentioned that somebody else has told me something completely differently, they have actually said like, oh yeah, not everybody has the same level of training.
If somebody tells you something that sounds wrong, just call back. It's like, oh, okay.
[00:13:47] Chris: Not only that, but I don't think the reps realize they could be sweeping aside like a 55 minute conversation you had with that other person.
[00:13:54] Leah: Right, exactly. and it does take a long time a lot of the time, even if you was on hold for a good 10 minutes.
[00:13:59] Chris: Well, if they repeatedly put you on hold, it means they're just trying to make it look like they're doing something and they're probably not sure what to do.
Or they're just scrounging around for info or they're asking somebody else to help them find some info. So that's probably not. A good use of your time, but you probably figured that out when you're on hold so much. So, getting back to the 72 hour window, anyone who's got questions on where you think you are in that pipeline, how serious they are about suspending your account, their response or review of your plan of action draft that you put in front of them, whether or not that's something you can trust or believe in, let us know. Obviously we're dealing with these issues all the time and we're happy to kind of help clear away some of the lingering discolor smoke from some of these episodes because we know it can be confusing.
We know there's kind of a lot of back and forth if you feel like they're kind of pulling a bait and switch on you in terms of the timeline, we're happy to kind of clarify what your first or second action items should be at that point, you don't necessarily wanna jump into rewriting the POA. You don't necessarily want to write to Jeff at Amazon right away the way some people still seem to do.
And you, you want to make sure you vet whatever advice you find out there, whether it's on the forums or on random blogs or kind of anywhere like YouTube.
[00:15:18] Leah: And so top tips for Account health because maybe you do have a 72 hour notice and you don't have time to listen to our other episodes about this.
Top tip number one with account health specifically, keep calling back until you get somebody that's in the United States. . And top tip number two, any information they give you, you need to clarify that it is from the investigator's notes and not just their opinion. If it's their opinion, it very well might be wrong.
[00:15:43] Chris: Correct. Very much so. They might try to tell you that, well, I've got a lot of training for this, so my opinion carries a lot of weight. But that doesn't mean that they are giving you a real reason why your previous appeal was rejected. That's what you need confirmed.
[00:15:57] Leah: Well, and at the end of the day, I think some sellers think that account health has the authority to actually reinstate or approve an appeal. They do not, it's only seller performance. So at the end of the day, their opinion doesn't really mean anything. It comes down to what the investigator's opinion was.
[00:16:13] Chris: Exactly. So thanks for listening in on this episode of Seller Performance Solutions. Leah and I will be back next week and we hopefully will not hear from you with a major crisis, but if something big does develop, reach out to us sooner than later, as opposed to just diving in and winging it and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, because that often doesn't end well.
So thanks again for listening.
Extreme ASIN MergingExtreme ASIN Merging[00:00:07] Chris:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommercechris, I'm here with Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris. Leah, how are you doing?
[00:00:16] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:19] Chris: Good and today we are talking about an interesting question, series of questions we got through our website and a contact that mentioned that they wanted to talk about extreme merging of ASINs, I liked the extreme merging part, because as you know, this is a hot topic. The FTC has been scrutinizing, investigating and filing charges, filing lawsuits.
[00:00:44] Leah: Yeah.
[00:00:44] Chris: Filing charges and lawsuits around ASINs being improperly merged on Amazon and the confusing experience that is for consumers, of course, that's what the FTC Federal Trade Commission is all about and there's been lots of issues that they've investigated in the past about product reviews being fake and how that negatively impacts consumers, for example, in this particular instance and I think how we've heard this come up over the years is the improper merging of ASINs. There's a variety of ways it was being accomplished, but the bottom line was if you went to page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and looked at what the reviews were talking about, they were talking about a totally different product.
So clearly somebody had me merged those ASINs to harvest reviews and sales rank.
[00:01:27] Leah: Well, so that is one version. I mean, Amazon was actually proactively merging duplicate ASINs at one point, particularly when they started to tighten up their UPC policy. So if there were multiple listings with different UPCs, but it was all for the same product, the way in which to correct that would be to have Amazon merge them. So that is in that instance and also the instance that you mentioned, sometimes you'll see one ASIN will have like 10 different UPCs associated with it. And that's because those UPCs were all associated with different ASINs at one point, and were then merged into one ASIN and either by another seller or by Amazon, often by Amazon at the seller's behest.
[00:02:08] Chris: Right. So let's unpack some of the questions that we got from that particular seller and what makes sense or doesn't make sense and what solutions Amazon has or doesn't have. So some of his questions were, who's doing the merging? Why is this happening? Right. Are the UPCs or GTINs legitimate and are they all in fact for the same product? Right. Let's start with those.
[00:02:32] Leah: Well, yeah, so I mean, we sort of started to answer the who is doing it and why are they doing it?
[00:02:37] Chris: Are those the only reasons they would do it? Maybe we should start with the merging.
[00:02:40] Leah: Those are the main reasons. So whether it is somebody, like you said, taking a listing and they want to keep the reviews on an old listing, whether or not it is like a full, fully fledged form of abuse where they're just taking an entirely different product and then trying to merge it with another ASIN in order to keep those reviews. Or it's something where maybe it was a slight update to the product or maybe there was an error made at one point and the wrong UPC got associated with it, whatever the case may be, they then asked Amazon to merge them because they basically said these are the same product, they're duplicates. These need to be merged and then the other scenario, like I just said, was cases prior to Amazon's GTIN policy change where most often resellers would just kind of add their own UPC to a product.
[00:03:32] Chris: Resold UPCs, right?
[00:03:33] Leah: Well, not just resold UPCs, but you know, generally speaking a manufacturer isn't assigning seven different UPCs to their own product. But what many resellers used to do was just assign their own UPC to a product and then list it. So rather than there being one listing for the product, you would end up with like 10 listings for the same product because anybody could just assign a UPC and create. So part of cleaning up the catalog, Amazon merged those together. So those are the main reasons why, and those are the main people that are doing it. Whether it's black hat people trying to get reviews from an old product, people trying to keep reviews on a product that's maybe slightly changed over the years or a UPC duplicate listing issue that Amazon's tried to fix.
[00:04:12] Chris: And a couple of very interesting questions came up, through our interactions with this seller who came through our site. One question I thought of is, will Amazon devote teams and tools and time to finding all the improperly merged ASINs in the catalog, which is hundreds of thousands of listings, or millions of listings, I don't even know.
[00:04:33] Leah: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna be honest. I don't know if they can. Also just answer the question about if all of the UPCs are legitimate, Sometimes. sometimes they are all GS1 issued UPCs, but more often than not, they aren't. And, and that is again, why they were merged in the first place. Somebody assigned a resold UPC to create a duplicate listing. So usually you'll find that one of the UPCs associated with it actually matches the GS1 database and then all of the other ones are not. But that isn't always the case if they're doing it for review reasons rather than cleaning up duplicate listings.
[00:05:05] Chris: Correct, and the second really interesting question that was posed in that form that was submitted was inauthentic complaints. Are you going to be flagged for inauthentic? Which we all know, those are kind of vague and confusing to begin with simply because the UPC is considered invalid or if you're on a different listing for the same product with a different UPC, is one of them valid the other one isn't? And is that the basis for an inauthentic complaint from a buyer or a brand? And then of course, that would lead us into the whole IP infringement conversation as well.
[00:05:38] Leah: Yeah, we certainly have had sellers, not so much recently, but we certainly have had sellers who jumped on the wrong version of a product and then they did have issues with inauthentic. Also listing policy violations where part of the appeal process, and again, this is mostly resellers because they're the ones that are jumping on another listing. Part of the appeal process was putting into the plan of action that from now on that they were going to check there are UPCs against the GS1 database before they list against the ASIN to make sure that they are in fact listing on the correct product and the correct ASIN going forward. We haven't really seen as much of that recently. At least from the Amazon enforcement side of things. I think partly because I don't think Amazon knows what to do with this mess.
I mean, up until what, 2015 or 2016, Amazon was actively telling sellers to buy resold UPCs. So you now have millions and millions of ASINs that have improper UPC data associated with them. And one of the fixes for a long time was creating a new listing and then merging that old listing together. I'm interested to see, because there's usually like a few month lag time between us seeing something publicly and Amazon reacting to it, I am interested to see in reaction to the recent case that the FDC filed against a supplement seller for creating incorrect variations in order to make it seem like they had more reviews than they actually did.
I will be interested to see what Amazon decides to do with this going forward because the number of ASINs that are associated with multiple UPCs and Amazon's catalog is in the millions. And similarly, the number of ASINs that have resold UPCs associated with them from the prior to the policy change is also in the millions and I don't think Amazon has figured out a plan yet of how they're going to handle that. So I'll be interested to see if we start seeing more enforcement around this, how far back they're gonna go enforcing these things because again, I mean, we're talking about stuff that's been going on for nearly a decade at this point.
[00:07:42] Chris: It's a monster of a project.
[00:07:43] Leah: And it is a massive problem, but if they're getting flack from the FTC, they're gonna have to do something to make it look like they're doing something.
[00:07:51] Chris: I don't know if they're getting enough flack yet from the FTC to take on a monster project like this at a time where they're shedding headcount, not adding it to design, to grab so many engineers, grab them and design new tools and train and create new teams to dig into. I mean, do they have enough pressure to do that? Wouldn't they rather just be lax with the enforcement as they have for all these years and leave inaccurate info. I mean, there's already plenty of listed info that's not accurate.
[00:08:20] Leah: I don't think it's ever going to be totally cleaned up. I just don't even think that's possible at this point. But we see regularly when they get bad press or they get flack from a government agency they will loudly enforce on some sellers in order to show that they are doing something about it. We see that regularly, particularly with listing policy enforcement. We'll have like hundreds of cases in a week and then we won't see those sorts of cases for like six months. Like we do regularly see actions like that, and so I think we'll probably see something similar where it'll probably just be the lowest hanging fruit for them to enforce on, we'll suddenly get a wave of enforcement around it maybe, and then we maybe won't see it again. I will say, however, that like sellers are still merging listings and I think that this is the riskiest time to be doing things like that because there is public scrutiny on it right now, and again, even if you have a legitimate reason for it, what you think is a legitimate reason is not necessarily something that the FTC or Amazon thinks is a legitimate reason.
If you're slightly changed your products over the years, that is not a legitimate reason to merge it with the old ASIN or even to create a new version as a variation. Not something that you want to be playing with right now and I know that there are tons of services that are happy to take your money to do this for you.
Just because something is technically possible to do in in the catalog it doesn't mean that you can do it. I mean, obviously it's possible to technically do things that you're not supposed to do on Amazon, otherwise people wouldn't need to hire us.
[00:09:55] Chris: Well, that's the same thing in the in law enforcement as well, right? There are things that you can technically do that are also illegal. It doesn't mean that you can't accomplish them. It means that there could be consequences and repercussions, right? And in this particular case, it is alarming that a lot of of services are either ignorantly offering this as a workaround or they deliberately are putting your brand in your whole account at risk by doing this because of what Leah was just saying about this is a terrible time to be doing risky ASIN merges just because somebody that you think you can trust told you that it's okay just because they've been doing it for a while, because you've done something in the past and executed it flawlessly and no one ever hassled you at Amazon about it, doesn't mean that'll continue on into the future without repercussions and penalties.
The other thing is Amazon could look at multiple listings of yours. They might not feel like going through your entire listing collection and catalog of your own listings, it's a lot easier, and I speak from past solid performance experience, it's a lot easier to suspend your whole account and delete all your listings and force you to sort that out instead of them sorting it out.
And I think a lot of people don't understand that perspective. They think, well, they might shed a few of our listings and they might send us a policy warning or a performance notification telling us, Hey, sometime in the future, clean this up. We took a few of your listings away. I don't know why people assume that, it's a lot easier to either cancel all of your listings, which as you noted, this is mostly resellers dealing with it.
Some resellers have thousands to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of listings. It's a lot easier to just suspend your whole account, shoot first, ask questions later.
[00:11:42] Leah: Well, so the interesting thing is that often times if the ASINs were merged due to duplicate listings, it actually isn't the reseller that is merging them.
It's often the reseller that created those duplicate listings but it is often the brand that is trying to merge them together into one ASIN, which isn't necessarily the incorrect thing to do, I think the issue right now is that you trying to clean up duplicates. Looks a lot like detail page tampering.
And I think a lot of sellers don't really take listing policy violations as seriously, because like I said, Amazon will do these purges where there will be like hundreds or thousands of cases where people are being suspended, and then we won't really see any enforcement around that for six months.
But that being said, Usually when it's considered product detail page tampering, Amazon does suspend the entire account versus just the listing. So I think it's not something that sellers really hear a lot about because it's not happening constantly. But when they do take action, they do tend to take action against the entire account.
And if this is something that you've done on your account in the past, obviously like you can't undo right? What you have done. But if an investigator is looking at your account and they've seen that you've done it in the past. If they see that you're still doing it, they're far more likely to suspend you than if they saw that you'd done it in the past, but you're not doing it anymore.
So just doing it now I think is just an extremely risky time to be doing it. Again, there is also legal implications now that the FTC is paying attention to this and I do also just wanna briefly touch on, this isn't exactly what the question was asked via the email, but it is related and that is brand name changes because this is another conversation that I've been having with a lot of sellers. And again, there are a lot of services that will do this for you if you pay them to, but it is definitely against policy. Amazon considers a brand name change to be a fundamentally different change.
Doesn't matter if you own both of the brand names and because that's another reasoning I've been seeing from other service providers being like, oh, it's fine if you own both brand names.
[00:13:46] Chris: I don't know where that came from.
[00:13:48] Leah: I don't where that came from too, but it is definitely not correct. And this isn't just my reading of the policy. This is from conversations with higher ups in Amazon that have talked to people that did this before hiring us and then later got in trouble for it. It doesn't matter if you own both of the brand names, it doesn't matter who owns what. It is 100% against Amazon policy to change the brand name on an existing ASIN.
So if you want to rebrand your product, you need to create an entirely new ASIN for that product, start from scratch with reviews, start from scratch with sale velocity. You can't just change the brand attribute, even though it's technically possible to push through. You cannot change the brand attribute on your ASIN that is already existing in Amazon's catalog. You are risking your entire account by doing that. Best case scenario is that Amazon at some point just switches it back to the old brand attribute, worst case scenario is that they do take out your entire account.
[00:14:42] Chris: Or they revoke your brand registry, we've seen different things in terms of outcomes. We haven't seen mass account suspensions over this, but that's yet.
Once they start paying attention to stuff, I think a lot of sellers don't understand, that people got away with certain practices for a certain amount of time because Amazon either willfully or not, wasn't paying attention to it. They either knew about it. They had no fix for it. No plan for it. No training around it, no process for it. So that's why they ignore it or they simply weren't paying attention to it, period. That doesn't mean that yesterday is tomorrow and that whatever was ignored yesterday, no one cares about tomorrow for exactly the reasons we're talking about today.
If the FTC jumps in and suddenly finds something interesting, guess what? Amazon might not be lock and step with exactly what the FTC wants them to do, but they're certainly thinking about it, paying attention to it and trying to cover themselves.
[00:15:36] Leah: They're certainly gonna make a show of paying attention to it and acting accordingly. So there is going some kind of enforcement.
[00:15:43] Chris: At least an initial minimum push. That's potentially just observational or review oriented, review meaning they're willing to take a look at it to decide what can be done. Just to show that they're taking an interest.
It doesn't mean they're suspending everyone tomorrow, but clearly once they start unearthing these things, I mean, this is a tricky topic, what we're talking about today because you and I see this stuff all the time. We don't even have the best accurate prediction for which way this is going to go.
[00:16:14] Leah: No, I think also this is the one area of policy where when sellers do get in trouble for it, they consistently think that they have done nothing wrong. And we don't really see that with other supensions, I mean, some people don't think they did anything wrong regardless of what happened, but this particular area of policy 95% of the sellers we have worked with on cases like this where Amazon has taken action, the seller doesn't think that they did anything wrong.
And then I look in the account or I look at the listings and it's like, oh here are the like 30 things that were wrong here. It is a very poorly understood part of policy, and it's also a very poorly enforced part of policy, which means that a lot of people just don't take it seriously or I have the inevitable three times a week conversation of, well, I see other people doing it and it's fine.
[00:16:59] Chris: It's not just that, they're interpreting the policy favorably to their own reading of what they need and what they want. And the biggest error, the biggest mistake you can make is assuming that Amazon's reading of their own policies is a hundred percent coinciding with yours because we find that to be rarely the case and Amazon's policy interpretation is what counts. Not yours or what you see other sellers doing or what agencies and consultants and service providers who might not even have knowledge of compliance are telling you is allowable.
[00:17:36] Leah: well and again they are like Seller support said it was okay, not a valid reason, not something that you can show Amazon later to get you out of trouble. Support don't have like a good grounding in the policy here.
[00:17:47] Chris: Correct. And a good aside for, for that is support and account health reps aren't policy experts.
You might think that's crazy. They should know all the policies. So anybody who has any questions, we know this is a huge topic. We do see people still doing improper ASIN merging. That's a really risky thing to do. If you do that, make sure you understand that that's high risk behavior and you could get in a lot of trouble for that.
[00:18:14] Leah: But also not just by Amazon, the FTC is paying attention to this. Now you're looking at potential legal issues too.
So any questions on that? Once again, direct them all to Leah. None of them to me. Thank you again for listening. This is important stuff and compliance and policy are things that any responsible brand owner or Amazon business owner needs to pay close attention to.
So we're happy to answer questions about it. Take care and we'll see you next time on Seller Performance Solutions.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions podcast with Leah McHugh and Gary Huang, who I met, I believe in 2016.
So we've known each other six or seven years. I guess we would say you're most recently known for the Seven Figure Seller Mastermind that's coming up in Japan pretty soon. Now, about a month and a half away. Is that right?
[00:00:29] Gary: Yeah, definitely. We have a brand new event, it's the first ever Amazon conference in Japan for Amazon sellers since Seven Figure Seller Japan Mastermind in Tokyo, April 4th to the 5th. Very excited about that. Thanks for having me on the show guys.
[00:00:45] Chris: Oh, of course. And Leah and I are gonna be there of course, in Tokyo, so we're pumped about it too. Maybe taking a step back from that, how did you get started in e-commerce, but also the Amazon space?
[00:00:55] Gary: I got started in E-com a long time ago. I'm not gonna give you my life story , but basically, I started off on eBay. 2005. Selling women's shoes, women's shoes. So for those of you that, to remember that they come in the nineties, married with children. I was kinda like the online Al Bundy. I was women's shoes online on eBay. So they weren't fancy shoes. They were just like imported from China. These kind quirky Mary Janes. And they're like, you know, this like niche culture of like rockabilly and people that love like Polkadots.
So that's how I got started. They were imported from China. I knew a local wholesaler. I was based in LA at the time, my hometown. So that's how I got started in e-com. Back then eBay was the biggest player, kinda like Amazon today. , Amazon did not exist at that time.
We had a very small warehouse I was sharing with my mom. She's in the fashion industry, so I was self fulfilling. Go pick and pack. Yeah. We had a deeper printer. We were driving to the post office. I was driving myself. I said we, I had like a high school. I in a couple hours. I think every two days she would help me like pack the shoes and I would drive off to the post office.
I thought it was pretty cool. I held my little business, so that's how I got started.
I did that for about three years and then 2008 came up and I made to Shanghai. The US economy was suffering with the financial crisis as everybody remembers. And China, it was like the Rising Star Beijing Olympics and stuff. So I made a move and I found a job in the corporate world, working in supply chain. So I worked for a small consulting firm sourcing. So I was the point person for my foreign clients. Literally I visited hundreds of Chinese factory, like from like the big fancy ones to like the really scary ones that may have some, like health code violations.
I put the e-commerce business on hold at the time cause it was very difficult to fulfill with myself being there.
I'm also fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and my family is from China originally. I was born in states and I majored in Chinese and it was kinda like my superpower. So I use Chinese a lot, handled multimillion dollar working campaigns for clients, really like many different industries. So it got a lot of experience with that. That's chapter two, chapter three. I started listening to podcasts in like 2015, 2016.
And then I started getting back into e-commerce. I figured I'm on the ground in China, I can hop on the train to go to the factories. So I built a Amazon private label business with a partner, Apple watch band category. So we created a private label brand in that. So we built a six figure business within like less than a year. So that's how I kind of got back into Amazon at that time. That's chapter three.
[00:03:40] Chris: So I have a question on that. When you started selling on Amazon because most of what we're talking about today is going to be about expanding into international marketplaces. You were on.com or you started with that, and then you went in the UK and then you tried Europe.
How did you look at, you know, I'm starting in USA or were you not even thinking in those terms?
[00:04:01] Gary: Yeah, I launched a number of private label brands. Yes. That was the plan. I mean, that's what I was doing.
So I started at.com and then I went over to Europe. Went over to UK, Germany. We had some success there. And also the smaller marketplace, that was before all of the extensive VAT requirements, that we see now.
[00:04:19] Chris: So you expanded within like a year, or how aggressive were you with it?
[00:04:26] Gary: I expanded probably around, I wanna say 2017, so about a year, year and a half to two years. And then, I would always go to these e-commerce conferences. At the time I was based in Shanghai at the time, so I lived in Shanghai for 11 years.
Met my wife there, my son was born there, and I would always go to conferences. That's where we we met Chris in Hong Kong at the Global Sources conference.
[00:04:51] Chris: Back then, I was talking to brand owners a lot about, when is it smart to expand internationally? Will Amazon support brands that are being aggressive about it? That conversation's changed a ton since 2017. But it did lead us to conversations about which are the best marketplaces to expand to in terms of Amazon's regional marketplaces. So that conversation usually leads people to UK, or Germany, or of course Japan, right?
Japan was sort of the unsung marketplace for some of our US-based clients for a while. But I think people started to understand how big the marketplace was there, how much opportunity was there. And that was something that even got you and I talking about the mastermind that you're putting on there.
So maybe we can talk a little bit about, just how Japan differs from other regional marketplaces where some sellers might have had success, like say UK and why some opportunities there may have been missed up to this point.
[00:05:54] Gary: Yeah, I feel Japan is very underrated because it's the fourth biggest marketplace. Behind US, UK, and Germany. But almost nobody is talking about it, I think people are intimidated by Japan, the language barrier and cultural barriers but I think some people would be surprised that, I mean, there are barriers, but you can totally do it without knowing Japanese.
I still don't speak Japanese very well and I selling in Japan, and there are also certain advantages that it's actually, it may be easier and more cost effective to sell your product in Japan than a UK and Germany. So I do think it's a good opportunity.
[00:06:37] Chris: You and Leah, work on the compliance side a lot. I thought we could talk about compliance a bit. Because I know that'll be served well at the Seven Figures Teller Mastermind in Tokyo.
[00:06:47] Gary: So, talking about compliance, the opportunity is definitely there. It's the fourth biggest market, yet there's a lot lower level of competition compared to UK and Germany, and even compared to some of like the smaller markets like Italy, there's more sellers on in italy and Spain than in Japan, and they're like a fraction of the size of that. And people forget Japan is the third biggest economy in the world. I mean, like people are kinda sleeping on Japan, right? and Amazon is the number one most popular e-commerce shopping platform in Japan. So actually, when I moved into our new apartment, we had furnish the whole thing. I was asking the realtor, where I buy my stuff, which shop should I go?
He like Amazon. So people may be surprised that Amazon has overtaking Rakuten. Rakuten was the former number one platform. So Amazon is the biggest platform in Japan. Yeah. So, it's great opportunity.
But talking back to compliance, there are so many important differences. If sellers want to sell into Japan, probably number one is importing. To legally import into Japan, you cannot just use a US LLC as the import of record, like what you could do with some other country. In Japan, you would need a Japanese registered address.
So whether that's an importer of record that's based in Japan, or an individual based in Japan . Japanese government wants to have some support of accountability. Somebody in Japan if something happened, right? But that's number one. That's one of the, the big requirements for Japan. After that, number two is product compliance, because Japan's compliance laws and regulations are different from other types. So for example, even if you are selling a water bottle, Japan has like any product that touches food, basically you would need compliance testing for that. And there are different types of compliance tests that are required. And I think one other thing that surprised me is you cannot just take any compliance test certificate and apply it for Japan. Japan actually has their own approved laboratory. So it cannot just be like an SGS, it has to be their pre-approved laboratory from X, Y, Z agency, based like in Hong Kong or based in Tokyo, for example. So you really have to work with someone that's familiar with the compliance laws in Japan to be able to legally import to Japan. Otherwise, you know, there's nightmare stories or products getting stuck at customs and there's the fines and you have to find a place to put it if it's rejected, et cetera. So that's why it's very important to pay attention to these japanese compliance regulations.
[00:09:20] Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's maybe something that a lot of sellers in other countries aren't necessarily used to dealing with. Even in regulated spaces, Amazon doesn't always preemptively ask for that information before it gets to them. So a lot of times they've been selling it for years and didn't even know that they were compliance regulations for their products.
So in terms of the first step that you think seller should make when they're thinking about expanding into Japan, what, what do you think their first step should be?
[00:09:49] Gary: I think if they're brand registered, they can get started to apply the brand registry, you can move it to Japan so that way you have all of the protections. Sometimes there are like kind of unscrupulous sellers that are like selling your product in Japan without you knowing it. They're dropshipping it and they're selling it for like four times the retail price, right?
So that way once you have brand registry, you can knock those guys off. I think that would be the first step. And then as you are moving your products to Japan, obviously, make sure, you do your product research, there are excellent tools out there to verify the demand, verify the competition.
Competition on the whole is a lot lower, but you have to be careful with the demand because Japanese consumers are a little different. But the tool, helium10 works for Japan. So definitely use the tool for that.
And then also one of the, the big things, the big advantages selling in Japan, a lot of people are not aware of this, is that the review threshold in Japan is actually a lot lower than in Europe, in other countries. That means that you can move your product into Japanese market. You can carry over those. So even if you have just like a couple hundred reviews, you could become, one of the top sellers in terms of review count from day one. A lot of sellers are not aware of that. So that gives you a huge advantage, you have the reviews, you have the social proof. I mean Japanese shoppers, I find they pay more attention to the number of reviews, not just necessarily the score.
[00:11:14] Chris: That's a great point. clients of ours and others love to talk about reviews but maybe you can get started and ramp up quickly. If you haven't sold in Japan before, maybe you can jump in and sort of make a splash and get a handful of reviews that will be meaningful for your sales rank without eons of time passing first, right?
[00:11:32] Gary: Yeah. I mean, you, you carry over those reviews and like in the past there was a phenomenon where you could carry over like those 500 reviews from us to the foreign market, but once you get the first review in that foreign market, all those reviews go away.
That's not the case anymore. You still keep those 500 reviews and you just add onto that. And then one other benefit, and I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to hear this, is that the PPC costs in Japan are lower than us, than UK, than Germany, than the European markets. So that will be an advantage as well.
PPC expenses, that's probably the number one or number two expense, you know, after Your product costs, your inventory costs, right? So you'll have to add an advantage.
[00:12:08] Leah: And then how are you handling localization and the language difference? Cause I think that is probably the barrier that most sellers think of when they think about expanding into Japan.
Yeah. Definitely do not use Google Translate. Definitely higher an agency that can do the translation or the localization.
I mean, there's great ones out there, like YLT. Yana runs a great agency. They have native Japanese speakers. You know, she's helped us with that. Not just that like localization, Japanese consumers with their product with looking differently. They may look further in detail.
So, with the images as well, make sure that the images have japanese on them. But yeah, definitely hire, don't just Google translate.
[00:12:51] Chris: What types of sellers do you think the sellers coming to the Seven Figure Seller Mastermind in April are going to be? Mostly people who have already established themselves mostly?
Western sellers who have already established themselves in Japan? Or will there be kind of a mix of people who are thinking about doing it and just wanna stick a toe in the pool or some mixture of the two? And then maybe after that we can talk about the different speakers you've got.
[00:13:17] Gary: Yeah. So coming to the event, we do have seven figure sellers already selling US, already selling in the European marketplaces and they're looking to expand their brands into a brand new market. I think this is one of the best ways to scale your business because you are going kind of into a blue ocean, right? You're not just competing with like the million plus sellers in the US, right?
There's only about , in Japan last time we checked, I think it was about 70,000 sellers compared to one point, I think 2 million. So it can be a very blue ocean opportunity. Um, and our goal is to help sellers make additional, like let's say 300K to 900K in Japan revenue, right? That's our goal. So if you do have you know, successful SKUs, like all the challenges you know, at the conference we'll have import of records, we'll have product localization experts, we'll have compliance testing experts. So you basically, any question you have in the room to help you so you don't have tto search the internet, we can help you pick all the top people we think we can help sellers .
[00:14:18] Chris: And I know Ritu Java's gonna be there, right?
[00:14:22] Gary: Yes, yes. Ritu Java. You know, she's actually lived in Japan for 17 years. She has Japanese permanent residency. So she helped me with my Japanese listings, she has a wealth of knowledge in Japan.
Not many people are aware of that. And then she's one of the top speakers in the world. She just won, I think the favorite speaker award at one of the events recently. So she's gonna be speaking about important topic, Amazon Japan SEO and PPC best practices. We may even get her to talk a little bit about Chat GPT and how you can use it.
And we also, we have Amazon coming, Amazon ads. We have eight figure Amazon Japan sellers, seven figure Amazon Japan sellers. So I think there's gonna be a strong line up of speakers. I think this will be one of the best events this year, regardless of Japan. Obviously I'm biased, but we put a lot of time, Chris's gonna be here as well, you know, for brand protection. So, you got to play defense as well, right?
So obviously defense it's very important.
[00:15:23] Chris: For sure. We're gonna be talking about brand protection, brand abuse, and reporting things to the right teams. And of course, if you're reporting things through proper channels in Japan, and it's not getting anywhere, how to escalate and surface those things elsewhere within the Amazon ecosystem to make sure they get the proper attention and review and get fixed. So, healthy selling for sure. I'm really looking forward to this. Any last thoughts before we close on what you want people to know who are kind of on the fence about going to Japan? It's Tokyo, April 4th and 5th. It's cherry blossom season. We could talk about that for a moment.
[00:15:59] Gary: Yeah, This time of year will be the best time to visit. As Chris and Leah knows it's the famous cherry blossom season. People like tourist actually come to Japan this time of year just to see the cherry blossom. So we wanted all of the attendees to be able to enjoy this, this time of year, so the evening of day one, April 4th, we're going to have a networking social in a local Tokyo Park underneath the cherry blossom tree. So we're really gonna lay out a spread with some Japanese sake, beer, sushi bento boxes and network with other sellers, you know, the speakers like Chris and some of the other guys. So we really wanted to create this one of a kind Japan experience. You cannot get anywhere else in the world. So I think that is big. And the other thing is, I think just choosing the right marketplace for sellers, I think that could be as important or even more important than choosing the right product, right?
Because expanding to Japan, you're not really risking a new product. You already have the supply chain. You have the manufacturing, you have the proven listing, right? You're just moving it to a new marketplace. I mean, obviously there are challenges and obstacles, but if you're able to overcome these challenges, these challenges are becoming like a mote around your business because all the other sellers are intimidated. They will be left out outside and you guys will be inside.
[00:17:16] Chris: That's a great point. Once you climb that wall, you're on the other side of it. Everyone else has to start at the bottom of that wall.
[00:17:24] Gary: Exactly. So we're gonna be able to fast track this for you guys in two days in Tokyo, April 4th to the 5th at the Seven Figure Seller Japan Mastermind. So yeah, I'm super excited, guys.
[00:17:36] Leah: Yeah, me too. And we'll include the link to the conference in the show notes as well so anyone that wants to sign up can find that easily.
[00:17:43] Chris: And I would argue that anyone who can survive the challenge of dealing with or selling on Amazon anywhere in the world is strong enough and competent enough to deal with a different, potentially strange and unusual, but different marketplace like Amazon Japan.
Any questions about that, certainly reach out to Gary directly. Gary, the best place for them to reach you with questions about the event?
[00:18:06] Gary: Yes, it'll be by email gary@8020sourcing.com. So gary@8020sourcing.com.
[00:18:16] Chris: Sweet. All right. We'll include that at the bottom. Thanks again for talking to us today. We can't wait to see you in person. Awesome.
[00:18:22] Gary: Thanks so much, Chris and Leah, can't wait to see you guys here in Tokyo.
[00:18:26] Leah: Thanks, Gary.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. We're back with Seller Performance Solutions, our wonderful podcast about brands and Amazon sellers.
I'm here with Leah McHugh and today speaking with Daniel Fernandez of AMZ Clever, and you're based in Miami, right?
[00:00:26] Daniel: Very close. I'm in West Palm Beach.
[00:00:27] Chris: And we're, we're speaking with him today about his past experiences as a seller and also now currently helping Sellers as an agency.
So maybe we can start there. What were your first experiences with selling, and then at what point did you decide that you wanted to transition to an agency owner and help sellers that way? Did it grow organically from just your initial interest in e-commerce?
[00:00:50] Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say I've been in the industry for about eight years. That time I was living in San Francisco, working in tech, and somebody, just a random friend sent me one of the first FBA podcasts from a guy called Pat Flynn.
[00:01:07] Leah: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's going way back.
[00:01:09] Daniel: Yeah. OG, right? And that got me hooked, you know, so I, shortly after, launched the product and it did so well and it ran out of stock. But at that point I thought this was it, right? So I decided to leave my job and it was one of those situations where I had the golden handcuffs on and took me 10 minutes to write my resignation email, took me an hour to hit the same button, but eventually did. And started this journey. And it was very tough at the beginning because when I was able to restock that product, the ranking wasn't there anymore.
But it still was selling. And , you might think I, I, I learned the lesson. Ran outta stock again. And reorder. And then the third time, the ranking was definitely not there anymore. Right? And I had already put a lot of time and, and effort and all of that and I had taken by that point, like courses after course, after course like crazy. I had learned a lot. And I hired a coach and joined a business mastermind down in San Diego. And they told me, look, you've got all this knowledge and you've done well, but obviously learning the lessons here, but you need cash flow now. So why don't you switch to an agency?
Right. And that was almost eight years ago. I did that and never, never look back. Continue working one client as to the other and hiring people. And this brought me to China where I think we met the first time.
[00:02:31] Chris: In Hong Kong ?
[00:02:33] Leah: Oh wow. We are going way back.
[00:02:35] Daniel: Yeah. Hong Kong and then recently moved back to the States, so here I am and what we do hasn't changed. We maybe added Walmart, obviously Amazon, and it's it's full management. We help brands grow.
[00:02:58] Chris: So you got two or three dozen clients somewhere in that vicinity, I think you were telling me. They're mostly private label brands or do you help resellers as well?
[00:03:07] Daniel: Yeah, I would say our ideal client, right? The brand that we help become the most successful is a private label brand.
And there's a few more criteria, right? It's a brand that is basically in the business of growing their product line. So adding new products, very prolifically, and they are, they are also not just selling products, they're actually growing a brand. Maybe the brand already fits outside of Amazon and they wanna be able to leverage that inside Amazon while maintaining the brand recognition. And the customer basically, really identifies with it.
[00:03:43] Chris: Are these people coming to you right at the beginning, you're helping them launch, or do they get their feet wet a little bit?
They start some selling and then they need help once they know a little bit more about what they're doing, but they want to do it better, do you jump in at that point when they're still trying to get established, but they've already kind of opened things up?
[00:03:59] Daniel: Yeah, we've done both. I would say maybe three Fourths are brands that already have proof of concepts.
And maybe that the last one fourth is brands that we've even taken pre-revenue brands. And to be fair, I speak with a lot of brand owners and a lot of them are not a good fit, especially these ones that are pre-revenue. But the ones that we took on, we just saw something special.
Usually just a product that was well differentiated. Or maybe it was similar, but the marketing was just well differentiated. So, no, me too products. That was a little bit what we looked for.
[00:04:36] Leah: Which is awesome. Cause I think that as the way the marketplace is going now, we've kind of cycled back to that like brand recognition being important as opposed to whoever can hack the data quickly and as well to do well I think it's interesting to see, because you know we've all been in the industry for a while. It's sort of cyclical, right? Where you have like lots of brand differentiation and then just like trading in the same products. And now we're kind of heading back into the brand differentiation, which I find really interesting.
[00:05:02] Daniel: Yeah. And I chat with a lot of D2C brands that they achieve success outside of Amazon already. So they're with social media, with pay media outside Amazon and Basically leaving money on the table, right? With these brands, like the biggest issue is they're being already searched on Amazon, right? And not being there, not having a presence is costing them tens, hundreds, millions of dollars. But not being there also correctly, it's also costing them, right? So that's a lot of what we see.
[00:05:39] Leah: Yeah, it's kind of crazy when you look up like major brands on Amazon, how bad some of their Amazon listings are because it's not what they do. They're good at all the other sales channels, they don't have like dedicated Amazon people. Still surprisingly, you'd think they'd kind of like get around to it, but I tend to use major brands as my examples of like what not to do when I have to give a talk because they're so easy to find.
[00:06:03] Daniel: So listing yesterday in the US that the images were all in Japanese.
[00:06:09] Leah: Oh yeah. Nice.
[00:06:10] Daniel: That's a brand, that's an example.
[00:06:12] Chris: So that works for Japan. Not so well here.
[00:06:14] Leah: Well maybe their demographic is Japanese speakers in the US. Yeah, very niche.
[00:06:22] Chris: Yeah. . I think some people think it's going to be straightforward.
It's going to be easier than it could be. What kinds of pain points do you see with some of the brands that you're managing? Is it just mostly costs, like rising costs of inventory, rising ads costs and so forth. Or are they just kind of unsure what their edge will be on competition and they haven't quite turned the corner on how to sell more units for their dollars?
[00:06:47] Daniel: Yeah. A couple of things. So for, for D2C brands, one of the biggest pain points is attribution. Because these brands are spending a few million dollars on social media ads and influencer marketing and etc. So they have a lot of traffic that's being generated, a lot of brand aware traffic going on.
Which obviously is ending up on Amazon. So how do we actually know what the real role is, right? Because there is efforts being done outside of Amazon. We feel a lot of brands that are little worried, right. How to scale profitably if I may say because there's many ways to do it wrong, right? So I think that's another. One Last is for these brands that maybe, are not D2C, maybe they've been selling to distributors and all of that, almost guaranteed there's gonna be resellers on Amazon. And that is a problem because, this Japanese listing I was mentioning, the issue is because there's a reseller and they don't care much. They made a mistake or the Amazon system or whatnot. But we see a lot of inconsistencies on catalogs on the brand when big brands are selling through distributors and a lot of them are, because of that, wanting to go D2C. Which creates a huge project. It's very difficult to iron everything out, but you know, when on it, it can pay off tremendously.
[00:08:12] Chris: And in terms of this year versus last year versus the year before, did you start working with some brands that their first year was like the covid year and they saw a huge impact and revenue was growing and easier and now they have to work a little bit more for it because more sellers.
Of course, in the last two years coming in, more sellers are coming in all the time. But it's not quite what it was a couple of years ago. Have you gone through pain points like that with some of your clients?
[00:08:40] Daniel: Definitely. And you mentioned it something about cost per clicks going up. That's a real thing. And what we have seen is that because of the pandemic, it drove so much shopping activity to e-commerce. I mean, basically the whole retail sector switched to e-commerce, brands had a phenomenal year or couple of years. But as retail stores started to open back up, right?
The traffic, retail traffic went back to normal somewhat. But then there is these sellers, these brands sitting on tons of stock because they bought, based on projecting that this craziness will continue. So one of the biggest challenges we see is, okay, how do we move product, oversupply of product profitably or somewhat efficiently, right?
That's one of the challenges that we've been dealing with and also because there is this oversupply of stock and arguably demand on Amazon went down a little bit last Q4, right? I think the first year that Amazon just had like a little, like tip down. There are some solutions for that.
[00:09:46] Leah: Yeah. I think also because Bloomberg yesterday published an article about how this is the first year that Amazon is essentially taking about 50% of sellers revenues by the time you calculate ad spend and all of the fees associated with it, you're only really getting 50% of your revenue on Amazon. So, if you have too much inventory and not rising costs that's a tough spot to be in.
[00:10:06] Daniel: Yeah. So Amazon is love and hate, right?
And there's brilliant people working there and they know what's going on and I think they've been very prolific with their advertising products. They've launched new ways of targeting customers. For example, right now, what we are doing a lot of is CPC is a common term, stands for cost per click.
That's what advertising has been based off of for many years on Amazon. Recently they launched something called vCPM. Which basically means instead of paying per click, you're paying per thousand impressions. This is something that has been available on platforms like Facebook and whatnot.
Yeah. We're noticing that we're getting cheaper clicks by adopting these new options from Amazon, and I think they're being so prolific to bring the cost per click down temporarily, right? Because when the avalanche of sellers come and adopt one of these new methods or targeting options, et cetera, obviously the clicks, become more expensive, right?
My advice, what we're doing with clients is adopting these vCPM there's a new sponsored display video ads, which right now, also at the beginning, they tend to be cheaper. So few things to take advantage of.
[00:11:22] Chris: And any other words of advice for brands out there that are new to Amazon or looking at the year ahead in terms of planning for Q3, Q4 planning for Prime Day?
If you had to give one big piece of. To brands in 2023 for the rest of this year, what would it be?
[00:11:44] Daniel: I would say to mind more the curation of what gets sent to Amazon. To really, really reserve Amazon to those hero SKUs. In the past, Amazon was very friendly with restock limits and we could pretty much send everything to Amazon.
But going forward, Amazon has realized that their warehousing is a very expensive part of their business, so they want quick turnover. So I think this year, really the focus should be on the top 25 SKUs or top half SKUs via FBA.
And I think FBM will probably make a little bit of a comeback.
[00:12:21] Leah: I think it already is.
[00:12:24] Daniel: It's trendy right? Right now?
[00:12:25] Leah: Yeah. It's climbing. It's climbing again. Yeah. Because Amazon isn't building as many warehouses now. I mean, they were in manufacture or construction overdrive before the pandemic even started. And then they doubled down during the pandemic as well, and then they pulled it all in 2022.
[00:12:41] Daniel: Yeah. So I would say don't overlook FBM would be the other piece of advice and the last one is Amazon is pay to play. Right? It's really allocating that budget, to be able to get exposure.
The days of reliance simply on organic ranking is no longer there. Advertisement or paid media sales, and then organic sales. There should be a strategy that implements or applies both.
[00:13:06] Chris: Great. Thanks. And I guess we might not see you at the Prosper show.
Maybe we'll connect with you at one of the South Florida Wizards of Ecom events in the next few months. Where can people reach you if they have questions or wanna hear more about your agency?
[00:13:20] Daniel: Yeah, definitely. And I hope to see you, here in south Florida. So my company is a AMZ Clever. We have a website, LinkedIn, everything. But really to anybody listening, I invite you to send me a direct email, at Daniel@amzclever.com.
Great. Sounds good. We'll catch up with you next time. Thanks everybody for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. Thank you, Leah, and have a great day.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hello everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here once again with Leah McHugh, and today we are talking about something distressing we've seen happen very recently. There seems to be multiple pieces to it that Leah's going to unpack in a second.
But we're hearing about people having inventory suddenly declared as defective and unsellable. They're trying to reach FBA teams, they're trying to reach account health teams. A lot of confusion, a lot of chaos. We're getting these contacts from Amazon brands almost every other day, or what is it every day now.
So, some of it seems tied to product recalls that may be real or imaginary. I wanted to start with that piece first because I know we had talked in the past about abuse cases where there was no product recall. Somebody just made this complaint to Amazon. Amazon warned the seller, took their listing down. That was for invalid complaints about fake product recalls. So I wanna make sure that we clarify the real recalls from the fake ones. So can you start there in terms of the legitimate ones that you've seen so far?
[00:01:14] Leah: Yeah. Well, so first I think we should probably start with what defective actually means in Amazon speak because I think that is where people get confused in terms of the recall thing.
Defective within Amazon doesn't mean damaged. It means that there's something wrong with the product, making it unsellable such as a recall or if the product doesn't match the description that was given to customers. So I think the reason why sometimes people are getting messaging with the term recall in it is because the defective is the status that inventory goes into if there's a recall. And then recall doesn't necessarily mean government recall. It can also just mean a safety issue with Amazon and they've just put it in defective status to make sure nobody else gets those products. And so I think that's where people are getting confused because defective doesn't mean damaged, it's different. It's a different term, it's a different status. Both are unfillable, but one is like defective, doesn't mean damaged. And I think another reason that people are upset and it makes sense for them to be upset. Is that what we're seeing in a lot of the cases in the last week or so, is that all of their inventory for an ASIN gets moved to defective. So it's pretty standard that you'll get like one or two pieces moved to defective sometimes, but they're seeing whatever the amount of inventory there is for that ASIN being moved into defective status and so sometimes, you know, that might just be like 10 pieces if that's all you have left but we we're also seeing where it's like tens of thousands of units that have suddenly been moved into defective inventory.
[00:02:44] Chris: And it's good that we're defining our terms. So we will never confuse defective with damaged because damaged inventory is, you know, people file reimbursement requests for that.
[00:02:54] Leah: Or it gets damaged in the warehouse.
[00:02:56] Chris: And this has nothing to do with that. A lot of people I've talked to, go in the voice of the customer, they go into return reasons. They look deep on ASIN level data, and they don't see any history of defective item complaints, and that really alarms them because it looks like they're being attacked by a competitor or it's a straight up, crazy mistake by Amazon. But a lot of people are trying to divine the origin of these. What are the cause? Of, like you said, having thousands of units quarantined in this unsellable status. I think the one I started working on last night was 9,000 units. I mean, this is not, like you said, this isn't 10 or 12 or 14 pieces.
[00:03:38] Leah: Right. You're looking at potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory that's suddenly been moved to defective. And another thing to also note, which is another reason why I think they maybe get confused with the recall, is that if the inventory is in defective status, FBA won't check that inventory for you. Where if it's damaged, you can request a bin check If it's defective and you call FBA and you're like, Hey, how come all of my inventory is moved into defective? They'll be like, we don't know. But the only way to get it out of defective is to remove it all from FBA, check it and then send it back in.
So first of all, don't do that unless like you actually know that your inventory is defective.
[00:04:18] Chris: We're assuming nobody would do that as their first option.
[00:04:22] Leah: Right, but FBA won't check it for you. So you can't be like, Hey, this seems incorrect. Can you go physically look at that inventory?
They won't do it. And they will also tell you that their tools cannot move it from defective back into sellable. Which I'm sure is true. I'm sure their tools won't let them do that. But their solution for you is to have all of the inventory returned to you, check it, and then send it back in.
And like, obviously if you have hundreds of thousands of units or whatever, you're not going to want to do that.
[00:04:52] Chris: Well, and you kept talking, this is a little bit different, but you kept talking to people and you did a lot of digging in research in terms of Amazon reps were calling different FBA warehouses because Amazon wouldn't remove the items, right? For legitimate recalls even.
[00:05:10] Leah: Well, yeah. I mean that is where there is an actual recall present and the inventory should be in defective status. So that's a little bit different than what we're talking about here. We are kind of talking about and what we've seen in the last few weeks is really inventory that isn't defective being marked as defective.
And I've seen that come in one of two ways. One way is when an ASIN has been suspended, the inventory goes into stranded and then we've seen it quite a few times in the last week where once the ASIN gets reinstated, the inventory gets stuck in defective, even though the ASIN has been fully reinstated.
And you talk to account health and account health are like, there's nothing on your account that says that those units should have been moved to defective. But we can't talk to FBA. But, so we saw that quite a few times where the ASIN was reinstated, but then the inventory was stuck in defective and nobody could tell you why and nobody could get it fixed.
We did get it fixed. If you have a SAM that's probably like the quickest kind of route to get it resolved. But, and then with the other way that we've been seeing it is just totally normal active ASINs, just suddenly having all inventory removed into defective unfillable status.
And I think with the reinstatement ones, I was like, oh, well this just seems like a glitch with the tools. But when it's just kind of happening outta nowhere based on nothing, then it's like, okay, well now this is probably an abuse tactic, unfortunately.
[00:06:31] Chris: Well, so what are people doing wrong, so opening cases with support, We've seen examples of what kind of messaging they get back calling into account health reps. I mean, what are people going to try initially before trying to fix it the proper way?
[00:06:45] Leah: Yeah. So it's Account health and FBA, Account health can't access FBA and will refuse to help you because according to them, this has nothing to do with your account health and they just can't talk to the FBA team.
And then the FBA team, like I said, are just going to tell you that they can't check the inventory and they can't change the status and you have to remove the inventory and send it back in. So really the only way that we've found to get this resolved is to escalate it.
[00:07:07] Chris: So there's escalating with internal cases, obviously there's, from my way of thinking, you're treating this like you would almost an account suspension. Or I mean maybe not doing reinstatement appeals per se, but you are sending email escalations, right?
[00:07:22] Leah: Yeah, because it's one of those things which Amazon doesn't really excel at, where multiple teams are required to fix it.
So just contacting FBA, they can't do anything. Account health can't do anything. You need to get it to somebody within an escalation queue because they have the ability to communicate with multiple teams.
[00:07:43] Chris: And keep in mind we say this a lot on the podcast take with a grain of salt, what you hear from account health reps when you call them, which inevitably people will, or seller support.
If you're directed to seller support about this. I've heard that somebody called, somebody that I talked to called Account Health and they said, well, I think this product is the subject of a recall, but there's nothing annotated on the account that says who initiated the recall, or you better contact the manufacturer to find out if there's a product recall.
[00:08:12] Leah: And of course, this particular person said, we are the manufacturer, so we know there's no recall. Right. And I can kind of understand where account health could be thinking that, because again, if defective means potentially subject to a recall and all of their inventory has been marked as defective.
It would make sense to think that, oh, this must be subject to a recall. I mean, the fact that they are actually saying that there aren't any notes is helpful because if it isn't actually subject to a recall, because recall can also mean a recall by Amazon. And we have seen that in the past where a government recall isn't required, but part of the reinstatement process is that Amazon requires you to remove all of the current inventory from their warehouses before reinstatement. A good way to test whether your product is subject to a recall or not with an Amazon system, is open up a merchant fulfilled offer on that ASIN and if you're allowed to do merchant fulfilled, probably not subject to a recall.
[00:09:04] Chris: Any, any last thoughts on this particular topic in terms of info you can scrape together people or questions you can be asking.
[00:09:15] Leah: Yeah. The main thing is just you need to push, you need to push for an escalation if you have the strategic account manager, that's a very easy way to raise an internal escalation. If you're working with someone like me or Chris, we can obviously help with the escalations. If you have absolutely no idea how to escalate to anybody..
[00:09:31] Chris: Ask, before you start escalating.
[00:09:33] Leah: Well, but I mean, even just within the FBA requesting that that team escalates it for you, can actually work. It'll probably be a little bit slower than if you had a different sort of escalation, but I actually usually will do that simultaneous to another escalation. So you kind of have it being escalated from multiple angles to potentially get it looked at a little bit faster.
And also you know, one team just sometimes is less busy than the other team and so you get a quicker response. So I like to do both. I like to push the FBA team for an internal escalation. If there's a SAM, push a SAM for an internal escalation and then escalate it to whoever escalating to in that particular week that we're dealing with the issue.
[00:10:14] Chris: Well said, the reason I asked was because inevitably people will write to the Jeff Amazon email and start barking at executive seller relations.
[00:10:22] Leah: I mean, it does still sometimes work.
[00:10:23] Chris: Saying but not as much as it used to. Not nearly as often.
Is that just enough to get the ball rolling and then you handle it differently elsewhere?
Because I think the expectation when people write to Jeff nowadays is it goes to executive seller relations and it gets fixed by that team without many more escalations, many more follow ups. They expect that to be the result that they're looking for. Is that hopeless?
[00:10:48] Leah: It depends on the issue. I mean, I think in my experience recently, executive seller relations certainly doesn't have the access and the ability that it had, say, 12 months ago. But I mean, for issues like this, executive seller relations should be equipped enough to assist. The only thing is like everybody's emailing Jeff, right?
So you're probably gonna be waiting longer for action via that channel than any of the other channels. So, I mean, yeah, it does still work sometimes, but it is what it is. It's there and it's well known and a lot of garbage gets sent to it.
[00:11:19] Chris: That's the thing. You're at the back of a long line. It doesn't necessarily get prioritized and many of the people we're hearing from have thousands and thousands of units pushed into unsellable.
[00:11:28] Leah: And a lot of times it's their best selling ASIN. So you don't really wanna be rating around weeks for resolution on that.
[00:11:34] Chris: Oh, for sure. The one I'm working on right now is their top selling ASIN.
[00:11:38] Leah: Isn't it interesting how when it's potentially abuse, it's always the best selling ASIN?
[00:11:42] Chris: Not a coincidence. So I should probably wrap this up and get back to working on that particular case.
But in the meantime, any questions about randomly assigned defective units or unsellable inventory? Ask Leah because as she's demonstrated this podcast episode, she knows all about this and I'm still catching up. Thanks again for listening, everybody.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hello Amazon Sellers, welcome to this episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I am Leah McHugh, and I am here as always with the ecommercechris, Chris McCabe, and today we are also speaking with Laura McCaul of Sponsored Profit. Hi Laura.
[00:00:25] Laura: Hi.
[00:00:25] Chris: Hey Laura.
[00:00:26] Laura: Happy New Year.
[00:00:27] Leah: Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us. So we had had a really interesting conversation. I wanna say like a while ago now, a few months ago about, you know, Chris and I are always harping on people kind of wasting money on black hat tactics to get reviews or to rank as quickly as possible using some maybe not so great tactics to trick Amazon into thinking that their pro products are popular and you had said they could easily spend that same money on ads and one get a better result. And two, it's a result that Amazon's never going to penalize you for or take away from you.
[00:01:04] Laura: Correct.
[00:01:05] Chris: And I had a second part to that comment, which is just when did this change? Amazon made more data available, I wanna say six months ago.
You would know the month better than I would, but that seems to have been the impetus and the driving point forward with the host strategy that you were talking about. So when was the fundamental shift or change in your view?
[00:01:27] Laura: Yeah, good question. And yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.
So we that we can talk about this because I think it's really important just to kind of backtrack a little bit just on what Leah said first in terms of, you know, how sellers, how do they now launch products in a compliant way. Because, number one, as a PPC agency, we've always used PPP C to launch products and to rank products. Right?
That's always been the compliant way to launch products. It's just in years gone by there were other methods that you've just mentioned that kind of gamed the system a little bit, that kind of tricked the algorithm. And so, to part answer your question, Chris, around, I think it was October 2021, when those really big changes in terms of service, came down the line in respect to rebates and search, find, buy and all that kind of stuff. I think that's when the fear and the panic kind of set in for sellers in terms of, well, how do we launch products now going forward? And so, again, as a PPC agency, PPC has always been our go-to launch strategy.
It's just perhaps the appetite or the openness of sellers to kind of embrace that has taken a little bit of time to catch up. And it's always bemused us a little bit that when it comes to launching products, sellers wouldn't give a second thought to spending a bunch of money on giveaways and essentially giving away thousands of units of inventory, but have a conversation with a ppc agency and talk about investing in ads. And it's like, Ooh, no, I don't want to do that. It's just like, but there is another way you can do this. And it's totally legit. But in terms of when I guess our launch strategy and essentially now it's become our growth strategy sort of really took a further kind of leap forward, was your right Chris, sort of towards the backend of last year when Amazon started making a bunch of new reports and data available to us in brand metrics, in brand analytics, search query performance. And so what that has kind of given us is it's given us more granular level data that really allows us to see where does a fit in terms of its true position in a category from a brand perspective and then we have reports that in search query performance that shows us, how do products convert on specific search terms compared to competing ASINs. There's the search term impression report that shows well what percentage share of impressions does a particular product have for a particular search term. So all of a sudden now you can see are we leaving money on the table or have we kind of maxed out our ad sales with these search terms, we convert great, we sell a premium product. Well, let's look at the data.
The data would suggest actually, you know, on certain search terms, you don't compete or you don't rather convert that well, we've always had unit session percentage as a metric. But we know that that's not really kind of true conversion. It's based on the number of sessions. So again, there's more data available now that really kind of gives us a more accurate reflection on conversion.
And then as I said, even on the brand side of things, we can kind of see, well, you know, what percentage of the market does a brand have or what percentage or that it's the purchase percentile, where do you sit in terms of, paid and organic sales? You're in the bottom 10 percentile or the top 90th percentile so all of a sudden now we've got all this data that just gives us some very objective data to kind of really pinpoint, okay, where do we sit and more importantly, where can we compete?
[00:05:42] Chris: Where can you go? I mean, we are seeing more contacts from sellers. I have noticed more queries coming through our site about this in the last couple of months and it just made me think how many people are aware of it. You see all kinds of things posted on LinkedIn about this topic, but how much of it is real for lack of a better word. Do you think there's a lot of noise out there ever since they provided more data?
And some of it's accurate and some of it's not, some of it's a service trying to capitalize on it and some of it is isn't? And do you think sellers are confused about what the opportunities really are?
[00:06:28] Laura: Oh gosh. A lot to unpack there. I think ultimately, yes. I think there is a lot of talk around how accurate is that data. So obviously I I watch and listen to all the podcasts in and around Amazon PPC and the Amazon space in general. I would still go with some data is better than no data and we still have to test stuff, like nothing is bulletproof.
But in terms of sellers, I still think the majority of sellers are unaware that this amount of data and information is available. I think that the clue is definitely in the names of these reports and the names of the dashboards. They have brand in them.
So this is really now Amazon again, pushing forward to become a platform of brands to offer customers the best possible customer experience, it's a branded experience and Amazon's still giving brands, private label brands, an opportunity to really set up their store on the platform and they're making all of this data available to help you level up your sales. I know Amazon PPC can kind of be the villain of the piece and I know sellers like to hate on PPC agencies and probably for good reason in some respects. But I mean, ultimately, and I'd like to get your take on this, Amazon has now become a paid to play platform.
[00:07:55] Chris: We don't hear a lot of hatred of PPC. I think people understand that ads spend, I mean, call it whatever you want, necessary evil. Call it the rules of the game. I mean, this is a key function of being a seller and being a business owner.
So we haven't heard too much complaining. I don't know Leah can speak to that,
[00:08:21] Leah: If you hire the wrong person for anything to do with your business, there are gonna be complaints. I think in general, people are fine with spending money on ads.
[00:08:29] Laura: Yeah. Maybe you're right. I mean, at this point, we got thick skin and we take the rough with the smooth, but I mean, I think yeah, of course it's a cost of doing business and if we just kind of pull back a little bit and look at what's happening on Amazon, Amazon is simply maturing as an advertising platform just like Facebook. They're just like Google did, right? And what happens, these platforms start out with great organic reach, more people come onto the platform. Competition starts to increase though, the platform starts to kind of pull back on that organic reach and all of a sudden now we have paid placements and then it becomes an advertising platform, first and foremost.
I think, in terms of what this means for, for Amazon PPC, there's still a lot of opportunity for Amazon PPC I know that there does seem to be like a bit of a mad scramble to do all sorts of stuff off Amazon and I've got nothing against off Amazon traffic.
But, Amazon still Has so much built in demand it's just how do we tap into it? It's just the rules of the game have changed a little bit. It's gotten more complex, it's gotten more expensive and so what that means, again, to kind of come back to the whole branding piece, perhaps, whereas before sellers didn't have to pay too much attention to their profit margins or to their reviews or to these kind of things. This stuff now makes you viable or not viable. And so because of that, how we see Amazon PPC changing is really now it's moved from just a means to drive pay traffic. But also now as a means to drive rank so you can grow your overall business.
And advertising isn't, and it's never been about just advertising one product. It's about growing your business in a profitable way. It's just as Amazon has become or rather, ads have become more expensive and the platform has become more competitive. It's just become a little bit more difficult to do, but it's not impossible.
But it just means the strategies that worked, six months ago, 12 months ago, and certainly anything beyond that. They just don't work or certainly don't work as well, and so we just have to, I think look at Amazon PPC a little bit differently.
We have to adjust our strategy accordingly, but we also need to start making the most that we can of all this additional data, because this is really, there's two things I think that are really critical, making the most of this additional data to make even better decisions because you need to spend those ad dollars wisely and so you need to make sure spending them on the right things in the right places at the right time. So that's one part. The other part which is equally important and again, is something that came out of last year, is Amazon experiments and the ability to split test and to always be kind of cranking up the conversion, because again, when clicks were really cheap, conversion was maybe something that, again, sellers and brand owners didn't pay a lot of attention to it. It's always been the low hanging fruit. It's always been the one thing that every 1% improvement in iteration you can make means that's an extra percentage of traffic that you weren't getting before, but now you're getting for the same spend. So I think now with Amazon experiments, always be testing, always be trying to improve your click through rate and to improve your conversion because, again that just means you're gonna get more out of your ad dollars and ultimately get more for your money.
[00:12:14] Chris: We're always preaching about don't just marry yourself to one approach without paying attention to how times change. I mean this is a frequent subject on this podcast whether it's about appealed strategy for reinstating from a suspension or what you're talking about or many other things.
[00:12:30] Leah: I had a quick question. Or actually two questions about using your host strategy as a launch strategy. Question number one, is a lot of, I would say one of the more prevalent launch strategies that we see sellers talking about is having to lower your price to basically less than cost in order to get your rank up there in the first place, and then you can slowly raise your prices. Is that something that you are doing as part of the host strategy or this that isn't necessary to do ?
[00:12:57] Laura: I think it depends. I think certainly with new products, getting that initial visibility is really key. The conversion it is a key way to achieve that and so of course, launching with a price that is, it's like lost leaders, isn't it? It's like when you go to the pharmacy or something and you see the new products at the end of the aisle, right? I mean, they're launching them at a super competitive price because they kind of just wanna get some sales and to get some feedback from the market.
So with new products, obviously if we can be super competitive on price or if we can use coupons or promotions to help. That obviously kind of gives the product a little bit more juice. And again, amazon isn't gonna have an issue with that in terms of, kind of ongoing, like how do we rank for keywords for existing products?
You know, again, depending on the keyword, depending on the strategy, it shouldn't always be required because what we're doing is we're being very targeted on those search terms, based on the fact that we now have the data that says, we know we can convert better than the competition on this search term , which means we're gonna pay a lower cost per click. We're gonna convert and stick and therefore, price adjustment doesn't necessarily even come into that conversation. But certainly for new products to kind of get that initial love from the algorithm. Sure, it won't harm. But it's not a long-term strategy. You gotta make money.
[00:14:26] Leah: Well, yeah. You can't have it below cost forever. And that actually leads very well into my second question. In terms of launching a product with this strategy, how long does it take to get that necessary data on the new product to then start ranking on the first page?
[00:14:42] Laura: Yeah, It's always how long's a piece of string because it depends on the product and it depends on the category. So, at the moment, most of the testing that we've done has been with established products. And we're getting established products to page one in as little as three days.
[00:14:59] Leah: Okay. Wow, that's awesome.
[00:15:00] Chris: The three days is what caught my attention when Leah and I first talked about talking with you today.
[00:15:06] Leah: It's hard to catch Chris's attention with ads talk.
[00:15:09] Chris: Because I'm not a natural fit for an ads conversation. Usually we're talking with people about their listing gets suspended and how much they have to spend on ads to recover sales rank because sometimes they appealed it a few times before they approach us and like they lost time and money that way. And then the more time goes on they have to recoup sales rank by upping their ad spend, which is a wonderful conversation for another day. But when I heard the three days.
I was like, I guess my first thought was does everyone know this? Or only a couple of us.
[00:15:41] Laura: Sometimes it's easy to kind of operate your business in a little bit of a kind of bubble in a vacuum. So we started out, obviously with out existing clients and we always start out in a very kind of small way when we start testing and, and this is going back, I think the keywords that are as far back as like page seven. That's where we've got that in three days. And if it's page two, three or four, it can be faster. So yeah. But here's the the challenge with all the new data. So it's a little bit of a double edged sword as Amazon can be.
So we've got all this data, but it's all in disparate places. So pulling the data and analyzing the data and then ultimately making the decisions. because the data we're looking at is, we're looking at conversion, we're looking at cost per clicks, we're looking at sales volume to to rank.
So we're pulling together all this different data. We've built our own tech, we have done from day one and the advantage is, is that when we see opportunities like this, we're like, okay, what do we need to do to kind of update the tool to be able to help us with this specific task or strategy?
And so, perhaps that's what's allowed us at least to kind of take a little bit of a jump on this IS that we've made some adjustments to our tool to be able to pull all this data together so then we can very quickly identify our high opportunity search terms and then it's just a matter of reallocating budget.
But it's finding those search terms, cutting through that data. That's kind of the tricky part. But then as soon as we've got the, the search terms, and here's the interesting thing, it's taken that kind of 80-20 approach to what we do and when you've got those search terms that you can convert on, that you are profitable on, that is driving volume.
It works very quickly and the difference it can make to your overall revenue, it moves the needle quite quickly. But it's pulling all that data together. So initially it was done manually and then we made some updates to our tool to help us do that. And that's what's given us a bit of a lead on it.
[00:17:49] Leah: Awesome. That's amazing. So if people wanna reach out to you, what is the best way to reach you, Laura?
Probably the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn or alternatively sponsoredprofit.com. You can schedule a call with me on the website.
So yeah, the website or LinkedIn.
Okay, great. And we'll put both of those links in the show notes.
[00:18:08] Chris: Thanks again, Laura, for joining us. Thanks everyone for listening to Seller Performance Solutions, throughout this year into next, we're going to have other guests with other wonderful tips and strategies like this. stay tuned. We'll talk to you next time.
[00:00:07] Chris: Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McKay with E-Commerce. Chris, I'm here with Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you?
[00:00:15] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:17] Chris: Good. Ready for another exciting chat about the wild world of Amazon and today talking about compliance enforcement, right? You've seen some interesting, troubling as well cases and I guess today's main topic is what's going on with the compliance teams. They've shifted a bit in terms of who's responsible for what, but also how they handle documentation requests, how they deal with what content is listed on a product detail page is that a fair place start?
[00:00:48] Leah: Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like we were kind of trending in a good direction before and then now it seems to have gone back to some of the issues that we had maybe like a year ago or a year and a half ago, where I'm seeing a lot more products being incorrectly identified as a different kind of product or Amazon identifying the wrong regulatory body for different products and then rejecting your appeal when you sent in the correct information.
[00:01:16] Chris: Well, that was happening before. I mean, you're right.
[00:01:18] Leah: It was trending in the right direction though. It was getting better and then in the last couple of weeks, I've been seeing it more than I have in the last six months.
[00:01:27] Chris: Right. So starting early 2023, maybe compliance is somewhat reverting back to its infancy, which is a scary thing to think because there's been a change at the top in terms of management and who's in charge of this stuff. From my perspective, I don't work on these every day the way you do, but I get exposed to them and see the messages and so forth.
It seems like they're trying to handle compliance now. The way they handle account suspension appeals and inauthentic ASIN suspensions and things that are dealt with in a much different way. It seems like because the same people are in charge of the executive level of how this is going to be managed, they're handling it with the same approach and that is worrying because these are just more intricate and complex.
Yeah, I mean they're asking for the wrong documentation, like you said. Sometimes it just seems like they're flagging the wrong products, which I'll get into the causes of that in a minute. But what else are you seeing?
[00:02:22] Leah: Well, they're also sending the wrong templates. So when they do reject the documentation, their reason for rejection or the reason that account health or somebody else gives you for the listing being flagged is also just completely incorrect.
Which again, is something that I saw maybe a year ago, but that again, had started trending in the better direction as things were getting fixed and now we seem to be back where we started in terms of you can't even trust what Amazon is telling you as to why a product is flagged or even on the safety side, we've seen they send a safety questionnaire, the safety questionnaire is answered, and then they send you a different safety questionnaire asking for this, like for the same issue, asking for totally different information or one of them even mentioned a POA, which makes no sense.
[00:03:10] Chris: That's a new thing from, I spent pretty much all last weekend going back and forth on a product safety complaint appeal, and they were, they were changing up the survey questions or the templates almost on every response.
And then that was interesting that yesterday we saw them say, your POA hasn't been reviewed yet. No plan of action was ever requested. Obviously the person who had that message delegated to them or transferred to them didn't even understand the process entirely. Which means what? You go back to square one, you send them all this stuff again.
It's so confusing when they either don't respond at all or when they respond with this generic gibberish because you are left questioning, do we roll this back to the beginning and just send everything again? Or are they going to say, well now you've sent us several submissions and that's gonna take even longer to review and get back to you? What's the initial strategy there?
[00:04:01] Leah: I mean, the good news is that compliance doesn't seem to treat multiple submissions the way performance does. You don't really get ignored after you've submitted so many times. I think the issue here is that, you're often being rejected for not providing the correct information because Amazon didn't ask you for the correct information.
So how are you supposed to know that that's what they're looking for when you've been told something completely differently or what I think is very concerning, at least I would be concerned if I received this notification. They send you a rejection email saying that your product has been identified as an illegal drug when it has absolutely nothing to do with drugs or anything illegal.
[00:04:41] Chris: I think I understand that we've seen so many of those brand registry responses where they say you've been found to engage in illegal or deceptive or fraudulent activity because it's the only template they have handy or available. I think this is kind of a parallel to that.
[00:04:56] Leah: But they definitely have a restricted products template. I've seen it multiple times. They're choosing to send the illegal drug template. And I honestly, I mean, this is a theory, so I'm not saying that this is definite, but I think that it might be being sent to try to scare people off. Like, stop submitting information. You're selling illegal stuff go away.
[00:05:15] Chris: It could just be that, like we said, there's new management in charge of compliance, which is only maybe 60 to 90 days old from what I heard and they're handling compliance the way they handle basic account reinstatement or basic plan of action appeals and this, that's maybe the core of this problem.
Like those people, that's what they know, they're not necessarily trained in compliance. Right. They also, we've had a couple cases where they assumed we knew things that weren't even listed anywhere in the site. Well, of course this is a band ingredient. Oh, really? Where's that? And then they're like, oh, I guess we don't have it posted anywhere.
Yeah. How many times have we seen that?
[00:05:53] Leah: Well, so Teethers, I actually noticed this week they didn't finally update the teething restricted product policy we saw those products being removed from the platform six months ago. So it took them six months to publicly put in the policy that's that those products aren't available after they already started removing them and telling people that they had listed restricted products.
So how are you supposed to know what you are and aren't allowed to list on Amazon if they don't update the policy pages for six months, if at all.
[00:06:20] Chris: Yeah, that's a great example. Can you go into just for parallel purposes and a quick background on, yeah, it was about six months ago.
[00:06:29] Leah: It was, I checked. I checked my emails.
[00:06:32] Chris: ] I can't believe that was six months ago. I'm in my Amazon time warp all the time. But the interesting thing, and you can kind of take it from there, but my takeaway from that case was once we complained to, I think it was account health management about all the mis- messaging, misinformation. The client got a call, remember? Within 24 hours of that escalation email that they sent, and that person actually went back through, you know, weeks later and told them things that were never in the messaging things that we would've never known and then the question becamedid they finally do their homework after months of this, or are they just making this up on the fly?
[00:07:17] Leah: Well, right, and if it's not a public policy and you're still seeing those sorts of products listed on the site because I've yet to see them actually remove all of a certain product from the website. How are you supposed to know that anything that they say is correct when you've already been told 10 different answers as to what's wrong?
[00:07:33] Chris: Or your competitors are still listing and selling the same exact stuff you were taken down for, and there's no explanation for that.
[00:07:42] Leah: I mean that goes back to my Amazon is inconsistent.
[00:07:46] Chris: Yeah, but I'm saying they don't justify the inconsistency with, Hey, we've got a new program. Hey, we we're rolling out a few new things. We're gonna iron out some kinks. There'll be some bumps along the way, but we're trending in the right direction and steadily you're going to see all these types of products removed.
None of that's communicated from what I can tell internally to themselves, let alone externally to us.
[00:08:09] Leah: Right, and so again, when they tell you that we've just decided that these sorts of products can't be listed on the marketplace anymore. How are you supposed to know what that message is saying is correct when you've already been given so many different answers as to what the problem is?
You know, because we were previous to that message, getting other responses, asking for other information or saying that something was missing in order to get it reinstated and then it turns out none of that was true and they had just banned those products on the platform.
[00:08:38] Chris: The way that people find out is they only learn some of these details after they start the appeals process, which is crazy because that's creating more work for Amazon. More work for the seller, more work for people like us, of course but really by escalating it like that seems to be how people get real answers. And unfortunately for Amazon, they don't have enough communication skill or experience communicating these types of things to prevent people from having to escalate in order to get those answers, which is extremely inefficient.
[00:09:14] Leah: Well, and again, it's hard to believe their answers. I've been given incorrect information from executive seller relations. I've been given incorrect information by account health. So how are you supposed to even know that is really true? Or if they're just saying something to get you to leave them alone. Particularly like in this case where it took another six months for them to actually publish the policy change.
[00:09:40] Chris: We should probably talk about this just for a couple of minutes. The people who send you messages or the account health rep on the phone, or you're talking to your account manager, whoever it might be that you're interacting with at Amazon, they may sound confident in their answers. Make sure you double check and fact check and verify. Either doing the whole thing again and getting the same answer again, or however you can examine and scrutinize and confirm the info you've been given because just because they say it assertively or confidently doesn't make it so. We've talked to a lot of brand owners and sellers who are like, I've got important news. Like they just called me, I just got a message and they think it's straight from the horse's mouth just because somebody at Amazon told them something like, oh, I got the answer. Now we can pivot and change what we're doing in the appeals. What do we find out 48 hours later?
[00:10:32] Leah: That It's like completely incorrect.
[00:10:33] Chris: Right. Right. Take everything with it. We have to have a grain of salt episode just about don't believe everything you hear. Take it all with a grain of salt. That person might be a. regurgitating something they said to somebody else about a different issue, and they're just comparing and contrasting with you inappropriately.
b. They could just be making something up because they don't wanna be spinning their wheels. I mean, Amazonians don't enjoy sounding or looking ignorant or untrained. And I think what's happening in a lot of the compliance cases that you're looking at is the message goes out from the Amazonian to the the brand, and they're using the wrong template or asking for the wrong test results or documentation because they don't have.
That training because there has been a change of leadership. Do you know what I mean?
[00:11:19] Leah: Well, and so often, actually more often than not, you're not emailing with compliance directly. It's going through support. So you're messaging support who passed your message onto compliance. Compliance then tells support what to tell you.
So there's this weird telephone game that that may or may not be accurate] and also, interestingly, generally account health can't see compliance notes, so anything account health says about compliance might just be their opinion.
[00:11:54] Chris: That's what scares me. I've heard account health reps, sometimes they do the right thing and say we have no visibility into this. But other times we hear them saying, oh, this is about invoices. Like they're just making stuff up. They're just winging it.
[00:12:06] Leah: Right. Like, oh, well, have you tried explaining to them what this document is? And it's like, you mean the document that they asked for? No, I haven't tried explaining to them what it is.
[00:12:14] Chris: Well, my favorite was, I was jumping in on one of the calls with a client and account health reps, and they kept harping on this, you need a letter of authorization. They just kept repeating it over and over like a Pavlovian response. They're so robotic and the training is so inefficient and subpar. And the lack of interest in training is appalling that they were just like, the problem is you don't have a letter of-- No, I'm the brand owner, and they were just going back and forth about it. And I have to like jump in and be like, look, you know, we're going in circles and this isn't a good use of anyone's time.
So the bottom line is expect that these things are gonna be thrown at you. Be able to diagnose when you're getting bad info. And also wouldn't you argue that if you've got an attorney who specializes in, let's say, FDA matters, I mean, you're running by them, Hey, they're asking me for these docs.
Is this the documentation I should be asked for because hopefully that lawyer, that's their area of expertise, right?
[00:13:15] Leah: Yeah. Well, I've mean assuming it's a product that's regulated by the FDA, Yeah. Or the EPA. Yeah, I think so. Just some general, like communicating with the compliance team tips. First of all, like I said, you're not emailing compliance directly, even if you are submitting it via the appeal button so your first sentence for everything that you send in should be, please transfer this case to the product compliance team. If you get an immediate response, it hasn't been transferred to the compliance team, support just replied to you with something.
So if you get an immediate response, send everything again, all of the attachments, all of the texts that you just sent, send it again. It should take a couple of days.
[00:13:53] Chris: Yeah. And keep in mind, Amazon's in a transition period, with new people are in charge of at least compliance escalations, if not farther down the food chain of the the compliance investigation teams. But if they're still sorting things out themselves in terms of how to communicate with each other, what's required, what kind of messaging to send, that's gonna take time, like months to iron itself out just on the internal side, let alone dealing with like a brand owner that might not have the required documentation. Right?
[00:14:24] Leah: Also, if they ask you for additional information, don't just send that one piece of additional information. You need to provide them with all of the requested information that you've already sent, because chances are it's not the same person reviewing it and they're not gonna look back at the case. So you need to submit all required documents. All of your explanation every single time, even if they only ask for one piece of it or one additional piece, you also need to make sure that it is, generally speaking, the less text you provide, the better.
If your not submitting a plan of action, you're purely submitting the documentation or your explanation as to why the documentation that they're requesting doesn't apply to your product, and don't just say something like, I don't think it applies to my product. You need to cite the actual law per regulation number, blah, whatever this product is considered a blah, blah, blah by the F FDA, the EPA, CPSE, whatever the body is, you need to cite that law. In your text, you need to say, please see the attachments, list the attachments, that's it. There should be no other information because they're not looking for that, not looking for a plan of action. They're not looking for future prevention. They don't need you to reference Amazon policies.
They're just looking at the legal compliance of the product.
[00:15:41] Chris: And just a quick footnote for our listeners. The reason Leah sounds extra passionate on that one particular note is because she's currently working on a case for a client who had been working with somebody different previous to us, who for some unknown reason, had them writing POAs plans of action and having them submit those simply because was better to have more information, even if it was extraneous, the logic behind that mystifies us or it doesn't exist. We're gonna do another episode on Don't be Sending in POAs when none has been requested.
[00:16:11] Leah: And on the extraneous information point, don't send in extraneous documentation. You're just sending in wire documentation that applies to the question. Don't start sending in utility bills or your trademark or any other information that they're not asking for. You're just providing the information that has been asked for.
[00:16:28] Chris: And maybe we can just wrap on this one last question I had, which I'm still kind of mulling over myself, but want to hear what you have to say about it in terms of what are people supposed to do when it's straightforward like they just keep getting asked for the same documents and they keep attaching them and they just over and over. Are you supposed to just say, you've asked us this six times. We've sent it six times. Here are the dates, why? Why are these being misrouted? Are they still in the queue? I mean, are you supposed to go that way with it or are you supposed to just say, look, Here's everything again, here's a list of everything we've attached. This is what you've asked for. This is the last time we're sending it. We're going to escalate this outside, somewhere else. So that we're not going to get the same message over and over or should it be a combination of those two things?
[00:17:15] Leah: Well, so again, if you're getting an immediate response, it hasn't been transferred to the right team. I think that's what a lot of sellers do. They just get stuck going back and forth with seller support, not realizing that it's never actually going to the compliance team, right? So, first of all, make sure it's taking a few days to get a response so it's actually gone to the right team. Second of all, if you're submitting the documentation that Amazon asked for and they're rejecting it, then, that should be a point where you escalate, if you are sending in different information than they ask for, because Amazon has incorrectly identified what documentation is needed for your product , then I actually, I usually do this before I send any information in. You need to check the listing. There could be information in the listing that is causing it to be flagged and if as long as that information is in the listing, Amazon's not gonna change their mind on how your product should be regulated.
So you need to check that information, not just in your own backend, but with the catalog team because quite often I've inherited quite a few cases where people have appealed and appealed and appealed, and Amazon rejected and rejected and rejected. I removed one word from their listing and all of a sudden problem solved.
[00:18:19] Chris: Yeah. Well that's again, fodder for another episode. Some of the agencies we see doing stuff are moonlighting as experts in this area, and they don't have the expertise. And I think that's why a lot of people send in 10 appeals and nothing happens. And then we do one and it goes through, but we'll pat ourselves in the back for that some other day.
[00:18:38] Leah: But again, if everything's checked, you know, escalate. If everything's been checked and you're still getting nonsensical answers, escalate. Give 'em hell.
[00:18:47] Chris: Right. I mean, if it's been properly checked, because ] I'm sure there are brands and different agencies out there who have conversations about, are we sure we did the right thing?
Are we sure we went through it all and Oh yeah, yeah, we did. You know, we had our best people on it. And I mean, a lot of these agencies. Again, story for another time, but a lot of these agencies don't have a compliance arm who are familiar with these things, so, thanks again for listening. We know this is a complex topic. You will hear us throughout 2023 returning to this because it's going to keep coming up. We're going to keep getting examples from sellers and brand owners showing us messaging that doesn't make sense, documentation requests that don't add up. If you're experiencing this yourself, Excellent opportunity to reach out to Leah directly and to keep me outta it because I cannot look at more emails with 17 attachments, leah@ecommercechris.com is an excellent place to go with these questions and examples. Thank you again. Talk to you soon.
[00:19:43] Leah: Thanks. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our illustrious podcast with my colleague Leah McHugh. Hey, Leah, how are you?
[00:00:16] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:17] Chris: Good. Today talking about something really, really important, and I hope everyone thinks about this content and what they're doing and their best practices around preventing account compromises or a hack. I know that word gets used in a lot of different contexts, but we do hear from sellers who say, I was hacked and sometimes they don't really explain what that means. So we're talking about account compromises, where you lose control of your Amazon account. Could be from a variety of different avenues and we'll discuss that in a moment.
But somebody else takes over your account, changes the password, locks you out of it, and then you have to try to regain control of it.
[00:00:55] Leah: Or just changes the bank account details.
[00:00:57] Chris: Yes. Oh, that's one of the things we're going to talk about. Sometimes they're just trying to change those details.
Hopefully you don't notice from their perspective, you don't notice. And they get the money transferred overseas, which I think used to be a lot more common than it is now because it happened to so many people. What was that in 2018, 2019 that Amazon was just making sure that everyone would use two factor.
[00:01:26] Leah: Well, they also now send an email to the primary when the bank account details are changed, just to like confirm that that's been changed. And if that wasn't you, you should probably let them know. And also, they seem to be a lot quicker to flag an account as compromised than they were previously. So that is getting caught quicker before you lose all of your funds.
[00:01:45] Chris: Maybe we should start there because the problem three, four years ago was that a lot of these investigations were taking too long, they were way behind in the queue. So by the time they saw the email from the seller, from the primary, and of course if the primary email that they got the email from didn't match the account, they wouldn't even find the account, right?
But a couple of days might have passed before they saw how much damage was created by the new party who was doing god knows what on the account, trying to disperse the funds, putting up new listings, whatever it was. And they were way, way behind. So they had to change things back then because so much money was leaving the building and it just made them look bad even if it wasn't exactly Amazon's fault that the account had been compromised, even if they thought it was seller faulted.
[00:02:37] Leah: Right. And I think that there were a few articles in the media as well about this, which also tends to prompt action from Amazon's side.
[00:02:45] Chris: And also, if you're a victim of a crime like this and you go to Amazon and say, well, all the money was sent out, am I getting that back?
I mean, what if Amazon just said no and you were owed 6 figures?
[00:02:55] Leah: I think they did so no in some instances didn't they?
[00:02:58] Chris: They said no to some people who contacted us. That's what we remember but as time went on and it happened to more people, they would say yes more often and they might've started getting legal demand letters just in terms of the funds disbursements.
Maybe there were some arbitration cases around it. But long story short, Amazon had to up their game when it came to security.
[00:03:19] Leah: Or long story short, an actuary realized that it was cheaper to pay out the money than to arbitrate all of these cases.
[00:03:25] Chris: Exactly, exactly.
[00:03:26] Leah: Who's cynical? Not us.
[00:03:29] Chris: So, they did pay out a lot of the funds as the trickle became a flood and then on their side, they understood the incentive to bolster their team's tools and SOPs around account compromises.
[00:03:43] Leah: Well, something that you just said I'd like to point out, which isn't really about preventing an account compromise, but it's making sure you have information just in case you are compromised. Make a note somewhere of your merchant token. So if your primary email does get changed at some point you don't run into the issue that Chris just talked about, about Amazon not being able to find the account that you're talking about because the primary you're getting them is no longer the primary.
Have that noted somewhere even just like on a piece of paper in case your computer gets hacked. Just having that noted somewhere. So if need be, you can identify your account correctly to Amazon quickly and easily, rather than having to go back and forth with them not being able to find your account.
[00:04:21] Chris: Right. That's what I was alluding to when I said you're emailing from an email that's no longer the primary and they can't find an account associated. You'd have to put the merchant token in the subject line and like you said, you might not have that, but I'm glad we're talking about primary emails because there's different kinds of account compromises, right?
There's you lost control of your seller central account and then there's the type where you've lost your entire email inbox. There's email security too. If you lose control of the primary. That's a bigger problem, of course, but it just means that somebody else is seeing the performance notifications, the email, the primary hasn't necessarily changed, but you don't own it anymore.
[00:04:58] Leah: Yeah, and so that's why, generally speaking, we recommend that people only use their primary email as their primary email. Don't use it for anything else. I'm still seeing a lot of sellers where their primary email is like their customer support email address or the SEO's email address and it's a publicly facing email. It's getting a lot of mail and also it makes it easier for hackers to guess which email is the primary on the account. If you're using it for everything to do with Amazon, you want to only use that email for your Amazon account. We actually had one client who their primary was receive only we had to get them to change it so they could send the emails from that account because they literally only used it for logging into their account and receiving notifications and that is, I mean, you probably wanna have it be able to send as well, but that is how you should be using your primary email.
You want it to be like a secret key to your account that nobody else has access to. Nobody else knows what it is because it vastly reduces the chance of your email being hacked and then also your account being taken over.
[00:06:09] Chris: Yeah, and if somebody contacts Amazon trying to pretend that they're you in other ways, let's say if they know the primary email already, they're way down that path. It's much better if they have no idea what that primary is or if they can't even reasonably guess what it might be and if it's a public facing email, like you said, that's at least one guess. You might have multiple public facing emails. You might have marketing emails sent. I mean, if they've already got your domain, then if they can go on LinkedIn or look on the site and and see what a few names look like. They could do Karen @ and then your domain and then they're like most of the way there.
[00:06:48] Leah: Well, and a secret email is that you're not using for anything else is much less likely to receive any sort of phishing emails, which is another way that people tend to gain control of accounts. They send you an email, there's a link in it that you shouldn't be clicking, and because you think it's Amazon, you click it and now they have access to your account, which is my next point. Don't click any links, in email sent to your primary email address. Go directly to Seller Central by typing it into the url and log in directly. Don't click any links that are prompting you to update information on your account or prompting you to log into your account. Just type that in separately because otherwise, It's not highly likely that it's a fishing exercise but it increases your risk.
[00:07:31] Chris: There's a ton more of that. I mean, most people know about phishing emails at this point.
They get stray emails that look like they're from their bank, but might not be. Or you get an email from Wells Fargo and you think, oh, I don't actually do Wells Fargo. That's interesting. The worst thing you can do is click a link that you think you're signing into your bank. Why not just go to your bank's website and sign in.
[00:07:52] Leah: Yeah. And my cybersecurity friends like to say that the weakest link in cybersecurity is humans. Yeah. So you're much more likely to be hacked because of clicking something that you're not supposed to or giving information that you're not supposed to, rather than somebody furiously coding on their computer to gain access to your account.
[00:08:11] Chris: Yeah, exactly. And also how many people have control of your primary, you know, within your organization. Is it one, is it five? Maybe one's not so great. If that person's on vacation and no one can access the primary, that's a problem. But having tons and tons of people that have access to that email is just increasing the odds of something going wrong.
[00:08:31] Leah: Yeah. And that's something else that I see a lot of still, where sellers don't create different user accounts for everybody that's logging into their account. So everybody's using the primary. I mean, I still have people offering me their primary to log into their account and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't gimme that.
[00:08:45] Chris: We still see that a lot, right? We have a lot of sellers contacting us, saying, I'm just gonna give you my credentials so you can sign in and look at my performance notifications. First of all, if you're the owner and the manager of that account, you should know how to sign in and where the performance notifications are.
So you can read them yourself for your own purposes, let alone for ours if you need our help. But secondarily, you never want to be sharing credentials like that. You need to create unique user admins.
[00:09:11] Leah: Well, and people have offered me their credentials before they've even paid us or signed a contract.
Don't give out those credentials, your employees should have their own login credentials to log into your account because whoever accesses the primary has control of your account. They can change bank details, they can change the login information, they can change who has access to your account.
So, like Chris said, you really only want you and like a backup person to have the primary login. Otherwise, you're increasing the risk and also increasing the risk of a related account suspension. Secondarily because you're getting all kinds of weird IP hits on the primary email.
[00:09:50] Chris: And it might happen at a weird time, you know, midnight on a Friday night. And we've talked to people who didn't know it happened until Monday morning. They didn't sign into the account. Nobody was responsible for anything over the weekend, I guess, or over a holiday. There's a reason for the timing.
They're counting on you, not noticing. And also you can't just contact Amazon and say, well, this is our primary email. We didn't get a performance notification. If the primary was changed, you might not have gotten anything so that's kind of part of it.
[00:10:21] Leah: So keep your primary email to yourself. Think of it like a secret key. That's how I like to think of it only you and one other trusted person should have that information.
[00:10:29] Chris: Yeah. And then let's jump into the conversation about service providers having access and the best practices way of handling that, of course, is make sure you interview or examine your service provider for how they access the account, what their procedures are. Are they robust? Are they familiar? Maybe the best place to start, are they familiar with the incident of account compromises and how to prevent them or are they very loose security wise?
[00:10:57] Leah: Well, and same thing if your service provider is using the same email to log into all of their client's accounts. I mean, one vastly increasing the risk of a related account suspension as well, but two, I mean, that's a known email. The security there isn't great either.
[00:11:13] Chris: And if they're signing into a suspended account, Think of the IP address or the timing of it, or are they going to be using an address on your behalf?
I mean, there's all kinds of service providers, right? Will they be using a physical address on your behalf for like returns that they're using for other customers? So that's an address relation in Amazon's tools. Are they using the same mobile number, right? Across however many accounts? Well, that's going to link all those accounts together.
[00:11:44] Leah: Yeah, exactly. And again, you know, the likelihood of that email, if they're using the same email, that email's probably getting phishing emails as well and all of a sudden you have, who knows how many compromised accounts. Again, the compromise at least won't be with the primary, so that's good. But you still potentially have somebody accessing your account that you don't wanna have access to your account.
[00:12:03] Chris: Right. And it can take a while to sort this stuff out, even if it seems straightforward, I can prove my identity and the other party can't. People have wasted time with seller support tickets or cases that go nowhere.
People have sent emails to Jeff at executive seller relations and that takes time to sift through. Some of this can stretch from days into weeks for sellers that aren't savvy. So the idea that this can be easily remedied within an hour, I mean, I hope that's true for some people at least, but that could be a minor percentage of cases that we hear from.
[00:12:39] Leah: Yeah, I mean, I've even had people where we've called into catalog because there was an incorrect change on their listing. And catalog was like, well, the change came from your account so they didn't make the change. So somebody clearly had accessed the account to change their listings to either try to get them in trouble or make them sell less.
[00:12:57] Chris: Well, and on top of that, we've seen some recent examples of either service providers or other interested parties, could be investors, where there's simply too many people added. There's just long lists of users added to an account and it's like do they really need all of those? You're upping the odds that something's going to go wrong. And also I think some of those employees or investors, whoever they might be, Aren't savvy with either computer security or Amazon type issues and so they're more prone just from a lack of training. Maybe we can talk about training for a minute, just because the more amateur level people that are involved in signing into an account, I think the more likely things are to go wrong.
[00:13:40] Leah: Yeah. And again, the more likely they are to click on a phishing link than somebody who's a little bit more savvy with how the online world works. so I just wanna recap because these are important steps that people should be taking and I don't want it to get lost in our cynical discussion about how Amazon works . So number one, note your merchant token somewhere outside of your account just in case. Two, your primary email should only be your primary email. Don't use it for anybody else, anything else. Don't send emails to anybody from that email address, you want to be the only person that knows your primary email. You don't wanna be getting any emails to that account from anyone other than Amazon then don't click any links that you get emailed, if there's an email prompting you to sign into your account, just sign into your account separately. Don't click the link in order to update your details, sign in, whatever the email is prompting you to do. If it's a real notification, that notification will also be in your account. So you don't have to use the one that they emailed you. It will also be in your account if it is correct.
And then finally, user management. Don't have anyone else signing in with the primary email. Each user should have their own email. And also make sure that the people that have access to your account at least have a basic understanding of email security and account security and aren't just signing into everybody's accounts and doing god knows what.
[00:15:00] Chris: And these are just Amazon type street smarts. Use your head, it might not have happened in your own life that your identity was compromised or you lost control of your bank. We realized for the large majority of people out there, they don't necessarily see that within their lifetime, hopefully.
But Amazon, there's a lot of money at stake. You've got competitors watching you. Some of them might be unsavory, some of them might be very well seasoned in black hat tactics or frauds or tools. So this is a lot more common in the Amazon space than it is out in the rest of the world. I just wanted to make that clear.
[00:15:35] Leah: And I should also mention I wasn't going to because I figured it was well known at this point, but I decided that that's a bad assumption to make. Turn on two-step authentication on your account for all users. Require two-step authentication. Ideally, you're getting one of those little, like key chain, key authenticator things that isn't connected to the internet, that has never been connected to the internet, so that can't get compromised.
But you definitely want to have two-step authentication required for anybody signing into your.
[00:16:01] Chris: Right, and a lot of these tips we discussed today pertain to things beyond account compromises as well. Related account suspensions often come from, well, sellers tell us, I've never heard of the business that account health reps told me I was related to, how am I related to that seller? This must be wrong. They dispute it as an error, and of course that appeal gets rejected. Why did that happen? Because they didn't realize they were granting access to their account from service providers who were related to a seller who got blocked, and that is the related suspended account.
You would never know it. Just because it's the name of a customer of some service provider you work with so these are good questions when you're vetting service providers, any level of scrutiny is welcome because you want to avoid ridiculous appeals and conversations with account health reps about related accounts when that is definitely avoidable.
[00:16:52] Leah: Yeah, and I have a whole section on that in an article I wrote recently about the documentation that you need and how you need to document those relationships so I'll link that in the show notes as well because you need contracts and termination letters for anybody accessing your account.
[00:17:05] Chris: For sure. Thanks, Leah.
[00:17:07] Leah: Thanks Chris. Talk to you soon. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe, along with my co-host Leah Mchugh. Leah, how are you?
[00:00:16] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:18] Chris: Great, and I think we got a great topic for today. We've talked to a lot of brands, you know, kicking off the new year, looking at which products are attracting maybe negative attention from Amazon or potentially they're observing some buyer complaints and they're concerned that a performance notification is in the offing and you and I have talked a lot about maybe not embracing products as if they are something that you know you will always sell, right?
You have to do a continual assessment of voice of the customer, of complaints that are coming in today, what you can do to prevent them from coming in tomorrow. Do you think that brands sort of mentally schedule like, well, we're gonna sell this much in Q1, this much in Q2, this much in Q3, getting ahead of themselves before they consider, well, what if something goes wrong? What if we're not keeping an eye on our factory or our manufacturer?
[00:01:13] Leah: Yeah. I mean, I think any organized brand is probably projecting how much they're going to be selling in each quarter. But I think that there's maybe too much of a bias towards always being selling . There's too much always be selling going on because you know, if you have a problematic ASIN and it isn't always necessarily quality control, that is the problem. I mean, quality control is often the problem, but sometimes it's just a problematic ASIN, like people don't necessarily understand the product very well, or maybe it's a product that can have negative side effects that people buying it aren't necessarily aware of.
So sometimes it's a product detail page issue, and sometimes it's just a problematic product that maybe just isn't a good fit for Amazon because Amazon doesn't have a high tolerance for any order defects, as they call it. So, I understand the wanting to continue to sell a product, but I think what a lot of sellers maybe don't understand is that you're not just risking that ASIN that keeps being taken down or keeps being complained about, you're potentially risking your entire account if you keep having issues over and over and over again with a product and you continue to try to sell it.
[00:02:27] Chris: Well, maybe it's more new products. I mean, you wouldn't sell something for two years and then suddenly have a dramatic disconnect with customers on that particular item, right?
[00:02:36] Leah: Well, like if that happens, then yes, it is a quality control issue, most likely.
[00:02:39] Chris: Right. Well then it's definitely quality control. Unless you've latched onto a new outfit who's helping you try to boost sales on an ASIN, and they've made dramatic changes to the detail page. And they, and they put in more sellable terms and took out some of the in informational stuff. That's one theory I've got, because sometimes we're looking at the detail page with them or they tell us that they've made those changes and customers don't understand the product as well now as they did before.
So I don't think it's always a quality control problem, but yeah. Sometimes it is just a simple like what factory swapping out materials for something inferior.
[00:03:16] Leah: Yeah. Or just an issue with a particular run. I mean, yeah, if you do see an anomaly where all of a sudden an ASIN that you haven't had problems with is suddenly having tons of complaints, then yeah. I mean, first step would be checking quality control. But I think there is also a bias toward overselling and under-delivering sometimes on the Amazon marketplace and I get that it's a competitive marketplace and you're trying to stand out against the competition, but in terms of a long-term business strategy, underdelivering on a product is not, it one, you're not gonna get repeat customers first of all. And two, you're just gonna have issues and a high return rate on that you wouldn't necessarily need to have. Right. If you were maybe more forthcoming with how the product actually works and if you're clever about it. You can actually turn it into a marketing standpoint.
I'm working on a product at the moment, which is a supplement product, and they actually are very explicit about the fact that it does not taste good. That is very clear on the detail page. But then they explain, but then they explain why and why it doesn't taste as good as the other ones because it has a higher concentration of the active ingredient.
[00:04:26] Chris: Well, let's define what you mean by under-delivering. You mean like, you're not actively monitoring voice of the customer and bad product reviews or underdelivering in terms of the quality of the product. Like you're trying to make it more cheaply. You already assume that it's successful. You've already seen decent sales. You already assume you're on an upward trajectory in terms of growth of revenue, and then you start monkeying with success and making changes.
[00:04:53] Leah: Well, sure, some people do that.
[00:04:55] Chris: What do you mean by underdelivering?
[00:04:58] Leah: In this context, I mean just avoiding saying certain things on a detail page that you think there's gonna turn people off of your product but is important information for them to know. So things like side effects that could happen if you try that product, or like I said, like maybe it doesn't taste good, but that's how it's supposed to be. Being as explicit about that information upfront is important because again, like I said, you're reducing the number of returns, you're increasing customer satisfaction, even just in terms of how to use the product. A lot of times that isn't really clearly stated on the detail page. Maybe you need to buy something else in order for the product to work. So if you don't state that on the detail page, customers are gonna get it, and they're gonna expect one thing and receive another.
And I get that when it's your own product, it's sort of hard to realize.
[00:05:47] Chris: Envision and newbie using it? Yeah.
[00:05:48] Leah: Well, right, because they're so familiar with it. So I mean, that's where customer testing and customer feedback plays a really important role. Even something as simple as giving it to a friend and seeing if they can figure out how to use it based on the instructions or on what's available on the detail page.
[00:06:06] Chris: And some people would think the usage instructions are in the packaging, in with the product, and so they don't feel the need to put as much of that on the detail page, I think is part of the problem.
[00:06:17] Leah: Right. But again, if those details include something that just a general customer wouldn't know when purchasing, it's definitely worthwhile putting it on there.
And also, sometimes it is on the detail page, but it's buried so far now and that people don't see it. If it's an important aspect that people keep complaining about, put it in the images, put it in the bullet points, put it high up on the detail page so people are aware of that early on, rather than hiding it somewhere in the description that no one actually looks at most of the time.
[00:06:46] Chris: Right, right. And like you said, buried on the detail page. Sometimes it's just a matter of thinking in terms of, well, am I hiding something where somebody will find out later and they'll be upset and they'll be more prone to leave a negative review. Because if they had known X, Y, Z in the beginning, they wouldn't have bought the product to begin with.
So you would've lost that sale, but you wouldn't have accrued that negative review, you know?
[00:07:11] Leah: Right. In the long run, I think you're better off losing that initial sale than having an upset customer who's likely to return it anyway, so that sale is now moot and who will probably never purchase from you again or from that brand again.
[00:07:27] Chris: Right. So what else do we wanna remind brands of? Aside from keeping an eye on the detail page, not making certain changes, that'll undermine understanding and awareness of the product and how it's used.
[00:07:37] Leah: I think another, maybe this is more of a mindset shift, rather than an operational change. But I don't think enough people are looking at product feedback as something useful.
So if you have a product and people are consistently complaining about a certain thing about your product, maybe that's a good opportunity for you to either make another product or update your product with a better version that fulfills the need that the customers aren't currently getting with that product.
And that's certainly something that any of your smart competition is going to be looking for. So why not do it yourself, and you're fixing two problems with one stone.
[00:08:15] Chris: It brings to mind somebody that we interacted with recently who jumped the gun in terms of, I think we're being attacked by a competitor.
Oh, by the way, the reviews of this product are under 4.0. So it's like, well, you might have a few negative reviews here from a competitor. We understand that, but, There's also the possibility that there's consistent complaints, which are not just from abusive competitors and maybe there are so many reviews here that aren't from competitors that look valid and that also make valid points about the product.
You don't want to just that have that knee-jerk reaction that, yeah, definitely a competitor. Oh, we've sustained over a period of time. Several bad reviews.
[00:08:57] Leah: Well, right. And so that's a matter of figuring out where you assign your resources. Are you gonna assign your resources to a competitor who may or may not actually be attacking you or you assign your energy there to creating a better product. Yeah. And improving it so you aren't getting those complaints consistently over time. Because ultimately in the long run that second option is what's going to be way more worthwhile to your business.
[00:09:23] Chris: Right. And worth noting at this point, if you're going to have a throw down with Amazon about, this is definitely a competitor, you can't just make the accusation say, oh, I don't know where the evidence is.
You're, you're Amazon, go look in your tools. You sort it out. I know we've talked about that a lot in the podcast before and we do consistently get these messages that lead with, not a statement. Well, it could be something wrong with the product or it could be a competitor they lead with, this is definitely a competitor.
If you're going to say that to Amazon, you can say it to us all you want. We're used to it. If you're going to say it to Amazon, you've gotta have some basis for it. Something, some patterns that you can show, some recognizable features to that accusation because otherwise they are just ready to sweep it to the side and be like, no, you gotta take a look at voice of the customer. You need to look at some of these return reasons, right?
[00:10:11] Leah: You need to look at yourself first, which is right. I feel like I've been repeating.
[00:10:15] Chris: Even if it doesn't make sense. I would say even if you've got a previous attack from a competitor that that is similar and maybe you start from a bias position where you, you do think it's likely that it was a competitor, fine.
Shine that light on yourself first every time anyway, just to make sure. Just to look under every rock and see if anyone's come up with a legitimate complaint. Because like you said, it could be a bad batch, it could be a single bad batch.
[00:10:42] Leah: Right. Well, similarly, I have people complain that they were reported by a competitor for a term of service violation. It's like, right. But had they reported you and you weren't violating terms of service, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So the most important part of this is that you were violating terms of service and we need to improve that first.
Doesn't matter why it was flagged at that point, it just matters that you were flagged and you were in the wrong. Right. And I feel like it's the same way with the abuse. Like, you know, yes, it sucks that a competitor is attacking you. But if you already have the problems, that is really what you need to solve first.
[00:11:14] Chris: Although if your competitor reports you for abusing terms of service and their abusing terms of service in easily identifiable and reportable ways, you can still report them.
[00:11:24] Leah: Sure. But that doesn't solve your problem of you broke terms of service and now you're in trouble for it.
[00:11:30] Chris: Right. Right. Two wrongs don't make a right. But it's not that we're saying forget about your competitor entirely. I mean, if they're doing something they shouldn't be doing.
[00:11:37] Leah: Saying again, look to yourself first. You need to focus on that before you can start thinking about your competitors.
[00:11:43] Chris: What is Amazon looking for? Product quality, performance teams, they're looking for patterns. They're looking for clusters of data. They're looking for return reasons that all match up, say similar things. I think a lot of black hats and abusers understand the types of clusters Amazon's looking for. That's why they try to huddle up the negative reviews in a bunch. But regardless of whether it's not a competitor, if you had a bad batch, you would have a bunch of complaints that are similar in a bunch all in a row. So that's why we emphasize that. And also just, you know, new year, new you could your quality control be improved?
I think every business owner wants to think about what they could improve in the new year, whether it's manufacturing a product or how you monitor your interactions with buyers or Amazon's customers.
[00:12:32] Leah: And I see I've been seeing a lot of advice lately actually about harvesting your competitor's reviews, looking at the negatives, seeing what people are saying over and over again and making a product that meets those needs. Why are you starting with your competitor's products to do that? Do that with your products first.
[00:12:49] Chris: Right. Look at your own house first before you wander over to your neighbor's house to figure out what they could be tidying up. You wanna clean up your own house.
[00:12:57] Leah: I'm not saying don't do that with your competitor's products too, but like, you should be doing that with your own products first and then move into those other areas.
[00:13:04] Chris: Yeah. So no knee jerk assumptions. Keep an eye on quality control and don't make assumptions about whatever quality of product you got from your manufacturer last year will automatically be the same this year. And of course when it comes to detail page, if you wanna make some changes, try to boost your sales, we totally understand that. Have a list of best practices at the ready to make sure that you're not making some changes without considering how it might make the product confusing, hard to use, hard to understand. And that might be driving some negative experiences as well.
[00:13:37] Leah: Right. And you don't have to guess at this and this is not a sponsored shoutout. This is just something that I saw that I thought was cool. ProductPinion. You can have them have customers go through the detail page.
You can see it in real time. You can get customer feedback from actual customers. So it isn't just a matter of you thinking what customers want. You can actually get that data pretty easily now.
[00:13:57] Chris: Yeah. Good tip. All right, thanks Leah. And anyone has any questions on this. Please reach out to me or to Leah.
I'm sure we'll be touching on this type of topic again in the future on Seller Performance Solutions. Thanks for listening in. We'll see you next time.
[00:14:12] Leah: Thanks, Chris. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our illustrious podcast here at ecommerceChris. I'm Chris McCabe with Leah McHugh. Happy 2023 to you.
[00:00:17] Leah: Yeah. Happy 2023 chris and fellow Amazon Sellers who are listening.
[00:00:21] Chris: Hopefully you're ready to talk about all the annoying intricacies of the appeals universe and brand registry, compliance issues, ASIN reinstatements, account suspensions and so forth. I know we are every year here
[00:00:34] Leah: But today I actually wanted to talk about avoiding those issues in the first place.
[00:00:39] Chris: Right? This time is a bit more upbeat, which is a great way to start the year in terms of assessing your account for potential pitfalls, problems that could result in trouble, but getting to it first. Reviewing your account properly, listing issues, going through performance notifications, making sure before you decide to act or decide to ignore them, that you put them in the right bucket. You understand what's going on. Your diagnosis is correct. But just generally speaking, anticipating what we even saw in the first couple days of this year, which was you sold as new complaints inauthentic complaints, things that could impact any brand owner out there.
[00:01:20] Leah: Yeah. And I just think this is a good time for people to start preparing for the year ahead. I mean, you're already preparing your marketing plans for the year ahead, your financial plans for the year ahead, most likely your inventory plans for the year ahead.
I think this is a really good time to start planning your plan Bs. Do you know what you're going to do if something goes wrong? And how can you be prepared for those situations? So, I mean it's complex because it's not the same for every single type of product and it's not the same for every single type of seller.
But I mean, first place I would start with is do you have all of your documentation? And what that documentation is looks different for different sellers, but pretty much every seller should have some documentation. Your insurance , for example, should be something that every seller has. Invoices. Your invoices, invoices that will pass, or your licensing agreements, your trademark information, your copyright information, your patent information, compliance documentation and testing, depending on your kind of product, not just have it, but have it organized and somewhere that you can pull from quickly and easily if you need it for any reason with Amazon.
That would be where I am starting in terms of preparing for the year ahead.
[00:02:36] Chris: And being ready for Amazon to ask you for really anything spur of the moment or to reject anything with invoices. A lot of sellers were just like, all I know is I need to have them, which is a great start. If you don't have invoices, you're in trouble.
But they don't understand, based on what we saw in 2022, at least, why Amazon's rejecting them as non-verifiable documents, why they're rejecting suppliers. People are still sending in, for example, invoices that have pro forma across the top.
[00:03:07] Leah: Right. So that was what I was gonna actually go into next is, is not just getting that information together, but also start reviewing all of your processes. So you know, what is your onboarding process with your suppliers? Are your suppliers sending you the documentation that meets Amazon's requirements? For example, does your supplier have a website? Are there invoices providing all of the information that Amazon needs to verify them.
And then also like your processes around listings and your processes around quality control, who's in charge of it? Who's checking it? Because there shouldn't just be one person who everything hinges on them doing it accurately. There should be checks and balances. Also, if you're automating things, there should be somebody manually checking and what happens if that person is sick?
What are your plans in that situation? Or if you know your warehouse can't fill orders in time or you run out of inventory. You should have a plan B ready to go for all of these situations, and you should be reviewing your plans to make sure that they are meeting Amazon's requirements.
[00:04:12] Chris: And regular listeners of this podcast, of course, hear us talk a lot about having contingency plans for appeals like Q4, peak holiday, we talk about, hey, have an appeal drafted or ready to go in case your top selling ASIN goes down for different kinds of reasons, have a draft or at least the blueprint of a draft ready to go, not a template for sure, but anticipate the problems you might see if buyers complain if you get attacked by a competitor.
This is kind of the same conversation about, have a contingency plan, but in terms of preemptive, right? Instead of just you get attacked and you're ready to go, you know, drop of the hat, now you've got all these processes and SOPs in place because whether January's slow or not, you know you're going to need this stuff because Amazon typically rolls out that, oh, now we're gonna do the You sold as new stuff again.
Now we're gonna do the inauthentic item complaint stuff again. Now we're gonna have a whole new wave of everything you mentioned: patent design, copyright, trademark disputes, which may or may not be valid, by the way.
[00:05:14] Leah: Right. And I think also part of that planning process should be planning your own professional network, so you may not need help from people like us or maybe help from an attorney right now. But there's a pretty good chance you may need that help in the future. So why not start reaching out to them now and establishing that relationship so that can be part of your SOPs. If this happens, contact this person and, and get them up to speed rather than rushing to find the right person.
Maybe not vetting them as well as you would because you're suddenly panicked and in a rush and then accidentally hiring the wrong person. Like, it's much better to know who you want to work with before you need to work with them. Are then hiring the first person you come across because you've panicked and you're in an emergency.
[00:05:59] Chris: So this time you've given me the great segway, so I got you back for that. Because that's a great point for what I've been seeing lately, which was some people didn't get the sales in Q4 that they wanted, and they cast about reading a bunch of generic posts on Facebook or LinkedIn for a service to help them up their sales without vetting them, without understanding their level of expertise and without knowing whether or not their listings are compliant anymore. In terms of, you know, well, whatever we gotta do, we gotta just get some more revenue, more sales. Lots of people are out there pushing services that say that they'll help you rank higher, they'll help you get better sales. They know how to do SEO, but we're also seeing people hiring services that did what? One of them just created a whole new ASIN. The listing was actually suspended, most likely because of non-compliant practices and methodologies. And then I think the service just created the new, Hey, we'll get your listing back up. And they just made a new one.
[00:06:55] Leah: And that's something that I've been seeing a lot lately where they're like, they got it reinstated, but we don't have any of our sales history or reviews. And we had to put a different UPC on it. It's like, that wasn't reinstated, that was just a new listing created. Which one, yeah, you're gonna lose all of your sales history and reviews, and two, you're putting the entire account at risk at that point because Amazon doesn't want you to just make a duplicate listing because they didn't want to reinstate your original one.
But I also mean to make these plans across even proactive services in terms of like advertising and things like that, because a lot of the good firms, ours included, can sometimes have wait times because a lot of people wanna work with them because they're good at what they do. So if you have plans to start, say running your ads in a certain month, and then you contact your provider of choice and they're like, oh, we have a six month wait list, that's gonna put a wrench in your plan. So it's better to contact them preemptively, find out how they work, find out what the process is, and so you know that when needed, whatever service, agency, consultant, whatever is, is ready to go when you need them.
[00:07:57] Chris: Yeah, well in that case that we were just talking about, I think the agency or the service told the seller, Hey, we know how to solve this problem. And they positioned it as, Hey, we got your listing reinstated and there was no reinstatement and there was certainly no discussion about, you're not supposed to create another ASIN and try to just merge the reviews, or in a lot of cases you can't even accomplish that.
Or Amazon catches you trying to merge reviews with a suspended a and they figure the whole thing out. Which is a policy violation across the whole account. So that's the type of thing I'm anticipating, at least for January, maybe for the entire entirety of Q1, if people are trying to sell more now because they didn't sell as much because of the economy, because of marketing or ads reasons, because of any other reasons.
They're trying to recoup some of those lost sales and they're willing to do some of this reaching. So I'm kind of hoping that we don't hear from more people like that. But since the year is only a few days in, it's a little disconcerting that we've seen people using less than best practices.
[00:08:58] Leah: Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm just jaded cause I see that every day.
[00:09:02] Chris: I mean, you see it all the time because you're the listing compliance and the brand registry. And just to kind of conclude this episode, amazon's aware that there's a lot of trial and error going on out there, and Amazon's aware that they don't necessarily give you the right info.
I mean, whether they acknowledge it or not. We know and they know that seller support reps give you all kinds of advice. Some of it's not even compliant with policy. They expect you reasonably or not to read those tea leaves and to understand that you're getting bad advice from the Amazon reps or even from account health reps who don't know what to say and just make something up. And they still punish you for it. Bottom line. So, your interpretation of a policy, Amazon's interpretation of a policy probably won't be the same. And then if you end up using a service or somebody that you hired to do this for you and they don't understand it either, they're not gonna go for the finger pointing like, well, we didn't know because we hired somebody to deal with it for us. If you have compliance questions, again, you don't have to necessarily jump right into hiring us to solve every problem you've ever had with compliance. But make sure you do understand the issues at play before you start appealing. You know, my usual mantra, I always hope this will be year.
[00:10:13] Leah: Well with compliance you're dealing with legal requirements as well.
[00:10:16] Chris: I always hope we're in a year where people won't appeal knee jerk, jump the gun, send in three or four, and then like, you know, garbage and garbage out. You give Amazon garbage, they're gonna start messaging you back this generic stuff, which is either the wrong template or they don't know what you're talking about and they send you something and you don't know what they're talking about and just spins around and around and around and yeah, it's great when we find this out early and jump in and say, okay. Pencils down, everybody stop, stop calling people, stop emailing people. Just hang on, then we can fix it. But the tendency is for people to say, we're gonna try it this way. We're gonna try following what Amazon says. I mean, take what they say with a grain of salt. Because part of the communication bubble with these guys is just like, you're telling them, one, you're talking past each other, right?
[00:11:04] Leah: Yeah. And some of the teams I think have actually gotten worse unfortunately when it comes to communication. There have definitely been some gains. I will say that that catalog have been a lot more helpful in the past six to 12 months. So good job catalog. Some of the other teams, they don't seem to have the same access to tools that they used to, and so they just send nonsensical answers that don't even necessarily apply.
[00:11:28] Chris: Which would be executive seller relations, what we've seen so far in 2023, and also brand registry. But we've seen that for a while.
[00:11:37] Leah: I just expect that from them at this point.
[00:11:39] Chris: Yeah. Before we even started this podcast, we were saying that brand registry was improving or doing better or was good at the beginning, but they've gone way downhill. Executive seller relations, which don't forget how many people love to write to Jeff, even though Jeff is in space or Jeff is in France, or he's on a giant yacht, whatever's doing.
But the bottom line is executive seller relations. I mean, we, we've been saying, Hey, it's not what it used to be like back when I was working at Amazon and the few years since that time, but now it's really a shell of its former self. So these, these messages to Jeff, you could really wind up reading anything under the sun.
And the reason we're going down this side road for the moment is because I know that a lot of brand owners are basing their decisions and basing their next appeal and basing their strategy on what the language in that message says. And not a lot of people are thinking about whether or not it coincides with the actual situation. Because it might be a random response by somebody who's like, ah, we gotta get a bunch of these outta the queues.
[00:12:40] Leah: Yeah and we see them send messages saying that like, something is impossible. And , I mean, for us it's like, well, we've already done three of these this week, so we do know that it's possible. But thank you very much for your message.
[00:12:55] Chris: That's the example we're thinking of, which we can't share more details on that. That's a client case that we're doing now. We had executive seller relations put something out there that was completely wrong to the client.
[00:13:06] Leah: Well and it's not just them, we've also, you know, we've had the ads team say that the ad will never be re-reviewed and you can never advertise that product again. And then one escalation all of a sudden, oh, there's nothing wrong with this and it's been reinstated.
[00:13:17] Chris: Right. The final word messaging. This decision is final. You know, you can see a fist being banged, and with one appeal, we fix it. People do take that seriously, when they put the final word messaging at the bottom of almost every message, it, it used to only be on one or two or three different blurbs back when I was working there. Now it's at the bottom of almost, we may not respond to further messages. They love putting it on almost everything because they wanna reserve the right to ignore you, right? This is how they handle sellers. But the idea that they're gonna put that at the bottom of a message. And then, you know how many times we've seen it, that one appeal goes in after that?
[00:13:54] Leah: Well, that's the thing. It's an almost immediate reversal, which is kind of hilarious. I mean, not hilarious if you're dealing with it, but after the fact you're like, what was that?
Right. We'll do, we'll do a future non humorous comedy episode perhaps on all the crazy stuff we've seen them say, this is a decision's final, we won't be answering you anymore. And then, the sky's clear and the sun comes out and, oh yeah. Sometimes we err on the side of caution. We made a mistake. Anyway, that's what we've got for our initial 2023 episode.
Any questions on the wide ranging topics we covered today, let me know. Let Leah know. support@ecommercechris.com and thanks for listening. We will catch you soon.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, welcome back to Seller Performance Soltuions. I'm with Leah McHugh. Leah, how are you?
[00:00:14] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:16] Chris: Good. Good. Today is a good day I think, to talk about. All of the conversations we've had throughout Q4 and throughout the year and prior years about Amazon's enforcement being inconsistent, and the conversations we've had with brands or business owners about, Hey, I'm listing this stuff and Amazon took me down, but look at my competitors, they're selling all the same stuff, and it's the same category, it's the same product. What's the difference between us and them? That alone should be the basis of an appeal. And of course, we've had to be the bearer of bad tidings and say, well, just because you see other people doing it doesn't mean you get the green light, because Amazon teams are horribly inconsistent and not just making mistakes, But they're not explaining why some are allowed to do things and others aren't. Is that fair to say?
[00:01:03] Leah: So I think, yeah, I think that's the key thing, is that in these conversations, we're the ones that are saying that Amazon is inconsistent. I think sellers maybe somehow don't realize that Amazon is inconsistent.
They just see it as, well, I have been incorrectly penalized because these other people aren't being penalized. Or I'm also, as often this one listing was penalized, but my other listings that are exactly the same are still up and active, so this must be a mistake. And it's like, no, it's not a mistake.
Amazon's teams are just really bad at flagging the stuff consistently right, and enforcing it consistently, and even replying to appeals consistently. You know, you'll have the exact same issue on multiple ASINs with the exact same issue. One is accepted for reinstatement and one isn't even though they should be the same thing and they should be getting the same response.
[00:01:54] Chris: Yeah, and I have a theory about that that I can go into in a second, but a parallel example that it reminds me of is the people with invoices, right? They submit the invoice and Amazon accepts it and reinstates they're listing for authenticity or whatever the issue was three times in a row.
And then they send the same type of invoice from the same supply the fourth time. All of a sudden Amazon says, we can't verify your supplier and they're prompting people to appeal again or escalate it or do a bunch of things, and it's like, Well, how about you just scroll back through your own account annotations and look at all the other times you accepted that invoice.
So if the invoice is suddenly not acceptable, that means it wasn't acceptable then either, and you took it anyway.
[00:02:33] Leah: Yeah, and that happens a lot on the compliance side as well. Suddenly your compliance documentation isn't acceptable even though they accepted it previously. And a lot of times when I've reviewed those cases, they shouldn't have accepted it the first, the first few times.
[00:02:48] Chris: So it could be a mistake. I mean, yeah, there, there are all kinds of mistakes. Sometimes they just don't read anything they're sent and it's easier to reject it if not doing their job isn't, you know, there's no oversight of quality on the investigations. But , it could just be a mistake in terms of maybe Amazon did take the listing down inappropriately. Right? We see those as well.
[00:03:09] Leah: Well, and we're also seeing a lot more often the Amazon teams grabbing the wrong template response and so replying back with something completely unrelated. And I think this kind of comes back to something that I say a lot, maybe not on the podcast, but I feel like I tell people this a lot.
I feel like the biggest benefit of working with a consultant or, you know, on the ad side of things working with an agency, is that people like us are seeing this stuff all of the time, so it's a lot easier for us to identify, no, that was sent an error, versus no, this is the actual issue, or this shouldn't have been rejected, or this should have been rejected, or this was flagged incorrectly and this wasn't.
That's where experience comes into play because they are so inconsistent that unless you are looking at the stuff all the time, it really just doesn't make any sense and you'll end up going down a weird path of either showing Amazon all of the other listings that are totally fine for the same thing, which isn't gonna get you anywhere, or that this was flagged incorrectly when it wasn't flagged incorrectly.
Like that's where the experience of seeing these issues en mass really does come into play.
[00:04:19] Chris: And also understanding the nature of their mistakes when they make mistakes. Why they're making mistakes. Which Dear listener, by the way, we're not just going to talk about how enforcement's inconsistent for 10 or 15 minutes.
We do have some background and I have some theories, but I also have some answers in terms of why is this happening? Why is it so inconsistent? How does it not make sense that they would take a sweeping action that would impact everybody? There's a variety of manual and automated reasons for the mistakes, but in terms of appeals, why would they reinstate some of your ASINs but not other ASINs?
One explanation for that is that their tools are cumbersome. Their tools and processes and SOPs aren't the greatest. They haven't upgraded them to the extent they could, so sometimes it's simply easier and quicker for the investigator to get two or three out of eight or nine ASINs reinstated for you, because they're doing this stuff one at a time, or the tools are clumsy and they don't wanna be there forever.
So they take an action based on your appeal, which is, well, I'll fix some of this, but no one's circling back and looking through to see, well, why didn't you reinstate all eight or nine ASINs. Why did you only do a couple? If they take action on a couple of them, they at least took some positive action and they can justify I guess, the time they spent on your case, right?
[00:05:39] Leah: Yeah. Well, and also if you're submitting separate cases for separate ASINs, even if it's the same issue, chances are it's not the same person reviewing those cases. So it could be somebody is actually reviewing it and somebody is just hitting deny, you know? Or it could just be that, that they were in the mood to deny things that day.
Like we said, it's wildly inconsistent, but unfortunately that's not changing anytime soon.
[00:06:04] Chris: Well, I'm trying to get at the why it's inconsistent. I'm trying to give at least some well-reasoned theories behind the why.
[00:06:09] Leah: Well, that is a why.
[00:06:10] Chris: I think they just hate admitting mistakes too. I mean, they'll never put in a message, you know what? Our tools are kind of bad. We haven't upgraded them in a while. Our SOPs are weak. People make mistakes here constantly. Like nobody can write that in a message and send it out publicly. And I think some of the problem here is that they just don't want to admit their mistakes.
But the problem with that is, well, okay, you don't have to admit everything publicly, but at least clean it up on the inside and we don't see that changing over time.
[00:06:41] Leah: Yeah. That's good to know, I guess, but not particularly helpful to sellers.
[00:06:46] Chris: No, I think it can be helpful. When you dispute this stuff, you can appeal saying, Hey, look, again, the parallel example of you've accepted these invoices six times in the past. But you can say, we've had some of these ASINs reinstated, why didn't you reinstate the others?
Any investigator can go through, look through and find that the prior investigator did take some action and that person knows that they were headed in the right direction, but they didn't finish the job. So I think you can use it. I think it is useful to mention in a subsequent appeal or escalation, you guys are already turning the wheels in the proper direction. Can you finish the job? That's my paraphrase. Of course, I wouldn't write it like that.
[00:07:26] Leah: Yeah. I mean, that is useful once you're sort of a certain way in, but I think as a starting point, you need to take everything Amazon says with a grain of salt but also your starting point needs to be you investigating what Amazon has said, and by investigating, I don't mean looking at other people's listings, like let's just get that one out of there because I've had this conversation every single day for the past five years, Yes, there are other people doing it who are still active, like just looking at other people's listings is not helpful.. You're just wasting your own time. So you need to look at what Amazon has said is wrong. Look at your listing or your account. See if that is, if in fact correct or not. And then if it is correct, figure out like is is this something that you did? Is this something that maybe is an attack, but you just can't start from a place of this is an abuse from someone else, or this is a mistake from Amazon.
You have to start from a place of, is this something that we have done wrong? And if the answer to that is no, then you can proceed from there. If the answer to that is yes, then you proceed along the appeal path. But I think it's a mindset thing of knowing that you need to investigate yourself first whenever Amazon says anything, you can't just have this knee-jerk reaction of, this is incorrect. Why am I being unfairly treated? And like, because yes, that is possible, but having that knee jerk reaction is just going to get you into more trouble and have it take longer to resolve than if you actually investigate it, because you can use that investigation, even if Amazon is incorrect, to show Amazon is incorrect, rather than just being like, well, other people are doing it and this is unfair.
[00:09:07] Chris: Or the knee jerk reaction, it's abuse and being attacked. I mean, we talk about abuse and brand attacks a lot on this podcast, but we're not saying you should assume that that's what's going on.
[00:09:16] Leah: Right, your first step should be am I doing this wrong?
[00:09:19] Chris: Right. We're always saying that's one of multiple possibilities and there's all kinds of abuse. I mean, abuse is not getting better. It's getting worse so which is discouraging to an extent with all the stuff Amazon's tried. Some of it didn't work to prevent abuse or to resolve it faster, so it could be abuse. But if you start assuming that and you just throw it at Amazon and say, well, I'm just getting attacked. It's abuse and I don't know why and I don't know where it's coming from. They, again, they're loathed to admit those types of mistakes, right? And they're loathed to admit that they've been duped by abusers. And they're definitely not going to admit if somebody internal is committing the action that they shouldn't be.
That's harming your business at the behest of somebody else who's motivating them to do it. They're not gonna admit any of these things. They're gonna con continue to send generic messages. So you have to have your strategy set, I would say from the get go.
[00:10:15] Leah: Well, right, and that's why I think the most efficient way of starting this is to start your investigation, assuming that you're in the wrong, so you start your investigation assuming that you're in the wrong, once you investigate it, if it turns out that that is not the case,
you're still, as part of that investigation, you would be identifying that abuse. So you would be using your investigation to build your case with Amazon, whether it's your fault or not. You're actually doing this all as one and you're saving yourself a lot of time, and you're saving yourself a lot of frustration by starting from that point and progressing that way rather than assuming it's wrong and then having to backtrack later.
[00:10:54] Chris: Yeah, I mean some appeals where they send links to all the other comparable products and they say, you guys screwed up, we should be re-listed. You took our ASINs down, but all of these are up. There's two potential outcomes there. Oh yeah, we screwed up. Sorry about that. And they put yours back up. Or if they had screwed up, or they take all those listings down too.
[00:11:15] Leah: I have never ever seen somebody showing examples of other listings, get them reinstated. Ever. I have never seen that.
[00:11:25] Chris: Probably those are more likely when it's just a straight up mistake. It could be an automated bot mistake and they were planning on putting them all back anyway, whether or not they heard from you or it's a manual error. Somebody just low level, untrained, whatever.
[00:11:41] Leah: Well, I have never even seen that get a legitimate response. Like to me, I think for an investigator, they just see that and immediately ignore.
[00:11:52] Chris: I mean, why do things happen selectively to begin with? Bad training. No oversight. bad SOPs.
[00:11:58] Leah: Well, and it's automated. I assume a lot of it is automated intentionally. So it isn't all at the same time. Because otherwise, intentionally, that team would be dealing with like a hundred thousand cases at once.
[00:12:10] Chris: It's automated. But there are different types of investigations. Some begin with automation, but finished with manual reviews.
[00:12:17] Leah: Right. But it's the same thing. Even if it's a manual review, they can't complete hundreds of thousands of manual reviews all at the same time. So of course they're not all going to come down at the same time. And occasionally we do see like thousands of listings go down all at once.
Yeah. But generally speaking, that's not how they operate because those teams can't function that way. They can't complete all of the work all at the same time. That's never going to work well, which is why wouldn't you do see actions where they take thousands of listings all down at once. Sometimes it can take people months to get that resolved because those teams get so backed up in that issue.
[00:12:54] Chris: Yeah. I mean, didn't we work on something earlier this year? I guess when it was like three to four hundred ASINs and it was like every time there's an appeal, it took like four different appeals and they'd do like 75 or 80 each time.
And then like if he did it enough times the right way and it got to enough people, eventually all 400 came back.
[00:13:13] Leah: I mean, especially with compliance, because usually they're like knee-jerk reacting to like government agencies giving them a hard time. So you'll see like thousands of listings here removed and you can see in the forums like six months later, there are still people trying to get their ASINs fixed because that team is so backed up trying to like fix all of the problem that the automation caused, that they just get behind because they can't function that way.
[00:13:37] Chris: They're backed up. But also I think the people six months later posting the forms didn't know how to appeal it properly in the first place. Like they sort of did some of it to themselves.
[00:13:45] Leah: That too, but you also will see a lot of those times with those mass actions some of them will be incorrectly flagged because they tend to go too far rather than not far enough when they're doing them all at once. And so, but it'll still take weeks or months for the incorrectly flag ones to get put back up because they're now backed up with all of the cases.
[00:14:04] Chris: Right. And we were just talking yesterday about we haven't seen as much of the Amazon like sort of half apology messages. You know, sometimes we err on the side of caution.
[00:14:14] Leah: Yeah, I haven't seen that one in a while.
[00:14:15] Chris: I think they realized that that was sort of Torching the dumpster a little bit and rubbing people the wrong way, and they don't use that one as much. Maybe they just updated their messaging templates, but because it's not that they're airing on the site of caution. I mean, if you're carpet bombing ASINs across the platform,
[00:14:32] Leah: Maybe Legal was like that's admitting fault and we shouldn't do that.
[00:14:35] Chris: Either that, or they're just like admitting they're pulling back the curtain a little bit to show different stakeholders in the marketplace. Hey, we love carpet bombing ASINs, which is like a shoot first, ask questions later approach and you know, we'll, we'll grab the mop in the bucket and maybe start cleaning up the mess afterwards, but initially you're going to lose some ASINs and you're gonna lose some revenue. That's very kind of, unpopular to say whether it's internally around Amazon or externally to sellers. So, maybe that's why those messages are on the decrease. We've seen people get reinstated where there's no message at all. I think that's the most interesting thing I've seen lately is just, here you go.
Here's all your ASINs. No performance notification to, to back it up, which is kind of concerning that that still happens. Hey, at least, at least they get their listings back. The riddle of inconsistent enforcement, as Leah was saying, I do not see that changing anytime soon on the Amazon side.
What can change is your reaction and your approach to it.
[00:15:35] Leah: Yeah. And like I said, I preach pretty hard that you need to come at it from a place of maybe I did do this wrong. Investigate that and then, and then proceed from there. Because you're just saving yourself. I know it can be a hard thing to wrap your head around that this is your fault potentially, but in the long term it'll save you so much time and so much frustration if you start from there. Rather than going the other way because Amazon doesn't wanna hear it unless you can prove it and in order to prove it, you need to investigate yourself.
[00:16:08] Chris: Agreed. Well, I'll speak for myself and for you. If you have examples and you wanna show Leah or myself, feel free to put them in front of us. Thanks for listening, and hopefully you will not be annoyed by this nuisance of such inconsistent enforcement yourself with your brand. If you get stuck and need help with it, please let us know. Thanks, Leah.
[00:16:29] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh.
[00:00:15] Leah: Hello.
[00:00:15] Chris: And today our guest is Adam Mellott from BetterAMS.
Hi. How are you doing, Adam?
[00:00:21] Adam: I am good guys. Leah, Chris, great to be here. How are you?
[00:00:25] Chris: Good to see you again. Haven't seen you since our conference in Oregon, but I'm sure we'll all gather again in Oregon very soon.
[00:00:33] Adam: Yes, yes. Hopefully in the new year.
[00:00:35] Chris: Speaking of the new year, this is the time of year. There's my transition where people are starting to see traffic to the ads winding down for Q4 and maybe turning their attention in the near future to Q1, as we all will. So maybe we could start with kind of how that downward trend progresses for the rest of this month, December, and then what you see people planning for, for January, just generally speaking.
[00:01:01] Adam: Yeah, yeah. Good question. So I think at this point, keeping a close eye on that Christmas shipping window's gonna be really important as we approach december 22nd, December 23rd. If you're anything like me, you have procrastinated a ton of Christmas shopping, so you'll need to get back on Amazon and, and start doing some searching.
And what we're seeing now is a lot of those products are going to be delivered after Christmas. So what we're seeing is a relatively high click-through rate and conversion rate drop off. So just being aware of that shipping window, pulling back ads, as soon as you see, products delivering after Christmas is gonna be key.
[00:01:37] Leah: And Amazon, I've noticed, is also already kind of behind on their own shipping times. We were in a secret Santa the other day and everybody was supposed to open their presents on the video and I think like one person had actually received it, even though it all been shipped on time. So just also something to keep in mind, even Amazon's timelines aren't necessarily accurate at this point.
[00:01:59] Chris: Do you see people who are so busy with other stuff that they kind of forget about this and they neglect to keep an eye on it and then their spend doesn't make sense or reconcile with the date on the calendar? Is that common or is that more of an outlier?
[00:02:16] Adam: I would say as long as you have proper eyes in the account, it would be more of an outlier. But on a product level, it's certainly something that we're seeing. I know this year it's really nice that Amazon had put in that arrives before Christmas label on product listings.
And what we're seeing now is just occasional products that aren't gonna be delivered after Christmas that we are having to pull back on for that reason.
[00:02:37] Leah: We had also talked about people maybe forgetting to remove some of their crisp Christmas verbiage in their ads.
[00:02:44] Adam: Yes.
[00:02:45] Leah: What are the dates for that again?
[00:02:48] Adam: I don't have the hard dates here. But moving up to Christmas, you're gonna wanna make sure that any advertisement that has holiday ad copy in it, whether it's an advertising a deal, whether it's advertising a Christmas gift, you wanna make sure that that fits within Amazon's terms of service.
As far as dates go, there's gonna be a small window where leading up to Christmas and directly after Christmas, you're gonna have to change that ad copy. If it is holiday related or deal related, or your ads can be flagged and ultimately stop delivering. So just making sure that that holiday copy is wiped well within Amazon's requested window prior to Q1 2023 is gonna be really important.
[00:03:31] Leah: Yeah, definitely. And also, I imagine Christmas verbiage in your ads probably stop working in January, so worth changing for that reason as well.
[00:03:39] Adam: Yes, they do. I think it's pretty simple, just to run through ad copy and, and find any Christmas related headlines. So definitely recommend getting that changed asap.
[00:03:49] Leah: Yeah, so we were talking before we started recording, but Chris and I really only see ads sides of things when people are having issues where their flags are being disproved usually because the product's been incorrectly flagged as restricted. Is that something that you guys see a lot on the ads management side of things?
[00:04:07] Adam: You know, I would say yes. Recently quite a bit. Yeah. Uh, it's interesting as well in the UK I know they've banned advertising for high sugar, high fats products. Is that something that you guys have dealt with on your end quite a bit over the last few months?
[00:04:22] Leah: Yeah, interestingly, I mean, the people that have reached out to us haven't been people that actually sell high sugar, high fats, because I think anybody selling those products was already aware of the change coming and they knew that they weren't going to be able to advertise.
What we were seeing were people being incorrectly flagged as their product being high sugar, high fat, and so their ads were stopped, even though their product, in some cases, their product wasn't even an edible product. It was just like a container or something totally unrelated. But it makes sense with the sorts of abuse we see around this.
It's normally someone trying to get your listing flagged as adult or anything that would stop you from serving ads would is the abuse tactic that we tend to see. So it does make sense.
[00:05:01] Chris: And sometimes the ad is restricted but the product isn't restricted from sale. That was the interesting piece.
[00:05:06] Leah: That happens a lot actually. So defeats the purpose of the whole restricted product flag.
[00:05:13] Adam: Right, and on the ad side, that's something where if we see a product listing still up and live, and then we see the ads not delivering. We can dive in on our end, but ultimately we need to go in and create a case with Amazon and kind of play the waiting game. Do you guys have recommendations or, or any quick fixes on, on that specific issue as far as ads being shut down?
[00:05:36] Leah: Yeah, I think, I mean, certainly the easiest step if you have a strategic account manager or an ads manager that you're working with, with Amazon, having them internally escalate it, it's the easiest first step.
If you don't have that point of contact, I mean, certainly the first step should be opening a case with the advertising team. Generally speaking, they don't give you a useful response.
[00:05:56] Chris: Right. Copy and paste at that point.
[00:05:58] Leah: But you can use that to then escalate the case to a manager to actually properly review it. But going through that first step and then saying, you're incorrectly flagging this, your team is not reviewing it properly. We need somebody to actually review this properly. That's usually the best way to go. And this week I worked on one where the ads team were basically like, you can never advertise this product.
This is our final decision. No matter what you do or what else you send, you can't. And then we escalated it and they were like, oh no, this is fine. Your ads are now live.
[00:06:28] Chris: They love to say, this is our final decision. We're never looking at this again. They send it for brand registry stuff, sometimes for IP infringement related stuff.
They've started sending it all over marketplace enforcement just to try to lessen the number of complaints or emails or appeals in the queues.
[00:06:46] Leah: Well, and it's an excuse not to reply again, right? This decision is final and we may not reply to future communications about it, right? It's their excuse to not look at it again.
[00:06:55] Chris: Well, they're trying to increase the odds that they meet their internal SLAs and their metrics by just discouraging. They do it with people who are fully suspended on their whole account too, as if people are going to be like, oh, all right, well I guess I just won't write you anymore and that must drive you nuts Adam.
I mean, we're used to the whole left hand doesn't know what the right hand thing is doing, and I know a lot of sellers are used to that now when they weren't before. And maybe you're more used to it now, but does that kind of drive you crazy to the point where you're just like, you know what, we need to bump this up to executive seller relations, or we need to like get some higher level management at Amazon involved because they're just confused talking to each other, communicating inside with each other.
I know it doesn't throw you off your game, but does that just kind of drive you crazy so that we can, you can complain to us as much as we can complain to you about it in the future?
[00:07:47] Adam: You know, if you've been in Amazon ads, For any decent amount of time, then this is definitely an issue that you've dealt with on more than one occasion.
It definitely takes some patience when dealing with Amazon's internal team. But it's always great to have just those internal contacts with Amazon to reach out to and kind of try and get these things expedited. One thing I will say at this time of year, The last thing you want is for one of your listings or ads to be flagged and then not see it for three or four days. So at this point, you know, leading up to Christmas, when we have nine days, and let's say the shipping window closes in roughly a week. You wanna make absolutely sure that that none of your products are being flagged or any of your listings are being shut down at this point in the year.
So just keeping a close eye on things, I would say multiple times a day and making sure everything is running smoothly is gonna be really imperative.
[00:08:34] Leah: Yeah. Also, because if you do have any issues, Amazon's teams are that much slower to respond this time of year, so it'll take a lot longer to get it resolved than normal unfortunately.
[00:08:44] Chris: Yeah. And headcount wise, some people that have been working extra hours now Are given a little bit of a break after the holiday windows close for shipping, so they also might take longer to respond, not because they're so furiously busy, but because there's few of them doing fewer hours.
[00:09:03] Leah: I will say in terms of if you have an Amazon account manager, in my experience, they are far more incentivized to fix these issues than any of the other teams because their metrics are spend based. So, they do tend to be a lot more helpful than say, another Amazon team who's only metrics or speed. So useful if you have those contacts, for sure.
[00:09:24] Adam: On the ad side, it's interesting that you said a lot of people within the next week we'll be taking, kind of their holiday or seasonal break, right? It's kind of the slower time.
But on the ad side of things, this is kind of where we need to pull back. So I think Amazon's internal team knows that, or at least on the ads side knows that. And they know that advertisers are gonna be back in the ad console, pulling back budgets, adjusting bids shortly after Christmas. So, that's a great recommendation.
You know, if you do need to open a case, definitely reach out to an internal contact should you have one.
[00:09:53] Chris: For sure. I think ads managers and SAM's, strategic account managers are getting used to a world where sellers know other ways to escalate things if they can't push it through successfully or quickly, which is kind of what's interesting to us, that it's not just around ASIN reinstatement or account reinstatement anymore.
It's troubleshooting of deals, teams, and ads and other things now, where people will say, oh, since our last call three weeks ago, I've been doing this to try to escalate it and get it pushed through. And sometimes the managers are like, oh, really? or they push on whichever type of manager to open an internal escalation for them because something's stuck and they're just getting the copy and paste responses over and over.
There's a lot more knowledge out there in the space that you can do these things. We'll take some credit for spreading the word, but just troubleshooting that they've been doing on their own through articles or videos or whatnot. It's become commonplace. Have you noticed this with people you've talked to in terms of just like instead of opening a case, they say, well, what about this? Or what about that? Like, trying to be more aggressive with it.
[00:10:54] Adam: Yeah, I would say, there's definitely more conversational approach around issues that that sellers are seeing on Amazon. LinkedIn is a great place to educate yourself on the platform and issues that, common issues that sellers and advertisers alike are facing.
So, honestly, establishing relationships within agencies, within Amazon and really utilizing the network that you leverage on LinkedIn is really, really beneficial. So that would be something that I would recommend starting sooner rather than later.
[00:11:22] Leah: Yeah. I agree. I say regularly and I often use ads and what we do as an example of this, the benefit of having an agency even just for informational purposes is that you are seeing, and we're seeing thousands of examples of what's going on, on Amazon at any given moment. Whereas if you're just your own seller on your own account, you're really only seeing what's happening on your account. So it's a lot easier for agencies to see trends and see where things are going and make predictions and make decisions based on those predictions rather than somebody who's only data is what's happening on there account alone. Which is why I usually recommend that people work with an ad agency or an agency for what we do, because you really do need that knowledge in order to be successful with Amazon in general in terms of optimization, but also Amazon in terms of how things work.
[00:12:12] Adam: And I think, you know, the industry is changing rapidly. It's really important to keep a pulse on things nowadays. This isn't Amazon of five years ago when everything was a lot simpler, so as things are changing rapidly, and as Amazonians are putting out content on LinkedIn, I think that is a great place to keep a pulse on everything.
[00:12:31] Leah: Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:12:33] Chris: And a lot of them feel more motivated to put that out there and they're not as reigned in by the company. They're willing to, and they're able to post a bit more to educate than they were in the past where it was kind of like, don't share anything, don't say anything, now it's like, loosened up a little bit because Amazon realizes finally, At least in certain ways, they can ease their pain by allowing more education to float around out there , and get kicked around and discussed. Because like you said on LinkedIn in particular, those poster are shared and people are reading that stuff wanna learn more about it. Probably the fact that Leah and I are reading more about it. I won't speak for you, Leah, but I'm reading more about it than I did two, three years ago, just to stay up on it. So that means everyone, every consultant in any part of the Amazon space or community should be reading more about this, this topic as well.
[00:13:21] Adam: Yep. I couldn't agree more. I think it is a multifaceted approach at this point to understand Amazon as a whole and it's only becoming increasingly challenging as Amazon rolls out new updates and as the entire thing gets bigger. So I would agree.
[00:13:37] Chris: Yeah. People can't afford to not be in the know. So any parting words of wisdom for those who are turning the page to Q1 and beyond for 2023? No predictions. You don't have to give us an actual prediction because that's a bit cliche, but any final words for our audience before we wrap it?
[00:13:56] Adam: Yeah. No predictions, definitely no predictions here, but I think heading into Q1, we're gonna kind of see a slight shift, and I think people are to no surprise after gift buying season are gonna be more price conscious, and profitability focused, both on the consumer side and on the seller side.
So just ensuring that quote unquote bleeding in campaigns is cleaned up. Mm. Making sure that, again, holiday copy, aggressive budgets, things like that are kind of cranked down, heading into Q1 and just really capitalizing on what we know works well in Q1, the New Year, New Me crowd.
CBG brands always do pretty well here to start the new year. So capitalizing on what works historically, I think is, is step one.
[00:14:37] Chris: Terrific. All right, Adam, from BetterAMS. Thank you for joining us. Best way for people to reach you if they have questions about this?
[00:14:45] Adam: Email me at adam@betterams.com or feel free to look me up on LinkedIn. It is Adam Mellot.
[00:14:51] Chris: Adam Mellot. All right. Thank you again, Adam. Thanks Leah, and we will catch you next time on Seller Performance Solutions. Have a good one.
[00:14:58] Leah: Thanks, Chris.
[00:14:58] Adam: It's been a pleasure, guys.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hey Amazon Sellers. Welcome to the Seller Performance Solution podcast. I am Leah McHugh from ecommerceChris, here with Mr. ecommerceChris, Chris McCabe.
[00:00:18] Chris: How are you? Good.
[00:00:20] Leah: How are you?
[00:00:21] Chris: I'm good. Hello. From the other side of the world.
[00:00:24] Leah: Just In case you guys haven't noticed, we sound a little bit run down because it's peak Q4 and we're dealing with a lot of suspensions and a lot of attacks.
[00:00:32] Chris: And fortunately here talking about preventing those things, right?
[00:00:37] Leah: Yes.
[00:00:37] Chris: Proper ways of reviewing accounts. The account health rating is still a hot topic. We're getting lots of messages from sellers saying, this is my score. What does it mean? Am I at risk? How do I fix it? We've had a lot of those conversations and I'm actually looking forward to what you have to say in a couple of these, because I know there's been a lot of intellectual property reporting issues from people you've talked to lately. Do you wanna start us off with metrics? Are those metrics misses? How would you , quantify or qualify those?
[00:01:10] Leah: Well I mean it's interesting because we've been seeing actually quite a number of suspensions regarding potential IP infringement where there isn't even a complaint made against you. It's just information on the product detail page that's leading to an account suspension. So that's certainly something that I've been telling sellers for years that you can't put other people's trademarks anywhere in the product detail page. Granted a lot of these are cases where they didn't realize that it was a trademark because I assume everybody's not checking every single word that they put in a detail page with the USTPO but places where we see a lot of sellers not realize that they can't put trademark terms are the hidden keywords. Those also get flagged as potential IP and also in your images and that's one that I don't think most sellers I speak to even realize that's a thing. So if you have lifestyle images on your product detail page, and those lifestyle images have other products in them, none of those other products, trademarks can be visible in those images or that could also get flagged as potential IP.
Or the brand could also make it a complaint, but particularly for potential IP infringement, those are the two places that I'm seeing a lot of sellers get into trouble because they don't realize that those are places that Amazon's looking.
[00:02:27] Chris: That's a lesser known one that a lot of brands I'm sure don't recognize right away. In terms of backend keywords, also for compliance reasons, right? People are leaving certain terms and backend keywords and getting flagged and they're like, where is this on the detail page? But they don't even look in their backend keywords.
[00:02:45] Leah: Oh, you mean like for like disease claims and things like that?
[00:02:48] Chris: Disease claims, right?
[00:02:50] Leah: Yeah. So for those sorts of compliant flags, those are for the most part, fully automated at this point. Amazon just has their spiders crawling through the detail page information and flagging any keywords. So it doesn't matter if it's visible on the front end, if it's in the system, those spiders can pick it up because, once again, even if you don't explicitly say this is your product treats a specific disease, if people search for that disease on Amazon and your product comes up, then that is an implied disease claim. So Amazon's algorithms do pick up any of those terms.
Also, we see a lot of people, particularly in the supplement space, mention drug names in the hidden keywords and that also is something that can get picked up by Amazon's bots and get your listing flagged as being non-compliant. But I mean, that's a specific example of keywords that can be flagged, but really anything right, that's not compliant or even misrepresents your product.
More recently we've been seeing people get flagged for their product being a restricted product when their product actually isn't that kind of product, but because of wording that they used in the hidden keywords because they thought it would improve their search results they're listing got flagged as a product that it isn't, but then now you have to convince Amazon that that is wrong, even though you are the one that put that word in your listing in the first place.
[00:04:15] Chris: Well, that's probably a driver for all the food and safety complaint warnings that we've seen sellers getting, they're trying to resolve that they either get a complaint and some of those items aren't even food.
[00:04:29] Leah: Yeah, a lot of time it is keyword based. I mean, sometimes this time of year it is also just somebody attacking. That is an area as well where because there are a lot of tools that show you if somebody's searching for this, they're also searching for this word. So people put that word right into their backend keywords. But yeah, that can get you into trouble if it makes the algorithm think that your product is something else than it is. Also in terms of Amazon could try to change the product category if your product is being misrepresented in the details. So that's also something to keep in mind when you're adding sort of erroneous keywords into your listing to try to improve search.
[00:05:06] Chris: Well, and we've said this before, and I won't dwell on it now, but when you're hiring out for listing optimization services, make sure they've got a compliance arm, or let's just say an interest in compliance because if you're just letting them do whatever and they're just trying to surface your product and make it more searchable, with all these little tricks and gimmicks and workarounds that can bite you back and Amazon will not want to hear, they won't wanna see you pointing fingers at someone else who's not the account owner because you're the seller of record and they don't wanna hear those as excuses because the buck stops with you. That's why we harp on it so much on this podcast because ultimately who gets punished, who pays the ultimate price? It's the seller. It's never the third party service.
[00:05:51] Leah: Right. And Amazon's also sort of inconsistent with their enforcement of this. Sometimes it's just a matter of removing that word from the listing, sometimes it's like no your product's been classified as this and we're never going to reinstate it. So it is worth taking a look at things that you're putting in your listing that may imply that you're product is something other than it is because you don't want that to just be permanently removed from the marketplace because Amazon doesn't want that kind of product on their marketplace anymore.
[00:06:17] Chris: Right. And that's kind of another semi scandalous thing going on, people are reclassifying their products just to avoid having to submit compliance documentation.
[00:06:25] Leah: Yeah, that's the other side of this. Don't just like remove words from your listing to try to hide what your product actually is. That's just asking for an account suspension.
I know you can pay to have that done but that is just asking for an account suspension if Amazon thinks you're trying to skirt their processes by misrepresenting your product, which is something we've talked about previously on the podcast.
[00:06:49] Chris: It's worth emphasizing though, because a lot of people, I think, are focused on metrics and they are focused on the policy warnings that they've received, not ones they might receive, right? This whole episode is about preventing this. Well, one good way to prevent it is to not break the rules or not hire some crazy people to do this for you who have no idea what they're doing, or don't care what the guidelines and the policies are, because a policy violation could easily be interpreted as a code of conduct issue. Well, once you're in the code of conduct minefield, you could lose the account at any time. The entire account all for one listing, right?
[00:07:27] Leah: Yeah. And you're actually much more likely to have the account suspended if Amazon thinks that you've tried to hide the fact that you are listing a restricted product than if you actually just list a restricted product.
If Amazon flags your product as restricted because of keywords, usually they just restrict that listing. If they believe that you've tried to hide what your product actually is, they're much more likely to suspend the account. And we do get a lot of those cases coming through the contact form where they're like, oh, it's actually this, but I didn't use any of those words and now my account suspended.
And then so particularly when there's like safety concerns because then there's a reason that those products are in fact restricted from the marketplace. But if Amazon thinks that you're trying to hide what you're actually selling, then yeah, you are much more likely to get suspended, which actually brings me to my next point in terms of avoiding an account suspension, which is know what's going on.
Like if you're listening to this podcast, chances are probably are keeping up to date with what's happening in the Amazon world. But make sure that you are aware of what's happening on Amazon it's very easy to just get sucked into what's going on in your own account. But I think one of the most useful things about having people like Chris and myself and other consultants in the space is that we see a lot of accounts. We're seeing what's going on at the big picture level. Whereas if you're just working on your account, all you're seeing is what's going on inside of your account. So it's difficult for you to predict trends in terms of Amazon enforcement, what Amazon is concerned about if you're just looking at what's going on inside your account, chances are you're not going to see issues until Amazon flags them.
[00:09:09] Chris: And enforcement trends take some time to form as well. Unfortunately, I sometimes see LinkedIn posts or Facebook group posts that are interpreting what's going on a little bit too quickly or just a little bit too generally.
[00:09:27] Leah: Oh, I see the opposite. Where someone's like this new thing is happening and it's like, that's been happening for 12 months but it's new for you.
[00:09:32] Chris: Yeah. Well, if it's new for that person, they're going to say, this is new because they haven't seen it before but enforcement trends are really important to monitor without just jumping on the forums occasionally to see if one person posted one thing that might be similar to your case.
It's a much bigger issue than that. It's a bigger marketplace. There are things going on across several categories. Sometimes it's not across several categories, it might just be in your category and that's worth knowing for the appeals process and for identifying what you might be facing if you have to do an appeal in the near future.
[00:10:11] Leah: Well, yeah. And it helps you get in front of things before it's actually flagged on your account.
[00:10:15] Chris: I know this a time of year that some people are postponing making certain improvements or changes because they're just trying to ride things out until they get through Q4. But as we've seen with the account health rating calls, account health reps have been calling saying, Hey, you're at risk, or, Hey, things aren't looking so great in your account health dashboard. They're doing that. All month this month, November into December, like they would any other month of the year. Amazon isn't taking a vacation from enforcement. And I think we've talked to a few sellers who maybe don't understand that they're just trying to ride things out.
Amazon's not riding anything out. They're doing what they normally do. And if it's fifth week versus two weeks from now, it's all the same to them. They're not the ones losing the revenue.
[00:11:02] Leah: And that actually brings me to my next point, which is to prepare for the worst. So if in case you do get suspended or again, to try to avert a suspension. Make sure you have backup plans for things, particularly if you're doing your own shipping. Make sure you have backup plans. The last thing you want is an automated suspension because of a late ship rate. Make sure you have backup plans for customer service.
Make sure you have backup plans for anything that could go wrong in Q4, and then further up with that, having a backup plan. If you do get suspended, make sure you already have all of your documentation. In order ready to go, like chances are you probably already have the documentation, make sure you have it organized.
Make sure you have it easy to access. Maybe make sure you have it easy to pull together. If you need invoices, if you need letters of authorization, if you need compliance documentation, make sure you have all of that somewhere where it's easy to grab if needed, so you can quickly appeal things that require that documentation. Don't wait until you're suspended to then request something from your supplier or to request that from a different department. Whatever the case may be, make sure you have that ready to go so you can appeal well as quickly as possible. If something does get taken down during Q4.
[00:12:15] Chris: I mean, I'll do you one better on that. Have an appeal.
[00:12:19] Leah: Sure.
[00:12:19] Chris: Like pieces of an appeal, almost ready to go or something that you start, especially if there are signs of trouble already and there's rumblings around, Hey, you might be at risk for suspensions for let's say IP infringement, IP complaints, safety complaints, authenticity, whatever it might be.
Typically there are some warning signs. So many lightning strikes that we hear about from so many people contacting us. That gives you an opportunity to start, you know, come up with a kind of blueprint of, well, we need some root causes. Start chipping away at those start lining up lists of preventative solutions, it'll make writing the appeal quicker, easier, and not such a steep mountain to climb if you've been chipping away at it because you saw this coming three weeks out.
If you're putting your head in the sand and trying to pray and hope that it goes away it's going to make it extra painful when it's time to submit a finalized appeal to teams. That, let's be honest, air on the side of caution and first and second appeals pretty routinely.
[00:13:23] Leah: Well, and the other side of that is if you do have problematic ASINs that you can see are potentially going to cause issues, what is the risk versus reward?
Is it better to actually just remove those ASINs from sales during this period if you're potentially risking your entire account over selling those ASINs? No one ever liked the risk versus reward conversation, but throw that out there.
[00:13:49] Chris: Cost benefit analysis. and we know it sounds somewhat crazy to be saying, oh yeah, take your top selling ASIN off. It could get the whole account suspended when we're in the thick of November Crush. But, that's a risk assessment and a decision you have to make .
[00:14:05] Leah: And that's always often not the best selling ASIN anyway. A lot of times we see people getting into trouble over something that they barely even sell or aren't even selling anymore they just haven't removed it from their catalog.
[00:14:16] Chris: True.
[00:14:17] Leah: Remove things from your catalog if you aren't selling them. Don't keep it in your catalog to get in trouble for something that you aren't even selling.
[00:14:23] Chris: Right. Or a product that's your lesser used, lesser sold product because again, everything is algorithmic with Amazon.
They don't care if it's an ASIN you care about or not, right? They don't call you up in advance of a suspension and say, well, we were thinking of doing this, but do you wanna just pull whatever units are left and dump this ASIN? And in which case we don't have to? No, it's all numbers and data.
Everybody, any questions on this or all of the other worthwhile subjects during the holiday peak, get in touch with us. Thanks again for listening. Leah and I want to hear your questions or comments, so feel free to weigh in on what we've talked about today and on any other episode. Thanks leah.
[00:15:08] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris host of Seller Performance Solutions. I don't have Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris with me this week, but I do have Carrie Miller of Helium 10.
We're really excited to talk to her. Hello, Carrie. How are you?
[00:00:22] Carrie: Hello. Great. How are you doing?
[00:00:23] Chris: Great. We're here to talk about some dicey stuff but we're excited to have you, number one because you're with Helium 10. Number two, because we still have wonderful memories of the Sell and Scale Conference, which I guess was almost three months ago now.
Don't know if it seems like more recent or distant past, but we had a good experience with that. We had good memories of it. And mostly talking to you about some of the brands you've been talking with this Q4 and this holiday peak because you've got some stories, of course we've of course got stories of brand nightmares, people getting attacked, abuse reports to Amazon, what Amazon does with it. But I thought we could start with your interactions with some people who have been dealing with counterfeiters, dealing with maybe detail page abuse, fake reviews, negative reviews that are extreme.
You had an example we were talking about just before we started, so maybe I'll just kick this off by giving you a chance to kind of give us some background on that and then we can get into it.
[00:01:23] Carrie: Yeah. So, one of our elite members is actually a creator of a product that went viral, and I actually get ads for this product all the time.
It's very well known all throughout. And his wife actually is the one who created this product and patented it and so they have so many counterfeiters. They've actually lost retail deals because there's so many counterfeiters people are using their exact packaging and branding and everything, not even just not even doing their own packaging.
[00:01:49] Chris: C opying their packaging?
[00:01:51] Carrie: Copying their packaging, copying the product, the logo, everything. Or they might remove it, like just subtly and it'll still be the same packaging. So it's been a nightmare for them. I was just jaw dropped listening to this story and how many millions they're losing every day.
But that's probably a big one is just some people with patented products that get their products counterfeited and they lose tons of money. So that's a big issue. I have heard other people talking about it. This not as bad as this particular one.
[00:02:18] Chris: Do they have an IP attorney quarterbacking some of the IP reporting to Amazon, or are they just using the brand registry tools and hoping they work?
[00:02:26] Carrie: Yeah, they had IP attorney, the wife is actually an attorney herself as well but they have outsourced to another attorney. They worked with another company too to try to try to get things sorted out and they have not gotten anywhere. They said, oh, we've been kind of nice.
And I was like, I don't think you should be nice in this situation. I was like, you need to go hard on this. And they had people basically who they sent cease and desist letters too. They said, we're going to attack your listings. We're going to ruin your listings.
We're going to attack your product if you don't stop this, or if you get us taken down, they're really harassed by people , I didn't know how prevalent that was, but it's like they've got a lot of that.
[00:03:04] Chris: At this time of year it's always, I mean, for years now it's been prevalent, but if they're making as much as you say they're making with that kind of product they're going to attract eyeballs.
They've got people, black hat types that are tracking their sales, that wanna make sure they get some of that money and they siphon off some of that revenue. And unfortunately, a lot of bad actors out there understand how to hit them, where to hit them, how often, they've kind of got a playbook for that.
And one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked to you about today was do brands have a response or like a counter for that? Do they go into the holiday knowing that they need to have an excellent, robust strategy in case they're attacked before they ever are attacked? I know it's a little bit late in the year to talk about what's your prep for Q4?
But I mean, are people still getting caught off guard from your experience? Are they still kind of like, what do we say? What do we do? Do we open up a seller support case? Do we write an email to Jeff? I mean, do they grasp at straws or do you think they've got kind of a game plan that'll help them at least get started?
[00:04:11] Carrie: I don't think people have a game plan. They just start with what they think they can do. Maybe they'll start with their attorney, they'll start with seller central. They'll try to open up cases. They'll try to figure out what to do. They'll google a lot of stuff.
They'll see what they can do to protect themselves with patents. A lot of people that are in our group, they have patents not only in the US but all over the world and some of these products, You know, really, really genius . There's another guy who patented his product in Europe.
He's actually only had a few counterfeits. But it's now just starting to get traction. So it's really something that you think that if you have a patent that you'll be protected and that your brand won't get annihilated on Amazon and you won't lose retail deals because of this.
So it's really kind of disheartening all the money that you invest up front for those patents, getting it all designed, getting it out there.
[00:04:59] Chris: Do you find that people are, copyright's been a big IP attack this year and last year, do you find that people are copywriting their images? Their detail pages? Do you hear that they have done it or do you hear that they should have done it but didn't do it?
[00:05:13] Carrie: Yeah, the first product that I was talking about that's viral right now, it's really huge. They copyrighted everything and they've tried to get things taken down. It has been very difficult for them, even though they have everything copyrighted. Their actual listing, their packaging, they've copyrighted everything cuz the wife is a lawyer, right? So, he knew because she's a lawyer to do all of this stuff. But it hasn't protected them, unfortunately. Like even the images, the exact copy, everything.
[00:05:39] Chris: Yeah, because what happens sometimes with copyright is the other party copies your images and then tries to fake or misrepresent to Amazon that they have prior use of those images before you ever sold like two years ago. I mean, they try to fake that information and Amazon's so gullible, they fall for it and they'll think you copied those images. Of course, they're your own images. That's what's so crazy about it and it took sellers and brands a while to catch up to that logic or illogical response by Amazon. Amazon finally understands this is a repeat abusive attack a year later, 15 months later but it still takes time to resolve it. That's the problem. And like you said, it's very disheartening.
[00:06:21] Carrie: And it's kind of like whack-a-mole too. It's like we got this one. Now there's 20 more that have popped up.
[00:06:27] Chris: Which is why the seller support cases, I'm sorry to say don't work. That's worth doing maybe in the first 60 minutes that you're being attacked just so you can have a case ID in case people keep pestering you for it. But you can't expect a resolution from a seller support case. Some people call account health reps and they talk to them about, Hey, what else can I do? And they get some generic copy and paste advice. It's worth doing just to say that you've done it in case somebody else at Amazon bothers you about not trying the traditional paths or the established protocols.
Have you noticed one category being vulnerable versus another? I mean, at Helium 10, you come across brands in every category, right?
[00:07:08] Carrie: Yeah, no, I think these are all spread out throughout. I think supplements are always, there's always something going on with supplements. Grocery, there's different things that happen with grocery, it's more challenging than non-perishable product. .
[00:07:21] Chris: Food safety, product safety for sure.
[00:07:24] Carrie: But for the most part it's just these patented things that are, that are sticking out in my mind are just attacks on listings, bad reviews, which I've had that same thing happen to me. Writing those fake bad reviews that are just so outrageous, you know?
[00:07:36] Chris: Do you think they're getting better at the fake reviews? Because a lot of times we see sloppy stuff where the language and the phrases are the same and they just copy over and over reproduce the same language and it makes it easier to complain to Amazon, Hey, they took the same review and duplicated it like a thousand times, you know? They used to do that. Do you think they're getting more sophisticated with that?
[00:07:57] Carrie: There is sometimes they'll say, you know, you can tell it's broken English, but it does seem that like they're more sophisticated because the guidelines are really clear about how a review could get taken down. So unless it's within those Amazon guidelines of, okay, we'll take this down, they're not getting removed for the most part. So yeah, that's what I've been hearing. So any tips for that I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate.
[00:08:17] Chris: Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, pressure and pushing Amazon to act, pressuring them to review it again, if they ignore the first case email, lower level stuff, you have to bump it up. I think a lot of people have understood that the social media teams at Amazon are more enhanced, I guess now Twitter has become a much bigger deal over the last 12 months. Hey, we're being slaughtered by fake reviews. I mean, you don't need 180 characters or however many they give you to spell out, like we're being hammered with attacks by fake reviews, a lot of them say the same thing. Sometimes you can report the reviewer. That's gotten. Less common over the months and years, but sometimes you can find the reviewer and say, look, they've reviewed all these products the same way except for this one, seller's products. Yeah. Like I tend to work with people in brands and categories where they'll be eight top sellers and seven of them will be getting attacked and there's one that's not being attacked and there's one that's not having reviews loaded with negatives. So it's kind of like you can't show Amazon everything, but you can point them in the right direction. Amazon loves to make an excuse, like, well, you haven't given us definitive evidence, smoking gun proof. They don't say that in particular, but they give you the sense of, Hey, look, we'll take a look at it. We can't guarantee results. You have to kind of, unfortunately the burdens on the brand. I'm gonna start like a new YouTube video series or something called Burden on the Brand, which is unfortunate, but that's the reality, which is like it's on your shoulders to keep coming back and to keep, I mean, you've been to a lot of the same conferences I have and you talked to some of the same people.
You have to show that you're never going away. I mean, it sounds crazy and it sounds like reckless and irresponsible, that it's on you and not Amazon and it's not a shared burden, but it is on you to show Amazon. We're never gonna give up. We're gonna keep coming back because this is a constant.
And honestly, your attacker, the black hat abuser of your brand, of your listings, they only get the message, quote unquote if they know that Amazon's going to be continually reading reports about them, continually reviewing them and continually researching them. And it must be tough for like Helium 10. You don't want too many dark clouds and you negative content. But that is actually what works is when Amazon understands like you're gonna keep coming back. You put a lot of effort and money and time into your brand and there's abuse here and it can't be denied. Maybe you don't meet their high lofty standard of what's smoking gun evidence. I guess the question is, do you have trouble communicating somewhat unsavory message to like e-commerce entrepreneurs or new brand owners or new seller account owners at Amazon in terms of like, this is sort of a a dark side of the company.
[00:11:15] Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I think, people don't like to necessarily hear that. They wanna know what else can I do? So they're not really giving up, I would say. They're just like what else can I do? What else? What's another avenue? Am I doing this wrong? What's the technique? I think those are usually the kind of people that we have in our league group are kind of more like that. They're like, well, I'm not giving up, but I gotta figure out another way because I'm beating my head against the wall. So yeah, it's a rough thing cause we'll just keep encouraging them to keep doing what they're doing and to go hard. Like, this one particular, they're like, oh, kind of nice about it. And I'm like, you need to go harder. You know, you're a nice person but this is your business and your livelihood and your idea that they're stealing.
[00:11:52] Chris: Yeah, it's tough even for us as consultants because on the one hand, bedside manner is important because people are anxious and stressed and losing money and crazy stuff's happening that's out of their control to an extent, and we were sympathetic and we want to help. On the other hand, we have to keep telling people like, you are being too nice about it. You're being too patient not even so much nice. Because there's different ways of being nice and there's different ways of being angry or negative. You have to be factual, you have to use data points. I mean, we're definitely not telling people like write a lot of angry emails and send them to right to Jeff and his girlfriend and all these other people because invective doesn't really work on Amazon. It never did, even back in the old days of executive seller relations, processing escalations like when I was working there.
But if you're factual and if you're data driven, right, there's the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. If you're not getting any better quality answers, when you are data driven or factual, that's not your fault, that's Amazon's fault and then you have to just surface it in more places.
Certainly be unique and be custom when you write to this executive versus another one. Don't treat them all the same because they're not all the same. And don't treat every part of Amazon the same because Amazon's very diffuse and there's disparate teams that don't necessarily communicate with each other very well. Again, not the brand owner's fault that Amazon doesn't know how to communicate internally but for strategy, it becomes your problem. Which is interesting because there are brand outreach and emerging teams and people that we even talked to and had involved in our conference in Oregon this past spring in terms of like brands that wanna launch a new product or wanna launch a new brand.
There are teams at Amazon that are receptive to that and help you do it, and they're being bogged down too by some of these pain points. So it's kind of strange that like brand owners have the same problems as some teams at Amazon have. Parallel universe. But that's true. That's the reality of what we're dealing with. Are there any kind of parting thoughts or words, pearls of wisdom, words of advice that you have for people in terms of just finishing strong in Q4? And also jumping into 2023, we can kind of do a part two maybe for January. But any other words of courage that you can, you can share with our listeners?
[00:14:22] Carrie: You know, just keep going and especially right now, because you gotta really make most of your sales within the next week or so because of Christmas. So just keep your head down and keep working. And if problems arise. Just keep going for it. And if you get on seller support and you do need their help, just keep hanging up until you get the right person, because it's the time of year where you need to get it done, you know? So I kind of do that. But yeah, just keep a good attitude. Try to be nice to those people that you do think can help you. And yeah, I think it's been a good year, even though it's kind of a down economy, which is exciting.
[00:14:53] Chris: You do need quite a bit of fortitude to hang in there and it sounds like maybe generic advice, but really at this time of the year at this part of December is when people start getting a little bit weary, but the battle isn't over yet.
Exactly. You know, you're kind of in that in between like your post Black Friday, post Cyber Monday, but there's still a lot going on.
[00:15:14] Carrie: Yeah. Keep your sales going too, like your coupons, because people are still looking for deals in a down economy. Keep those coupons on. I keep making really great sales and I think the reason why we're doing so well is cause I have coupons on all of my products and I will until December 20th at least.
[00:15:30] Chris: That's a great point. In a down economy, the dates on the calendar don't necessarily line up with what's going on in the markets and in the real world. So whether it's December or January, you kind of wanna keep going just because there could be a sales spike in your future that you didn't even necessarily anticipate.
[00:15:48] Carrie: Exactly. You're getting paycheck to paycheck, they maybe couldn't buy stuff last week, but they can now. So, There's a lot a lot into it. I actually talked to a lot of people who are out of town and they're like, I just didn't have time to do any Black Friday actually, point of view. So they're gonna be looking for stuff in the next week or two, and really this is, this is a good time to double down.
[00:16:09] Chris: That's a great point that, that speaks to me personally because I'm so busy with reinstatement work and appeals and brands getting attacked over this whole week, black Friday, cyber Monday, that I do all my shopping in December after that peak, nightmare period is coming gone, nightmare in terms of like people losing sales from lost listings.
But Carrie Miller of Helium10, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your insights. I hope we can do this again very soon, hopefully in January with the big banner 2023 that we're looking at. We'll share any information for your audience or for ours on this material.
Anyone who's still getting attacked or struggling to appeal or strange things happening on their listings that result in a take down or they don't understand what's happening. Feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to give some some advice to people who are trying to rectify their own anti-competitive behavior problems or black hat attacks.
So thanks again and I will talk to you soon. Take care.
[00:17:09] Carrie: Talk to you later. Bye bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to another wonderful, lovely episode of Seller Performance Solutions.
I am here today, as always with Leah McHugh. How are you doing, Leah?
[00:00:17] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you Chris?
[00:00:18] Chris: Good. Good.
[00:00:19] Leah: We get like progressively more tired sounding as we get further into Q4.
[00:00:23] Chris: Yeah, we're doing this one. If you can't tell late in the day people, so just hang, hang with us. Hang loose.
[00:00:28] Leah: 8:00 AM where I am.
[00:00:30] Chris: Yeah, sure. Late in my day. Today we're talking about these interesting mysterious product recall messages that a lot of clients and brands that we've talked to keep receiving. In a lot of cases there is no recall present. I think it's fair to say, and it's bizarre that they were reading that message.
And in other cases it looks like it might be an abuse tactic. So, first off, if you have your products being recalled, isn't there an agency or a government notification? When I worked at Amazon, I would process some of these notices that these agencies would send to Amazon. Hey, there's a product recall, take these listings down. Inform the sellers of this. Like I was involved in the Amazon process but since we've been consulting, I don't remember anyone getting a recall notice that wasn't there or didn't exist?
[00:01:21] Leah: So yeah, so usually CPSC is the government agency that would be notifying. Whoever about the recall, right?
Or the seller itself. So you as the manufacturer are supposed to be the one notifying people of the recall. And if not you, then the CPSC. This is one of those cases where, you know, my favorite Amazon game is this incompetence or abuse . Where products are being flagged as being recalled.
Is it somebody hitting the wrong thing in the system or is it somebody sabotaging you're listing. And honestly, at this point, it could go either way. And then it's probably a mixture of both. Some cases are probably somebody doing the wrong thing internally by accident, and some of it is probably people sending false reports regarding recalls.
[00:02:05] Chris: Right. Right. I think it's an abuse tactic. It's hot right now. I think people are, yeah, some of them are right click errors and the investigators are just screwing up the messaging as they often do. The rest of it is competitors, abuse and competitors making false allegations about recalls.
This is kind of a theory I'm working on since we've seen so many of them. We are in the thick of it in November. So of course we're looking for black hat tactics and abuse all over the place because that's what this month, unfortunately, is all about for a lot of brands, just defending themselves and defending off these attacks.
But I'm starting to wonder if competitors are making fake allegations of a product recall. Would they be what, falsifying paperwork? They're putting this in front of Amazon and saying, Hey, this product should be recalled, and for some reason, I think Amazon's believing that and then taking action against their competitor.
I mean, what are the odds that that's actually what's happening?
[00:03:04] Leah: I mean, I think it's probably a little bit more involved than that, having reported safety concerns about products to Amazon myself, just telling them that something is unsafe doesn't usually result in anything. It usually takes a little bit, a little bit more work than that.
Sure. So I think it probably is more involved, but I mean, we are certainly seeing it. We're seeing it too often now, I think for it to just be user error internally and particularly this time of year, whenever we see a spike in anything that seems a little bit odd, chances are it's an abuse tactic.
And honestly, like, not to encourage the black hats, but it's a good way of, of getting somebody's listing taken down for a longer period of time because you either have to convince Amazon that your product was not subject to a recall or you have to try to convince them that the inventory that they have is not subject to a recall, and otherwise they want you to remove all inventory before they'll even consider reinstatement.
So first of all, you know it's going to be confusing to whoever's getting that notice. These product hasn't been recalled, so that's gonna take time for them to process. And then it's a matter of. Checking to make sure that it isn't actually subject to recall, and then getting documentation that says that it is not subject to recall, which, if you're the brand owner, isn't that hard to get because it's really just you're sending in a letter, but certifying that it isn't subject to recall. But if you aren't the manufacturer or Amazon doesn't accept that letter immediately, Amazon then expects you to remove all inventory before they even consider reinstatement. So it's potentially can slow somebody down for more than a day that's getting that reinstated.
[00:04:42] Chris: That's what it's about, right? This is to create disruption and to distract the competitor from selling and marketing and running ads and doing all the things they do to win sales from the Black hat seller.
[00:04:56] Leah: Well, yeah, and I think similar to any sort of notification that somebody gets, that doesn't make sense.
I think a lot of sellers kneejerk reaction would just be to send an email saying this wasn't subject to a recall, what are you talking about and you know that's not going to get you anywhere with Amazon. So just that back and forth of like, no, you're wrong. No, we're right. No, we're not like that can slow a lot of sellers down, not realizing that they do need to provide that letter certifying that it's not to a real recall.
[00:05:22] Chris: Of course, as a brand, your attackers know that Amazon is going to send you copy and paste gibberish, worthless messaging and that they're not gonna read what you send them. Like they're counting on their being friction and back and forth when you try to appeal it, they know, I mean, this is what the fake IP complaints are about. It's the same exact thing, right? Oh, I'm gonna take copies, my own copies of your images and put them on the internet somewhere, and then claim that you stole my photos.
[00:05:49] Leah: Like they don't think it's gonna work forever, but they're just trying to get you down for as long as possible.
[00:05:53] Chris: it sounds like a circus, It is a circus, but it works because Amazon is so slow to understand these concepts and so behind the curve, and by the way, I wouldn't worry about encouraging or discouraging black hats. I mean, fraud and crime is their profession.
[00:06:10] Leah: So yeah, I know they're always, sometimes I'm like, I don't want other people to know, you know?
[00:06:15] Chris: No, they're already, first of all, they're already stress testing and trying these things out before they become a thing. Then there's a second round. I mean, we can have another episode just about Black hat operations in terms of how they think and what they're after. But it's pretty obvious, then a tactic works and they share it around their, you know, masterminds and their BS groups and their little fraudster shows.
[00:06:41] Leah: I have had cases where it is actually just like confirmed user error on Amazon's part where they just like sent the wrong template .
[00:06:50] Chris: That's what I said. Well, that's what I meant by a right click error. Like they're just sending you the wrong damn thing.
[00:06:54] Leah: Right. But I've had people internally on the phone with seller support saying that somebody internally had also like, accidentally marked the product as subject to a recall. So there are definitely user error issues with that.
[00:07:09] Chris: That goes without saying, that goes without saying. Amazon could always, we don't assume it's black hat attacks, we just observe what we see. Suddenly there's a spike and we start interpreting it just so everyone knows how, how we work. But, The errors on Amazon could easily respond and say, sorry, we sent you a message about a recall. There is no recall. Sorry about that. I mean, that is extremely common. Whether it's a right click error or a one time right click error is possible or it could be a group of sellers who got the wrong message too. So the first step is identify which basket this problem belongs. And is it an attack? Is it abuse? When you're talking to account health reps, make sure they're really sharp and on the ball and with it in terms of was this just a mistake? Was it an error? Because reporting it as a complete and total Amazon mistake is one thing. Reporting abuse and demanding that Amazon step up to the plate and prevent abuse while fixing your listing and reinstating you, those are two different things and two different approaches.
[00:08:14] Leah: Yeah, and it's unfortunate because you don't necessarily know which one it is.
[00:08:19] Chris: Right. I understand you might need help interpreting that, which is one reason we're talking about this today. A lot of times in mid to late November, you don't really have time to spend sifting through all these details and trying to figure out what's happening to you and that is one reason why we respond, you know, extra quickly during this high revenue holiday peak. But we do discourage people from guessing or supposing things or looking on the forums and saying, Hey, that sounds like what happened to me. I'm just gonna assume it is, and I'm gonna start drafting an appeal on that basis. A little more research and a little more work goes into it.
[00:08:58] Leah: Yeah, and I should also mention as well, these are handled by the product compliance team, not seller performance, so the usual three part plan of action with root calls, immediate step, future prevention, isn't actually what they're looking for here. The compliance team, they don't want a plan of action. They just want documentation and proof that the product is in fact compliant. So don't waste your time putting together a plan of action for this. It's not going to the team that wants a plan of action and honestly, like what would the root causes even be?
[00:09:31] Chris: No, disputes and protesting an action Amazon's taken, you don't do that in plan of action format. A lot of people do that, I think, right? Because they're listening to the wrong thing, or they're reading some whacked out article, or they're on the forums getting bad advice.
[00:09:44] Leah: And It's just on the account health dashboard. It doesn't show you which team it's being routed to, so if you're not handling these all the time like we are, you don't necessarily realize that it's going to a different team.
[00:09:54] Chris: True. And it's a good occasion to remind people, read the message. Very closely. Don't assume they want a plan of action, they might not even be asking you for one. We've seen a few people write a POA and send it to us to review it before they send it in, and then we look at the original notification and there's no mention of plan of action in there anywhere.
So I think they were just making assumptions. Make sure you know, you're not blowing half a day writing a plan of action if it's not even what's being asked for?
[00:10:21] Leah: Right. Exactly.
[00:10:22] Chris: Outside of compliance, I mean even for other, even for other things. So again, we know Q4, Peak holiday, you're distracted, you've got a lot going on, but the details matter on these cases and whether or not it's a complete Amazon screw up and they sent you the wrong template or a black hat attack. Two totally different outcomes, two totally different things. Do not waste time writing the wrong kind of thing and sending it in because Amazon could just respond saying, we have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:10:57] Leah: Actually, they'll probably just respond with the original notification.
[00:11:00] Chris: right? Or they might just copy and paste the original. They love doing this, at this time of year, especially just to get some of these emails out of the queues so that they can stay within their SLAs, their service level agreements.
[00:11:12] Leah: Yeah. And additionally, compliance are looking for documentation here. That doesn't mean they want all documentation about absolutely anything. They want specific documentation showing in this case that the product has not been subject to a recall. Potentially, they may ask you for test reports depending on the type of product. Don't send them a bunch of extraneous documentation that has nothing to do with anything that they're asking for because once again, the investigators have a limited amount of time to review this.
If you send a bunch of extraneous information, chances are they're just gonna reject it to get it off their desk and to keep within their KPI.
[00:11:46] Chris: And take with a grain of salt, whatever you hear from an account, health rep or a seller support.
[00:11:51] Leah: Oh, account health reps can't really see anything to do with the clients.
[00:11:53] Chris: Well, I'm noticing more guessing and more maybe it's this , maybe it's that. I can't really see. I don't really know. And those are the only people you can call and talk to. .
[00:12:05] Leah: Right. And even though it is on the account help dashboard, they don't have access to the notes like they do for seller performance cases.
[00:12:11] Chris: Take it with a grain of salt.
[00:12:12] Leah: Whatever they say is most likely going to be a guess.
[00:12:15] Chris: Right? We know this is vaguely frightening and somewhat confusing in some respects. If you have any questions on it, please let us know. thanks again, Leah. I'll talk to you soon.
[00:12:24] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, and I'm here with Norm Farrar of Lunch with Norm, famous podcaster, thought leader with a pretty good reach into the Amazon community.
How's it going?
[00:00:22] Norm: Good, how are you?
[00:00:23] Chris: Good. We wanted to get this out today or recorded today and posted very soon because this is the week, right? It's a week of fantastic revenue growth in sales, but it's also the week where strange things happen.
Abusive attacks, anti-competitive behavior spikes, historically in the Wednesday into Thursday, Thanksgiving, and then Black Friday timeline but lately we've been seeing attacks the week before, a few days before and that's why we're going to hurrily post this, in the next 24- 48 hours.
So I guess I would start before I get into my list of the crazy new things, new attacks that we've seen sprouting up. I wanted to kind of pick your brain for what you've seen in terms of brands questioning, you know, is this just an Amazon screw up? Is this an attack? Do I know the difference? You were saying that you saw a relatively new creative black hat method.
[00:01:17] Norm: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, this is my Love/Hate relationship with Amazon because I love selling on it, but sometimes when this stuff comes up it's hard to resolve. But anyways, one of the things that we've been seeing lately is people giving us 3, 4, 5 star and mostly four five star reviews. they give us praise, but then they put in a really negative comment like oh, I love the product the customer experience was awesome, packaging was great, but my dog could have choked or could have a choking violation. And then right after it comes the same choking violation, oops. There goes my mic. Anyway, it's happening. People are getting suspended and they're doing it in a very positive way.
[00:02:06] Chris: Well, it's a backhanded compliment, right? It's, oh yeah, I loved it. But I mean, it sounds like there's two intentions. One is to hide within the review negative comments. And then secondarily, they have other buyer accounts on other orders that leave a choking hazard or a safety hazard review, that mentions the same stuff.
Choking. Harmful, whatever it might be in a negative review. Maybe they follow that up with a one star or two star with the same kinds of, is that fair to say, with the same kinds of comments?
[00:02:38] Norm: Yeah, I think that's fair, I did notice, and this was overkill, but on one listing I saw 23 of these come in in a week and they were all over the board. But I've seen it where it's only been a few, but this is something that started happening this year and leading up to black Friday, I'm sure it's gonna happen frequently.
[00:02:58] Chris: Yeah. The black hat fraudster type sellers and services get creative around this time of year for a reason. If it's an older style, obviously fake complaints, bogus intellectual property. Complaints that have nothing to do with the kind of product it is, like they've just copied and pasted negative comments they made on a totally different item. Sellers have all month or all year to figure out how to defend themselves against those, but people don't necessarily figure out within days or hours how to contend with these newer kind of creative attacks and that's a problem because there's no established appeals path. People panic, open a bunch of cases, call account health reps for advice that account health reps won't have because they won't know much about it yet or they'll just start writing to Jeff, right?
[00:03:47] Norm: And how does that go?
[00:03:48] Chris: Well, I think Jeff's getting ready to send his girlfriend into space right now, and Jeff has many other competing priorities and how, you know, how the numbers look at the end of Q4. First of all, Amazon's already publicly capitulated that they think the numbers will be down this Christmas. Whether it's down from last year or down overall is another story.
But what we've seen lately, in addition to what you and I just discussed, is requests for inventory to be pulled due to a product recall that doesn't exist and I can get into the weeds on that one in a minute, but just to go through the rest of the list. Fake food or safety complaints for consumables when the items aren't even consumables and just generally mystery stuff where there's a message that asks you for something. Certificate of analysis, ISO certified lab tests for the products that these people sell, that's got nothing to do with it. So they're being asked for compliance documentation, basically that has nothing to do with their product.
And what it looks like to us is that people are abusing the reporting process by making up fake complaints, sending it to abuse teams, and the abuse teams at Amazon are just rubber stamping them as valid or legitimate, and looking at the seller for two seconds and saying, okay, well just take the listing down and send a warning. That's incredibly alarming at this time of year. So I guess my question to you would be, do the brands you hear from work with and so forth, do they know this stuff? Do they know that they might get an off the wall accusation that has nothing to do with their product, and will they just assume it's a glitch or a technical issue and start opening cases, or will they understand that they're being attacked?
[00:05:35] Norm: Well, I've seen this happen about two years ago, but they would come up with a compliance issue and the brand I was working with would come back and, and do a plan of action and show that they're under compliance. Everything was good and then around the same time, and this always happened Black Friday or Prime Day, same compliance issue came up. We don't know why, we don't know how, but it always took us outta the game for that period of time. These are things that as a seller, you've gotta be aware of that it can happen. If it does, you've gotta try to solve it somehow and it's part of being resilient.
I mean, there are gonna be times that this happens, but the main thing is, to figure out what happened and then create a risk, risk evaluation plan so if it does happen the next week or the next year, you can go and do it very quickly. So that's what we've tried to do when we've had some issues and we know it's either a plan of action that got us taken care of, or we just had the right wording, done the right way. We use a project management tool called called Teamwork, and we just put it in a notepad so people can go and and check it out.
[00:06:54] Chris: Yeah. And one of the reasons we're talking is like a past example was the idea that people were making ASIN contributions in other marketplaces. The brand didn't even sell in Mexico, Canada, UK, whatever, but their listings were getting taken down in the US because of ASIN contributions or flat file overrides to vacant fields in the ASIN contributions in other marketplaces. I mean, and Amazon wasn't even hip to this for the longest time. Abuse reporting is what pointed it out to Amazon. They were kind of slow on the uptake, so you have to be prepared to kind of look in these, you know, open, open these areas up that you don't think about every day. Look under a few rocks, right? Because sometimes this is going on and you're not even like aware of why Amazon's asking for stuff. That's what concerns me the most. Some sellers just say, well, this is just a mistake. This is just wrong. And they, and they open the case and they bang on the table saying, fix your stupid mistake Amazon, they don't realize that to Amazon eyes, it looks valid initially.
[00:08:01] Norm: Yeah. And it's funny that we're talking about this today because I hadn't looked at my email and then I, I just sent you a message saying, give me a minute. I saw that one of my products are suspended so I gotta see what the problem is after this call.
[00:08:17] Chris: Yeah, so I mean, initially there's an evaluation process as we saw with the pesticide problem last year, the year before. Some of the sellers we worked with did have language in their listing that had to be deleted, and they had been properly flagged, at least within the parameters of how Amazon wanted to flag listings but they had terms like antimicrobial, antifungal. They did have terms that were keywords for their pesticide investigations, right? So we could delete that language from the flat file, update the listing with catalog, petition for reinstatement and that would work. If it didn't work, you could, you could fix that easily with a couple of appeals.
But there were people who were flagged for pesticide who didn't have that language in their listing. Somebody had gone in and monkeyed with the ASIN contributions and terms that would get them flagged, you know, back end keyword abuse simply by putting the word pesticide in. I mean, among other terms, and we're still seeing that like a year and a half later, keyword abuse is still rampant. It still works. The only difference is it can be solved a little bit quicker because Amazon itself knows more about the problem and the nature of the abuse. So hopefully we'll see less of that this year, 2022 than we did in 2021 because last November we were dealing with it constantly but there is that immediate moment where it's like, well, is this me or is this somebody else doing something or is it actually like a technical issue? I mean, if it's a technical issue, fine. Open up a case with support, get a ticket opened, have somebody research it but just I would caution people to keep in mind, don't assume it's a technical issue for one thing. And secondly, sometimes Amazonians will tell you whether it's support or any other reps.
Even account managers will say, I think this might be technical in nature, but it's because they don't understand that you're getting attacked and they don't understand abuse and they don't understand how it happens. So do some Q & A before you dive in and say, Hey, Jeff, you know, Help me out here, jump off that 500 million yacht. Help me fix this, pass this on to executive seller relations. I mean, what do you see people doing, I guess is my question? Do they escalate it right away? Do they ask themselves tough questions? Is it a hybrid?
[00:10:40] Norm: Yeah, it's a bit of everything. So it might be opening up a case right away. It might be doing some examining. It might be getting somebody to try to either reinstate or figure it out, you know, contacting you and trying to figure out what's going on because especially if you're a mid to more advanced seller. Every day that you're down is costing you big bucks.
So, I'd rather get it solved right away and out of the way. But sometimes even the simplest things like we just talked about it, the simplest things seem to take the longest amount of time to get the listing back.
[00:11:20] Chris: Even the catalog corrections, I mean, you can call into catalog, let's just say there's terms in your listing, in your title, in backend, keywords, whatever. You have to delete them. You go do that. You get on with catalog, you're like, Hey, I need to make sure that these corrections take before I do the appeal, because if the corrections don't take, and numerous brands didn't understand this and were getting denied repeatedly in appeals without knowing why. The corrections hadn't gone through catalog hadn't approved and confirmed the corrections. So of course they got an appeal saying, we fixed this. They looked at it and said, no, you didn't, and they rejected it, and that caused ridiculous amounts of friction last year into this year. I'm hoping this time around people do the catalog correction step and then they appeal it as opposed to just opening the case and saying, we'll do this on our side, but you gotta reinstate the listing and then we'll fix it or something like that. Some of the nuance of the flat file corrections, maybe were lost on a few people, but those details matter, like you just said. Skipping steps, while I completely understand, you're losing 10, 12, $14,000 a day. For some people it's an hour during Black Friday on some of these ASINs, your top selling products.
Temptation is there to skip steps, but you absolutely can't do it. It, it just costs you.
[00:12:41] Norm: And you gotta give Amazon what they want. One of the other things, I think we've talked about this before is you can't be aggressive, you can't talk aggressively to Amazon, either, it won't get you anywhere. So if you're thinking that, you're going on the defense right away and you're screaming and yelling and you think the more you scream, the faster your problem's gonna be resolved, it doesn't work that way
[00:13:06] Chris: yeah. We've seen that with people who are spamming the queues or spamming certain execs at Amazon, their emails, putting all caps all over the place or just sending them a bunch of emails. We've heard from sellers who got suspended for code of conduct violations for inappropriate contact for that. So Amazon doesn't take kindly to that. , I usually say feel free to act more aggressively, professionally aggressively, appropriately aggressive. If you have confirmed that you are, that you've already made the corrections or that you are in the right and that Amazon screwed something up, they should still correct whatever went wrong, but as a right way to do it in a wrong way to do it. Not sending out the same email. The other problem is people write one appeal or one escalation, and then they just send it a million places. Which is kind of like, they group them together and group ignore them because they can see it's the same contact going all over the company. So they're not happy with the spam part of it, number one.
Number two, that means they can pass the book. No one needs to actually read it because somebody else is gonna read it because you sent it everywhere. And that's the seller psychology. I understand the desire to put it in front of as many eyeballs as possible, that's just human nature. The critical thinking element is absent because it's not actually moving your cause forward.
[00:14:25] Norm: That's a great point.
[00:14:26] Chris: Well, we'll talk about that next time for now, if people see and hear these things and need your counsel and your advice, best place to reach you is.
Just norm@amz.club, not.com cuz that's Amazon, right? A norm@amz.club.
Amz.club. Right. And I'm Chris, chris@ecommercechris.com.
We'll spread this far and wide and we're trying to get the message out, to as many brands and as many sellers as possible because we know that this can happen earlier in the week, in this peak holiday of Black Friday, cyber Monday week. and it could be more aggressive. And as norm pointed out, there are new creative tactics being used that Amazon won't necessarily know yet.
And a lot of other sellers don't have comparable resolution or success cases yet. And you might have to kind of get creative on your side and, and compose some unique content to fight it. So thanks again, norm for joining me.
[00:15:28] Norm: You're very welcome.
[00:15:30] Chris: We're always talking about this stuff, so I'm sure I'll talk to you again soon.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hello, Amazon Sellers. Welcome to the Seller Performance Solutions podcast. I am Leah Mchugh from eCommerceChris, and I am here with Mr. eCommerceChris. Chris McCabe. How are you today?
[00:00:20] Chris: Seller Performance Solutions, Chris. How are you doing?
[00:00:22] Leah: Yeah, it doesn't have the same ring to it as Mr. eCommerceChris, which I've never actually called you before, but now that I've done it, I think that's gonna be a thing.
[00:00:31] Chris: It sounded like you said mystery Chris . I'm trying to keep the mysteries to a minimum . The one interesting mystery that you pointed out a moment ago was, The mystery of getting approved with certain invoices. We're gonna dispel any notion of where this mystery comes from, but the idea that you can submit invoices, get approved to sell a brand or in a category, and then magically, suddenly with no explanation or reasoning, those invoices are suddenly unacceptable for authenticity or proving that you belong in that category or in that brand.
[00:01:08] Leah: Right. Particularly when your account is suspended and Amazon is holding your money and inventory hostage, suddenly those invoices that they accepted to sell that product in the first place are now no longer acceptable for them to give you back your money or your account, or inventory.
[00:01:24] Chris: Right, and we're referencing, there are a lot of suspended sellers who are trying to get their accounts and their funds back, but some sellers have had enough of this charade.
They only want their funds and they're just in a disbursement appeal process, funds dispersal process, and they can't get their money.
[00:01:45] Leah: It's been a long time since I've heard of anybody get their money back without getting the account reinstated.
[00:01:49] Chris: They're kind of creating a new process for themselves to decide if they want to keep funds permanently. This didn't used to be an appeals process just to get your money. Now it is after the last year or two, but, it's interesting and I'm starting to see antitrust investigator interest in stuff like this.
Because if you are your own court system, if you're your own fiefdom or government and you're judge, jury and executioner over the appeals process, and you decide. well we've reviewed this and we've decided not to send your money for our own reasons, which arbitrarily changed from the moment we accepted your invoices to sell to this moment, and we don't feel that we have the any obligation to tell you why that is.
[00:02:41] Leah: Right. Well, and it's changing the approval process based on what Amazon wants. So yeah, we want lots of people selling new products because we want competition and we want prices to be competitive. So yes, you're approved, but oh wait, now we have your money and we kind of like it where it is. So now we don't approve those documents.
[00:03:03] Chris: And it's kind of a question, are they trying to play the angle that I think banks used to play where there was unclaimed money in an account that they would just keep? Usually they have to give it to somebody maybe after a certain amount of months or years if money's sitting in an account not being accessed, they absorb it. Is that the game they're playing? Or is it like being terminated for cause? We found cause to remove your selling privileges, you granted us the right.
[00:03:32] Leah: The cause is the rejection of the same documents that they have already approved before you could even sell.
[00:03:42] Chris: Right. I mean, it's paradoxical at its core, but I'm just trying to get into the Amazon collective brain here to figure out what their reasoning will be. If they're ever in court or called upon by antitrust investigators to defend this practice, will they say sellers have already granted us the right, I suppose is the word you need to use, the ability to judge their access to our selling platform, using our own procedures, our own reasons for suspension. And then once they're suspended, once we deny their appeals permanently, then they're in the funds disbursement process. But, As a result of deciding that they can never sell again, we are then granted the right to decide if the reasons by which we suspended them are worthy of keeping their funds forever.
[00:04:37] Leah: Well, and I think if you look at it the way most sellers are seeing it, like yes, it's a lot, often it's a lot of money to the seller, but you know, on the Amazon scheme of things, it probably isn't that much of a line item. But the fact is we have seen this with so many accounts at this point, that that dollar amount of funds being held has gotta be pretty big. If you're thinking that at least some of the ones we've seen are like a seven figure amount being held on one account. And we're talking about many accounts that we've seen, and obviously we're not seeing all of the cases of this happening.
[00:05:17] Chris: Right, of course. But between the numbers of people that came to us with six figures being held and some seven figures, a lot of the larger amounts, six figures and above, might be getting some of it back in arbitration, but anything under six figures. I had a lawyer say anything under 90,000, don't pursue an arbitration. This is an attorney that does arbitration, by the way.
[00:05:41] Leah: Right. I mean, you have to figure out the costs on your end as well, right?
[00:05:44] Chris: So, But we've had people that are in six figures who didn't even go after it. They gave up, and then of course, people at the lower amounts gave up. So all those people never go to arbitration, never get reinstated.
Maybe they didn't manage their appeals process correctly. Maybe they could have been reinstated. Everyone who gets reinstated gets their funds, but as we know, a lot of sellers don't know how to get themselves reinstated or their attorney told them, don't pursue arbitration. So all those don't even get adjudicated and Amazon keeps the funds. I mean, God only knows what that number is over the last two or three years.
[00:06:19] Leah: Yeah, it has to be astronomical. And just from an accounting standpoint, I'm like, what is that line item called?
[00:06:25] Chris: Other. I'm gonna say miscellaneous. But we now live in an age where sellers know much more, at least since 2020, about this antitrust investigation that's been ongoing, not just on the federal level, on the state level as well. And sellers seem to understand that we're not necessarily initiating those conversations, they initiate it with us. Because it was live on national television two years ago. So ever since then, this is commonplace and extremely well known.
Sellers also know to approach the FTC and file complaints there. Because I think that traces back to the FTC investigating fake product reviews on the site, and then it just bled into other issues from there but that started five, six years ago. This idea of going to the FTC when you're not getting your funds paid out is growing into these other things of approaching your State Attorney General because now everyone knows that state ags, depending on where you live, are creating their own independent antitrust investigations or have had their own investigations ongoing for a while.
If you're looking at California, New York and Washington. I mean, they've had their own investigations publicly discussed and reported on in the media. So the game has changed. Amazon picked a really interesting time, I guess late 2019, early 2020, to start doing this because that coincided exactly with the uptick of interest and coverage and scrutiny of the antitrust investigations.
So whoever's deciding to keep everyone's money, seller money, permanently held at Amazon. That person made a curious decision at a very interesting time.
[00:08:10] Leah: Yeah, the timing was definitely like an interesting choice. Same as the pricing, the we won't show your listing if you don't lower your price.
They started doing that full scale at a very interesting point in the antitrust scrutiny. I'm not sure if that was, that could have been coincidental. Who knows? But just interesting timing.
[00:08:30] Chris: Well, I think it's intentional. I think they're doubling down. Kind of like, if somebody like Elizabeth Warren puts out a tweet criticizing how Amazon does certain things, they double down, instead of saying, Hey, Senator would love to sit down with you. We think your staff or you misunderstand this. We can clarify this if you're willing to approach us with questions instead of tweeting. That's how most PR professionals I thought would handle stuff like this. Instead, they like retaliate with a double down message like you don't understand small business in America. You're a stupid senator. Go away. What are you doing? What are you saying? This I think is just the Amazon arrogance and the Amazon approach for antitrust, for public criticism in a lot of areas, any scrutiny of their business, right? Because they seem to be very disinterested in having the government try to break them up.
[00:09:21] Leah: Well, yeah. I mean, most companies are not interested in the government breaking them up.
[00:09:24] Chris: Right. I'm being sarcastic of course, but I'm saying they're drawing the battle lines here. They don't wanna wait and kick the can down the road and fight.
[00:09:33] Leah: Yeah. And I guess it could also be like, well, if we start changing our behavior based on demands now, imagine what'll happen in the future. So they're just sticking to their guns no matter what. And sometimes, like you said, doubling down onthe interesting, possibly monopolistic behaviors. Alleged monopolistic behavior.
[00:09:53] Chris: Right. I realize we drifted away from the original concept of why are you rejecting invoices you accepted a year ago, but this is part and parcel of how do you deal with a company that arbitrarily decides things, turns on a dime and then what do you do about it? Part of your solution is to figure out how you can draw attention to some of these practices, because they're not really planning on stopping things unless they're stopped. Or unless there's public criticism or scrutiny. There aren't congressional subcommittee investigations every day for every pricing issue. For every permanent funds hold. You know, we're talking about macro, not micro here. But what matters to each seller is the micro, which is like, why are you keeping my money?
How do I get my money back? And what's your justification for rejecting invoices you accepted yesterday, rejecting that today. You're going to have to push them for explanations and pressure them. I mean, some people just go to the social media teams and Twitter.
[00:10:59] Leah: Which is really kind of having diminishing returns as everybody starts doing that.
[00:11:04] Chris: Yeah. Right. And then to even go down another tangent, we don't have time for, if Elon Musk concludes his purchase of Twitter, don't forget Bezos and Musk are at each other's throats in the space race. So if Musk thinks Twitter can be a good vehicle for criticizing Amazon and Amazon's business practices and potential antitrust violations of Amazon. Maybe he'll be tweaking the algorithm and bumping up those tweets so that they're more visible.
[00:11:32] Leah: That's an interesting conspiracy theory. Well, that was a little further than I was expecting.
[00:11:37] Chris: Conspiracy of the week. I just came up with that on the fly. I feel pretty smart right now. But no, I think public scrutiny is the only way that you're going to get Amazon to come to the table and say, this is the percentage of accounts where we just keep the funds.
And these are our explanations for keeping the funds. We're answering all of these sellers, they're probably gonna show a lot of the messages that say nothing. You haven haven't sent us sufficient information for us to disperse your funds.
[00:12:03] Leah: But it's also one thing to not disperse funds because of like a confirmed counterfeit case, which I'm not fully on board with that either, but like that is one thing, right? But it's another thing to accept proof of authenticity in advance and then suddenly change your mind on that proof and not give them money after they've already accepted it, before you sold it. Like those are two very different scenarios, right?
[00:12:32] Chris: People are accused of counterfeit all the time on Amazon too. That word is starting to lose meaning because we work with private label brands who are accused of counterfeiting their own products and then their invoices get rejected for products that they have a manufacturer or a factory in China or wherever making for them, their invoices get rejected and their suppliers are are rejected as unverifiable too.
But brands, of course, are knocking off resellers constantly by making counterfeit complaints without test buys, which is the counterfeit without test buys even crazier in this context. And then Amazon says, Well, you've been accused of counterfeit and we see that you failed our authenticity review process, which we can't tell you more about because that's proprietary.
[00:13:14] Leah: Right, but again, like you failed their authenticity review process after you passed their can you sell this product from the suppliers you have test.
[00:13:23] Chris: And also they keep all funds. They don't say we're keeping funds for your sales of certain ASINs, not just the ASINs and those orders that we mentioned in your original suspension notification, which even if we're willing to devil's advocate, play along and say, Yeah, fine, keep some of the funds that should be restricted to the ASINs that they flagged as potentially infringing, potentially counterfeit.
They keep all funds, they don't disperse a nickel. So that's even more of a favorable to Amazon process where they're judging you. You know, but it's not a democracy, right? They're the judge, they're the jury, they're the executioner, right? So very confusing, very convoluted stuff from their side. No wonder sellers ask us so many questions about it. We know we took this conversation down a lot of. Interesting paths, but if you have any questions about this or if you're going through any of this madness yourself, reach out to us because you're probably at the point where you gotta come up with some creative thinking and some new strategies.
So we're happy to help facilitate that. Thanks Leah.
[00:14:35] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris I'm with Leah McHugh, also of ecommerceChris. Hello. How are you?
[00:00:15] Leah: Good, how are you, Chris?
[00:00:17] Chris: On the other side of the world. Everything going okay over there?
[00:00:20] Leah: Yeah, it's good. Yeah.
[00:00:21] Chris: Fantastic. So today wanted to talk about this recent trend. I won't use the term alarming because I've been using that way too much lately. Suspected IP complaints. The concerning part, I would say, is that we're seeing a mixture of private label brands and resellers hit with this.
Naturally, resellers have a long history of being flagged for potential IP infringement, intellectual property claims. This is Amazon trying to get out ahead of received intellectual property claims.
This is something where sometimes sellers have to get a listing amended, right? They join a listing or they create a listing that has potentially trademarked content on it according to Amazon bots and algorithms.
[00:01:03] Leah: Yeah, and that's normally how I see it in the cases that I work on, they're not even necessarily asking for a plan of action in those cases.
It's just an automated notification that comes through and all that's really expected of them is to edit the listing to remove whatever trademark Amazon thinks they're infringing on, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, especially if they think you're infringing on your own trademark, and that is in fact the brand of the listing.
[00:01:26] Chris: Well, so this is something you've seen on the cases you're working on, is you have to get on a call with the client or the seller and call catalog and get content removed and content updated so that those words won't be in the listing anymore. Otherwise people appeal it saying, Well, we deleted this in our listing, but they haven't updated it on the catalog side, the word remains and then they get rejected on appeal and that's creating a lot of confusion.
[00:01:51] Leah: Well, so I see that on the compliance cases. I don't really see that on the suspected IP cases because generally speaking, performance doesn't block the listing when they send that warning. So it's actually a lot easier to edit the listing. You can usually just edit it in Seller Central and that change goes through when, if a listing is blocked, then yes, you have to do the additional steps of flat file, call catalog.
[00:02:11] Chris: Correct. But in the age of the new account health rating, obviously we're hearing from people who all of a sudden have a bad score or they see on their account health dashboard that several of these pop up. So again, whether they're private label, whether they're resellers, sometimes they're on a listing for whatever reason, maybe they control that listing themselves. Maybe they don't , that listing has violations on it or potential violations. And now because Amazon's trying to head off additional received IP complaints throughout Q4, they've got account health reps calling a lot of sellers that we've been talking to, to say, get this cleaned up, resolve these suspected IP complaints.
In some cases, also resolve any received IP complaints because we are going to ask you for a plan of action within 72 hours if you don't. They don't even necessarily say how long you have to fix it but because we're already only a few weeks out from Black Friday, we're seeing more people say, No, we just got the 72 hour message. So those people are asked for a plan of action at that point.
[00:03:17] Leah: Yeah, and also, it's a lot harder for a reseller to edit a listing if they don't have the highest level of contribution. So if you're given 72 hours to clean something up that you might not actually be able to update on your end, that is a tough situation to be in for sure. My question is, as you've worked on more of these than I have, are you seeing it where it's just suspected IP complaints that they're getting the 72 hours warning? Or are they getting a mixture of suspected and confirmed infringement complaints that are triggering the 72 hour warning?
[00:03:51] Chris: In most reseller cases, they have both but when they get the call from account health reps, I mean, as you can imagine out there, it's very inconsistent how this is approached by Amazon, when they get the call from account health reps, so far it seems like the emphasis is on suspected.
And if they say, I didn't create this listing, what do you guys want me to do? That's not an answer. And if they end up asking for a plan of action, it's why didn't you identify that there were potential IP or in Amazon's terms, suspected IP infringements on that listing? Why did you join it in the first place? Don't you have a process to prevent that? And then some of the resellers are like, I don't know. I have thousands of listings. What do you want me to do? The seller I talked to a couple days ago has 4,000 listings and wanted me to go through 4,000 listings which I could not do.
[00:04:39] Leah: Well and again, I mean, it's a flawed process, so you can't sell a product on Amazon if somebody else puts incorrect information on the detail page because you can't correct the detail page.
[00:04:49] Chris: Right.
[00:04:50] Leah: That's exactly a terrible SOP.
[00:04:53] Chris: This is Amazon's means of making life convenient for themselves because they're trying to prevent intellectual property complaints. So if you've got an agreement with the brand you're selling, if you're reselling that brand, You should be able to come back with, no, I'm an authorized seller of this brand, should you not?
[00:05:12] Leah: Well, the suspected IP usually isn't because of the brand of the listing. It's usually, I mean, it's supposed to be because you mentioned somebody else's trademark on a listing for a product that has nothing to do with that other trademark. I have seen it come in where Amazon is like suspected IP for the actual brand of the product that is being sold, which is just an error on their end.
[00:05:31] Chris: And some of these are just bot mistakes.
[00:05:33] Leah: Yeah. My concern with the bot mistakes, because I see the bot mistakes on the compliance side as well, right? Because I have bots looking for specific words for the compliance stuff.
My concern with the bots is that you can go through the process of appealing with Amazon, know this is flagged in error and on an individual basis they will reinstate but is anybody tweaking the algorithm because I'll see the same mistakes happen over and over again on different accounts and different people's listings.
[00:06:02] Chris: Well, no.
[00:06:03] Leah: So nobody's going into the algorithm, for example, on the compliance side, Amazon keeps flagging up telescopes as a prescription only device in a class two medical device and a telescope is a class one medical device and it doesn't require a prescription to buy one.
But for the last 6 to 12 months, I have seen multiple listings continue to get flagged for having that word in it, so nobody is fixing the problem. They are just fixing the individual issues become of the problem, which is kinda funny because that's the exact opposite of what they expect sellers to do with their plans of action.
[00:06:37] Chris: Right. It is the opposite. To take a step back, engineers at Amazon who are building these tools and tweaking these tools are only as good as the quality of the meetings they have within for from what needs to be flagged.
[00:06:52] Leah: But nobody ever goes back to the engineers and be like, Oh, we need to remove that.
[00:06:58] Chris: Or if they do, it still doesn't get fixed. It's probably the quality of the conversation that enforcement people and marketplace management has with engineering teams. And that's because sellers constantly wonder where this is coming from and why it can't be fixed. Look at the pesticide flags. I mean, that's the best example, right? These things take not just time, they take quality meetings with quality personnel to sort this out.
In the meantime, you have account health reps reaching out to sellers that we later hear from, and the account health reps are trying to figure it out themselves, just like they're trying to tell you as the seller what you need to do next.
But ultimately, if you're asked for a plan of action within 72 hours, the clock's already ticking. And whether it's a bot error or you listed something inappropriately. I mean, some sellers don't even create their own listings, they outsource that. You have to figure that out very quickly, like in terms of causality, right? Root causes in the plan of action, and you have to put the POA together and you have to get it to them within 72 hours because November being peak that means they might take time, extra time to read your appeal because there are so many people asked for appeals, and it's yet again where Amazon's suspending a lot of people in peak and creating more appeals when they're already drowning in appeals.
[00:08:21] Leah: Yeah, and that's why I was surprised to see them asking for appeals for suspected IP because it seemed like the whole point of the suspected IP, was for Amazon to be able to resolve this issue without having to go through plans of action before there were complaints, right? So I'm surprised that they're now asking for a plan of action for something that they were trying to make completely automated.
[00:08:41] Chris: My guess would be they looked at last year, 2021, 2022, and they decided we got so many IP infringement claims last year because so many sellers have so much money to gain in Q4, and they're just looking to take each other out any way possible. So we've got to reduce these received IP complaints, tweak the suspected IP algorithms. We're only kind of sort sure what we want, but we're just gonna push the burden on them to start telling us what they're doing. And if we don't like what they're doing, we'll keep them suspended or we'll threaten to suspend them. If we do like what they're doing, we'll accept their plan of action and consider that at least the end of the matter for that one appeal.
That's my theory, because the IP infringements haven't ebbed at all over all this time. I mean, there's still so many sellers reporting each other. Even the fake counterfeit complaints really never went down. In the old days, you could send in an invoice and say, but it's not counterfeit.
Here's where I got it. Here's my supplier. Here's their website., go on and verify them. Here's the invoice, here's the proof. And then Amazon investigators don't look at the invoice or don't like something on it, won't say what they don't like and they send that we need more information message, or they just say, we can't verify your invoice to verify your supplier. That started over a year ago, and that creates even more work for them.
[00:10:03] Leah: That's been, that's been so many years at this point.
[00:10:08] Chris: I mean they really beefed up the constant rejection of invoice and the constant, we can't verify your supplier. And I think that coincided with, when they stopped calling suppliers as well. The calls have gone down.
[00:10:23] Leah: Well and certainly the requesting your supplier's supplier is a new request.
[00:10:28] Chris: That's newer.
[00:10:29] Leah: Which is kind of hilarious. If you know anything about supply chain relationships.
[00:10:35] Chris: Right, and again, these are private label brands having invoices rejected alongside resellers. A lot of brands who have factories in China manufacture, you know, the factory doesn't have a website. Amazon will just reject the supplier, even if they've been manufacturing your stuff for years and you've shown Amazon numerous invoices in the past.
[00:10:54] Leah: So why would you be counterfeiting your own items unless you're Gucci? But that's another story.
[00:11:00] Chris: And on that note, anyone who has questions about suspected IP. We can have a conversation about received IP complaints.
Typically, you're trying to get retractions from the right owners if it's a legitimate claim when they're received, but the suspected IP what to do about it. Maybe you can amend listings the right way, Maybe you can't. Let me know, let Leah know because we're sifting through a lot of these throughout the month of November and December, and it looks like this is going to be one of the hot button issues for Q4 2022.
So thanks again for listening and thanks Leah for joining me.
[00:11:32] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm here with Leah McHugh, how are you doing, Leah ?
[00:00:14] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you?
[00:00:15] Chris: You're looking well. Good.
[00:00:17] Leah: It's clearly nighttime where I am.
[00:00:18] Chris: Yes. It's nighttime where you are. We've got the 12 hour Asia America difference, which is kind of convenient or not depending on your perspective. We're talking about safety complaints today. We're in the thick of Q4. We're seeing a lot of brands coming to us with, Hey, I gotta fill out this safety questionnaire. Sometimes they're finding the complaints. Sometimes they have to call account health and say, where are the complaints? There's some confusion over that, but overall, what do you think the biggest trend is in terms of just identifying where to begin this process?
[00:00:52] Leah: I mean, yeah, certainly. Well, actually a lot of times they give you some of the information that was reported to them in the actual notification itself.
[00:01:00] Chris: They're actually giving you, in quotes, I believe the specific buyer complaint comments in the notification itself for those who are willing to read it, Correct?
[00:01:10] Leah: Yeah. And it's surprising the number of people that come through our intake form on the website who are like, I have no idea what it this is about.
And it's like, perhaps it is about these complaints that are in the notification that Amazon sent you. So that's a good first place to start is thoroughly reading the the notifications sent to you by Amazon.
[00:01:31] Chris: That's true. I think some of those sellers coming to us are saying that they don't understand what it's about because they see those comments and they're like, I don't know what these buyers are talking about.
But maybe that's because they have a deeper understanding of the product than the buyer does. So it could be detail page content related as well, not just the quality of the product.
[00:01:53] Leah: I mean, Yeah. Yes and no. I think there is also a tendency to a knee-jerk reaction of this must be fake, or this must be a competitor, or they wanted a free return and they put in a bad thing to get the return for free.
I think there's a combination of putting your head in the sand and then maybe you know more about your product than the end consumer does.
[00:02:14] Chris: Yeah. I mean, most sellers in this day and age are aware if they get like a negative review. They've got somebody getting eyes on it pretty quickly. So some of it's from product reviews. Right?
[00:02:26] Leah: Right. But it's not only from product reviews, I mean, there's multiple ways that safety complaints can be made. I mean, certainly directly to Amazon, not in the form of a review or a fee or feedback to the seller. And then also other sellers are reporting sellers for unsafe products and they're going through amazon's abuse teams, channels, and Amazon's legals channels in order to do that. So it's not necessarily tied to a specific thing and voice at the customer because there's only certain sources that are going to show up and voice at the customer. Often times, people can't even find the quotes from the notification in their voice of the customer. It's not necessarily from there.
[00:03:07] Chris: It could be from just direct to customer service complaints, right? A lot of people also assume that it's a competitor buying from them just for the purposes of leaving nasty feedback, not necessarily looking and or reconciling those comments with other buyers who have bought from them and said the same stuff.
[00:03:26] Leah: Well, and just because it's a competitor reporting, it doesn't mean it's not true.
[00:03:30] Chris: That's what I mean, and maybe the competitor is, is guessing that you don't have the right documentation together to show Amazon. Right?
[00:03:42] Leah: Yeah. Or they have actually tested the product themselves and found that it was unsafe. I mean, there's multiple ways that it can be reported.
My point is just to not focus on the fact that you maybe can't see it in your voice in the customer, or that, you know, it doesn't show up in your reviews somewhere.
[00:04:01] Chris: Right. And it could be something that doesn't hop to mind immediately, like the packaging of the product itself.
[00:04:08] Leah: Yeah, well, I mean certainly if it's due to user error, then something is lacking somewhere, whether it's the detail page or the product instructions or packaging. If the incident is because of user error, just saying that they used it wrong is not an appropriate defense. What you need to do is look at what needs to be improved in order to reduce the chance of user error in the future.
[00:04:29] Chris: Detail page corrections, amendments, they didn't used to have the safety questionnaire. They used to just prompt you to review your detail page whenever it was clear that the buyer was confused or there's a misunderstanding.
[00:04:42] Leah: They have had it for a while now, though The questionnaire. I mean, it's been years.
[00:04:46] Chris: But I mean, I know I'm taking people back to before, potentially before you were selling on Amazon.
[00:04:51] Leah: The before times.
[00:04:53] Chris: The, like 2017, I guess this is rapidly becoming ancient history, but 2017, 2018, I remember we were helping sellers do appeals before the questionnaire was in. And also, before sellers were really familiar with how should I deal with this? My detail page accurately represents the product. They weren't really understanding that there were confused people that weren't necessarily nasty buyers who just wanted to take their bad day out on the seller. They didn't understand maybe the dimensions of the product weren't prominently displayed. Maybe the use. Instructions weren't quite clear.
[00:05:31] Leah: Right, but you're also talking about the days before multiple courts had decided that Amazon is liable for product safety on its platform. So of course they're looking for more information.
[00:05:41] Chris: I was building up to that, and I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to hand it off to you for the finishing of that thought. I assume you're going back to that frontline episode, right?
It was kind of around that time. Late 2020, late 2019, early 2020, which isn't that long ago. But, yeah, when Amazon realized that they had no good answers back in those days, they brought out Jeff Wilke, their retired senior executive.
[00:06:06] Leah: But I mean even before that frontline episode, multiple court cases had deemed that Amazon is also liable for product safety incidents if they haven't done any due diligence to stop it from happening. So naturally they want more and more documentation from sellers, where sellers are essentially confirming that they are the ones responsible and providing information that shows Amazon, that Amazon can show a court that they said they fixed it.
[00:06:36] Chris: Right. A lot of people thought it went back to like the hover boards that were exploding all over the place. Mostly, I believe it was about the consumables products. The supplements in particular, which was almost entirely unregulated. And sellers were selling supplements, throwing stuff onto the marketplace that certainly wasn't safe in a lot of cases, wasn't accurately described on detail pages. There was a glut of sellers that thought this was the get rich quick scheme of the future, and the supplements space was where it all played out.
So naturally, if supplements had labels and the products didn't have those ingredients, that's a problem. And I think that's one reason why Amazon's hands were forced into doing something here. Amazon knew what that space was like.
[00:07:25] Leah: Yeah. And they've also been getting a lot of flack from the FDA and the CPSC. I don't know if anybody else does this, but I like to read recall notices because it has a lot to do with what I do for work and like every other recall notice on the CPSC website mentioned Amazon at this point.
[00:07:40] Chris: Mm-hmm. Live listings on Amazon, yeah. And also I just think people were jumping into it as new sellers or new business owners who didn't really know anything about compliance documentation for starters or FDA regulations.
And they weren't interested in hiring. This isn't like, you know, something that product safety compliance and setup isn't something we do, but they weren't interested in hiring an an agency or a consultant that knew that process backwards and forwards.
[00:08:10] Leah: Yep, exactly.
[00:08:13] Chris: So anyone has any questions about obviously Q4, tons of safety complaint enforcement actions, listing suspensions, appeal requests coming out of Amazon.
That make sense this time of year you have more orders for everything listed on the site than any other part of the year. So any questions on that, let me know, let Leah know and we look forward to hearing from you soon. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, I'm here with Leah McHugh, also of ecommerceChris, how you doing Leah?
[00:00:14] Leah: Good, how are you, Chris?
[00:00:16] Chris: Good. I think it'll be better after we get some things off our chest today. In terms of craziness we've seen with IP, intellectual property claims, I think some brands are either misguided or misled into believing they can accuse anyone of counterfeit that they find popping up on their listing at any time. I'm not sure why after all the content floating around out there, I suppose there is some contradicting material, but I'm not sure why so many brands just run muck and believe that they can accuse anyone of counterfeit without doing a test buy or without thinking of the potential consequences.
[00:00:51] Leah: Possibly because some lawyers are telling them that they can.
[00:00:55] Chris: Right, Right. Well, for their own, For their own gain, of course. Yeah. But for their own financial gain, lawyers are trying to act like you need a lawyer for just about everything that involves Amazon, which of course is, is not true.
But in this particular case, we've had sellers that are private label brands who are coming to us suspended, of course, account suspensions. We often hear from people immediately after that suspension happens. They're suspended for making false IP claims, or they're suspending their ability to make IP claims, I should say. They revoke their access to the IP reporting tools.
[00:01:27] Leah: Right, Or all of brand registry. I've seen both. Sometimes they just revoke access to the reporting tools. Sometimes they're revoke full access to brand registry, which means no more A+ content. None of the little perks that you get with brand registry, including the reporting tool.
[00:01:40] Chris: Right. I was leaving the brand registry part to you because you're dealing with that on a daily basis and seeing those nightmares. But, one seller that contacted us did manage to get reinstated. It's not that it's impossible to appeal it , but it has to be appealed properly. there's a certain amount of confessing going on.
I think I read it in part of their appeal, they were saying that their employee had gone a little crazy reporting people that they saw on the listings. And I guess my question to you is, do you think whether it's a lower level employee or not, are people just seeing somebody pops up on the listing and automatically going to the counterfeit reporting tool?
[00:02:18] Leah: Yeah, I mean, people of course are doing that. Which that tool is not for enforcing distribution agreements, it's for reporting counterfeit. So unless it's an actual counterfeit, somebody selling your product that you don't wanna be selling your product doesn't count as something that you can report with that tool.
And I think, I think that's the biggest misconception and I think that's been a misconception of brand registry since the beginning. Brand registry doesn't mean that you get to decide who lists your product on Amazon. That tool is not for reporting people that you don't want selling your product on Amazon.
That tool is for reporting counterfeits of your products. So products say you have done this test buy on, you've confirmed that it is in fact a counterfeit. That is what that tool is for. Similarly, the infringement tool is not for reporting people that, again, have maybe created listings for your products that you don't want sold on Amazon.
That tool is for reporting people who are legitimately infringing on your trademark. Like they're using your trademark in their product listing for a totally different product that has nothing to do with your brand. Right. And I think that's where people are running into issues. Another area we're seeing people run into issues is, You have access to brand registry while your trademark is still pending.
So we're seeing people reporting trademark infringement while the trademark is still pending with the USTPO and hasn't actually been accepted by the USTPO. And you don't have the right to report an infringement until that trademark is confirmed, so we're also seeing people get their brand registry revoked because they just immediately start reporting even though their trademark has yet to be accepted by the USTPO.
[00:03:55] Chris: Right. And of course, amazon as usual is sending the same message for every case. For every outcome you've engaged in, deceptive, illicit, or fraudulent behavior and no seller seems to understand why they're getting that. And then they come talk to us and we tell 'em, Look, you reported somebody for trademark infringement.
Your trademark was pending. A lot of people don't understand why they've lost access to A+ content or had their brand registry revoked because of false or unsubstantiated IP claims. That's the piece I'm having trouble understanding. Why don't they backtrack into, Well, we did report all these other people, Amazon threw those claims back at us.
We were over zealous. We didn't understand what we were doing or we had bad guidance from an attorney that wasn't an IP attorney, whatever it might have been. They never seemed to understand. I mean, I understand Amazon doesn't spell that out in the message. But I would think you, as the seller would know, oh, remember that stuff that we threw at Amazon last month that they threw back at us? That might be why we lost brand registry.
[00:04:53] Leah: Generally speaking, when I speak to sellers, they, they think that they've been using the tool correctly. It's not that they're intentionally misusing it, it's just that they don't understand how they are supposed to be using the tool.
I mean, similarly, a lot of brands give their distributors access to brand registry, and not a lot of sellers know that their distributors aren't supposed to report infringement because of course, if they're selling those products on Amazon as well. Amazon doesn't want somebody other than a brand owner with reasons to report other sellers. So again, it happens a lot because it doesn't actually spell out anywhere on Amazon that you're not supposed to do that. We just know it because we've seen it.
[00:05:33] Chris: Yeah. What I'm more driving at is, there must be material and content out there saying, Hey, look at this great new weapon against anyone who pops up against your listing. I think it's a failure for them to vet content that they're consuming. Maybe it's just a seller forums post. I don't really know. There's so much garbage content out there that tells you to do things you shouldn't be doing. But I'm wondering if it's just eagerness to take care of something that they've been sweating for a long time, that they've been annoyed about, that they can't fix by resolving through their distribution channels, Or are they just consuming articles and videos that are pushing them to do something that doesn't work?
[00:06:08] Leah: I don't even think it's just the sellers. I see services that does do this for people that get them in trouble too, or automated software that just blanket reports. Anybody selling your product as counterfeit, which again, is potentially going to get you into trouble. And before all the sellers do the like, well, I've been doing it for years and I haven't gotten in trouble.
I have that conversation every day. And yeah, you haven't gotten in trouble yet. That doesn't mean you won't.
[00:06:32] Chris: Right. There's tons of stuff you could be doing right now, live on the site that bots won't grab and flag and get somebody to review your account right away. Some people will, some people won't. This is the inconsistency of the tools and the SOPs inside Amazon, but that's also pretty well known at this point.
If something's not happening to you, that's happening to a competitor or happening to you, that isn't happening to a competitor, that's always the explanation. Inconsistent enforcement.
[00:06:59] Leah: So well, What I find interesting with this is that, I mean, was it this year? Was it last year? I don't know.
It all blended together in my head at this point, but when they first started doing this, most of the cases we were seeing were actually incorrectly flagged by Amazon. It seems that they have actually figured out a little bit better that either their SOPs or the automation where they are actually correctly identifying misuse of their tools and suspending for that.
Which I, professionally find interesting. It is good news for sellers and it's also not often that we see brand registry improve in a way. Good job brand registry,
[00:07:35] Chris: Right. IP attorneys are out there. If you don't know one, you need them to review what you're planning to do. Obviously if a product is fake and you can prove it's counterfeit, you don't necessarily need an attorney to help you understand if something's counterfeit. But in terms of making trademark or designer patent or copyright allegations, Leah and I aren't attorneys, but we can help steer you in the right direction. The one cautionary word of advice we'd advise you on here is don't just find the most vocal or omni present attorney that doesn't have IP attorney background.
I mean, in the Amazon space, most attorneys that are visible aren't IP attorneys and a lot of sellers don't seem to grasp the difference, which is unfortunate.
[00:08:13] Leah: Yeah. And also as a brand owner, you yourself should at least familiarize yourself with the difference between trademark or copyright and patent infringement, because we also see a lot of people report the wrong one for the wrong thing.
So yeah, good to know that for yourself. You don't necessarily need an attorney for that. That one's fairly easy to find definition for, but definitely worth looking into before you report any of those things.
[00:08:35] Chris: And registering copyright, You don't necessarily need an attorney for that either, right?
[00:08:40] Leah: But I regularly see sellers reporting counterfeit or reporting trademark infringement when they mean copyright or copyright infringement when they mean trademark. So good to familiarize yourself with what the differences are between those different types of infringement.
[00:08:53] Chris: Yeah. If you're a private label brand owner on Amazon, I would say it's essential.
So definitely. Any questions on anything we talked about today, or if you've had your ability to report IP claims revoked and then appealed it successfully or unsuccessfully, let us know. We will be happy to steer you in the right direction. Thanks again. We will talk to you soon.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, I'm here once again with Leah McHugh of eCommerceChris, Leah, how you doing?
[00:00:16] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:18] Chris: Doing okay. We'll see how we are after this discussion because we are getting inundated, this is kind of part two of our drop shipper suspension discussion, we're getting inundated by contacts, sellers who are doing dropshipping the wrong way. They've either been busted for dropshipping policy violations, or they don't have invoices for products that they list. They think that they can just produce an invoice once there's an order. Once they source the product, then they'll have an invoice.
They don't understand that Amazon loves to suspend people based on the ASINs they're listing and demanding to see an invoice in advance of an order, which undercuts the entire business model. So you finished that episode with a comment that there's a right way to do dropshipping, and that's what I hope we could dig into today.
And hopefully we'll get the right kinds of questions at the end of it. But if there is any confusion, hopefully we can clear it up.
[00:01:16] Leah: Yeah, definitely. So I think what most sellers are getting into trouble with is a version of dropshipping, which I think of as dropshipping arbitrage, where they're essentially purchasing items from another retailer and then sending it directly to Amazon's customer, which similar to arbitrage, they're purchasing it from a retailer without that retailer's knowledge that that item is being resold to another third party and then putting that through Amazon. And so those people tend to get into trouble because the packaging will have the original retailer's information or the packing slip will have the original retailers' information.
That's often what is flagging these drop shipping violations, but that is not the proper form of dropshipping. So dropshipping is entered into usually with all parties knowledge. So the person that is, sometimes it's a manufacturer, whoever's shipping the items to the end customer knows that you are acting as a middle man.
They will dropship that product to you. That's actually how many big box retailers manage their websites. They aren't holding all of those thousands of different skews of inventory. They have dropshipping agreements with the manufacturers, with the brands. Those brands get the order sent to them from the big box retailer, they fulfill the order with the big box retailer's information on it, and it goes to the end consumer. Everybody involved knows what's happening. There's documentation, there's invoices. It's all very clear, and that is how you should be dropshipping if you are going to continue dropshipping on the Amazon platform.
No more arbitrageand calling it dropshipping.
[00:03:02] Chris: Well, no more sellers doing obvious avoidance of the being the seller of record as well. That's the main policy violation is amazon doesn't want to be flooded with buyers talking about why is the price different. I got a Home Depot receipt in here. I looked on the Home Depot website. It's only $13.99. In that website, I paid $29. They don't want these conversations. They don't want these messages. It's a lousy buyer experience, and I think that's what a lot of these dropshipping courses, classes, video watchers don't understand in terms of why this isn't a business model is because if you're confusing buyers, at least on Amazon, we're not talking about all these other wonderful marketplaces out there.
We don't know what they care about, what they don't care about. What Amazon cares about is not having a crappy buyer experience and not confusing buyers.
[00:03:56] Leah: Right. Which is why what I just said is the right way to do dropshipping on Amazon because you don't have those problems.
[00:04:03] Chris: Right. Well, I mean, and, and I'm just adding to that in terms of not only the big box retailer is okay with it and the brand getting the order is okay with it. It's not even just the supply chain side. It's also buyers will get better information inside the box.
[00:04:21] Leah: Yes, because everybody involved is aware of what's happening.
[00:04:26] Chris: There's no confusion on the seller side or buyer side.
[00:04:29] Leah: Additionally, you have invoices, so if there's any question in authenticity, you're not showing retail receipts in somebody else's name.
I mean, if you're dropshipping and you're having a retailer send the items to an end consumer. The receipt isn't necessarily even going to match your information. It's matching the customer's information. Not to mention it's a receipt, not an invoice. Whereas dropshipping, you have invoices, you have contractual agreements that show that everybody is correctly represented.
It is a much safer way of dropshipping if you want to continue with the dropshipping model. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the drop shipping model. I mean, certainly for big box retailers, it's been a very easy way for them to scale their online catalog without having to hold all of that inventory and without having to scale their own shipping and logistics operations. So there's no reason that Amazon would have an issue with documentation from that type of model.
[00:05:31] Chris: But playing devil's advocate here, a lot of the dropshippers would say that involves a lot more investment, a lot more time. You gotta get agreements in place. What about the running lean model?
[00:05:42] Leah: You're still running lean. You're not holding inventory. You're not paying for anything until it sells. It takes a little bit longer to set up, but it's not actually that much more difficult. It just takes you actually finding real suppliers and not just buying stuff online.
And honestly, the amount of time people are spending, like scanning items in stores and looking at prices online and then matching it against Amazon, it's probably the same amount of time. It's just using it differently and using it more widely.
[00:06:12] Chris: Right. Interesting parallel, I just had a long conversation with somebody about, if you took all the time sellers spent on Facebook, in the forums, on groups looking for a generic template for an appeal they could have just sat down and written a better appeal themselves.
[00:06:28] Leah: Right.
[00:06:28] Chris: Instead of posting on a Facebook group, like, I need this, Can you post one in here that I can just copy and paste? Like if you spent all that time messaging, private messaging people on a Facebook group about what plan of action did you use for this ? You could have like written your own and it would've been better in that same time.
Same with sourcing. I guess the answer to my own question is the courses, the YouTube gurus, whoever they are, need to make it sound as easy as set it and forget it. And as passive income as possible. And so they don't want to have to explain what you just explained in terms of, you need some agreements in place, you need time to set it up.
[00:07:09] Leah: How is constantly searching for the best deal online and then comparing to what's available on Amazon, set it and forget it, or passive income?
[00:07:19] Chris: They probably hire low cost VAs to do that for them.
[00:07:22] Leah: Why can't they hire a low cost VA to find them a supplier.
[00:07:27] Chris: That's a good question. Well, then the question to you is why don't these courses and classes and video threads that saw--
[00:07:35] Leah: Because many of those people that are teaching them have no background in retail and probably don't even know the difference between the models.
[00:07:43] Chris: It's a really good answer. Thank you. I was expecting you to say it's easier to present the kind of low barrier to entry model.
[00:07:54] Leah: Saying you can just like look at stores that you already buy from to make money. Sure. Yeah. That does sound good. But it doesn't mention the like many hours of time you'll be spending doing that and going to have to continue to do that.
Like I would actually argue that what I am saying for dropshipping is actually less work in the long term because you're not constantly having to like search for websites to dropship from to Amazon.
[00:08:16] Chris: I agree. And every time that, getting back to what you said about Arbitrage models. I was always sort of baffled that people would hire these armies or shoppers to go into stores to look for the product.
Presumably they have to get in long lines with other people in the store. Like that seemed like such a time suck to me and I guess this was kind of supposed to, Well, you're sourcing things like online arbitrage. Well, you're finding things online. You don't have to take the time to sit in traffic and drive to a store and buy things at retail outlets.
So I guess I thought the online arbitrage people thought that that would be a godsend because that would save them time, but now they just spend the time online instead of walking around the store.
[00:09:00] Leah: I think it's just, rather than time spent, it's perceived learning curve, you know? It's very easy for anybody to walk into a store, scan a few products, find one that's selling for more on Amazon.
It sounds a lot more difficult to find a supplier who's willing to drop ship products to Amazon customers for you, it sounds like there's more involved in doing it.
[00:09:27] Chris: That's what I think the answer is. I think that's, for whatever reason, overwhelming to people. Who maybe don't understand it or haven't looked into it, and they're probably already in a course that they spent five, ten grand on.
That's teaching them something that's more like easier to explain, lower hanging fruit. People understand how easy it is to walk into a store more than they do how to form a dropshipping arrangement. So, I don't know. I have recently looked at some of these videos myself on TikTok.
There was a woman just going hopping from, this is what it's like with Home Depot. This is what Walgreens is like, this is what Target is like in terms of sourcing. And it seemed like they were talking about coupons a lot. And so I got the impression well, Maybe they're trying to massage this as like clipping coupons in a smart way format.
And that's the angle they're playing. Like, we understand the coupon system better than other people.
[00:10:24] Leah: Well, you're trying to find underpriced retail items that are either underpriced in the store or overpriced on Amazon, or I guess ideally underpriced in the store and overpriced on Amazon.
Trying to find those sorts of deals. Which again, I can see how that can be perceived as being easier than, you know, making long term listings with suppliers that you have a relationship with.
[00:10:48] Chris: Yeah. And these models have been, we've been talking about this on the podcast, in articles for years.
I mean, arbitrage has been kind of on the wane for a while, and now it's at the point where Amazon's just rejecting retail receipts like crazy with no explanation and then the dropshippers that don't have any invoices or receipts, those appeals are getting rejected. I think a lot of the dropshippers appeal saying Well, we're not gonna do drop shipping anymore.
There's so much negative buzz out there. Even the word dropshipping has become so toxic, right? They lead their appeal with, Well, we're not drop shipping anymore, so we're gonna FBA. That's an appeal. That should be acceptable and those are getting rejected.
And then in terms of us and the contacts we get every day, then they double back on I already appealed it a few times. And I said I wasn't gonna dropship anymore. I said I'm gonna have invoices going forward, and that gets rejected. And that's the second wave.
[00:11:43] Leah: Well, because in order for that to even work, you have to already show your new and better suppliers, which requires invoices, which requires an investment, and it's a high risk investment, I guess it's perceived as a high risk investment because at that point, their account is suspended and they may not even be able to sell those products on Amazon anyway.
[00:12:03] Chris: It is more risky. I mean, I don't know, high risk because they could get reinstated. But yeah, so any confusion about that, especially the second piece about how do you appeal this sort of thing.
Long story short, you demonstrate your complete divorce from dropshipping of that model. You're either appealing, mentioning the model that Leah just discussed. Or coming back with a proven track record or new invoices or letters of authorization from new brands that you're going to sell or that you source from authorized distributors, if not from the brands.
So can't wait to see the kinds of questions we get after this one. , any last thoughts
[00:12:46] Leah: And no, I don't have any recommendations for where you can find these suppliers. Not my area of expertise, sorry.
[00:12:52] Chris: We don't rebuild. We, we had to answer some people who came in asking for appeals help, but they wanted us to rebuild their whole company, their whole sourcing and business model.
That's not what we do. We're reinstatement experts. We're appeals people.
[00:13:04] Leah: We just tell you what have to do. We don't tell you how you do that part.
[00:13:09] Chris: Yeah, we don't rebuild it for you. I mean, that's more like somebody who's managing their own business. All right. Thanks a lot Leah, for making that clarification.
I hope the message finds its way to the right ears and we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks again for listening.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe, Seller Performance Solutions podcast with Leah McHugh. Leah, how you doing?
[00:00:14] Leah: Good, thanks. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:15] Chris: Good. Today I wanna do a really quick one about we're being inundated with all the dropshippers who have been suspended. We're getting lots of complaints about account suspensions from people who are still doing online arbitrage, retail arbitrage.
As well who are getting all their receipts rejected. Why are their receipts rejected from Walmart, Home Depot, Costco, whatever. That's been a trend for years. I don't know if there's a bunch of courses out there still teaching dropshipping or arbitrage, but clearly Amazon's pairing back and thinning the herd with reselling.
They've been doing this for a long time with the drop shippers I understand they just sort of nuked all those accounts. Thousands and tens of thousands of them. We can do a second version of this podcast that's a little bit longer in terms of how Amazon can suddenly flip a switch and decide to suspend dozens of thousands of accounts within a summer. But just for today, I want everyone to understand if you are suspended for drop shipping, there are certain things you must do, they are are non-negotiable. You can't try to argue you way, debate your way with Amazon out of it, and if you don't do those steps right, you're not coming back.
We've seen a lot of sellers suspended for related because they try to open a new account. They're new sellers, they're newbies, they're new sellers. They say, Well, we bought this course. Taught us drop shipping. It didn't tell us any of this stuff. I usually now say, Well, what course?
Who runs it? Where did you find it? And they throw all this stuff at me that I've never heard of. Well, if I've never heard of it, it means the people running the course are taking your money without any real expertise, not, not much else to say there. In terms of appealing this, tell Amazon a lot more than just that you've abandoned dropshipping. I think at this point, word is out that you have to get rid of dropshipping.
[00:01:56] Leah: I don't know. I still have had this conversation with people that don't know that they have to change their sourcing model.
[00:02:01] Chris: Well, they're violating the policy. It's a policy violation. They're not the seller of record on the documentation inside the packaging.
But let's face it, even if you are the seller of record, even if you're not violating the letter of the law of the drop shipping policy, Amazon's trying to exterminate dropshipping, right? I mean, it's clear to everybody. So if you can turn the page, if you can show that you've invested real money in a viable sourcing model, a different business model, you're buying from authorized distributors, you have those receipts, you have those invoices in hand, and the suppliers have verifiable websites.
Hopefully the website shows that that supplier is an authorized distributor of the brand. Then you can write a plan of action, then you can appeal. Then you can take the first or second step towards healing this and getting reinstated, because Amazon sees that you've abandoned what they didn't want you to do, and you've embraced what they do want you to do, right?
[00:02:51] Leah: Yeah, and I think that's probably the hardest part, is finding those new and better suppliers, because I think the whole appeal for a lot of people of these models is that it's very little barrier to injury and doesn't require a lot of initial investment. So going from that to sourcing wholesale from authorized distributors can be a little bit of a jump for some people. But you know, you definitely need to do that rather than rushing to appeal without showing Amazon that you are now going to have better sourcing going forward, which is the mistake we see a lot of people make.
[00:03:29] Chris: Or they want to say, Well, we were new. We didn't know. Guess what? Amazon doesn't care how new you are.
They don't care if you were ignorant of the rules or the policies just because you were new. If anything, putting that in your plan of action makes Amazon uncomfortable with reinstating you as a seller because they think you're too much of a novice to understand how Amazon works. If you start blaming the course you bought, or the guru you listened to on YouTube, whatever it was, again, they think you are gullible.
They think you don't understand who you should trust and who you shouldn't. That definitely shouldn't go into your plan of action. Leah and I have both read POAs from people who are making all kinds of excuses for botching this, none of that works. That's why all of these appeals are getting denied.
[00:04:09] Leah: You can't blame your employees either.
[00:04:11] Chris: Right. We hired VAs overseas who were managing our whole business for us. We didn't know what they were doing. They didn't know what they were doing. Waving a flag saying, You handed off the responsibility for all of your business to a VA overseas, or not a novice VA. A VA who bragged to you about how many accounts they manage or not. It's all very unimpressive and, and it looks unintelligent to Amazon and it's not a business model that they want to entertain on their site. So be extremely careful not only with making these initial mistakes, because you definitely don't get a free pass on your first mistake, be very careful what you put in the appeal itself.
Because we're also seeing so many people getting denied over and over before they even contact us. Hopefully they'll hear this podcast first before they make those initial mistakes. You've already bungled the sourcing model and the selling process on Amazon. You've gotten yourself suspended.
Don't add to that layers of mistakes and errors by by sending in terrible faulty appeals. That would be my brief words of advice. We'll do a second episode covering this, but this was a short one for today, just to stop so many people from believing so many courses and so many ridiculous ideas. Leah and I don't have time to go through all these videos and look at all these articles telling people to do these, get rich quick, set it and forget it, wind it up and let it go business schemes, none of them have anything to do with responsible selling on Amazon. And I won't speak for you Leah, but I'm kind of tired of veering those stories.
[00:05:40] Leah: Yeah. I would actually like to do a rant next time we do a ran episode about how there is actually a correct way to drop that nobody seems to be doing on Amazon. And yes, that sounds like click bait, but it's also true there is, there is a different form of drop shipping that is the legitimate way to drop ship, of course, that no one in our space seems to be aware of.
Right.
[00:06:00] Chris: That's why there's a drop shipping policy on Amazon, it can be properly followed. This will be part one. My rant. Part two will be Leah's rant within the next few weeks. So thanks again for listening and please if you have any questions around the right way to appeal, the wrong way to do it. Let us know. We're happy to help. See you next time.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers, I am Leah McHugh from ecommerceChris and I am here as always with the eCommerce Chris, Chris McCabe. And today we have, Jamie Davidson joining us from Northbound Group. And we are going to talk about pretty much what Chris and I talk about. a lot of the times on the podcast, but from the, the point of view of selling your business, Jamie, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:00:38] Jamie: Yeah, thanks leah. Thanks Chris. Excited to be here.
[00:00:40] Leah: First of all, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about what it is that Northbound Group does.
[00:00:45] Jamie: Yeah. Sure. So Northbound Group, we focus primarily specifically on the Amazon industry, helping sellers and also service providers, SAS and tech enabled, service enabled companies, focused on the space to achieve a premium exit.
And then I'm sure we'll get into a little bit what that means. In terms of selling their business and really representing them on this side of things we've done, the Helium 10, when they had their first transaction, we represented them. A lot of you guys may know GETIDA. That was just in the news as well, too.
So A lot of the deals from complex to some of the, I guess, more straightforward ones were very active in really helping sellers sell their business.
[00:01:25] Chris: This is a great topic for us because we deal with some companies that are looking to acquire, right? Pre-acquisition due diligence, but more and more lately with the changes in account health, being very hot among sellers. The business owners before they sell, want to know how they can clean things up. Tidy things up, resolve their account health so that they will be a more attractive, acquisition. So we, we hear a lot from both sides.
[00:01:50] Jamie: Yeah, super smart. Yeah. Real really important. I'm sure we'll get into that. A lot of people, I'm sure you guys see this too.
Get into the process too late or start thinking about it a little bit too late. When really I'm sure a lot of the stuff you help people with, you really wanna be planning well in advance for such a big transaction.
[00:02:05] Leah: Yeah. And I, that's what I've really enjoyed about talking to you guys. It's less about, well, how much can I get as evaluation right now?
And more about if this is your exit strategy, you need to be planning for that in advance. What's the first thing that you guys look at when you start working with an Amazon seller?
[00:02:22] Jamie: Yeah, so we have a conversation we love along the lines, you know, similar to the way you help with people. We love to engage with people earlier in the process than later. The reality is a lot of people don't do that. And so we're working with them, but you know, the first step is, is really trying to understand, really validate what the business really is, where it's at.
A lot of people maybe think their margins, their profitabilities at a certain level. We've got a 40 person team. Really experienced financial advisors. So we run a lot of data. We create what's called a data room to really make sure we can get a good firm grasp on what the business, where it's actually at.
Again, sometimes there is a mismatch for someone maybe thinks they have their business is at 20% margin and it could be a lot lower than that. So ideally people wanna find that out sooner than later, because you can fix some things and get along those lines. So that's really. Really the first step.
And even before that is also just understanding the goals of what a seller is trying to achieve. Myself. I've been a long time operator and seller in the space, but it's kind of, you don't know what you don't know as a seller. So these transactions, there's a lot of different ways you can do it, whether you wanna take a , a full on exit or maybe you wanna what's called rolled equity take, you wanna sell part of it.
You wanna continue on kind of have another bite at the apple. Or you may just want like a minority stake, like GETIDA announced, Hey, they wanted a capital partner to help them to grow faster. So, there's a lot more options than maybe the typical Amazon seller realizes are out there.
So we, we first kind of wanna understand what's what's the seller's objective and then get a good clean look of where the business actually is right now.
[00:03:55] Chris: Do you ever find yourself hearing from them first? Hey, there's a couple things I wanna bring up before we get in or do they just wait to see, talk about the valuation, wait to see if you bring up hey, are there any issues with your account help? Any policy warnings, any recent listing takedowns? Is it always on one side or do you kind of share some of that in the initial discussion?
[00:04:17] Jamie: Yeah, that's good, Chris. I mean, obviously the more you can identify up front because we're on their side, we're trying to help them.
We have relationships with hundreds and hundreds of potential buyers, whether it's aggregators or private equity or, or strategic, but it's like anything else, the earlier you can identify it than the better, especially as you're representing them. But occasionally as people do bring things up, like, Hey, there's a lot of nuances.
Like, Hey, I have to switch to another Amazon account every periodically and sell on this other account. And it's like, okay, we need to understand that. Because at the end of the day, we say, it's not what you're selling. It's what the buyer is buying. And if it sounds too complex or it sounds if it's not gonna make a lot of sense, then that's gonna impact your valuation in a way. So, obviously you want things to be as clean as possible and the story of what the potential is and what the business is right now needs to be, as straightforward and honest as possible because if there's a sense of distrust in the buying process, that can certainly derail a deal by itself.
[00:05:13] Leah: Yeah, you bring up a good point as well about it, not just being aggregators. I think the last few years, everybody got a little tunnel vision in terms of aggregators being the one selling businesses. But you know, Hero cosmetics, for example, they just sold to Church & Dwight who definitely aren't an aggregator, but you know, that was the fourth largest direct to consumer acquisition, I believe in history ever. So yeah. Opening those blinders a little bit, I think will not just change the selling process, but also the operations process, it's not necessarily all Amazon.
[00:05:45] Jamie: Oh, totally. Yeah. And I think it's hard as a seller, you know, somebody who's running the brand to really understand. I mean, as Amazon sellers, like that's not their focus, their focus is to run a really good business and take care of their customers with their products. But so often you ask, who ended up buying the company? It was like, oh, is this guy out of India just was interesting to jumping in and they bought it for a few million. It's hard to kind of understand the full possibilities because the range of reasons why someone may buy your business is much more diverse than to your point than just purely aggregators, even though, obviously there's a lot of them involved, but there's more to it than that.
[00:06:18] Leah: Right. How early do you recommend people reach out to you before, let's say before they intend to sell?
[00:06:25] Jamie: Yeah. I love that question. Honestly, the sooner, the better. We've talked to people that have a conversation like, Hey, three years out.
So we've got, for example, whether it's an Amazon seller, let's say it's an agency or a service provider, they may talk to us and say, yeah, actually we don't have any plans to sell right now. And through the conversation, they'll learn some things through the conversation. Like I said, Amazon sellers, kinda one set of metrics, but if you're, let's say you're an agency or you're someone who has a software, there's certain metrics that we can talk about a lot of times, almost always in those conversations, whether they work with us or handle things otherwise, they're usually go, Ooh, that's eyeopening. I didn't realize that's really that important because you know, it's kind of the old beginning with the end in mind. So the earlier you can kind of have that mindset, even if you're not necessarily planning to exit, but ideally I would say, certainly at least a year out, but, certainly have the conversation with two years out because you're sure to, to learn some things and how to operate your business better.
[00:07:21] Chris: That's great to hear.
[00:07:22] Leah: That's a conversation we've had actually with a few people, not on the podcast, but we've had it at our at our conference, running your business with your exit strategy in mind will make it that much easier when it does come time to exit. Obviously things change over time, but just having that in the back of your head, when you're figuring out how your business actually runs, can make such a huge difference.
[00:07:44] Chris: Two years out is great to hear because we're hearing from people who are two weeks out who present a problem to us that has to be fixed and we'll say, oh, okay. And then they mention in the conversation well we're in the process of selling by.
And in more conversation, we realize that they're contacting us incredibly last minute because either they themselves identified problems that were never addressed or potential suitors are saying, Hey, what about this? They're flagging it in their due diligence. And then they want to hire a consultant to help them out. And it's like so late in the game, I mean, two weeks, you know, unless it's resolved right away and there's a lot of pressure, right? They've got pressure on themselves. Maybe they're getting pressure from the potential buyer to wrap this up quickly and to fix it up quickly.
And we're always amazed that they haven't put the process in place, got in the wheels turning in the right direction months earlier, if not years earlier.
[00:08:39] Jamie: Yeah. And I think some people are scared. They think that if they're gonna engage someone , like a Northbound Group or something that, Hey, it's gonna be really expensive.
So I wanna wait till the last moment the reality is when I say, Hey, two years doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna hire someone to help you at that point, but you need to educate yourself and be, understand the process and understand the timeline. And like I said there's things you guys do to help them out to understand like, Hey, these are the things I need to run a really clean business. And we always say, Hey, what's good for selling a business is also good for running a business. They're not mutually exclusive in any ways. I have a close friend of mine who sold five of these brands, him and his wife they've they started these brands and sold them all within two years.
So they just literally launched the brands with the intent to sell them. From the day they launched it they knew the plan. They had sold a couple brands before, so they kept learning the process, but most people don't have that experience.
And like I said these are massive life changing transactions. The biggest payday you're gonna have with your Amazon business is typically the day that you exit. But you need to just really educate yourself on the process and the opportunity. And like I said, it aligns with making your business more profitable. And that mindset is really when you think in terms of exiting your business, you think in terms of multiples, but in terms of running your business, that means like every dollar you save or every extra dollar you earn, you can think of it as Hey, that's actually worth three, four, five you know, maybe six times impact on the actual asset value.
[00:10:04] Leah: Right. And just giving yourself that breathing space also gives you the ability to adjust to market changes instead of having to push for the sale while everything is still working and nothing's broken to okay, well, you know, we're going into the recession right now.
Maybe people aren't paying as much for these businesses. Maybe I'm better off waiting until after the election or whatever the case may be to get a better price.
[00:10:26] Jamie: Totally. Yeah. And actually along those points, depending when people are hearing the information that could be, the market could be tougher, it could be more favorable in terms of as a buyer or a seller, but yeah, to that point that just something I've heard a lot from buyers a lot just because we talk to so many of them is a lot of sellers get scared.
They think, oh, my margins are tighter right now and they think it's not a good, they'd be surprised. There's always an opportunity to have that conversation because a lot of the buyers, for example, right now understand that when logistics costs went up and there's been some downward pressure, they understand on margins. They understand that across the board. So sometimes sellers don't realize, that there is an opportunity. They don't need to be scared about potentially selling because the buyers, if it's a good business, it's a good brand. There's a good opportunity. There's always a good opportunity to exit that. You don't have to kind of wait till the perfect time.
[00:11:17] Chris: Speaking of being scared, are you ever concerned that you're spending time on a business where they're building up high risk, high reward, but it's risk that you don't want to take on. So you ultimately think, well, this is a house of cards.
This is going to collapse because they built it on non-compliant behavior or little gimmicks and tricks that won't stay the test of time and then you've spent some time getting to know the brand and the product itself might be great, but their valuation and their standing in the marketplace is not what it appears to be at first glance or is that just run of the mill part of the daily work that you do, you expect a certain percentage of brands you encounter might be worth less than they appear at first glance?\
[00:12:03] Jamie: Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably human nature that most people think it's like, if your house you're probably gonna think it's worth more, in some cases maybe, but, at face value now, Interesting ways to structure deals and stuff that can be worth a lot more than . Yeah. I mean, the people that are buying these brands, they're buying them for multiple because and a lot of them especially aggregators and private equity, they have a lot of accountability towards that money, they need to de-risk that A much as possible and so they have very low tolerance for any of that. So, we try to identify it as much upfront, but, but yeah, by all means this is like pro professional capital that's in the space, four years ago that capital didn't really exist too much. So kind of anything went, but yeah, it's all the more reason why you wanna really just run a good clean business with a really scalable brand. That's really where the value is.
[00:12:51] Leah: Yeah. And even on our end, we've seen in terms of risk tolerance of buyers last year, there was a lot more tolerance to things that had maybe gone on in the account in the past compared to this year where they don't even wanna look at it if that's the case.
[00:13:05] Jamie: Yeah. To both of your points. One thing we've seen more too is, initially when the aggregators came in, it was kind of like the gold rush there was a little bit, I would say the due diligence was probably, it still happened and it was thorough to some extent, but now it's much more, they look at it with a much closer kind of magnifying glass in the business.
They're gonna be pickier. We haven't had any deals ever killed on our end that we've representing, but, but I do think as guys, you know, jump into this maybe a year or two ago where they could. Hey, I'm gonna call up a few aggregators and kind of get a deal done. I think the deals absolutely are still happening.
Buyers are buying, but you've gotta have your ducks in a row and you've gotta understand what going through the process the right way and being able to navigate it with some help typically. I think some of the aggregators learned the hard way that they bought an asset that was high risk and they considered it low risk. The old adage, like, well, everybody's doing it. So this brand isn't doing it more or less, maybe a rule bending, rule break than any other brand that we've heard about that's in their space or in their category. That is definitely a high tolerance for risk. The last 12 months have shown that I think some of those assets purchased didn't have the right value just because they didn't have any staying power and they, they might not even be selling today because of things they had done pre-acquisition.
[00:14:21] Leah: Yep. And then last question, is there anything that you wish that sellers knew that we haven't already covered?
[00:14:27] Chris: Yeah, I think in a short time we covered some of the big ones. I'll just recap that, I'd say there's always an opportunity for a good brand, a good business. Even if the margins, like I said, are a little bit compressed or not optimal, you don't need the perfect time, to exit. But that being the case I'd really focus again on trying to run a really good clean business. The more you can probably work with guys like yourselves, you run, get things, get your ducks in a row the earlier the better.
And, I think it's just a great opportunity because with Amazon, the beauty it is when you do exit your brand, you're gonna typically gonna have a non-compete for that category or subcategory, but the primary skill of building brands, there's so many other categories and opportunities that unlike other businesses and other industries, when you sell it, you may kind of be out of the game. You have so much opportunity. So if there's an opportunity, like, Hey, you're great at building the business from, let's say zero to 5 million or whatever that number is, then, Hey, you have that opportunity to potentially do it again and let someone else scale it. So that's my biggest advice.
And just like I said, think about it, as early in the process as you can, to be ready to exit. Yeah.
[00:15:28] Leah: And if our listeners wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way to reach you and Northbound Group.
[00:15:33] Jamie: Yeah. So I guess I'll give two things. One is just our website, which is, northbound group.com.
Other one, this is obviously a really big topic. Feel free. I'll give you my direct cell number. Anyone feel free to text is the easiest way.
[00:15:46] Chris: Are you sure?
[00:15:46] Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. I tested this out on a podcast for, but this is a big deal in all seriousness. If you want to connect my number is 404-275-8643 and our team, a lot of them are former Goldman Sachs guys, like big players in the industry. If nothing else we can get like just an initial look at you or have a conversation to see what your goals are and see if there's a way we can help.
[00:16:07] Leah: Awesome. Thank you. I think you are officially the first person to give their cell phone number for our podcast.
[00:16:12] Chris: You win that prize, very bold and daring stuff. So you're willing to put your phone number behind your words and your reputation, which is great.
[00:16:20] Jamie: Absolutely.
[00:16:21] Chris: Thanks for joining us today. We appreciate it.
[00:16:23] Jamie: Thank you, Leah. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. We've got a hot and relevant topic today. It's gonna come up a lot in Q4, I'm here with Leah McHugh and I'm Chris McCabe. We are trying to make sure that everyone has listings that are compliant and also accurate.
So Leah, maybe you can give a quick rundown of some of the rather alarming trends we've seen of late.
[00:00:29] Leah: Yeah. Well, so today I specifically wanted to talk about misrepresenting your products because we've been having a lot of conversations, to be fair, this is a conversation I've been having for a while. But it seems to be coming up more often lately of I sell a product that Amazon considers to be restricted. What if I just remove these words? So Amazon doesn't realize that it's that kind of a product, will that be okay? and I think part of the reason we're hearing about this more is because some of these listing restrictions, Amazon is just saying, remove the restricted content and will reinstate your listing.
But what they are saying there is specifically restricted content, not if this product's restricted and you make it look like it's a different product, Then you can re-list it.
[00:01:15] Chris: And of course, some people are adding certain keywords or content, so that it'll be easier to search and find on Amazon.
And they're kind of getting into hot water simply because they're reaching for more sales without understanding compliance.
[00:01:29] Leah: Well, and that's the larger conversation and the larger conversation, which I guess I probably should have started with, is that how you market your product matters.
Not just in terms of sales, not just in terms of ranking, but in terms of how your product is regulated. So a lot of things you can sell the exact same product, like structurally, ingredient wise, whatever, it's the exact same thing, but depending on how you market it and what you say about the product on the packaging, in your marketing, on your website, that's what actually decides how your product is classified to whoever the regulating body may be.
So an example that I use a lot. It's something that everybody is somewhat familiar with now because of COVID is alcohol wipes. If I sell 90% alcohol wipes and I market them as being to clean the lenses on your glasses, those aren't regulated by the FDA or the EPA. Those are just a regular consumer product.
If I say that those cleansing wipes, 80% alcohol are to sanitize your hands, now that product is under the FDA's jurisdiction and considered a medical product. If I say those same wipes are to disinfect surfaces, now that product is regulated by the EPA. So it's the exact same product. The only difference is the words that I used to describe that product and to market it to people.
And I don't think people understand that if you say that your product is something that can have a legal consequence.
[00:03:06] Chris: They don't understand it. And I think also the tricky part is sometimes they're hiring services that don't have compliance processes and they don't understand it either. And they think they're just using these terms or phrases to generate additional sales, without even considering this huge elephant in the room, which results often in a listing take down, ASIN suspension, which is how we sometimes first hear about it from that particular brand or seller. So something bad that already happened that was preventable. Right?
[00:03:38] Leah: Right. But the thing is at that point, you've already said it. So possibly. If you remove that verbiage, Amazon will reinstate the listing, but they could also come back and say, well, you said, this is this kind of product. Therefore we need to have all of this certification, whatever is needed for that product to prove that you're allowed to sell this. Another good example of this is supplements. If you start making disease claims, now you're in unregulated drug territory, even though the ingredients are the same.
All that's changed is what you have said. So yes, sometimes it is just a mistake and you did just put something on your listing that you shouldn't have put there, but it's not just Amazon being a hard ass, a lot of the times there are legal requirements.
[00:04:19] Chris: Well, they're holding you to it. They're taking you at your own definition for your own products. They're not commissioning an independent study to open up your inventory and FBA and study it all themselves and decide. For Amazon's self what your product is, they're taking you at your word. So you don't wanna start saying well, we said it's this, we said it's that. But we can't back any of that up because we were just using that for our marketing purposes. They'll hold it against you if you do that.
[00:04:48] Leah: And so another question that I often get is, well, can I just put that in the hidden keywords? And that's still part of your marketing. You're still, even though the front end buyer, can't see those words, it's still bringing up your listing when people search those terms.
So yes, that will still get your listing potentially flagged for whatever it is that you're claiming if you're not allowed to make that claim. So then the other side which is what Chris had started with, was people who are trying to sell products that have been like that are restricted products by Amazon. I'm trying to think of a good one that everybody knows this is a restricted product.
[00:05:20] Chris: You're misrepresenting the product. That's what we're focused on today, right?
[00:05:24] Leah: Well, yeah, but there are services and we've had people who have come to us at those after those services have failed to get their listing reinstated. Who are basically saying, well, yeah, this is a restricted product, but we're just going to make it look like it's a different product that isn't restricted on Amazon. And so they'll reinstate your listing. And the issue you run into there is Amazon might reinstate your listing if you're, I guess, call that lucky, but you're still misrepresenting your product. So potentially you're looking at, I mean, it depends on the product, but potentially you're looking at consumer fraud as one of the worst case scenarios. And again, you're looking at you're running into different regulatory bodies, depending on what the product actually is.
If you're not meeting the requirements for that product, because you're trying to hide the fact that it is that product in the first place.
[00:06:16] Chris: And we live in a day and age where competitors are typically watching their competition on Amazon. You're handing them ammunition to fire back at you when you make these mistakes, or if it's not a mistake and it's deliberate, you're deliberately deciding to hand a gift to your competitors who in this day and age, I think a lot of them know how to report abuse or fraud. Some of them might get the information over to the FTC, generate a complaint number that they can put in front of Amazon to show how serious they are about preventing you from misleading customers and from breaking laws around consumer fraud.
So you're taking a giant risk for maybe a little or a lot of additional sales, but that's all short term gain. Most of the sellers we work with are in this Amazon thing for the long haul. And they're not looking for a quick score just to cash out after Q4 and have a nice day, we're gonna do something else with our lives.
So if you're taking your business seriously at all, or you take risk seriously ,risk assessment at all, you don't just dive into this stuff saying everybody's doing it, amazon hasn't caught it today, what if Amazon catches it tomorrow and not today?
[00:07:26] Leah: Well, and then, even further than that, what if somebody hurts themselves? Because they don't fully understand the nature of your product because you misrepresented it or you didn't provide proper instructions in order to hide what your product actually is. I mean, there are genuine safety concerns with a lot of these products because a lot of the restricted products on Amazon are restricted because they are illegal or unsafe.
They've restricted them because they have decided that it's not worth the risk for them to have these types of products on their marketplace. So if you're misrepresenting your product and you're not providing a proper explanation of what it's for and how it should be used, you're increasing that risk of injury or misuse of the product, because you're trying to hide what it actually is.
[00:08:10] Chris: How about this buyer complaints simply because it's not the product you said it was. I mean, buyers love to tell Amazon that. You know, this is not a skateboard, this is a hoverboard. Well, we weren't able to sell hoverboards on Amazon. So we called everything a skateboard. That's great for the near term sale, if you're just looking to deceive buyers and make money out of it, do you think a company that has the buyer experience as their prime directive, will be happy that you are misleading their buyers?
It is after all their buyer at the end of the day. Pretty sure lots of sellers get suspended for misleading buyers about their products.
[00:08:46] Leah: Right. And even a less extreme version of that. Is people putting their own brand, like listing on Amazon under their own brand when the product itself is another brand's product and what the customer is receiving is under that other brand. So your listing says it's your branded product and what the customer receives is a totally other brand product. Again, not quite as a extreme case, but again, if you're selling regulated products, none of the required documentation is going to match the information you've put on Amazon.
If you're incorrectly saying it's your product that you make when somebody else is making it under a totally different brand.
[00:09:25] Chris: Sellers manipulating listings to add their own name as the brand when they're not, or to say that they're the manufacturer when they're not, drives me crazy because that results in so many counterfeit complaints from buyers.
[00:09:37] Leah: So I actually thought that that had not had gone down in the amount of sellers that are doing that up until recently when I've seen just a bunch of it.
[00:09:45] Chris: Because this is a fad and this is a gimmick and it's not just among sellers and seller groups, it's among third party services that are saying, Hey, we can surface your product a lot more easily and get you more sales with a couple of tricks. And if those tricks are no longer useful, we'll come up with new parallel tricks. No one at a company like that's ever going to tell you that they're risking your entire account or business.
[00:10:09] Leah: Well, not just that, if you're saying somebody else's product is your branded product, you're potentially looking at a lawsuit from that initial brand.
[00:10:16] Chris: The legal part, the legal part is almost a separate can of worms that we can either address another time.
We don't have enough hours in the day to have one podcast include all angles of this problem, but this should also be very logical stuff that any business owner that has even a rudimentary understanding of the law or a fraud should understand. And oh, by the way, we're talking about Amazon, Amazon loves to bring the sledgehammer down on people who they think are skirting the rules, let alone breaking laws.
[00:10:44] Leah: That's another thing. If Amazon understands that you are trying to misrepresent any of your information to them, that's an excellent reason for them to suspend your account. They don't want that kind of seller on their platform anymore. Some could argue that at certain point they didn't care, but at this point they don't want that kind of seller on their platform.
[00:11:03] Chris: And I think the sellers that employ some of these tricks don't understand that for certain things that surface in the media or public complaints, memes, anything that that really goes viral. Amazon wears as a badge of honor how many sellers they take out and suspend or how many listings they take down to show they're serious about buyer safety and buyer experience.
So you're playing straight into their hands because it makes them look good that they're suspending lots of people. Well, why make yourself one of those easy targets when you can clean it up, fix it now before a competitor reports you, before Amazon comes up with an online tool that catches you, educate yourself today, not down the road when there's a sweep and they get everybody.
[00:11:45] Leah: Right. And don't try to change your listing to make it look like something else. If you're trying to change it to make it actually correct. Oftentimes, you will have to create a new listing because there are certain attributes that if you change, then Amazon considers that to be an entirely different product because you know, it kind of is at that point.
[00:12:07] Chris: Yeah. Any questions on this? Direct them to Leah. No, I'm just kidding. I'll field a few of these as well. But this is a big Q4 theme and Amazon's serious about this stuff. Don't mess around. Let us know if you have any questions and thanks again for listening. We look forward to speaking with you again.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, the wonderful podcast created by myself, Chris McCabe and Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris to dive into the various wonderful problems that sellers face on Amazon listings taken down occasionally random messages from Amazon itself that are hard to read or understand and what to do about it. How to troubleshoot and best practices versus not so wonderful ideas that are sometimes floating out around there in the community, right?
[00:00:40] Leah: Yeah. I like to think of this as a 10 minute look into what we talk about all day long.
[00:00:45] Chris: Exactly. Exactly. And we've got a conference coming up very soon we'll be at Sell+Scale in Las Vegas.
And that got me thinking about so many business owners and sellers meet so many people, other sellers, third party services, others interested in running, selling, managing an Amazon business. How do you vet for expertise? What kinds of questions do you write for yourself before you go to certain, let's say boots for third party services, because there's an educational component at these shows, but then there's also a promotional component.
[00:01:19] Leah: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Chris: And I think some people don't necessarily prepare. They don't have time for it. They're not sure what to ask they figure, well, I'll just walk up to somebody's booth, hear what they have to say, listen to their pitch, and then I'll go to their competitor's booth and listen to the same thing.
I had this idea. I wanted to run by you get some feedback. I know you'll give me your very blunt assessment, but also it's worth discussing with sellers who listen to this podcast about how you examine the expertise level, but also maybe even a quick little test, like a litmus test for do these people know what they're talking about? Showing them your products as a brand owner. Hey, this is what we're trying to sell. Let's just say you're trying to sell more product, right? Market yourself better, rank higher. Let's keep it simple. Let's say you're speaking with listing optimization experts and there's a crowded field of them, right?
So you already know you have a lot of questions you have to ask. And you have to evaluate those answers. Don't you think it's a good idea to maybe show them what you sell? Give them a chance to say, Hey, this is just a few minutes of what I think you should do next. Given what you've told me about the product and given what the product is, and then kind of privately, you could take away whatever you've written down, whatever you saved from that interaction and vet it for compliance, did they give you a sales trick or tactic that might get you into trouble or might get the listing taken down? That's the step I think a lot of sellers are missing. They don't consider that either before they just run right in and do it. They might say, Hey, that sounds great. Let's just try it as an experiment. But do you really think they sit down before they implement it? Wondering if that might get them in a trouble, get a policy warning, get the listing suspended?
[00:03:04] Leah: I mean, obviously I'm biased because I see the people who get in trouble for their listing content so I assume a lot of people aren't checking it for compliance because I assume we'd had less cases if that weren't the case.
[00:03:17] Chris: But how do they check it? Is my question, because some people might just go to the provider website and look for some post that says, this is Amazon TOS compliant and they're like, oh great. It says it right here. They're they don't examine it.
[00:03:32] Leah: No. And I think a large part of it is that a lot of sellers don't know what they don't know. So it's, it's very easy to just listen to a sales pitch about how something is totally within the rules. And if you don't know that you don't know the rules, it's, it's very easy to just be like, yeah, sounds awesome.
So I think a lot of it does and sellers are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I think it, it comes down to the seller. The seller is ultimately responsible for making sure that things are done correctly. And I think particularly when it comes to product compliance, I don't know if it's necessarily fair to put product compliance on the copywriter's shoulders.
Product compliance is so vastly different for every product within every marketplace that I don't think it's fair for you to expect a copywriter or maybe not even the copywriter, maybe just one of the sales team at the conference--
[00:04:28] Chris: right.
[00:04:28] Leah: To know all of the rules related to the FDA and Health Canada and UKCA, that's very specialized information that you'd probably need to speak to like three different attorneys about, so expecting a copywriter to have that information just readily available at a conference is maybe asking too much.
[00:04:46] Chris: Or the person in the booth is there for promotional purposes they're not the person working on your account.
They might give you some ideas on who at their company might do it. But I don't know if I partially agree or somewhat disagree in terms of, I think it's a shared responsibility. Obviously the buck stops with the business owner. That's the way Amazon views it. That's the way we all have to view it.
But listing optimization again, using that as an example, You're not optimizing anything if the listing gets suspended. So they should also have that built into their due diligence in terms of marketing ideas and what they pitch you and what you can do to sell your product better, because you're not optimizing anything if you're getting ASINs suspended.
[00:05:27] Leah: Yeah. And I think certainly having an understanding of Amazon policy is important if you're providing any sort of service around Amazon. But when you're getting into the more complex legal issues, I do think it really is on sellers or on the brand owner, whatever you wanna call yourself.
It's really on you to make sure that you're getting your copy approved by somebody that is an expert in that area of compliance, and you're getting your packaging reviewed by an attorney that is an expert in that particular area, particularly if you're in a highly regulated space, like supplements or medical devices or anything like that. So I think, like you said, it's a combination effort, but I do think that if you're doing any sort of service within the Amazon space, that you definitely need to have some familiarity with Amazon's terms of service, because I mean, otherwise you're potentially selling people services that'll get them in trouble. And I mean, that's not fun for anybody plus it could lead to a lawsuit. You don't really wanna deal with that.
[00:06:27] Chris: And whether it's at on a phone call or at a conference, it's kind of the same concept of people are tempted to oversell their competencies, I think.
[00:06:34] Leah: Yeah. I also am a very firm believer in just because you're the best speaker doesn't mean you have the best knowledge or the best expertise. So just because a booth has like the best sales team doesn't mean that they're the best people for the job. And I think it's very important to be able to look past that and say, okay, is this person actually know what they're talking about or are they just telling me what I wanna hear?
[00:07:01] Chris: Look past the quality of the swag. You've gotta be able to look past that, right?
[00:07:06] Leah: Exactly.
[00:07:06] Chris: Not that it's not worthwhile for people to put more effort into what kinds of swag you get, because so many people are tempted to give the same old things but they're there for a reason, right? They're talking, talk is words. So you're like gravitating from a conversation to hiring them, to do something on your account. So that should open up a whole area of due diligence that you're spending time on and that's when you're really asking if you can't do it in a two, three minute chat at a booth or even on a short phone call when you're hiring them, that's when you're asking the meaty questions and you need to get meat in the answers, right? You can't just have things glossed over.
I think a lot of sellers, the psychology of it, go approach someone's website, somebody that talked to on the phone, somebody at a conference. With this idea already baked into their brains. This person's an expert on blank and I am not. So when I ask them a question, I'm assuming I'm going to get an expert answer back, or if I'm hiring them for a service on Amazon, they know that they have to play by Amazon's rules. It's Amazon's sandbox, and they have to go by those guidelines. Otherwise they're gonna be hurting me. Their customer, their client. And they don't wanna do that because I'm a new client.. So I'm assuming that they won't do that. By the way I was just using listing optimization as an example. I mean, this is communitywide for a wide variety of services.
[00:08:45] Leah: Yeah. And I think in particular, when it comes to Amazon policies, if somebody's telling you that something is TOS or if they're making claims about Amazon's policies, ask for their sources, I rarely, except maybe for clients that have worked with us for a long time and know that I know what I'm talking about. I rarely will say something about Amazon policy without providing a link to that policy and a quote about what I am talking about. If they can't do that. I mean, that's just like, you know, those Abraham Lincoln meme quotes that you see all over the internet, like you can put anything on a sticker and call it whatever you want, but it doesn't mean it's true.
[00:09:20] Chris: Got to fact check it.
[00:09:22] Leah: Right. You need sources. You need to check their references and you need to make sure that what they're saying is one true and two, that they actually understand what they're talking about and if they can't do that, if it's just because like, oh, everybody knows this. They probably don't know what they're talking about.
[00:09:36] Chris: Well, or just, if they've got a series of promotional testimonials somewhere that they've vetted. That's not enough. You have to know what questions to ask. The first part's on you, do some research before you even get there. Again, sticking with the conference part, know what you wanna ask, know what you have to ask.
So study up yourself, do some homework. Don't expect them to do the homework for you or to do it on the fly. And don't just approach a bunch of different people who do the same thing. Get their wide variety of answers.
[00:10:09] Leah: Don't just pick the cheapest ones.
[00:10:11] Chris: That's what I-- you stole my thunder.
[00:10:13] Leah: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you're gonna say something else.
[00:10:14] Chris: And then get evaluate like it's just a trial. That's what I really wanted to talk about today. Even people doing trials are getting damage on their accounts. You can't just say I'm gonna cut them off. If they do something bad. I mean, they might do something really bad in a really short amount of time.
[00:10:32] Leah: Or they're money back guarantee.
[00:10:34] Chris: Money back guarantee, all these things which you and I know, I mean the best example is why would you want to let an amateur take a crack at reinstating your suspended account just because there's a money back guarantee? If they're an amateur or if they're new, or if they're not seasoned vets of this area, why would it have any value to you to get your money back after they've screwed up your entire appeal?
[00:11:00] Leah: Right. No, absolutely. I think mentality wise, it's like, oh, well there is no risk because I get my money back. If something goes wrong. I don't think enough people think about. If somebody does something wrong on my account, here are all of the bad things that could happen, including an account suspension or including that listing being blocked or whatever the case may be.
[00:11:21] Chris: Right.
[00:11:21] Leah: Your inventory could get suck in immigration somewhere because whoever you hired to deal with that didn't know what they were doing.
[00:11:27] Chris: The risk is the permanent damage to your account.
[00:11:30] Leah: Right.
[00:11:30] Chris: So we shouldn't have to explain that there's no risk. I mean, there's no risk of your few hundred bucks for that month or whatever it was, of the service, but, I hope in the next year or so that people are asking us those kinds of questions too, that shows that they put deep thought into this and they wrote some stuff down before talking to us and then hopefully our answers, coincide with what they expected based on their research. And that's a rewarding interaction or they ask us follow up questions based on, oh, that's not what I heard because of A, B and C, and then that I think is a good process for vetting out real answers versus not, not so good answers because service providers, aren't going to promise to cover everything you ever do on Amazon. That's pretty unheard of in terms of anything that ever happens to your business, I will assume full responsibility for it, I guess, unless it's a full service agency that really puts into writing we do everything for you.
[00:12:31] Leah: But I mean, even if they take full responsibility, if you can't get your account reinstated, you're still suspended. Potentially without your money or your inventory. So, I mean, great if they'll pay you back for that, but you still no longer can sell at Amazon. I mean choose your level of risk that you're comfortable with, I guess.
[00:12:50] Chris: Yeah. In summary and conclusion, do some fact checking, Don't believe everything you read or hear.
[00:12:56] Leah: Surprisingly, Chris and I are telling you to do due diligence.
[00:12:59] Chris: yeah. Buyer beware.
[00:13:00] Leah: Our frequent listeners will be shocked that we're telling you to do your due diligence.
[00:13:05] Chris: Well, the reason we're even talking about this is we've seen the ugly outcomes. And we hear a lot of regret from people. We hear a lot of stories from people. I wish I had done that sooner, I wish I had talked to either us sooner or people who understood, let's say compliance, people who understood let's say the law better. It doesn't make sense to me personally. Maybe you're more charitable in your review of these stories, but it doesn't make any sense for people to just say, well, I hired a marketing company and they're not really knowledgeable about non-marketing stuff and that's where this all went wrong. Well, you're sharing the responsibility. Of course you have at least some of the responsibility, but you're sharing the responsibility with any company that takes over a task for you that you've hired to complete something, right? Because you have to consider all the things that could go wrong, especially when you sell on Amazon. I don't know. how we're almost in 2023, and we're still telling people how things can go wrong on Amazon.
[00:14:06] Leah: I like to blame the passive income gurus. Mostly because I just like to blame them for most things, because you know, easy but--
[00:14:12] Chris: Low hanging fruit.
[00:14:13] Leah: But it's the whole idea of selling on Amazon is easy. You can do it in your sleep. There's no work involved. You don't have to know anything and make millions of dollars. Like that's terrible advice and we're at this stage now where maybe 10 years ago, you could do that for a while, but we're not in that world. Anybody that's teaching you this, or if you pay them tens of thousands of dollars, they'll do everything for you and you'll just make millions of dollars without doing anything.
[00:14:40] Chris: Right. Four hours of work a week. I like that one. And hiring VAs to do everything for you without having any clue what they're doing or how well they know the work. So we will revisit this topic again I am sure as we get into the thick of Q4, we're going to see listing errors and compliance mistakes that result in bad things. Hopefully not, but if these things happen to you, you're looking to stem the tide or even identify warning signs before Amazon takes action. Ask myself, ask Leah or tune in again to our next Seller Performance Solutions podcast. Thanks Leah.
[00:15:14] Leah: Thanks Chris.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris, I'm here with Leah McHugh, expert extraordinaire on the category listing report. We've talked a lot about this in the context of abuse cases, right? People adding backend keywords to get listings flagged.
The pesticide example is the most common one you've seen. You've noticed some interesting absences, I guess, in the category listing report process. Is that fair to say? Or you would say it better, so I'm gonna kinda kick it over to you. in terms of what Amazon shows you for ASIN contributions and what that might mean when you're trying to fix something that's broken.
[00:00:49] Leah: Yeah. So we did a podcast on this just over a year ago and we were talking about how you can use the category listing report to see the live information on your listing. So if somebody is put abusive keywords in there, you can take a look and you can say, Hey, I didn't put this in there and this is probably why my listing is flagged for whatever it's flagged for.
Unfortunately, Shortly after we published that podcast, they changed the category listing reports, so now, instead of showing you the live information on your listing, it just shows you your contributions to that listing, which is a lot less useful in terms of making sure the correct information is on your listing because you know, I'm assuming you put the right information on your listing, but the category listing does not show you what other information other people have put on there now. So what used to be a really great way of checking all of your listings in one nice spreadsheet, where you could look at all of the information live on Amazon, and now it's just showing you what you put on there yourself, which hopefully you would already know anyway,
[00:01:47] Chris: Well that you hit on exactly why I wanted to talk about this today. Two things. One, some people don't know what's in their ASIN contributions because we ask them and they're either not sure. Or they say, like, we didn't put that in there. And it turns out that somebody did put that in there and they weren't aware of it.
[00:02:05] Leah: Well, yeah. I mean like if somebody on your team put it in there, yeah you're going to see that.
[00:02:08] Chris: Well, no, it could be a service that says we're gonna brush this up for you and they put the terms in without running it by the seller. But the alarming thing about this is of course, if you didn't put that in there, that means somebody put it in there.
Possibly just for the purposes of abuse to get your listing taken down. I mean, we're in the thick of Q4 here. This happens all the time.
[00:02:30] Leah: Right. But what I'm saying is you now can't see that on the category listing report.
[00:02:34] Chris: I know that hence my use of the word alarming. And so my question to you, yes. Initially, at least before we expand the conversation, is do you think people are just supposed to message different teams and Amazon saying we don't know where this came from.
We don't know what's going on. You guys have to look into it. And fix it because we didn't do this and it's wrong and it's crippling our listings and the category listing report won't show us what we need. Is that the position they're in?
[00:03:05] Leah: Well, so sometimes you can see it in Seller Central. It shows you the live information above your contribution in the back end of the listing. So sometimes you can see it there. Sometimes you can't because once they remove the listing from their catalog. So once the ASIN is blocked, what you see in seller central is not necessarily what Amazon's teams see on the listing when they look into it. Which is another problem because it means that when you make changes to your listing to try to get it reinstated, you have no way of knowing if those changes actually went through to the part that the team that can reinstate you is going to be looking at without calling catalog and asking them to check for you.
And the calling can take five minutes. Can take an hour and a half. Depends on who you get.
[00:03:52] Chris: Right? No, I liked your 78 minute catalog call the other day that you told me about.
[00:03:57] Leah: I have many of them.
[00:03:58] Chris: Yeah, I was just thinking, wow, you could have watched a short movie in that time, you know?
[00:04:02] Leah: Well, so another issue with that is that, you know, you can't just email catalog because they'll just send you whatever. And you have to say on the phone with them the entire time because their KPIs don't kick in as long as you are on the line. Yeah. So they can spend as much time as needed as long as you're on the call with them. But if it's just an email, they go back to their like however many minutes they have for a response. So you have to, you have to sit on the line the entire time while they try to check. Sometimes they have to ping a manager who isn't actually there and then you have to wait for them to respond. And then they go back and forth for a while, which is why it ends up taking 78 minutes.
[00:04:36] Chris: So you want to put your best man, best woman on this project. If it's not you. something can go wrong in that process and then you'll be back at square one and all that time was wasted.
[00:04:48] Leah: Well, and also sometimes you have to call more than once because sometimes you get somebody that has no idea what you're talking about.
[00:04:53] Chris: Well, do you think the change was made for less transparency instead of more transparency, do you think it was because of abuse?
Do you think that they didn't want you to have this cookie crumb trail back to some crazy thing that happened to you?
[00:05:08] Leah: I don't know. I actually think that what it used to be a really great tool for dealing with abuse and cutting it off before it became a major problem. Now it's just not as, I mean, it's useful in terms of like an overview of the information that you want on your listings.
I don't know if it was, I don't know. I struggle with the did Amazon do this intentionally thing? Because I'm always very cynical.
[00:05:32] Chris: Well, we don't talk a lot about the Amazon. Why? Because you could spend forever asking these questions and half the time, those are questions that Amazon's not even willing, let alone able to answer.
[00:05:42] Leah: My honest opinion is that this had absolutely nothing to do, because the team that makes that report is not at all related to the abuse team. So my assumption is that whatever catalog team was in charge of that report just decided to make this change and no other team was involved.
[00:06:00]Chris: No, of course they're not intimately connected with the abuse teams, but there could have been an instance or several where they said, look, we've got sellers throwing this stuff back in our faces and they're using data in this report.
[00:06:13] Leah: Yeah. But that would make their job easier.
[00:06:14] Chris: We already know Amazon wants to make their life more difficult with rampant inefficiency and they don't wanna make things easier for themselves. The selfish motives that we counted on for years haven't panned out.
[00:06:26] Leah: My guess is that it was just another reason that had nothing to do with any of this and nobody thought about that it would have an effect on this. They also moved it, which is good to know. So it is now under inventory reports, not reports and some people have access to it immediately. If you don't see it listed under your inventory reports, you have to request access with seller support, and then they usually get back to you in an hour and you have access to it for seven days, but some people have access to it automatically, I don't know why.
[00:06:55] Chris: So that's one key tip. What else are the main things that people have to focus on or think about?
[00:07:02] Leah: Well, I mean, those are the main things. So the category listing report is a good first step to check your listings because maybe you or your team did put something on there that you didn't realize at the time was gonna be a problem.
So certainly a good place to start. But you do need to also talk to catalog, look in the back end of seller central and also look at enhanced brand content, I feel like that's an area that a lot of sellers forget to check when things get flagged on their listing and global selling. So if you have global selling turned on for your listings, Whatever you do in one marketplace is gonna filter over to another marketplace.
Particularly if you have a highly regulated product and you don't want that to happen, you need to make sure that that is turned off on your listings. Otherwise, no matter what you delete in Canada, your stuff from the US is still gonna filter through. So you need to make sure that's turned off when you're having any issues.
I mean, generally speaking, if you have very compliance heavy products. I would recommend not turning on global selling for your listing content, but especially if you're having an issue with your listing content, you need to turn that off while you try to figure this out and spend lots of time talking to catalog.
[00:08:08] Chris: Yeah. And it doesn't help that there's confusion sometimes around, is this a technical thing? People love to use the word glitch that sell on Amazon, and they don't always know which team to go to. So some people are just opening seller support cases, hoping for the best. I'm not sure we see that a lot.
[00:08:24] Leah: I've also had quite a few cases as a ghost content, which is what Amazon calls it.
[00:08:29] Chris: Ghost content, let's define that please.
[00:08:32] Leah: Where you have no enhanced brand content associated with that ASIN in your account, like you checked your account, there's no enhanced brand content on that listing in that marketplace.
And then you call catalog and they're like, oh yeah, we can see it. This ghost enhanced brand content from before and then they need to manually remove it because obviously you can't delete something that you don't see on your account.
[00:08:49] Chris: Exactly. The unfriendly ghost, keep an eye out for unfriendly ghosts. And certainly if you have any questions about category listing reports, calling catalog. Guess what-- best person to talk to is not me, but Leah McHugh, I've seen a few category listing reports. She's seen a few thousand, so, she will be the person who would be happy to answer all of your questions.
He's Like
[00:09:12] Leah: don't email me about this, please.
[00:09:15] Chris: Certainly feel free to send these along to me or to come through the e-commerce Chris site. They will, I am very confident, find a good home with Leah. So, thank you for listening again. Thanks Leah. For all your wonderful insights. And if anyone has questions on this, let us know.
We will see you next time on Seller Performance Solutions. Thanks, bye.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers. I'm Leah McHugh from ecommerceChris and I am here with the ecommercechris, Chris McCabe.
[00:00:18] Chris: Hello.
[00:00:19] Leah: Hi, how are you?
[00:00:21] Chris: I'll be better once we have this conversation about barcodes and GS1 and GTIN exemptions, because this has been on the uptick, we've heard a lot of people asking us questions and many sellers don't seem to understand this too clearly.
[00:00:33] Leah: Yeah. I mean, they changed the policy seven years ago now or eight?
[00:00:40] Chris: And you're the perfect person to ask because we've heard you in the past referred to--
[00:00:45] Leah: As a fear monger?
[00:00:47] Chris: Nope. You didn't know I was gonna say this before we started recording as the barcode babe.
You've been referred as that..
[00:00:55] Leah: I have? Was this by you?
[00:00:56] Chris: You knew this. Okay. Everybody she's pretending not to know this. And I would like to add to this, the GTIN goddess, GTIN exemption goddess.
[00:01:06] Leah: I feel like only you have said this. But okay, sorry GS1.
[00:01:11] Chris: So a lot of sellers listings are suspended, they get policy warnings, listing violations. What is going on would you say?
[00:01:20] Leah: So the policy changed like seven or eight years ago at this point. I can't exactly remember when, which said that Amazon checks the authenticity of your GTIN against the GS1 database. And if the information there doesn't match the information on your detail page, they may suspend the listing. So they said that seven or eight years ago, didn't really enforce it. We did see, you know, in the last few years, people having trouble listing, creating new listings with non GS1 UPCs, but in terms of listings are already in the catalog, we really didn't see a whole lot of enforcement there. It's really only in the last six months or so where we've started to see more listings being flagged for not matching the GS1 database and the thing that we've been seeing the most of is actually people that have GS1 UPCs that are having their listings taken down for potentially not matching the database, which is kind of funny considering how many there are that don't.
[00:02:18] Chris: Let's just stop there for a second. So what's the initial attempt to resolve that, that you're doing with people?
[00:02:25] Leah: Well, so it's not what I'm doing, it's what people who come to us have already tried. So you get a notification, it tells you to submit proof that your EPC matches. So it wants you to submit your GS1 certificate and it wants you to submit proof of the relationship between your company and the brand if it's not the same entity. Normally in The form of a trademark registration of the brand name by your company. That's the easiest proof to provide also like in doing business as certification whatever, whatever the case may be on your particular account, but the path they give you through seller support and generally what ends up happening is that they just keep sending you the same notification in response to what you've submitted, asking you for the same information that you've already just given them.
. But what I have found is if you are brand registered, You can simply submit a technical issue ticket through the brand registry team, asking them to whitelist either the prefix or the UPC. If you only bought individual UPCs for your brand, provide them with the GS1 certificate, provide them with the proof of relationship in the form of a trademark registration, whatever, and then brand registry can whitelist that and then your as your ASIN gets reinstated.
[00:03:38] Chris: I think their posts on the forums or threads that we've seen, or maybe Facebook groups, I've noticed a lot of sellers go straight to this idea of I have a saving grace it's the GTIN exemption, or there's been posts on LinkedIn about GTIN exemption, GTIN exemption. So maybe just define that and then is that significant or not within this conversation?
[00:03:58] Leah: So you can apply for a GTIN exemption where you are essentially telling Amazon this product does not have a GTIN and I would still like to list it on Amazon and they allow you to list that using a different identifier, not a GTIN and so then you don't have to get a GS1 GTIN. The thing is, is that the people that are talking about this right now are talking about it on existing listings that already have a GTIN associated with it.
You can't apply for an exemption., If you've already associated a GTIN to that ASIN. Amazon won't retroactively grant you an exemption. If the products aren't listed and the product doesn't have a have a GTIN, then you can apply for an exemption, but there's no retroactively going back and being like JK, this doesn't really have a GTIN.
[00:04:43] Chris: Right.
[00:04:43] Leah: Pretend like that never happened. That's not how the process works and that's not how their system works. Like their system just won't even let them do that. So a lot of people are trying to get around this by just--
[00:04:54] Chris: It's a work around, right?
[00:04:55] Leah: But it's not a work around, cause it doesn't work.
[00:04:57] Chris: It's a would be workaround, I should say.
[00:04:59] Leah: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Chris: And that's I think why we've seen LinkedIn and other posts blowing up about, Hey, I've got a solution for this. This is kind of detail oriented stuff and there's no quick shortcut. I mean, from what I've observed, I know you're the expert on this, but from what I've seen in all the chatter, people are trying these things, they're not working. And then I saw people were like writing to the Jeff @ Amazon like, Hey, you guys are stopping me from fixing this. Now I can't sell, now I can't get this reinstated. Is there no solution at all? So, you know, runs the gamut of opening seller support cases to emails, to Amazon execs, to writing to Jeff, to executive seller relations.
[00:05:41] Leah: I think it's a combination of this is badly understood by a lot of sellers, and it's also badly understood by Amazon. So Amazon really hasn't given great processes for going through this.
And even the fact that they're just looking at the ownership information of the prefix doesn't make any sense because the ownership information in GS1 is at the company level. You're selling you're listing and selling your product at the brand level. So what they really should be looking at is the brand information, because lots of companies own more than one brand. But you still have to register within GS1 under your company name, which may not be the same as your brand names.
So the fact that that's how they're even looking at this information, doesn't make sense when they have a full integration with the GS1 database. But not even only that, I've also seen ASINs that are flagged that the company information does match the brand information and it still gets flagged because it just isn't being reviewed properly.
So I don't know what tools they've built to do this, but there are definitely bugs and they also clearly have not built out the SOP before they started enforcing this, because it seems like support don't actually know what to do when you send them the information to resolve it. Brand registry so far has been the only team that I have seen actually resolve this. Which is surprising, cause I don't usually say that about the brand registry team.
[00:06:58] Chris: No, but I could see how they would be more likely to understand it than other teams.
[00:07:02] Leah: No, and it makes sense that they would be the team to do it, but nowhere when you're told this, are you told to do it through brand registry?
[00:07:09] Chris: And you at conferences, for example, this year's prosper show, you did a presentation with GS1.
[00:07:16] Leah: Yeah, Michelle Covey.
[00:07:17] Chris: Right, and you've talked to them about this. Are there any other solutions out there that that could be proposed? That could be attempted?
[00:07:27] Leah: I think on GS1's part, they've already come to the table here. The fact that you can even buy individual UPCs now is a huge thing for Amazon sellers. Previously, you had to buy a prefix and that included a certain number of codes and it was potentially cost prohibitive for new sellers.
So I mean, GS1 are already working to make this easier for sellers. I think they have been trying to work with Amazon to create an SOP for sellers to better understand this. At this point, I think the ball is in Amazon court. GS1 has done what they can do, but they can't make Amazon systems work better.
So, they have the ability to add brand information to a UPC or a GTIN in their database. That information is there if you're filling it in, Amazon just isn't necessarily looking at that information. They're just looking at the ownership information, which then means you have to show proof of what the relationship between the company and the brand is.
[00:08:17] Chris: Well, inevitably you will get a mountain of questions from people, whether they hear this podcast or not, but anyone has questions on this. Leah's is the person to go to, make sure you ask for her, not me because her brain can somehow understand all of this source material. And I can only grasp chunks and pieces of it at a time.
I think it's just an interesting, and in some ways unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative headache that probably could have, and should have been addressed years ago. But as with all things Amazon. They go into it when they need to, when they have to, when they must.
[00:08:51] Leah: Right. And so I 100% agree that they should be checking the GS1 database to make sure that they do match because a lot of people don't understand that these prefixes are used for more than just UPCs or EINs, they're used across all different sorts of logistics within the supply chain and they're international so you want that information to match across the board. So what they are trying to do is the right way forward.
[00:09:19] Chris: Right.
[00:09:20] Leah: They just have never really figured out how to do it.
[00:09:23] Chris: Implementation.
[00:09:24] Leah: Right. Also the fact that like for years, they were suggesting that you use non GS1 resold UPCs on your listing doesn't really help the situation. Like they literally trained their support staff to direct people to resold codes prior to their policy change. So that does not help the situation.
[00:09:42] Chris: No way we're talking about resold barcodes on this episode.
[00:09:44] Leah: Yeah, no, it's already too long.
[00:09:46] Chris: We've touched on that before. Any questions about barcodes, UPCs, GS1, GTIN exemptions, Leah is the person to go to in summary. Not me. But thanks so much for taking people through this. I know it's kind of cumbersome, but it's important, necessary for people to understand it. And I'm sure we will revisit this topic again. So yeah, speak to you soon. Thank you.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm your favorite Amazon community host Chris McCabe, and I'm here with Leah McHugh.
[00:00:14] Leah: Oh, what am I? You're the favorite? And I'm just here. Thanks.
[00:00:18] Chris: Co-host I should have said my bad, my mistake. Forgive me. I'm a little rattled from some of the crazy things we've seen lately where Amazon keeps people's money.
It could be an active seller, mostly suspended sellers, contact us and we'll get into that in a bit. But I thought I would start with some of the mystery reserves that some active sellers, sometimes sellers who have sold for years and years, that doesn't seem to count for anything anymore, but they just don't get the full disbursement.
There's a reserved amount. We're familiar with concepts of temporary reserves, reserves pending reviews of particular ASIN sales or policy warnings. We've seen that off and on over the last couple of years, but this failure to disperse funds without explaining why has become rather widespread. Wouldn't you say?
[00:01:09] Leah: Yeah, I think we started seeing it what, two years ago. But we're certainly seeing it more lately than we have say in the last six months.
[00:01:17] Chris: And we're talking about chunks of money that are visible in your account, they just don't get sent. Sometimes this goes on for weeks. Sometimes it goes on for months, emails that some of our seller contacts, some of our clients have sent, were met with messages back that just said, oh, we're reviewing this.
Thanks for your note, we'll get back to you. Nothing happens. The money's never sent, if you bug them again via disbursement appeals queue or other methods sometimes as well. They'll just send the same message saying we're still reviewing this meanwhile weeks or months go by. They have your money, you don't have your money. It's a problem across a couple of levels, right? One is you don't have that money to do with, as you see fit to get more inventory, to invest in marketing, to fund your business. But also sellers are concerned, you know, does this mean something's wrong with my account health that they haven't adequately explained to me?
The account health dashboard, they're kind of monkeying with it. It's still kind of unclear like what your real status is. They mentioned this account health rating. There really hasn't been much pop behind that story since it came out, right?
[00:02:26] Leah: I've actually yet to see it rolled out on any account. The new and improved account health dashboard, it all looks the same to me as it has for the last few years so far. They made the announcement maybe a little earlier than they should have on that one. But I think the biggest difference that I'm seeing with these is that, you know, two years ago during COVID, we were seeing these sorts of funds holds on those like higher risk, extremely high volume products during COVID so things like masks and hand sanitizers and cleansing wipes and things like that. Now it seems to be across any product category, it doesn't really seem to be a pattern as to what accounts they're holding these funds on. And I think that's confusing and concerning.
[00:03:11] Chris: That's true. We initially saw it. I don't know if they were just getting their feet wet in this process to see who barked back or struggled to get their money again. Right now we're just exclusively talking about active accounts and live ASINs where people are making orders.
Sometimes these numbers are really climbing. I mean, we hear from some high volume sellers and we're not talking about thousands or tens of thousands of dollars anymore. We're talking about six figure sums.
[00:03:37] Leah: Sometimes we had a few like multimillion dollar sums.
[00:03:41] Chris: Yes. some seven figure sums.
[00:03:44] Leah: That's a lot of money to maybe get at some point in time in the future.
[00:03:49] Chris: And I remember there were some sellers who were suspended, but they were reinstated. They worked with us, we got them reinstated and you're supposed to get all your money that whatever was frozen or held by Amazon until the suspension was resolved, you are entitled to all of it.
[00:04:03] Leah: Right.
[00:04:03] Chris: And they would disperse the entire amount. So some of those sellers just didn't see a dime of that money for whatever reason. Technical glitch. Somebody didn't do their job. Somebody forgot to do something, but it would take weeks for them to acknowledge it so that all of that money could be in your pocket.
It's in somebody else's pocket, it's working, you know, whether it's in an interest bearing account or not, it's working it's magic for them, not for you. And all of those sellers eventually got their money, but some of them had been struggling to get it for weeks or months before they even came to us. Right. So just imagine. The pain points created by a system where disbursements are kinda, maybe, sorta of sent to you when it's supposed to be?
[00:04:46] Leah: Yeah. I feel like there's like a bunch of economic majors inside of Amazon who are like future value of money. We gotta get the money as fast as we can and keep it as long as we can.
[00:04:55] Chris: Keep it as long as possible, right? It's not like it's indicated anywhere that they're keeping it in escrow for you.
[00:05:01] Leah: No, of course not.
[00:05:03] Chris: Or that you get a chunk of the interest generated by that cash that sits within their accounts all summer. None of that's explained none of that is visible.
[00:05:11] Leah: Right.
[00:05:12] Chris: And then as you know, we've got clients right now who are active in selling and happy in other ways, but they're just not getting the full disbursement. So it's something that's unfolding still. We've seen different permutations of it, we're concerned about it. We definitely want to hear your stories if you're listening to us talk about it today, because now we're starting to hear that people are going to arbitration just to get paid funds that they could have gotten just in the normal course of disbursements and of course we know suspended sellers that don't even wanna sell, their so frustrated, so fed up with Amazon, they're like, just pay me my money. I don't need the account back. Sometimes they've tried to appeal it. They tell us they've sent numerous appeals. They don't want the account anymore. They don't wanna appeal anymore. They're they're giving up, but they expect to get their funds at the 90 day mark and they don't receive it.
And I hasten to add, this is not just people accused of selling counterfeit, like in the old days. It's not just people accused of violations of the code of conduct policy but as you and I have spoken offline and on. The code of conduct policy is ever widening to include more behaviors.
[00:06:18] Leah: Yep.
[00:06:19] Chris: And I don't think we're conspiratorial or conspiracy theorists saying that there seems to be a benefit, a financial benefit to Amazon to make that code of conduct policy as wide as possible, because that means they can keep more funds permanently for people who are accused of potentially what, how do they phrase it? Illicit fraudulent or deceptive behavior?
[00:06:42] Leah: Yeah. Well, that's the thing. If they're not suspended, they don't even get that verbiage, it's just being held.
[00:06:47] Chris: I know you don't even get that message.
[00:06:49] Leah: Right.
[00:06:49] Chris: You don't even get the pleasure of being accused of something if you're not suspended.
[00:06:54] Leah: I think I've said this in a podcast before, but I'm still curious how this money is accounted for in Amazon's books. Because we see so much of this happening that this has to be millions, if not billions of dollars that's being held at any given time.
[00:07:12] Chris: Right.
[00:07:13] Leah: What is the line item in their books for these? I'm so curious about this. Any forensic accountants hit me up.
[00:07:20] Chris: Creative accounting that must rival the WeWork IPO that failed a couple years ago because we've, for the duration of this podcast, which is, I believe 18 months, we've been talking about this off and on. So that's 18 months, I would say it's two, two and a half years stretching back into maybe 2019 end of. So that's a number that's in the hundreds of millions easily. Probably over a billion at this point which I suppose if you spread it out over enough quarters, but I don't know how it's accounted for.
[00:07:53] Leah: I mean, honestly, it's probably something really boring that just says like holding or something, but I'm just very curious how this is in as a line item in their books because at this point it's so widespread that it has to be a significant number on their spreadsheets.
[00:08:11] Chris: Right.. And I can clarify, we're talking about some of these funds are ultimately dispersed weeks or months later, to active sellers, the suspended sellers, often the money is permanently held, so it's a mixture of funds.
[00:08:24] Leah: Unless they get the account reinstated.
[00:08:25] Chris: Unless they get reinstated, then they should get all of it. But so murky and so bereft of accountability, such a hard topic to talk about, because so much of this is unseen but we've seen the results, which is people saying I never got my cash, right? So there's like a straightforward piece, which is like, well, you guys owe me 50 grand and you're never sending it.
They've created this independent disbursement appeals process. A lot of people go through that once they're deciding not to appeal for reinstatement anymore, they just appeal for the funds. A lot of those dead end, the same way account suspension appeals do where they stop answering you, or they take forever to answer you.
The silence means they keep your money, so you either continue to escalate that and push for your money or at least an explanation beyond copy and paste, generic messaging, or you go into arbitration, right? We've talked to a couple attorneys working with sellers who are just trying to get the funds who are struggling. I think the attorneys who do arbitration cases probably pretty consistently, we don't do arbitration, we're not attorneys, but they're baffled by this. Like how can you just justify keeping the money just because you're saying, Hey, you violated our terms of service. You agreed to let us keep your money if we decided you were suspension worthy. Is that really the end of the story? You know, is there some other way that aside from going to arbitration that you can just get paid.
[00:09:52] Leah: Well, and even if it is the case of counterfeit goods. Sure, you're not supposed to get profits from selling counterfeit goods, but I'm pretty sure that money is supposed to go back to the customers and/or the brand that was counterfeited. I don't think it was just intended to like, oh, well the marketplace just keeps that. That doesn't make any sense.
[00:10:11] Chris: I guess that's an FTC question-- I don't know. Is that an FTC question?
[00:10:14] Leah: Actually I don't know who what would be a question too, someone in the commerce division?
[00:10:19] Chris: Right, commerce version of the government. The sellers that told us they had contacted the FTC, I think some of them might have gotten dispersed if they took their FTC complaint ID and took it back to Amazon to show them that they were doing something else to try to get their money back and maybe if it's just not worth the hassle or if it's a lower, lower than threshold amount of money, maybe Amazon just disperses at that point to get rid of it. I'm not sure.
[00:10:45] Leah: Well, that's a thing. Surely it must be cheaper for them to just give you your money than to keep going to arbitration over and over again?
[00:10:52] Chris: Well, my theory on that is that they must know somebody's run some numbers, did some data analysis, they must know a certain amount of sellers just don't go to arbitration.
[00:11:02] Leah: That's fair. Yeah. Kind of like with insurance companies, they figured out the minimum amount that they can give you for you to probably just leave it alone.
[00:11:09] Chris: Right. Or just don't come back for their money. Maybe they were like, well, Amazon said I was guilty and I guess I didn't follow the policies. You know, maybe the sellers start, in a stockholm syndrome style, begin agreeing with Amazon. Like, yep, you're right. You get to keep my money. Most people want their cash because if they're not doing Amazon, they wanna move on with another business or just try to recoup whatever funds they can to sustain themselves financially and pay their employees. But I've been surprised over the last couple of years, we've heard from a lot of people who just said, well, they kept my 60,000 and I had another business going that was off Amazon.
A lot of people have off Amazon sales that they do.
[00:11:48] Leah: Right.
[00:11:48] Chris: And they just focus their energies there and they just give up. So Amazon must be expecting sellers to have thin skins or to accept being pushed around and to just give up.
[00:12:01] Leah: Yeah, I mean, I have heard from many sellers who stopped selling, who were like I have never slept as well as I slept after I stopped selling it on Amazon.
[00:12:09] Chris: Right.
[00:12:10] Leah: They're like no waking up with anxiety of what I'm gonna see when I open my email.
[00:12:15] Chris: We talked to a client who said that many times, and then they were reinstated and then all of a sudden they were like, oh, we're back on Amazon, we're back doing everything we were doing before, not what they were suspended for, but back doing high level of sales within their categories.
We can kind of wrap this up with just conclusion amazement on my part, conclusive amazement of some of these brands are big, some of them have been around for a long time, and I don't understand why Amazon just expects these people to roll over and say, yeah, go ahead and keep 25 grand out of every disbursement for as long as you want, I'm gonna keep selling as much, expanding, launching new SKUs. Like why doesn't Amazon understand that they're killing the motivation of a brand to sell more on their platform and potentially to sell way more than the amount they're holding. Right?
[00:13:10] Leah: Well, and in some ways, so it's almost worse to have them hold your money while you're actively selling than while you're suspended because you still have to keep everything going. You still have to purchase inventory, you still have to pay people. You still have to focus all of your resources on those sales on Amazon.
But meanwhile, you're not getting any of the cash flow from those sales on Amazon. So in some ways, I mean, obviously it's terrible if you're suspended and you're also not getting your money, but in some ways it's harder if you're actively selling and your funds are being held, because how are you supposed to keep everything going if you don't have the cash flow?
[00:13:44] Chris: Yeah, some of the smaller brands we work with, their cash flow is severely impacted, but also just--
[00:13:48] Leah: Cash flow is tough in eCommerce, just in general.
[00:13:50] Chris: I know. Supply chain issues, importing product from overseas, all the different things that can go wrong, that you need to reserve financial resources for, but also larger brands, even for selfish reasons, you'd think Amazon would believe this is a large brand, they're not gonna give up. They're going to hire an attorney to take us to arbitration, which is going to cost us administratively, financially, whatever it's going to be. Another headache on top of everything else. And also we are losing sales from that brand because they're not going to sell as much as they could, because they're afraid that at any moment we could swoop in and take their money and not explain why.
So the payments guys and the brand expansion, marketplace development people who probably don't talk at all, anyway, need to get on the same page, are clearly not on the same page because it's tough to have a category manager, expanding revenue within their product range or category if payments people are just sort of arbitrarily saying, Hey, this came to us from S team level executives or came down from on high and they want us to hold money longer. And we don't a hundred percent know why?
[00:14:56] Leah: Unfortunately, the category managers, at least in my experience, don't really take into account how this impacts their growing of the category.
They tend to focus more on let's add more products and let's get you to spend more on ads. And don't really like to talk about the actual practical sides of how to grow a brand on Amazon. If Amazon is holding your money.
[00:15:18] Chris: Well, we've talked to some, we've been on some calls with category managers at Amazon and clients and the category managers definitely understand when your top selling listing is down.
[00:15:27] Leah: Well, they just don't have any like way of helping you.
[00:15:32] Chris: Yeah. I mean, they might try to say that they're going to communicate with internal teams, they might try to create a ticket. They might say, Hey, look, I'm gonna try to move this along for you with an internal escalation, but it's very occasional, I would say.
So in any event, if you're having trouble with this stuff, we're still kind of amazed by it all. It's concerning. So if you have a large amount that's being held, you're not sure when you're going to get it, it's definitely something you don't wanna sit back and wait and continually read these messages that they're reviewing and reviewing and reviewing, especially when they don't really say what they're reviewing or why it's taking so long.
Leah, I'm sure we'll talk about this topic again.
[00:16:11] Leah: Yep.
[00:16:13] Chris: Thanks.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers- welcome to the Seller Performance Solutions podcast, I am Leah McHugh and I am here with eCommerceChris, Chris McCabe.
[00:00:14] Chris: Hello
[00:00:15] Leah: Hi
[00:00:17] Chris: Got a wacky topic today. Would you say, or what are we referring to this as?
[00:00:22] Leah: I don't know. We, we have, again, differing opinions on this one for a change.
So, we're specifically talking about the unblock team, which is a new team that people have been hearing from. Well, actually, I'll let you start. And then I will give my two sense.
[00:00:37] Chris: Right. Freshly referred to unblock. This could be anecdotal by one of the team members or reps at Amazon that we saw sending emails to one of our clients saying, Hey, we saw that you had tried to appeal this in the past and you're still suspended. I'm jumping in to help you. I mean, this is what the account health services team was supposed to be doing. This person referred to themselves as the unblock team.
[00:01:04] Leah: We are the unblocked team.
[00:01:06] Chris: We are the lollipop Guild. No, we're the unblocked team. They announce themselves. I don't know if that was anecdotal or if they were using jargon.
We see a lot of that with Amazon. Sometimes they use internal terms with external parties in writing and emails, which is sort of interesting sometimes entertaining and amusing.
[00:01:24] Leah: Yeah, at least for us, probably not for the sellers.
[00:01:26] Chris: Yeah. One possible explanation is that we've seen different messages sometimes in the UK versus US or Europe versus US. That could be one reason why it was referred to as the unblock team. But we did see that in writing in the message. We don't know a hundred percent exactly how that differs from the account health services team, because when you call account health services and you say, Hey, I either need a plan of action and I haven't appealed yet. What do I do? They're supposed to help you out and guide you in terms of how you put a POA, a plan of action together, what to do, what not to do, how long it should be, style format, whatever. That hasn't gone so well, as you've probably heard us say about account health In this podcast, on my articles, on my site. Account health reps, if you call seven times in one day, will probably give you seven different answers. Doesn't seem to be a lot of oversight or quality assurance on that team. Personally, I've been very vocal about this just because I've been on, I would say maybe between 500 and 750 of these calls with clients, maybe up upwards of a thousand by now. So inconsistent so many mixed messages in terms of what they can share with you, what they can tell. What's a big secret that they have to keep to themselves, even if it's germane to your appeals process.
[00:02:37] Leah: Well, in an all fairness to account health, half the time, the information that they're supposed to get from seller performance just isn't there for them to see.
[00:02:44] Chris: Right, right. I mean, I could go on and on, but perhaps this unblock team is there to shore them up because it's just been a failed experiment with account health. We occasionally hear from sellers who say, you know what? I was at zero with what a POA is and they took me from, you know, zero to 50% understanding in one or two calls, which is great.
I mean, if you're doing this yourself, you're not hiring out consultants like us to full project you through this process and you can get that done by yourself, power to you. And that's wonderful because you don't spend money on consultants. You get back to selling, how long it takes you is kind of another story, because you don't want to have 10, 12, 14 calls with account health before you can get one plan of action successfully reviewed or accepted, but the unblock team or whatever, they're calling it internally or whatever, we're going to refer to this as in the future, hopefully will fill in some missing pieces that the account health reps don't have.
[00:03:40] Leah: Actually, I have a question for you before I give my somewhat jaded opinion on all of this.
[00:03:43] Chris: Yes.
[00:03:44] Leah: Have you had anybody actually ask account health about the unblock team? Like, do they even know what you're talking about if you ask them?
[00:03:50] Chris: And I have a good answer for that because we have a small sample size so far, it's only a few people that have brought this to our attention. I saw it posted in a couple Facebook groups and people kicked it around in the forums and that's great. We need a larger sample size before we can say how useful this will be. In terms of asking account health reps about it. I haven't personally done that yet.
[00:04:10] Leah: I'd just be curious if they even knew what we were talking about.
[00:04:13] Chris: No, I'm almost certain that some of our clients have done it, just in the course of calling account health on their own or sellers that have contacted us, but haven't hired us for whatever reason, if they've pursued it themselves, I'm sure one or two of them have brought them up.
So, I'm keeping an eye on that for the next August into September heading into Q4, because maybe this is a Q4 initiative. Amazon loves to roll this stuff out July and August, right?
[00:04:37] Leah: Sure.
[00:04:37] Chris: And hopefully, I mean, we said this about account health and we were dramatically disappointed. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
[00:04:45] Leah: Well, and that kind of leads into my jaded opinion..
[00:04:48] Chris: We're ready for your 2 cents now it's been five or six minutes.
[00:04:51] Leah: So, I hope that this is an amazing new team. That's going to be able to do all of the things that all of the other teams we're supposed to have been doing for the last decade.
[00:04:59] Chris: Right.
[00:04:59] Leah: But I've seen this with other teams where brand registry has little internal teams that, you know, have their own name, like beam or whatever and it sounds all well and good. And then they can't do anything more than the rest of the team. And my theory is that there're small betas that then don't get the resources needed to actually be successful. So then they're like, well, that beta failed and they just go back to doing it the way they've been doing it forever. Right. And you either never hear from that team again, or that team suddenly doesn't have power to do anything more than the main team that they were a part of to begin with.
[00:05:32] Chris: Sure. Brand registry is a great example.
[00:05:34] Leah: And I hope that I'm wrong.
[00:05:35] Chris: Right. We're trying to maintain an optimistic, positive outlook. It's difficult in the Amazon space because we've been disappointed so many times, but there is, you know, a silver lining in the cloud here. Maybe what's been missing for the last couple of years from account health will be provided or augmented by this unblock team.
[00:05:55] Leah: Also, radical idea, maybe instead of making new teams just fix the teams that aren't working.
[00:06:01] Chris: Yep. You, you stole my next point, which was why can't we just fix account health reps, train them better, audit their work. Maybe they could listen in on a few of their calls. I know in the beginning, account health AHS managers were listening in and auditing quality assurance on those calls. Clearly that's either entirely gone away or they consider that team to be in a cruising altitude, and they don't need it, or they are auditing and doing some quality assurance and it's just totally ineffective.
Either way, some of the account health calls, without belaboring this point further, that I've been on in the last, I would say several months, some of them have been 100% waste of time where I don't even think they were operating in good faith. They were just like, Hey, nothing here. Can't see it. Did you actually look, are you taking the time to do it? If no one's looking over their shoulder, if no one's examining the quality of their work, if everyone's too busy.
[00:06:55] Leah: Well, and if they're solely judged on how quickly they get through the case work.
[00:06:59] Chris: They can stay on a case for minutes on end and I don't think they're being pushed. They weren't originally being pushed to do these calls quickly. Eventually somebody's got them on a clock, right? The old basketball shot clock, but they do take some time. It's just that if they keep putting you on hold and they keep casting about for answers and they keep asking a colleague and they keep looking at your annotations and there's nothing there.
They scramble for answers. They make stuff up. That's what offends me the most is sometimes they're clearly grasping for answers. They're either badly trained and they don't know where to look or they just start making things up.
[00:07:34] Leah: Well, they're put in a bad position where they're supposed to be the team that you go to for information and then they aren't given the information so they're put in this position where they have to say something but they have no information to go on.
[00:07:45] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying it's necessarily each individual reps fault, they're between a rock and a hard place. And we acknowledge that. But at the same time when they see no annotations, when there's no evidence that a plan of action's been reviewed, I mean, zero, nothing there, which we hear, what 33% of the time now?
[00:08:01] Leah: Yeah, you deal with account health more than I do.
[00:08:03] Chris: So, yeah. I mean, seller performance isn't being monitored. Isn't being audited.
No, one's really quality assurance on them either. So if neither team has quality assurance, then that means everyone's left to their own devices and that's why they can get away with just telling you whatever they feel like telling you. I think it's sometimes a knee-jerk response based on what they've seen all day long on all these other failed appeals that don't have any evidence of a real review by seller performance.
So the unblock team, this is what I'm building up to for the last two minutes, the unblock team, I'm wondering if they're like stealth secret seller performance investigators, dun dun dun.
[00:08:44] Leah: Because seller performance definitely has time to do things.
[00:08:47] Chris: No, but or are they hybrid account health and seller performance, but seller performance historically has never been public facing, never gets on the phone with you. I did know a couple people that I worked with back at Amazon who worked on, like you said, beta pilots. Where they would get on the phone.
[00:09:04] Leah: And then they're like, this is terrible. And then they don't wanna do it anymore.
[00:09:06] Chris: No, I mean, she told me we're not using names here, she told me she would talk to people for like 20 minutes about why she had rejected their plan of action.
[00:09:15] Leah: We did used to get calls from executive seller relations occasionally. There were certain executive seller relations people who would call than send a template.
[00:09:23] Chris: Right. Few and far between, these were short term things. Sometimes they'd even acknowledge like, yeah, it looks like we kind of got our wires crossed here. That was very, very infrequent, but there were occasional--
[00:09:33] Leah: I guess it's easier to admit that on the phone instead of writing it.
[00:09:37] Chris: Well, I think it's because they were managers themselves and it was their direct reports that had botched the investigation, sent the wrong message. I think we've got another episode coming up on just Amazon not filling in the template. No one's emptying the brackets and putting real info in there and the copy and paste isn't even being done properly.
[00:09:56] Leah: Or just the completely wrong template.
[00:09:57] Chris: Yeah. I've personally heard from a couple people on Amazon teams, even from a few years ago who were embarrassed at what had happened and they would sort of acknowledge without saying they were sorry, necessarily they would acknowledge that things had not gone according to SOP.
So the unblock team, my final thought or suggestion is maybe, once again, there's a beta where an actual seller performance person, the person who does the yay or the nay on whether or not your account or listing get reinstated might be a participant on the unblocked team.
[00:10:28] Leah: Yeah. Hopefully, I'm gonna end on a happy note cause I've been Debbie downer today and it actually has nothing to do with this team, but just in terms of teams, catalog have been very well trained and helpful lately and well done catalog team. If Amazon PR is listening, well done catalog team.
[00:10:43] Chris: That's right. Fodder for a future podcast where we say mostly positive things about experiences with listings.
[00:10:50] Leah: That's not our brand.
[00:10:51] Chris: You would be-- no, it's not, but you would be crazier than you already are. If catalog were not helpful lately. And they've been helpful. So you're just kind of mid-range crazy.
[00:11:00] Leah: Well, and to be fair, like the catalog always does try to be helpful, but in the last few weeks they have actually resolved issues with one case very quickly. You talk to them, they're like, yes, I see the issue. Okay. That's fixed. Check it in 24 hours and it, it is actually fixed, so yay. Thank you, catalog.
[00:11:19] Chris: And in and in closing, if Amazon PR is listening, we're not necessarily flattering ourselves assuming that you are, we understand you've got a lot on your plate so if you can't listen to us because of everything going on in Amazon land, totally understandable.
[00:11:32] Leah: But also we keep these short to make your life easier.
[00:11:35] Chris: And every brand and seller's life easier. So banter aside, any questions on this? Anyone hears from the unblock team and you're kind of like question mark question mark. Who are you? What should I tell you? What should I not say? First of all, low sample size would love to hear your story.
And second of all, if you need help with this stuff, we are just as interested as you are.
[00:11:55] Leah: Yeah. If you ask account health about the unblock team, let us know what they say.
[00:11:58] Chris: Yes. Let Leah know, contact her directly. All right. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening, and we are almost a hundred percent sure we'll be following up on this topic soon.
Anything else you wanna hear about on Seller Performance Solutions, do let us know.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our wonderful podcast. This is Chris McCabe, I'm here with Leah McHugh, We are talking about a sort of darkly funny, scary topic today.
Scary for sellers who get these messages from my former team, seller performance, usually it's about related accounts, but we've seen this problem across a multitude of messages.
[00:00:34] Leah: I think I've seen it kind of messaging.
[00:00:35] Chris: Every kind of message, which is the brackets that the employee at Amazon was in such a rush and doing such a poor job.
Clearly messaging doesn't get flagged and quarantined in some sort of outbox to be reviewed if it's this bad, but the message itself will just have empty brackets or it will have insert key information here within the brackets, which is obviously their internal jargon to the investigator to say, Hey-- if you're saying that this seller is related to another seller, you have to tell them the first few words or the first few letters of the related account name. That's just one example that we've seen.
[00:01:11] Leah: Yeah. I also see where they're saying you're infringing on somebody's trademark and then they don't tell you what trademark you're infringing on or they tell you an ASIN has a problem, and then they forget to fill in the ASIN.
[00:01:22] Chris: They don't tell you the ASIN. It'll just say ASIN brackets or sometimes I've seen empty brackets where there's just something was supposed to go in there. The investigator obviously didn't care, didn't put the time into it to double check it before it went out.
Sometimes there's a wrong ASIN, which is like a right click error from the previous investigation they were doing. Again, keep in mind, they call it IPH they're rushing investigators through these investigations. Well, haste makes waste, right? Lots of mistakes, lots of errors. That's the first problem.
Second problem is like I said, messages that have empty brackets or Amazon language that's supposed to be deleted inside the brackets, not being quarantined or dumped into some outbox with, Hey, there's errors on this page. Right? We've all seen that when we're trying to buy something or looking at stuff online that we're trying to do. That should happen. I'm not a software tools expert seems like that'd be an easy thing for them to execute or institute.
[00:02:16] Leah: That's kinda like when you're in Gmail and you mention attachment, and then if you don't have attachment ,Gmail will be like, Hey, did you forgot to put an attachment on here?
[00:02:23] Chris: Excellent example. Well, it's a hundred percent unprofessional and it's embarrassing to Amazon and managers and VPs and anyone who manages the marketplace should find this professionally embarrassing that this is happening publicly because what does sellers do? They throw it back at Amazon and they say, is this how you value us? Is this how little you care about professional communication? And of course currently we've seen this going on for weeks. So the answer is yes.
[00:02:48] Leah: I mean, those aren't even the worst examples that I've seen.
[00:02:50] Chris: Yeah. Well what about dear blank, dear comma.
[00:02:53] Leah: Yeah, but I also just see them send like the completely wrong template. So out of nowhere they'll be like, your products a drug, and then every other notification you've gotten about it has absolutely nothing to do with that and then it just turns out that they sent you the wrong template. Which we know, because we deal with this all the time, but if you're just dealing with your own account, then you're just like, oh no, now it's flagged as this as well.
[00:03:12] Chris: Right. She's speaking with such exasperation I'm guessing thinking of this one example we saw where they said your product's been flagged as drug paraphernalia. I think there were stickers or ?
[00:03:23] Leah: Right. Well, so in actual fact it was flagged as potential IP infringement, but they just sent the wrong template response.
[00:03:29] Chris: So lots of right click errors, lots of empty brackets.
[00:03:33] Leah: I've also had links to Amazon's internal tools in emails, which is always fun.
[00:03:38] Chris: Yeah. Talk about that for a minute. I think our audience will find that very interesting that they were sending you something that should have been sent to another employee and not to an external.
[00:03:47] Leah: Well, so they just replied saying to follow the directions on this page and then the link linked to Paragon, which is Amazon's internal tool, which then said you don't have access to this.
[00:03:57] Chris: Right. Sellers don't have access to Amazon's internal tools.
[00:04:00] Leah: They also regularly refer to Paragon just on the assumption that sellers know what that even is.
[00:04:05] Chris: Obviously we know what it is, it's the name of a tool, but that's basic mistake type stuff where we get the sense that whoever is managing those teams, managers have direct reports, sometimes it's a dozen, sometimes two dozen, sometimes it's dozens or hundreds, depending on what it is. It doesn't look like there's any meaningful quality assurance, there's no meaningful oversight. And I mean, I think some sellers have thrown these messages back at Amazon trying to shame them for not caring and not even meeting a basic level of competency, but I honestly haven't seen any sign so far that they care. They're kind of like, yeah, well, that's a mistake.
You know, these things happen. It's a big company, big marketplace. Sorry, we'll we'll try better next time.
[00:04:48] Leah: Or they just don't respond at all.
[00:04:50] Chris: Well, that's kind of their key game plan now seems to be like silence is one of their heaviest weapons to use in the communication wars with sellers, because they're not interested in admitting their mistakes.
They're not interested in being called out for things that are chronic, for things that are constant. And going back to what I said a moment ago, messages that say dear and a big empty space and a comma that's unprofessional, right? That's something that if you hired an intern, If you hired somebody on Craigslist to do some basic email responses for you, let's put it that way. And they had a high school education or they didn't have an education and they did that, you'd be upset with them. Wouldn't you? If you were paying the money and if you were having them manage your communications, you'd turn around and say, you know what? You've done this a couple times. What's the deal? Amazon's not doing that. So the minimum bar of like what you want to have for professional business communication or professional period isn't being met currently by these teams.
[00:05:49] Leah: Well, I think it's just one thing to not supply the information you need, which is bad enough.
I just think it's a lot worse when they supply just completely incorrect information because potentially you're sending the seller down a wild goose chase, right? To address something that doesn't even need to be addressed because you just happen to choose the wrong template to send them.
[00:06:09] Chris: Or some of these people are suspended for relations to another account. We've worked on a lot of these appeals in many cases, it's groundless and baseless. It's a mistake. But,. what you're doing when you're publicly, you know, professing to take care of your sellers, to care about your sellers, to treat them well.
Amazon's got a conference coming up in Seattle soon, right? Accelerate. They're going to invite lots of sellers to come and to meet with executives and so forth.
[00:06:34] Leah: Hopefully it's not as hot as the one in new Orleans. Yes.
[00:06:36] Chris: The one in new Orleans in June was well, something we'd like to forget, but it's an emotional experience to be suspended, right? Your business life could be on the line and they're sending you a message that should have key information that you need. You cannot appeal without knowing which account they think you're related to, like Leah mentioned. We've seen lots of these empty bracket messages that don't deal with an account suspension, but in this case it does, and people are showing us these message
Every day, multiple times an hour lately. That's terrible, just because you're telling somebody you're suspended, you need to do something to get your account back, you may never get your account back if you can't appeal successfully and we need to tell you blank or we need you to do blank. And there's a message that doesn't include the pertinent information that seller needs in order to do an appeal, they have to call account health reps who have almost nothing to say on this issue, because they're not the ones who sent the message and they're caught in the middle kind of between a team that sent a message that shouldn't have gone out. And the suspended seller, which is an unenviable place to be.
[00:07:40] Leah: Well, and we're not even talking about the poorly written templates that even when sent correctly, don't give you the information you need, right? Brand registry, for example, has one denial template, which says that you have engaged in abusive behavior, no matter what, the reason for denying your brand registry, you get that message.
It doesn't tell you what abusive behavior, right? And then it sends you to an appeal form, which has a box where you can put your email address and a box where you can put the role that you would like in brand registry and that is it.
[00:08:07] Chris: That's laughable.
[00:08:08] Leah: And so that's them sending the correct template.
[00:08:10] Chris: Right? Seems like that's the only template they were given permission to use. I don't know why they used that for every thing.
[00:08:14] Leah: But also what is the point of that appeal for?
[00:08:16] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Don't steal my thunder. We're gonna save this. Sorry. We're gonna save that for a different episode because I think it's a long template.
I think the part that always sticks up to me is it says you have engaged in illicit fraudulent or abusive conduct. These are strong words, and these are major league accusations for one business partner, if you wanna call them a partner to levy at another partner or business that's associated with their marketplace
[00:08:42] Leah: And also account health can't see any of the reasons for brand registry's decisions, right? So you can't even call or contact anybody for more information. Brand registry won't give you more information, account health can't, seller support can't.
[00:08:54] Chris: Right, right. And a good second or third example of template messaging that has just gone haywire. We know they get complaints about it. We know they're aware of it. They don't seem to have any control over stopping people from sending these incomplete templates, they don't seem to, we know they're aware of it. They don't seem to have the ability to create the tools.
[00:09:15] Leah: I mean, even just outside of the template, like what SOP are they using? Because that SOP is not working.
[00:09:20] Chris: Yeah. Well, the SOP is at Amazon sometimes we've seen messages where they've copied and pasted parts of the SOP into the outbound message I saw that once, maybe three, four months ago, this is just embarrassing stuff. I mean, anyone with any respect for themselves managing these teams has to take a cold, hard, look at this and, and say if I've lost my love for Amazon, maybe I don't belong in this role because I don't care about something that's professionally embarrassing.
We encourage Amazon to reverse that and correct it. We encourage sellers to show us more examples of this, even though we've seen a sheer tonnage of them so far, because that's something that has to stop. If you have to appeal something and you need information in that message, whether it's an ASIN or you've gotten an obvious right click error, where they're talking about a totally different seller, that's another thing it's like, what about privacy concerns when they send a warning to the wrong person?
[00:10:10] Leah: With the other person's information.
[00:10:12] Chris: Well, I keep seeing messages to, you know, Dear auto store 75. And it's like, okay. So that's obviously an active seller or a storefront that lost a listing. Does it make sense that you're compromising that privacy by messaging a totally different seller about a totally different ASIN, right? What if you happen to be writing that to another automotive seller? And they're like, oh, so those guys are circling the drain.
Great. All I have to do is buy from them and say that the product's unsafe or it's inauthentic, and then I can push Amazon to make yet another mistake by suspending that person.
[00:10:44] Leah: Also don't do what he just said.
[00:10:45] Chris: Yeah, don't do that. So wrapping up on that point. If you have messages that you don't understand what they're trying to tell you, you need us to act as interpreters or translation experts.
We're happy to do it. Hopefully this is a temporary blip and this will not persist, but I've seen this empty bracket stuff going on with the related account suspensions for going on two months.
[00:11:07] Leah: I been seeing wrong information being sent for years at this point.
[00:11:10] Chris: Yes. The IP claims where they accuse you of violating a trademark, they don't give a complaint ID. Don't give contact.
[00:11:16] Leah: or the Trademarks so you don't even know which trademark they think you're infringing on.
[00:11:19] Chris: Yes. Well, and then you saw one the other day, which was just a jumble of numbers so I think they copied the-- was that the complaint ID being mentioned?
[00:11:26] Leah: No, I actually, I figured that one out myself. That was the trademark registration number with the USTPO.
[00:11:31] Chris: Right-- so the investigator made, compounded the error by putting the trademark registration number.
[00:11:36] Leah: So could figure out what the trademark was.
[00:11:38] Chris: But my point is not everyone can figure that out.
[00:11:40] Leah: Most people don't spend as much time on the USTPOs database as I do.
[00:11:43] Chris: That's true. That's true. So contact us. Thank you again. Thank you, Leah, for joining, We're happy to hear any comment, suggestions, feedback, positive, negative, constructive, hopefully about seller performance solutions and have a great summer.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our wonderful favorite podcast. I'm here with Leah McHugh, doing things at home casual today, but not a casual topic. This is about compliance and we've had a lot of requests from Amazon, right? For manufacturer letters. You work on this stuff all the time.
[00:00:26] Leah: Mm-hmm .
[00:00:26] Chris: And so you'll do most of the talking, but just to set the stage for everyone. We've had some clients recently and some sellers that did not become clients who insisted on their way of viewing this problem. I suppose they came to us for help. They needed compliance assistance and suggestions and troubleshooting.
But they somehow tried to convince us, I guess you'd say that Amazon's inappropriately asking for the manufacturer letter. Are there any instances where Amazon's asking for a manufacturer letter where they shouldn't for a compliance issue or is this just a giant misunderstanding on the seller side?
[00:01:00] Leah: I mean, ultimately if Amazon decides that they need a letter from your manufacturer, there's not a whole lot you can do to convince them otherwise. We see that in terms of letters of authorizations to sell, in terms of licensing agreements, any number of reasons to do with authenticity, but we also see it more and more to do with things like compliance.
And certainly in highly regulated spaces of products, you should be able to get that information from your manufacturer or supplier a lot of times that information is actually publicly available information, which you can potentially find in the FDA database.
[00:01:33] Chris: Mm-hmm and you should be looking.
[00:01:35] Leah: Well, but if you're purchasing these highly regulated products and your manufacturer or your supplier is unwilling to give you that compliance documentation, first of all, if they don't have it, that's a massive problem. Second of all. If they refuse to give it to you, you need to start questioning whether you should be working with that supplier or manufacturer at all, because a lot of these documents are legally required documents that you need to have and you are the seller of record.
So if there's anything that goes wrong with those products, Amazon isn't going to your manufacturer or your supplier, they're coming to you.
[00:02:12] Chris: Maybe we should take a step back and focus on that piece because we have had a couple people contact us who said, well, my manufacturers queasy about supplying this or they are unwilling to, unable to, and maybe the seller is just afraid that they'll have to undo so much stuff that they've done with that manufacturer, which we understand is a painful process and a difficult decision.
But. As you were saying Leah, why would your manufacturers say, oh, we don't want to be named as the manufacturer of these products. We're just gonna spend all our time arguing why you don't need it from Amazon, which hasn't made sense.
[00:02:48] Leah: Well, yeah, and again, I am specifically talking about highly regulated areas of products. I understand if your supplier maybe doesn't wanna give their suppliers information because chances are, you could just cut them out as the middle man and go straight to the source. So I understand that, but I mean, I'm talking about-- and we see this with resellers as well, not just brands where if you're a supplement or you are a medical device or your electronics, anything that requires compliance documentation, Amazon isn't. Looking at your account and going, oh, they're just a reseller. I'll go to the source to get that information. Like, they're just asking anybody that sells that. So if you can't get that information, sometimes one of the other sellers of that product will supply it and then you don't have to worry about it. But you can't rely on that. And again, if you're selling highly regulated products, you should have that information anyway, in case anything goes wrong. Because once again, you are the seller of record for those products.
[00:03:42] Chris: And we see this across the board, right. You always are referred to as like, this is why they chased so many drop shippers off the platform, right? Some of them were violating the drop shipping policy. This is a kind of an unrelated example, but parallel, because they weren't the seller of record on invoices and paperwork inside the packaging, which guess what creates headaches and complaints and reports of counterfeit and so on with Amazon, and that's why they're so against it.
[00:04:08] Leah: Well, and ultimately if the FDA comes to you because there's an issue with your products, you can't just be like, oh, I'm just reselling it. I don't, I don't know if this complies with FDA regulations, you're selling it. They're gonna hold you accountable as well as your manufacturer or distributor or whoever else was involved in that supply chain because they're highly regulated products, and they're highly regulated products for a reason. So again, if your supplier distributor is consumables unwilling to give you compliance documentation, Perhaps you should not be working with that supplier.
[00:04:37] Chris: Right. And we can have a separate episode perhaps about how you vet suppliers, we we've touched on that before. We will probably need to go back to it. That's a bigger discussion in terms of how do you make sure that this is the right manufacturer for you which thankfully is a constant conversation all over the Amazon community in the space, but for today's purposes, I mean, consider also that Amazon's under the gun.
They're under public scrutiny for potential liability, for items that are sold on the site. As of now, they've been able to get most of the way through that issue by saying we're just a marketplace, we're just a platform but we've seen some signs in the courts that, that might be changing. The tide might be turning a little bit.
[00:05:17] Leah: Well, and if you look at the CPSCs website for recalls, every other recall is either sold on Amazon or sold by Amazon. So yes, they are under a lot of scrutiny for the quality and the safety of the products being sold in the marketplace because turns out some of them aren't that safe.
[00:05:33] Chris: Right. Huge indicator. Whenever you're checking federal agency sites, I mean, the FDA is definitely keeping an eye on this stuff. Amazon knows that.
[00:05:42] Leah: Well, and you see more and more in warning letters that the FDA sends to brands and manufacturers that they specifically cite information right on amazon.com. If they send a warning to somebody about their product, they don't cite information on the product or information on that person's website. They're also looking at Amazon to see, well, you made this marketing claim on amazon.com and that's not allowed for FDA regulations. You're seeing that more and more in FDA warning letters and Amazon of course is aware of this.
[00:06:07] Chris: The other thing that's big here is that, some sellers are kind of blaming someone else. They don't understand that the buck stops with them. And as Leah was saying, they don't suspend the manufacturer's account, they suspend yours. Right? This can impact brand registry, sometimes we've had people approach us saying, well, we botched the whole manufacturing process. We got the wrong manufacturer, we can't get compliance documents. Can I just have somebody else sell my brand until I sort this out as if brand registry can be handed around like a football and it just doesn't work that, I mean, you know this from countless hours every day on this, but a lot of people don't understand that brand registry doesn't work that way.
[00:06:46] Leah: Well, Amazon doesn't work that way. This idea of like, well, I didn't make the product or I didn't make the product detail page. That doesn't fly. If you're selling on the product detail page, you're responsible for all of the information on there, if you're selling a product, you are responsible for the safety and compliance of that product. And again, I think that the most concerning part to me isn't necessarily that sellers don't want to give that information to Amazon because I do understand not wanting to give other information to Amazon, which, Unfortunately you just have to get over, but I think what's more concerning to me is that we're seeing a lot of sellers whose suppliers are unwilling to give them the legal compliance information.
And again, does that mean they just don't have it or do they just not want to get involved? And either way as a seller of record, you need access to that information. if your manufacturer isn't willing to give you a letter of guarantee after they had a product recall. Then again, maybe you should not be sourcing from that particular supplier.
[00:07:45] Chris: Right. And we understand that it's unnerving to think that you're working with somebody who's something other than what they told you, but the FTC, the FDA, whoever it is when they go to Amazon, they'll send them links to live listings. What are they focused on? The storefront, the seller, the FTC doesn't contact you and say, oh, by the way, we saw your stuff on Amazon. Can you show us?
[00:08:09] Leah: Who did you get this from so would you go after them?
[00:08:12] Chris: No, they chase Amazon, right? That's one stop shopping for them. I mean, they're stressed and few resources to devote to it. Amazon's an easy place for them to go, to try to figure out what you're doing and if it's safe or compliant.
[00:08:24] Leah: Yeah, also, don't assume that your supplier, don't rely on them for compliance information. You need to look that up as well. Because once again, we've worked with many clients suppliers who give us very incorrect information about what is legally required for specific products. So you, again, need to be doing your own research to figure out what exactly your product needs to be able to meet in order to be legally allowed to be sold.
[00:08:53] Chris: And I hasten to add that this seems to be a recent trend. Hopefully it's a blip. For whatever reason, we've been hearing from a lot of these, I mean, compliance, there's an ebb and a flow. Sometimes Amazon focuses on it. Sometimes they rotate out and they're not so focused on it. Hopefully this is just temporary, but if you're out there hearing this.
And warning bells are going off or you're seeing red flags in your future, deal with it now, instead of when amazon's chasing you all over creation, sending you increasingly murky messages that you spend half a day trying to decipher.
[00:09:26] Leah: Don't just think I've been selling this for a year without a problem so it should be fine going forward.
[00:09:31] Chris: That, or don't just point out or actually as a favor to me, don't send us links to all these other people who are doing things in crazy, sloppy ways, because Amazon really doesn't care.
[00:09:42] Leah: We're also very much aware of the fact that everybody's doing things wrong.
[00:09:46] Chris: Yeah. Amazon isn't a everybody's doing it, so it must be okay type of place right now.
[00:09:51] Leah: And neither is the FDA or the FTC.
[00:09:53] Chris: We know that enforcement's inconsistent. I mean, we're kind of broken record on this podcast and in my articles on the site, but bottom line, we know that you can always find examples at any given hour, any given moment of crazy things on Amazon. It doesn't justify anything you might be doing that won't be considered compliant. So. Thank you Leah, for sharing your wealth of knowledge on this topic today. We know this is intricate complex stuff. If you have any questions about it, let us know. And, thanks again for listening to Seller Performance Solutions.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe of e-commerceChris, I'm here once again with Leah McHugh. How are you doing?
[00:00:16] Leah: Good. How are you, Chris?
[00:00:17] Chris: Great. Kind of a twisted tangled subject we're talking about today for a change. The reviews abuse saga has entered a new phase. Recent events are that Amazon suing more and more of these groups, whether they're on Facebook or they've got their own URLs and their own services. There are more black hats being hunted down, and sued by Amazon. these were things that people like me have mentioned for years in terms of why aren't these groups regulated, policed, maybe Amazon and Facebook could tandem go hand in hand and try to pick up some of the legal enforcement here, but the alarming recent trend appears to be trying to frame or set up or sabotage your competitor by making it look like they have been actively bribing buyers for positive reviews, right?
[00:01:06] Leah: Yeah. Which in and of itself, isn't totally new. I mean, we've certainly seen people get fake positive reviews out of nowhere, which is a competitor, trying to get them flagged for fake reviews.
[00:01:16] Chris: Right.
[00:01:17] Leah: I think the difference here is that they're using off Amazon tactics to further implicate competitors which maybe you can explain the specific case that you're talking about. So people know what the hell we're talking about here.
[00:01:30] Chris: Yeah I mean, well, we had different, I guess I'm chopping this into phases. Phase one seemed to be taking your product or your brand and putting it on one of these rebate sites. This was a few months ago, maybe it was earlier in 2022. We don't have to name the sites in particular. One of them I think no longer exist because Amazon's suing them, but the idea was, leave us a review and then you'll get the cost of the purchase fully refunded afterwards. The after order after review a hundred percent refund or rebate. So the rebate sites flourish for years, we've been talking about it since I think 2018. And it took until like earlier this year, late last year for Amazon to go after those.
[00:02:11] Leah: Well, and then there were the people that thought you could loophole that by offering a gift card instead of a rebate, even though it's basically the same thing, according to the FTC.
[00:02:20] Chris: Right. A lot of services, sellers, content we saw on YouTube and elsewhere groups indicated as long as you don't ask for a five star review, you can do all these tricks to get reviews. It was wrong. It was faulty advice, a lot of sellers followed it. A lot of them got suspended. Of course, that's how we first came onto this problem. The other tactic was creating a fake Facebook group or creating a fake URL fake brand site for your brand, your competitor does this. They make it look like you've got splashy content offering free stuff or payouts or whatever, giveaways in exchange for five star reviews, it's a complete scam.
None of it's real, but they put those links into an abuse report to Amazon. I think this started to thrive once Amazon abuse teams finally sort of showed that they were doing something right. Once enforcement picked up at Amazon. I mean, Amazon for, I think five years has been saying, they've been keeping an eye on this, but there was no real enforcement until more recently.
So once fraudsters and abusive competitors realized they could frame you for this, they started pumping emails into Amazon enforcement teams, abuse prevention teams saying, look what this guy is doing. This harms buyers. This is fraud. We're taking this to the FTC, since they police and enforce fraud on online marketplaces, why aren't you doing more to prevent this?
And of course, Amazon gullibly failed to investigate it and took down these sellers. We had clients who were impacted by this, right?
[00:03:56] Leah: Yeah. And I think we're probably gonna see a lot more of that sort of thing. Now that Amazon is suing those certain Facebook groups, because yeah, I'm gonna say it's a pretty good bet that there are people in there that are getting fake reviews for their competitors in those groups.
So if Amazon has access to any of the information in those groups, they're going to see what looks like. Your brand trying to get fake reviews. When in actuality, it's your competitor trying to frame you for reviews abuse.
[00:04:26] Chris: Right. And, and this is fixable. We've gotten people reinstated who have been falsely accused. It's not that it's not fixable. Another recent trend is that some sellers that are complete black hat, fraudster type brands who were paying for five star reviews are now using this trend of framing your competitor. Now they are claiming they are victims. And some of them have actually gotten reinstated in recent days that I've heard and seen which means that the trend is swinging the other way, where Amazon's reinstating brands. Who say that they were framed or falsely accused and some of the black hats are jumping on that piggy wagon. Piggybacking on that, jumping on that bandwagon or piggy wagon, as I like to say apparently.
And saying, Hey, we've been set up now. And some of those sellers are ones that were actually attacking others with like fake negative reviews while they were patting their positive reviews.
What that tells me and you can tell me if you agree or not, or how you see this. Long story short, what it tells me is that Amazon can't separate the legit valid reviews and the legitimately operating sellers from the ones that are just trying to game the system. It seems like they don't know which bucket to put these people in.
[00:05:36] Leah: No, and I think that's been the case for a while now, but I also, in fairness to Amazon, which is not something I normally say, this is so very messy at this point. You know, people framing people with fake websites and it's just so convoluted now that I can see how it is very difficult for investigators who have a limited amount of time to investigate this stuff.
I can see how it's very hard for them to be able to separate this out. And I understand that they are a very large data company, but they don't have access to the entire internets data. So these are off Amazon tactics that they have some insight into, but rather limited insight into as opposed to stuff that's being done on their own platform, which they should be able to investigate easily.
[00:06:28] Chris: I think they are able to, they just weren't motivated to until the press was screaming about this and until the FTC came knocking on their door so often. And, and my concern is that a federal agency like the FTC, I mean, we've seen sellers pretty much willing to do anything to just out of greed or their sort of addiction to black hat behavior.
I'm concerned that they're investigators or attorneys at the FTC that might fall for some of these reports, like it'll be reported to them. And then they'll send a list of brands or sellers to Amazon saying, Hey, what are these guys doing? Simply because they don't understand how Amazon works that well.
[00:07:05] Leah: And that's something that we've talked about before, maybe not on the podcast, but that's something that we talked about before just you and I, I think we are at the point now where some of these are major crimes and Amazon is not equipped to handle these, the FTC isn't equipped to handle these.
Like what is needed here are properly trained and funded FBI or police law or whatever.
[00:07:31] Chris: Law enforcement.
[00:07:31] Leah: Yeah. Some sort of law enforcement that understands how this all works and are able to actually enforce laws in an area that does take a certain amount of knowledge, the FBI has art fraud experts.
[00:07:45] Chris: Right.
[00:07:46] Leah: But there is no eCommerce expertise within law enforcement. And I think we're at this point now, I mean, certainly monetarily we're definitely at the point where that's needed.
[00:07:56] Chris: Well, cyber crimes. There are cyber crime units.
[00:07:59] Leah: Right but this is a very specific part of cyber crimes. This is not the same as you know, a human trafficking ring online. It's not the same thing.
[00:08:06] Chris: No, no. I mean, in my experience, dealing with federal agencies on occasion, how subcommittees that were doing the antitrust investigations and inside Amazon teams and other groups that kind of know and understand the technical side as well as the fraud prevention side.
I've noticed that there has to be a new branch. I don't know if it's a new cabinet role necessarily, but a new eCommerce fraud prevention or online marketplace regulation, regulatory arms, somewhere inside a federal agency or a government body that will understand how all these different pieces work, because Amazon's only going to police their corner of this.
It's not Amazon's responsibility to track down and locate, identify, arrest, prosecute fraudsters all over the internet. And we understand that.
[00:08:57] Leah: Well, and I think within the eCommerce community as well, these aren't thought of as crimes, these are just thought of as black hat tactics, when in actuality, These are crimes and, you know we get emails--
[00:09:10] Chris: Well it's fraud.
[00:09:12] Leah: Right, which is a crime. And most of these involve interstate commerce. And so then you're looking at potential wire fraud, which is a federal crime. It's not looked at as a crime because these aren't being regulated as crimes and until there's actually some sort of enforcement of these laws, I think it's just going to continue be, to be treated as oh, Amazon might get angry.
[00:09:33] Chris: But I honestly don't think most sellers fail to understand the word fraud. I think fraud is a straightforward term, which is like, there's something illegal happening, and it's really only fraud investigators like I used to be at Amazon, who would use the terms like soft fraud versus hard fraud. Maybe some of the sellers that you and I have interacted with or heard about over the years. Are kind of mimicking soft fraud when they're like, well, I just paid a service I didn't do this myself. So I'm not guilty of anything. Maybe that's what they mean. They think it's soft fraud and not hard fraud, but fraud is fraud.
[00:10:06] Leah: But we also regularly have people who just tell us things that they have done. And you're like, oh, you know, like a crime and it's just treated as, oh, well, this is what you have to do to stay competitive, right? Not, this is a very slippery slope.
[00:10:21] Chris: Right, right. But fraud it's fraud. And obviously it's taken Amazon forever and a day to catch up to this stuff, but the lawsuits do mean that they're going to be suing services out of existence that are breaking the law. Part of that process, I believe based on the conversations I've had with lawyers, I am not an attorney, is that some of those people who are some of those owners of those companies, That are at least based in the United States that can't just be ghosts and Phantoms and disappear. In order to settle these cases, in order to resolve whatever they're being investigated for by federal agencies have to hand over a list of practices and a list of clients.
[00:11:03] Leah: Well and I mean, Amazon does the same thing, right? When you, when you get the review manipulation Email, they wanna know who you've worked with, what services you used and dates and times and contracts with all of those people. They're using you to get information for the bigger picture.
[00:11:21] Chris: Right. We've even seen on occasion when they're suing a company, they specifically mentioned the company, if it's somebody who's been arrested or is going on trial for fraud or for bribery, we've seen them drop those names into an email, which is pretty striking that they'd say, do you work with this person? Not even a company at that point, they're drilling down into the person. Well, why are they doing that? Well, because they're looking at prosecuting that man, or that woman.
[00:11:49] Leah: Well or suing.
[00:11:50] Chris: Right. So, at this point we expect sellers understand most of this. I mean, I guess we do hear occasionally from amateurs that are brand new to Amazon that are like, well, we heard this was okay. And we know that that's just their ignorance of being new. But at this point, if you're still doing these things, if you don't care, if you're gonna show up on a client list for some of these companies that are sued or people that end up prosecuted, you know what you're getting into, you know, you're doing short term, not long term sales.
You're trying to get a couple of disbursements out of Amazon before you get taken down but everyone knows what's going on at this point. It's not 2018, 2019, where there was this murkiness and I attended a seminar. I heard a webinar. And it seemed legit-- we're way past that point.
[00:12:37] Leah: They said this was tos compliant.
[00:12:39] Chris: Yeah. Their website says it's tos compliant with Amazon. Of course they did. They're trying to reach in your wallet and lift some cash out.
[00:12:44] Leah: Anyone can put that on their website. It's not a regulated claim.
[00:12:48] Chris: Well, this is where Amazon and e-commerce gets Darwinian or Darwinistic, which is if you're not able to compete with others because you're gullible and you fall for these things, survive of the fittest, right? You will be the one that's that's shelved when it comes time to suspend accounts. Amazon wears as a badge of honor. When they get ugly stories in the news or government agencies are investigating them or the FTC, you know, publicly makes a statement about all the fake reviews on Amazon. Amazon wears as a badge of honor, how many sellers they suspend. The knee jerk reaction PR pumps out is we suspended 6,700 sellers last week.
So you are willingly putting your head on the chopping block when you do this stuff. And there's no way to talk to Leah or me or Amazon or anyone and claim ignorance or profess your innocence based on, Hey, we're new and we didn't know that at this point, don't even bother saying that.
[00:13:47] Leah: Yeah. I mean, we've talked about that before being new isn't an excuse anyway, but I mean, this has been going on. Yeah. When did they sue Fivver? That was like five years ago this has been a long time coming.
[00:13:58] Chris: It's been Fivver.. It's been Upwork. I just remember all the rebate stuff we had messages two years ago, maybe 2019, 2020. I think it was from some of these rebate companies or services. That were grouchy that we were saying rebates, rebate processes like that were bogus and were fraudulent.
[00:14:17] Leah: To be fair, we annoy a lot of services.
[00:14:21] Chris: Yeah, but I remember the rebates in particular. I mean, there were sellers, there were services, there were individual people we heard from who said how is this not TOS compliant? I wanna debate this. I wanna argue, well, let's go fast forward to 2022.
[00:14:33] Leah: Well, even recently people were freaking out about the clarification over this, and it's like this has been pretty clear for a while. Yeah. You may have convinced yourself otherwise, but Amazon changing slightly the wording and the policy doesn't mean that it was okay before.
[00:14:47] Chris: Right? Well, they wanna litigate phrases and it's like, well, you kind of don't need to debate or argue for a 45 minute YouTube video or podcast about this or that turn of a phrase, all you have to do is look at all the suspended accounts over and over and over.
[00:15:03] Leah: Right. And again, we're not just talking Amazon policy here, we're talking FTC regulation, which is pretty clear about incentivizing reviews.
[00:15:10] Chris: Yeah, I'm just concerned that people are going to start going to the FTC who don't understand how serious it is to lie to a federal agency and try to throw a competitor under the bus by lying to lawyers at the FTC.
[00:15:23] Leah: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's already happening. I do not envy the people at the FTC who have to sort through all of this. But yeah, I'm sure it's already happening, unfortunately.
[00:15:33] Chris: Yeah, we know this is shocking and scary stuff, but as long as you're on the right side of thelaw, and you're playing it the white hat clean way you should be okay. If you look like you've been framed or sabotaged by a competitor, show it to us.
This can be fixed. This can be resolved. I know this is crazy stuff, but we're always saying you gotta protect your brand. You always gotta be thick skinned and ready for something ugly to happen.
[00:15:56] Leah: Welcome to the craziness that is Chris and my day to day.
[00:15:59] Chris: That's right. Our daily life. Thank you again for listening. Thank you, Leah.
[00:16:02] Leah: Thanks Chris, bye.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hey, Amazon sellers. Welcome to the Seller Performance Solutions podcast. I am Leah McHugh-- I am here with Chris McCabe of ecommerceChris and today we are talking to Andrew Maff from BlueTuskr about building your brand off of Amazon to help build your brand on Amazon. So thank you so much for joining us today, Andrew.
[00:00:28] Andrew: Yeah, not a problem. Thanks for having.
[00:00:30] Leah: So this is something we've actually been talking about quite a lot this year. After many years of just playing with the data and running ads on Amazon, sellers are starting to kind of circle back to actually building a real brand in order to drive sales on Amazon.
And you guys actually specialize in marketing, just eCommerce marketing in general. So what are the most interesting things that you guys are working on at the moment in terms of branding?
[00:00:54] Andrew: So honestly we get a lot of Amazon sellers that are essentially looking to diversify. You get a lot of people that get suspended for whatever reason, or I've had situations where we actually worked with someone for a while that was well into the eight figures, had his credit card was just about to expire, changed his credit card, amazon thought it was fraudulent so they shut his account down for at least a week.
[00:01:17] Leah: Yep.
[00:01:18] Chris: A week?
[00:01:18] Andrew: And that was a majority of his business. He was pretty good. In fact, I think he took a page outta your book, Chris and figured out the best way to respond to Amazon by, you know, cuz like I've listened to your podcast so many times-- I know like you get a lot of people that just shoot them a support ticket. That's just like I got suspended and I don't know why and then they expect them to do anything about it.
[00:01:41] Leah: Right.
[00:01:41] Andrew: But he wrote a pretty decent sized novel explaining and then was able to get out of it.
But, because of that, we help a lot of people kind of figure out like the best way to do things outside of just Amazon being solely reliant on it. We do a lot on Amazon because we obviously need to kind of baby step away from Amazon.
[00:02:00] Leah: Sure.
[00:02:00] Andrew: You find a lot of people that think that, you know, we work with seven and eight figure sellers all the time who are like, all right, let's make a Shopify site and then launch it and we're gonna make just as much money.
And it's not the case at all. So we do a lot with helping sellers kind of ease into starting their own brand on their own site, or even going into other marketplaces and things like that. And kind of focusing on more of like an omnichannel approach.
[00:02:25] Leah: Yeah. It's interesting because it's sort of like we're completing the loop because I mean back in 2011, which is when I got started in e-commerce, Amazon was a sales channel, it wasn't the entire business and then it kind of went all Amazon all the time and then people are now realizing that's not really the best position to be in and now it's circling back to Amazon as a sales channel and an important sales channel, but still a sales channel. And I think the most interesting brands that I see are the ones that are using the different channels to drive traffic to each other. Is that something that you guys are working on a lot?
[00:02:59] Andrew: Yeah, actually even earlier today, I had a call with someone we're basically game planning, the best approach for us to drive some of their traffic from off Amazon, to Amazon during prime day cause as we're recording this, prime day is next week.
So we're kind of looking into different approaches on how to benefit their preexisting audience and send them to Amazon since that's where a majority of them are going anyway.
[00:03:21] Leah: Yeah, definitely. And actually, we did a whole series on this, leading up to our conference, but I'm gonna ask you as well, just because it's your wheelhouse. If you're building a brand this year, what would be your number one tip.
[00:03:35] Andrew: Oh man. Know your audience and know where they're at. It always really impresses me how many people will find a product and they'll go through the whole sourcing process and everything, and they'll be ready to do it, but they have no idea how to contact the right people.
And if you're in a relatively even minimal competitive space within Amazon, you still gotta do all your paid advertising and you gotta fight your way to the top to be able to stay up there for a while and kind of keep that snowball effect going. So that tends to be the one thing that I always notice you gotta make sure that you know who you're going after.
Cause the nice thing about Amazon is it's primarily search, so you're getting a lot of people that you just target your certain search terms, you can target certain ASINs and things like that. But from an off Amazon perspective, Once you start going in that direction, you gotta find out what channels are they on? How do you talk to them? What creative do you show them? And then it's a whole different beast.
[00:04:26] Leah: Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle. There are a lot more moving parts when you're selling off of Amazon. And that's not to say that there aren't a lot of moving parts on Amazon too. But they do take a lot of the work out of it for you. Getting into stores, selling on your own website, getting people to actually know about and visit your own website are very different skills than just researching keywords for Amazon listing on Amazon and sending in your inventory.
[00:04:52] Andrew: I agree.
[00:04:53] Chris: Why do you think people think they know their audience, but don't, and then the disconnect, how do you think that starts? What's the origin of that?
[00:05:00] Andrew: It tends to be that either they start way too broad and sometimes that makes sense, right? Like you wanna start relatively broad, figure out who's shopping and then you wanna hone in on your certain audience and kind of target your messaging based on them.
But a lot of times you get way too many sellers that are just like, I should be on Facebook ads so I'm gonna start running Facebook ads or I should be running ads on Google, but if you're an apparel brand, running Google ads is a nightmare because you're basically going up against anyone that's charging $20 or less for a t-shirt.
So like there's certain aspects of that where they kind of go in almost blind. Like they assume that these are the popular channels and thus I should be on them, but in reality, knowing how your customer shops and where they shop and basically the approach that they like to take is very interesting to know. Cause you get a lot of people as well that, one of the things that we always talk about is looking at basically how fluid the customer journey is now. Like we see a lot of times you'll have sellers, that'll increase their advertising spend on, let's say Facebook by 10%, but they'll look at their revenue on their website and it didn't go up by 10%.
But if you look at your Amazon and you didn't touch any major things on Amazon, then you look at that sometimes collectively that's actually a 10% because you get people who go to a site, have never heard of your brand before and they go, I wanna see if they're available on Amazon and then I can read some of their reviews and then they end up shopping on Amazon.
And in some cases you actually have the opposite. My wife, for example, one of the reasons I ended up kind of getting into this approach is I kept watching her shop on Amazon. But she was always so worried about, you know, back when it was a lot of fraudulent sellers and just a lot of knockoffs. So she would actually leave Amazon, Google the brand and see if she could find information about them before she went back to Amazon and shopped with them.
[00:06:48] Leah: You know, a secret-- I actually, I do the same thing except I don't shop on Amazon, I just buy it from the brand's website.
[00:06:55] Andrew: There you go.
[00:06:56] Leah: Sorry, Amazon sellers. But yeah, it's interesting because the way people are searching for products has changed. And I mean, Amazon has been a driver of a lot of that change, but we're seeing it shift again to more social media driving and obviously Facebook ads always drove a little bit of e-commerce, but now, you know, there are entire trends that were just started on TikTok by influencers and that's driving huge amount of product sales that wasn't something we were seeing a few years ago.
[00:07:26] Andrew: And Amazon knows about this. Like they obviously, they just released now that you can sign up for the beta once they release it for the buy with prime button, that is essentially that JavaScript that you add to your site and it's an immediate link back to the Amazon listing because I'm sure Amazon knows that A, some sellers are trying to own more of the data so they're sending them to their own site or B, as you mentioned, you're leaving Amazon and going to this site and they wanna make it easy for you to go back. So they're trying to really connect the two because that's how I've done it for years but I used to just Photoshop an available on Amazon button and then have to code it to go to a certain listing. And so now Amazon is just caught on and they're like, oh, we're gonna do this too.
[00:08:07] Leah: Right. And it's great for Amazon, because they're now getting a ton more data from your website that they weren't getting before. So yeah it makes a lot of sense that they would wanna track that customer journey. Yeah. Cool. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Was there anything else that you wanted to like final thoughts? Leave our audience with?
[00:08:21] Chris: Pre Q4? Summer has become our like ahead of Q4. Once prime day comes and goes everything we are dealing with is preparing for Q4 being ready for increased competition, anything that could come up for a brand. So pretty much just ahead of September slash August, what would you recommend that people focus on?
[00:08:43] Andrew: Honestly, that's a really good point, because I've been in eCommerce marketing for about 15 years now. And about seven or eight years ago is when I kind of got in the agency side and started to see what it's like working with a lot of sellers. And I do the same thing. It's usually. We'll start talking about it in July. And then we wanna start prepping like campaigns and everything that we're thinking about running in Q4 in August and it never fails.
They always wait until usually like, Mid October when they're like, okay, let's do this.
[00:09:13] Leah: Oh, wow.
[00:09:13] Chris: Yeah.
[00:09:15] Andrew: If there's anything that I can say to take away, it's plan it now look at how you did in Q4 last year and then plan it now. And then that way you're not stressed out because everyone's in a huge panic from basically November 1st until the end of the year.
And if you can get it out now, whatever happens is what's gonna happen. So you can't like sit there in Q4 and making changes all the time and trying to figure out what's what can I tweak now to make that extra dollar? My side is just prep it now, know what you're getting yourself into and then just let enjoy the ride for the last few months.
[00:09:47] Leah: Yep. You're speaking our language.
[00:09:49] Chris: I'm so glad you answered that way. I asked you that question, knowing you were going to answer exactly like that.
[00:09:57] Andrew: So, yeah, well, you were texting me and telling me to say it like that.
[00:10:01] Chris: I know you read from the script. Thanks so much. We're constantly preaching and, and we know how busy sellers and brand owners are. Right? I mean, it's not like people are twidling their thumbs, but preparation means everything in the Amazon landscape. So with this, and with things that we work on every day, we're always pushing people like-- God, get ahead of that curve as much as you possibly can so that you're not scrambling and wasting time in October.
[00:10:26] Andrew: Yeah. Completely agree.
[00:10:27] Leah: And then what is the best way for people to reach you? We'll link to the BlueTuskr website, but if people wanna reach out to you with question how should they do that?
[00:10:34] Andrew: Yeah. BlueTuskr website, BlueTuskr social or me, Andrew Maff. It's all the same on social so whichever one, pick your poison and I'm always happy to help.
[00:10:44] Leah: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much. It was great talking to you.
[00:10:47] Andrew: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it.
[00:10:48] Chris: Thanks Andrew. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody, welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe, along with Leah McHugh of ecommerceChris and we're here today with Yoni of Getida, the reimbursement specialists, the experts in this for how many years now? Several-- five to six years. I'm gonna say?
[00:00:24] Yoni: About seven years, yeah.
[00:00:25] Chris: Seven years based outta New Jersey. It's great to have you back. And you've been a guest on this podcast before. It's a great time to talk about-- just with what's going on in the economy-- it's a great time to talk about getting money back that you might not have known was there for you to get from Amazon, but we're gonna kick it off by talking about how some people are overcharged by Amazon and either don't research it or investigate it properly. Or they fail to get refunded. I thought we could start with that since that's been a hot topic lately.
[00:00:56] Yoni: Sounds good. Sounds good. So, this is the question I gotta bake it or you wanna wanna add in any other ingredients to the question?
[00:01:03] Chris: I wanna know, I wanna know, because we've been hearing from people who have claimed that they've been overcharged by Amazon. I want to know kind of the top one or two tips for getting started to resolve it. beyond that, if they get stuck, how you recommend that they get unstuck and if they get ignored, how do they get amazon's attention back for this particular kind of problem.
[00:01:24] Leah: And then I'm gonna add, how do you not get overcharged in the first place?
[00:01:27] Yoni: Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of ingredients are good. Let's let's talk.
[00:01:30] Leah: You got 10 minutes.
[00:01:31] Chris: You got five minutes of response time and we're gonna be quiet. Because we know you're a very knowledgeable man on this topic and we want to hear what you have to say.
[00:01:39] Yoni: Okay. So appreciate that. So yeah, lemme try to unpackage this a little bit. So before we enter the framework, right? So when you use Amazon's fulfillment centers, they're gonna charge you fees, fulfillment fees. So every time they pick a unit from the bin, they're gonna package in a box, and they're gonna ship it out. They're gonna charge you a fee. And they also, when they stored your product in your inventory in the warehouses, they're gonna charge you a fee as well. Both of these fees are determined by the weight and dimension of the product. So the larger and heavier Amazon thinks your product is, based on the data that's available, that's when they're gonna start overcharging you. So everybody has to kind of start with the basic elements to understand what's going on. And now that we have that cleared out, the best practice to see what's going on is audit your account. I'm gonna try to explain to you as much as I can, how to audit it, but if it's too much of a complication, too many headaches. Don't worry-- there's solutions out there that can help, Getida, we happen to be one of them. We'll be happy to help, but there's a lot of good solutions out there. So here it is. So all you gotta do is something very basic. You download your payment report.
Basically all the transactions that Amazon basically charged you with all the fees effectively charges you. It's not like what they're gonna charge you in the future, what they already did in the past. You have a window of 90 days to look back, to see if they overcharge you, cuz if they did overcharge you, are you gonna be able to mathematically find what the overcharge was and get a refund for that over reimbursement for that.
So that's the first file you need. Okay. So that's the payment report. You found all the transactions in the past 90 days with all the fees. That's good. And then what you want to do, go to sell essential, reports, fulfillment, fee preview-- and in the fee preview you're gonna see all the data that Amazon has per ASIN, per SKU, that you have and what they think the weight and dimensions are.
And based on those weight and dimensions, they charge you on the other report. These are two reports that you need. And the third report is your report. You the private label seller, or even the reseller, you need to know what the weight and dimension of each ASIN is or are. And once you have that in the report, you just cross reference and then you see all of a sudden there's a Delta,
There's a gap Amazon thinks for this station, instead of being three ounces, it's 30 ounces instead of being six inches, it's 60 inches, you know, sometimes zero can be the typo.
[00:03:35] Chris: Typo. Yeah.
[00:03:36] Yoni: Yeah, boom. They're gonna basically overcharge you a lot of fees. So for example, if they're supposed to charge you $3 per unit, every time they fulfill the order, but instead of that, they have wrong data so they're charging you $10 per unit. So they're gonna financially charge you $7 per unit, you sold 10,000 units, that's $70,000.
So that's kind of the framework. And that's how you run the audit. And of course, if you see there's a difference that is not in your favor, you need to open a case and accomplish two things.
The first thing, update the data. So going forward to stop the bleeding, the overcharges, and of course, backup 90 days, see what they overcharged you and get those refunds and reimbursements. And that's kind of the mission. Now ask for your question. I think you follow up that you had, Chris.
[00:04:11] Chris: Yep.
[00:04:12] Yoni: If they ignore you or they reject it, get stuck, they reject it. Anything less than getting your money.
So if that happens and there's a struggle, you can prepare more evidence for them. For example, they say, oh, we run a binge check and we did remeasurement and we stand by our data.
So another option that you have, once again, be always polite. Always be professional don't take this personal, this is just mathematics. Okay. So their calculations there's either still a gap, what you can do, an additional thing, is it basically showed them evidence. And how do you show them evidence? You take pictures of your product with the tape measure.
So it clearly shows the dimension and also another picture of your product on a scale. So they can see the weight and dimensions and you send it over to them-- see, tell them this is what's going on, please remeasure again, or, or do it correctly, whatever it is. And they might recalculate it or take your evidence as a complete truth.
And basically they give you that refund or in the recovery. So that's, that's available to you.
[00:05:03] Chris: Yeah, I don't mean to laugh. Like it's not a serious topic, obviously there's a lot of money at stake, I laugh because it's kind of sad that they force you to spend time showing pictures of you measuring something when they could have measured it properly the first time and they just didn't feel like doing it. So they just said no, because we get that a lot in what we do with reinstatement appeals, where it's like, ah, I don't feel like reading this. Oh, but there's a lot of good info here. Nah, I don't have time. Or I don't feel like it.
Or please provide the things that you just provided.
[00:05:31] Yoni: You give the perfect invoice and they tell you they need more data or you sent the same invoice and the other one's like, oh, that's enough. And boom, you're good to go.
[00:05:38] Leah: Right? Yeah.
[00:05:39] Chris: Because I imagine you get the same problem we do where people say, I gave them everything. They wanted four times. All they do is say no and they don't say why, right?
[00:05:47] Yoni: That is one of the main struggles is the haziness. You don't know why? Give me, tell me exactly pin point where the issues I'll comply. Just, I need to know where it is because there could be 30 variables you're gonna try to tweak. And then when you tweak them, you tweak stuff that we're sitting correctly and then you're tweaking that, you're tweaking that and it becomes a little off and the stuff you really need to tweak is staying there.
And the whole thing becomes very scrambled. So that's unfortunately, that's when you need kind of the assistance and support system that's out there, that know exactly , how to untangle. Also, you can do process of elimination or you have a good eye to see how Amazon already likes to see things and understand things and the mathematics of things, and then things become much more turnkey.
[00:06:23] Chris: And so to Leah's question about prevention, I mean, is that just getting organized before? Make sure you don't submit these tickets or claims prematurely because they'll be more easily rejected or what else?
[00:06:37] Yoni: Yeah. So first of all, have all your ducks in row, know your data. If you just have a file and you don't really know that it's a hundred percent accurate the data and you're fighting with them, and they really remeasure five times. And once the moment you remeasure yourself, so they're wrong and sorry they were right then you're wrong. You might have an issue. So be locked down your data, be very confident with it. So it's really, really good. Don't take anything for granted, because you're dealing with a large body that has a lot of power of decision over the fees and stuff like that.
So, you gotta stay professional with that. Another thing you can consider is that-- okay, let's say they they're right. And you see these fees are really heavy on your end, they're taking a toll on your on your margins. Another option that you have is look at Amazon's fee structures and weight and dimensions chart and if your product is borderline, let's say it's 16 inches. But if you go 14 inches down, you're gonna be charged less fees maybe, work with your factory or your suppliers to kind of remeasure it or reduce the weight and dimensions, if possible or as much as possible.
And then boom, you're gonna be able to reduce the fees and work with Amazon to say, Hey, you see, I send a new batch in, you can remeasure it. It has a new weight and dimension structure and boom, you reduce it and just have a better business in your hands.
[00:07:44] Leah: Yeah. That's a really good tip. Do you deal with cases where Amazon has pulled a product into the wrong category? And so then it's being charged the wrong category fees?
[00:07:53] Yoni: Well, yeah, we don't see it often and it's pretty seldom, but we have seen it in the past where Amazon had charged the wrong fees based on the wrong categories.
One example was I believe it was a small and light program. A product was ready and it was registered for that and it was eligible. And then even though all the I and Ts were crossed properly, they were still being charged more fees or charging incorrectly.
So they had a struggle with that. It's like everything's supposed to be working, but it's not. So how do you deal with it? It's very frustrating. Sometimes you have to kind of escalate to a phone level and team leadership and stuff like that, and really show them that air. Because the moment you open a case to a fresh case, you're gonna say, oh, make sure this, this, this, this, this, this, this, they're gonna tell you something.
So you said, I checked all this, this, and they don't know what to do. Right. So you really have to be able to go up the letter and to show them, Hey, something's off. Maybe do a reset, or maybe they'll tell you, delete the whole thing and release it again. Maybe just a system bugger error. So we have all these other options to solve it.
But we have seen it in the past. Yeah. It's not so simple.
[00:08:46] Chris: Yeah.
[00:08:47] Leah: Yeah. I'll have to remember that because we do have cases where people's listings are suspended because Amazon has moved it into the wrong category. So I need to remember next time I get them reinstated to send them for you for money afterwards.
[00:08:57] Yoni: Yep. I mean, I'll be happy to help.
[00:08:59] Chris: And on that note, riding the coattails of that comment, you know a lot about this entire material, you've been doing it for years. We're detecting that lots of other agencies, companies, service providers are coming out saying they can reclaim funds and lost money from Amazon for people you've been doing it a lot longer than they have. If you had to say what Getida's all about and how you guys are better at this stuff than everybody else?
[00:09:26] Yoni: Got it. So I'll start with saying that everybody out there that's doing work much love, much respect, it's all good, we don't have an issue with that. What's really special with us is that we're very customizable. So whether you have your own team or another provider working on your stuff and you wanna keep him, you like him, it's okay, you can keep him. What we're able to do is whatever they're leaving behind, we're gonna be able to detect and capture and put it back in your pocket and only we're successful doing it only then we're gonna get rewarded because just like that, it's free to join and it's free to stay. We only charge a fee based on performance, right?
We charge a 25% fee. So you're always gonna be able to see the gap, the Delta, we don't really have to say we're the best or anything we can just mathematically just, you know, prove it to you. And the proof will be in the pudding. So anybody at any time at any day can come to us, we'll give 'em a free audit, a free report.
We're telling you we can recover 5,000, 50,000, 500,000. And based on data, sellers can make an educated decision saying, oh, would you like us to get through that Delta that money that's owed to you? Typically they say, yes, money is pretty useful. It can be used from things to help people in their businesses and grow the business.
So that is definitely was something I can pinpoint. Beyond that. Just a few more things high level is that, first of all, we're an authorized solution by Amazon so if you visit Amazon seller central, there's an app store, we're authorized. So what does that mean? It means that we have a commitment to you, the sellers, but also to Amazon to make sure that we're terms of service, compliant, data security, private policy,
if somebody, somewhere in a basement is telling you let me do everything for you. I'll do this for you, this for you, but also auditing it and, and repricing and, and reimbursements, all that stuff for you. But they're not really in the app store. They say, oh I'll do it for free or almost free.
You know, maybe you should kind of rethink, because Amazon has created a whole platform called the app store and the service provider network so you can make an educated decision. See who's committed to Amazon standards and rules and TOS in terms of service. So that's another differentiation I can go on and on, but I'll give you Hightlights.
[00:11:11] Chris: No, that's great.
[00:11:12] Leah: We have a previous episode where we talk about being careful who you give account access to, so we'll just link that in the show notes.
[00:11:18] Yoni: There you go.
[00:11:18] Chris: We do that too. We do that too. No, I mean, we've referred lots of people your way, , but what's the best way to get an assessment by Getida?
And what's the best way to reach you with questions about anything they talk about on the podcast or really anywhere that you've posted
[00:11:34] Yoni: You got it. So you can always visit getida.com/ecommercechris-- if you do that, we're gonna prepare a $400 offer for you. So basically not only it's free to join, the first 400 bucks we're gonna get for you will be free. We're not gonna charge you a penny, this way you can really try us out and after $400, if you wanna leave us, you can leave. If you wanna stay, you can stay whatever you want, it's fine. So you can use that, but you can also use my direct email--
it's Yoni M which is yonim@getida.Com. That's my direct email. I'm also pretty active with social media. You can follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn. It's Yoni Mazor-- so that's it. Hopefully this is helpful.
[00:12:08] Chris: Yeah, you can be there reimbursement reclaimed funds mama-- that's what I got from
that.
[00:12:13] Yoni: I'll be happy. Yeah. Why not?
[00:12:16] Chris: Nice. Well, thanks again for joining us today, Yoni. Again, we've been partners with Getida for many years. Any questions about reimbursement and reclaiming these funds definitely go to Yoni for this because they've got a long track record and a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge. So thanks again for helping us today.
[00:12:35] Yoni: Thank you guys.
[00:12:36] Leah: Thanks Yoni.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hey, Amazon sellers. Welcome to Seller Performance Solutions. I am Leah McHugh with eCommerceChris and I am here with the eCommerceChris, Chris McCabe.
[00:00:17] Chris: The Chris, the Chris eCommerce.Chris. Yes. Yes. I'm excited to be talking about what we're talking about today. So--
[00:00:24] Leah: Yeah, so for a change, Chris and I don't fully agree on this one. But I have been seeing more and more communication from the executive seller relations team that indicates to me that they no longer have the access or power that they used to. So historically, That was really the only team within Amazon, outside of like the higher level executives who actually had access to all of the other teams. So they could contact the abuse teams and they could contact legal and compliance and seller performance.
I'm seeing more and more executive seller relations coming back saying we don't have access to that team, or we don't have access to those tools and they just send you back to whatever path that you had tried to go through originally, which didn't work, which is the whole reason that you had to escalate it and it was delegated to executive seller relations in the first place. Chris has a different view--
[00:01:17] Chris: it's circular.
Of how--- of what this means.
Well, no, it's circular. Well, I just don't think it's news that it's circular. What's new. Is that they say, like, we can't transfer this for you. We can't see the annotations. You and I disagree on whether or not they're being a hundred percent truthful when they say that. I think you take them more at their word.
[00:01:38] Leah: Well, no, I don't-- I've just seen it so many times at this point. Okay. That if they were lying and then we re escalate it and name them and call them out on it. I just can't imagine that that would keep happening over and over again.
[00:01:56] Chris: I don't know if they're lying. They're just accustomed to passing the buck, transferring things, not wanting to deal with things and trying to get stuff off their plate. Just the way seller performance always historically was. That's the biggest knock against my former team. Right? Is they look for excuses not to read a plan of action, not to look at an appeal, not to have to make a decision. This is the biggest knock against, I think marketplace management and enforcement generally speaking.
[00:02:26] Leah: Yeah. I just think that if we're calling them out on it to their bosses fairly regularly, that they're lying about what they have access to. That there would be something, you could be right. It could be just a lie to not have to do anything. I've seen it so many times at this point that I find it hard to believe that they're all just lying about the same thing.
[00:02:49] Chris: No, what they have access to they've always disagreed even within teams, even with each other, what they have access to just like calling account health services, you get about seven different answers on what they can do, what they can't do. Can they access annotations about why an appeal was denied or can they not, you get seven different answers.
They can't even be consistent on the most basic points. Some of them will say, I'll submit this appeal for you because something was missed, something went wrong and others will say, I have no ability to resubmit anything for you, no matter what the circumstances. So I think it's parallel to account health services.
And also, I know we can back up a second talk about what executive seller relations is. I know what caused this and it's all of the people sending all appeals or all kinds of messaging. To the Jeff at Amazon email address and expecting to get a proper review by ESR executive seller relations. So they've drowned that queue in that team in a lot of junk and they had to start watering down the review process, watering down the response process when, when I was there and I was working on the Bezos escalations or things that went to executive seller relations, where I had to pick that message that a lot of you have seen that says, you know, Jeff read your message.
And he asked me to review this and respond on his behalf. They did change that a little bit and take Jeff's name out after he left as CEO and they started inserting other people's names, but they're still using the same basic template from 8, 9, 10 years ago. It's been overused. I mean, Amazon sellers love to overuse email queues and they love to write to Jeff, even now that's what concerns me that this is so outdated and that sellers are just reading. Maybe you can tell me, I mean, old forum posts, ancient Facebook messages with ancient ad posts.
[00:04:42] Leah: Well, I mean, there's just so much bad information on the internet.
[00:04:46] Chris: Bad suggestions. Yeah. I can't figure out if somebody in a Facebook group is posting a comment, trying to look knowledgeable because you know, they're selling something and that's why they say write to Jeff, or if it's just old regurgitated information that no one's taken the time to, to render obsolete.
I mean, I think it's just a known path that still does regularly elicit a response, not necessarily a useful response, but they do actually get a response to it and it's known. So I think that's why we'll see, we see it used so often because it is one of the most well known escalation paths. I mean, it definitely seems like there are a lot more people on the executive seller relations team. For a while I could identify them by name. That's not the case anymore. There seems to be like, there are a lot more, but to me it just seems like there're an extension of seller support at this point. And my question is if they don't have the ability to do what that team was made for what is even the point of having that team?
Yeah. It's window dressing and it's kind of glorified support, which they consider a higher level of support.
[00:05:53] Leah: But they haven't fixed the issue that caused the need for that team to exist. They just taken that team's ability away to do anything while still mm-hmm, having the original issues.
That was the reason for that team to be created in the first place. So it's just made it even more convoluted to get things corrected.
[00:06:15] Chris: I think we can disagree on this perhaps, too, but I think I know why, I think they've been gravitating towards a fee for service model for years. I mean, yeah. And I think they want you to pay for an account manager and they want the SAS core tickets that your Sam, your strategic account manager creates, they want that to be your escalation, which is an internal escalation process.
[00:06:38] Leah: That doesn't work very well either.
[00:06:39] Chris: But that doesn't work very well either. I mean, most of our paying clients have account managers.
[00:06:42] Leah: Right. And that doesn't get them very far.
[00:06:45] Chris: Well, the second piece to this, of course, without going down this rabbit hole. They have had to internally restrict who can view what? So they're not really lying when they say I can't view certain kinds of compliance, annotations or account annotations. They are being truthful about that because with some employee bad behavior, which of course is surfaced in the press and, and this lawsuit that cropped up, where the feds are, are going after people who are paying employees to reinstate listings and accounts. Amazon internally had to totally change the rules on who could access what and who could read what? So that's not a complete fabrication, but we're curious as to why approved certified investigators for executive seller relations don't have access to things that you would need to see in order to properly adjudicate and appeal, or like an escalation.
[00:07:35] Leah: So, right. I mean, if you're escalating it, because the team that's supposed to fix this, isn't doing their job, how are they supposed to do anything if they can't access that team or they can't access tools to even see what it is you're talking about. Yeah. Just sending you back to the team that didn't do their job in the first place? I mean, it's not surprising , but it's also a waste of time for everybody because it's creating more cases on Amazon side, as well as creating bigger headaches on the seller side.
[00:08:04] Chris: And it's disappointing more than surprising and it's disappointing for a very specific reason. They're not realistic about what will happen when they keep sending you to a junk team that can't help you. Obviously you're going to go over everyone's head and complain that the channels you've been given, aren't functional, aren't audited, aren't practical, aren't working. You have no choice if your listing is down, you're losing thousands a day. Your whole account is down. Do you really expect to just stay in. People that stay in seller central and get the same copy and paste like garbage messages.
But Amazon will also penalize you. If you send too many messages that they deem to be incorrect, we've seen people suspended for that and they also can take away your brand registry. If they're not acting on your notice claims of infringement and you keep filing correct ones and they just keep rejecting them, eventually they take away your brand registry. So, just to take away the team that was supposed to be able to actually see all of these things is disappointing.
And we'll do a separate episode about the people we're working with, who have legitimate intellectual property complaints that file them and get them rejected by people inside Amazon who obviously have no idea what IP means. But this just reminds me of when they started pumping out those responses, you've appealed to the wrong channel. You've emailed the wrong channel, right. They severed all these pads. Of communication and thinking this will be better, we'll centralize, we'll gather everyone in seller central and we'll keep them there because it's easier for us. And it's convenient for us.
[00:09:45] Leah: Well, that's not a terrible plan if the team is able to actually do their job, if the team just 'continues to not really properly review things, then no, it's not gonna work.
[00:09:57] Chris: And you're just getting generic template, no information responses through the seller central channel. So it wasn't done for like functionality, it was done for their convenience. It's done for their reasons. It's hard to get certain people at Amazon to sit down with you and admit that these things aren't working the way they were intended to work, because they're so used to kind of using the scripted responses, which is, you know, the process was designed to deal with the problem you're talking about, go back through the process. Well, just the fact that they're telling you to go back to the process that didn't work.
Well, you're going in reverse because they told you, I mean, maybe they should just be more blunt with, which is tell you the process works. You're not doing it right. You need to do again because what's breaking here is you not us, but they're not willing to admit that.
[00:10:51] Leah: And also that's not true half the time, a lot of the time you're submitting real information, correct information. I'm not even talking about if you're suspended and your plan of action is getting rejected. I'm talking about any number of reasons where something has gone wrong on Amazon's side, and nobody knows what to do about it on their side. So the easiest thing is to just say, Nope, no problem. You're wrong. And then you're back where you started.
[00:11:20] Chris: That's easier to admit. That's easier than admitting we don't know what to do. I don't have time to figure it out. I'm on the clock. I might look like I'm ignorant about my own job, if I ask too many questions about what to do. So I'm gonna shuffle it off somewhere and hope that the next person can handle it. That's what they're not admitting.
[00:11:40] Leah: And I think why this is so disappointing to me is that I clearly over optimistically hoped that things would improve under Jassy, and so far, it seems like those teams are in worse shape than they were previously. So yeah, maybe the fixes are in the works and maybe a year from now, I'll be singing a different tune, but so far things are worse not better.
[00:12:08] Chris: Well within the next year, we have to go through another very hectic Q4. So I hope that's not true. And I hope things iron out quicker than that, because I mean, Andy Jassy has been around for almost 12 months as the CEO, he was around before that of course, but this is his show now. And we're seeing in the news, lots of executives reshuffling at the top of the company.
[00:12:30] Leah: I'm just not seeing the, you know, he's known for micromanaging and I'm not seeing the results. One would expect from a micromanager.
[00:12:40] Chris: I don't take people back to the old days too much anymore, but in the old days, executive seller relations and escalations that were read by Jeff or his assistants, or even my boss or my boss's boss, I could look around the room and see how many people were approved to work on those.
They were within my field division. And I was one of them and there were only a handful of us. So obviously over time. They've scaled it to the point where they're throwing bodies at a problem. But what that means for you as a seller, trying to escalate appeals is don't assume that just because they've got the fancy important sounding title of executive seller relations, that those are the top investigators on the team.
[00:13:21] Leah: Exactly.
[00:13:22] Chris: So any questions on this-- I mean, this is a kind of complex topic, so let us know if you have any questions on it.
[00:13:29] Leah: And thank you for listening to our rant.
[00:13:31] Chris: Yes, I'm sure Leah and I will revisit this and debate and disagree on it again in the future. So look forward to that. Thanks Chris.
Mm-hmm . Bye. Bye.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is Chris McCabe. I'm here with Leah McHugh. How are you doing, Leah?
[00:00:15] Leah: Good, how are you?
[00:00:16] Chris: Good, it's been an exciting week or two, shake up at the top, right? The executive ranks in Amazon. Not just splashing news stories that Dave Clark, the head of logistics or the head of the global consumer worldwide consumer, we always love some of these different titles and what they mean, but he's a big one to be leaving because he reported directly to the CEO, Andy Jassy. Some thought at one point that he might have been the next CEO to succeed Jeff last year. And the fact that he's leaving is a big deal in our world because a lot of sellers have come to escalate things to Dave Clark. And whether they're tweeting and mentioning him by name or tweeting his handle or emailing him directly or emailing some of his direct reports, which would be senior VPs that work directly for him.
And mentioning him by name and the escalation, people who have listings taken down, or of course an entire account suspended are grasping for straws and looking for ways to get an appeal properly reviewed. Right? This is why a lot of people come to us for help. They've already tried to appeal it themselves.
They've already tried to contact some VPs who have ignored them or bounced it around their own teams, transferred it to a manager who left it to rot or didn't review it properly and the seller typically gets a copy and paste response similar to what they received before. So what do they do? What do a lot of us do? You start climbing the ladder to somebody higher, right? A higher level executive.
[00:01:44] Leah: Well, I think too many people that are probably jumping the ladder and trying to go directly to the top and that doesn't really achieve anything other than burning a bridge for later.
[00:01:53] Chris: Yeah. I mean, somebody like Dave Clark, he leaves July 1st, but before that emailing him, you might hope that you're going to get taken a bit more seriously, but he might also be transferring it around. It's important to know how the reshuffle at the top goes and who replaces him or who reports to who? It's good to have an idea of what the food chain looks like, because when you're stuck when the appeal is not being properly reviewed, you have to customize these escalations. We keep saying this over and over. You're not just winging it. Throwing some words on a page, demanding to be taken seriously.
[00:02:28] Leah: Or just sending your same appeal to everybody you can find the email for we see that far too often, unfortunately.
[00:02:36] Chris: We're alarmed at how often we see spamming of the executive ranks at Amazon, hoping for a different result, even though you've already been rejected several times with the same plan of action you're over-confident in how good the plan of action is, or you've written a simple appeal saying I'm a small business owner. We love Amazon, or we hate Amazon, we want you to look at this, Jeff. People do still write to Jeff.
[00:02:57] Leah: Yeah. And Jeff still does sometimes work, certainly not in the way that he used to. But I mean, I think the biggest thing, and this is also something we've been saying for a very long time, is that an escalation isn't just sending your appeal to somebody else. An escalation is two parts, the escalation letter, which is your explanation as to why it needs to be escalated, which has to be something going wrong on Amazon's side. And also the appeal, just sending your appeal to everybody you can possibly get your hands on is not going to result in any sort of movement.
[00:03:30] Chris: Right. Or just Dear Jeff, we've been sellers for a long time. We've been treated poorly. I understand the desire to put that content in there. I understand at some times, you know, the value of including that, but that's not enough. And I think what scares me most about some of the escalation sellers write for themselves or sellers who hire somebody else out to write it for them, or that they have VA's do it or their own internal staff, whatever there's tons of stuff missing from these things. So, don't expect to be taken seriously at higher levels of the company, if you have decided to target those people with unserious, incomplete appeal content, that's what we don't understand. I understand the emotional need to be taken seriously. And you want to be heard. All of us want to be heard, especially at moments of financial duress and business stress.
This is not the way to go about it. If you are escalating to different VPs, if you're sending it will stay with Dave Clark since sending it to somebody like him who reports directly to the CEO, I would want to make sure as a business owner, as a brand owner, that it is exactly what he expects to read or his staff expects to read.
And you are a hundred percent sure that you haven't left anything out and you're a hundred percent sure you haven't put anything in that shouldn't be in it.
[00:04:47] Leah: Well, and the focus needs to be amazon's processes aren't working and it's negative for Amazon and it's negative for Amazon's customers. The focus can't be, I am not happy with the situation. The focus needs to be on I have done exactly what I've been told to do by Amazon. And the process is not working and it needs to be fixed. And that, that can be a number of things. It could be things not being done within the KPIs. It can be things not being reviewed properly. It can be things just not being actioned, but there needs to be-- your reason isn't just, I'm unhappy. I want this change. The reason needs to be you're in charge of these processes and these processes are not working and that's bad for sellers and it's bad for consumers because it means that bad actors are able to get along fairly easily. And people who are following the processes, the way that they're supposed to be followed are being harmed. And that's ultimately harmful for Amazon's customers.
[00:05:41] Chris: And focus instead on who reports to Dave Clark, that you've already been to and they haven't taken action. They haven't reviewed it. You've heard silence. You've seen generic copy and paste messages. That's meaningful that their direct reports aren't auditing their own teams, senior VPs aren't managing VPs properly. SOP's aren't being used or they're being disregarded, skipping steps. Right? No measures being taken to correct. A failed process. There's lots of hype around process. They're a process obsessed. They're a data centric process, obsessed company. We never see that in marketplace management. We don't see it in seller performance.
[00:06:20] Leah: Well, I can see, I can see that the processes are there. The processes just aren't great or adhered to.
[00:06:26] Chris: Or the SOP is probably need some improving to not just how are they being implemented in team-wide training, I think it's both. But complaining about "I've opened so many cases to seller support and that never worked, or I emailed self-performance. They never got back to me." Whining about those teams. I understand the whining. I'm not saying you shouldn't be frustrated because those teams aren't competent or professional grade teams, but having the basis of your escalation being the whining to an executive at Amazon that already knows that seller performance is hopelessly broken. That already knows that seller support is borderline useless. Those executives know that just as much as you do. So you're telling them something in a complaining fashion that they already know instead of the content you need in the escalation.
How long has it been? Two weeks, three weeks. How much revenue is it cost you? How many of their direct reports have you written to in the past? And by the way, when you're emailing or contacting these direct reports, whether again, it's through Twitter, email, other channels, your account manager, who knows, customize the escalations, because if you send it to a VP and they look in your account annotations, and they see that you sent the exact same complaint or appeal to one of their colleagues, what does that tell them? I don't have to waste time on this. I don't have to waste time on you. I don't have to read this.
[00:07:51] Leah: Well, and you're not having to start from scratch every time. I mean, certainly the situation hasn't changed but it can just be the exact same thing. Like you need to, you need to reconfigure it a little bit, rewrite it and also add the next step like well, the last thing we did was email this person and they ignored us or maybe they responded and then nothing happened or whatever the case may be. You need to be adding to it. But at the same time, you need to keep it short. So sometimes if we add things, it means that something else that you'd had in there before it maybe needs to be removed, that maybe isn't as relevant now or just wasn't as important as the last thing that you did.
We're not saying that you have to like start your novel every single time that you email this in, you can't just send the same email or the same appeal over and over again and expecting that eventually somebody will actually take it seriously. If it didn't work once it's probably really not going to work the third or fourth or fifth or tenth time.
[00:08:43] Chris: Okay. This is not War and Peace. You're keeping it short, which maybe we don't emphasize enough, but, stick to the facts. Stick to the points.
[00:08:50] Leah: I actually find the shorter I make my escalations, the more likely they are to get a response.
[00:08:55] Chris: Right. If a VP gets an escalation and they delegate it to one of their managers, I mean, it's coming to them from their boss, so the manager should review it and should take it seriously. But this happens a lot and their inboxes are clogged. The original processes set up, aren't working properly, as we all know, and escalations are often what's required to get these listings reinstated or accounts back up. So anybody with a clogged inbox is likely to read something to quickly miss some key salient points or just botch it, so just keep that in mind.
[00:09:29] Leah: And you can be, you can be pushy, but if you start your escalation with a whole bunch of emotional language, they're probably going to ignore it. You know, it's again, it's Amazon, so you want to lay it out like this happened and then it needs to follow a logic. So if plus this equals this, that's what Amazon's looking for, starting it with I hate Amazon or I love Amazon is just asking to be ignored.
[00:09:54] Chris: All caps. I don't know why I thought that died off a while ago.
[00:09:57] Leah: Weird subject lines to try to like, get somebody, to look into it from intrigue or something. All that does is make them not take you seriously. And we saw something that absolutely got read and perhaps laughed at, but not going to actually be taken seriously.
[00:10:13] Chris: Yeah. Key difference. You want them laughing with you not laughing at you and maybe that's a good line to end on, but we have seen some interesting , Shakespearian subject lines. I think one of them was there's something rotten in Denmark, which is a Hamlet reference, great. You know, maybe somebody who's familiar with Hamlet will find that interesting and funny. They probably want to get you out of their way as quickly as possible.
[00:10:37] Leah: I mean, honestly, I would just assume that was spam if I received that.
[00:10:40] Chris: Right. It does look like and sound like spam. So for those of you out there that were English lit or literature majors, which is a small percentage of us, I assume. That might mean something, but you're doing more than getting their attention. You're making an argument, you're making a case and you have to be convincing. So that executive or that manager sits back in their chair or on their couch or on their boat and says, you know what, we didn't do the right thing when we reviewed this appeal previously and I'm going to reverse the denials that came before.
[00:11:11] Leah: Well, and more importantly, the team that I am in charge of is making mistakes and this could come back and hurt me at some point.
[00:11:18] Chris: It could be escalated to my boss or my direct, who I'm directly reporting to. So questions on escalations, as you know, ecommerceChris always there to answer them. Leah and I talk about this stuff. E-commerce Chris with Leah McHugh, special guest. We talk about this stuff all the time on our own and with you. So feel free to show us escalations right before you hit the send button. And we'll take a look because hopefully if you're emailing something to Dave Clark, you understand the seriousness and the gravity of it. And you're not sending something willy-nilly off the cuff without considering it quite a bit. So thanks for joining us. And thanks, Leah. I'll talk to you soon.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, I'm here with Leah McHugh. Hey Leah, how you doing?
[00:00:12] Leah: Hi Chris, good how are you?
[00:00:13] Chris: Good. Talking about kind of an unnerving, frustrating topic that private label sellers and resellers are experiencing both the constant demand for supply chain documentation and the constant denials and rejections, without explanation on the Amazon side, right? The appeals teams, we think we find or found some quotes from Amazon executives that may explain why they're rejecting everything insight. Right. I mean, we've been talking about this--
[00:00:44] Leah: I mean, yes and no. I think that what the executives are saying are one, for PR and two, I think, you know what they're saying explains the request for documentation. It doesn't explain how badly they then handle it on their side.
[00:01:03] Chris: Oh no, that's fine. We can explain why they're handling it badly because we see constant rejection we have just to give people a quick sketch background, we have clients and sellers that were guiding through this process constantly asking us why would they reject?
I mean, these are private label sellers for the most part that we're working with, but also resellers. Sometimes people buying from authorized distributors could be a private label seller. They might have licensing agreements in hand. A lot of them have authorization letters in hand, all the wonderful things Amazon keeps asking for. And in a moment, we'll explain why Amazon is obsessive asking for these things, but all the rejections that we see clients are calling account health, talking to them, asking why, there have been really poor shoddy explanations if there even is an explanation from the Amazon teams on why an invoice gets rejected and why a supplier is considered non-verifiable and that's what we're going to be covering today.
[00:02:02] Leah: Well, and some of it, we know, documentation is something that we've been talking about for years at this point. And we still see sellers who don't have adequate documentation.
So that one is self-explanatory. I think the parts that makes less sense, at least on the surface is the people who are submitting documentation that fully complies with Amazon's unwritten rules, because they don't actually lay that out anywhere but it still gets rejected for no apparent reason. So people who are working with authorized distributors who have websites, who they provide the link to, and they provide a direct contact and their invoices have all of the information are still just getting denied as unverifiable and it's like, once it's marked as one unverifiable. There is no going back from that, it seems if you try to submit the same invoices again for a proper review, they just are like, we already rejected this as unverifiable, despite the fact that it is 100% verifiable.
[00:02:59] Chris: It's an knee jerk reaction. And we can get into that.
Obviously they're trying to save themselves the time and the work when they reject something that's been previously rejected, but quick caveat here, we're not talking about dropshippers who have no invoices, unless there's an order today. We're not talking about sellers who, for whatever reason, don't even have an invoice because that's already been covered and that's not a way to sell on Amazon anymore. It hasn't been for awhile. We don't understand why people are still doing it beyond paying some sort of membership fee or buying into a course that gives you bad advice. We're not--
[00:03:31] Leah: But Chris-- you could make a million dollars in a weekend.
[00:03:34] Chris: I can make some YouTube videos.
[00:03:36] Leah: Haven't you seen those ads?
[00:03:37] Chris: Yes. In my garage poorly produced. But we're not talking about that today because I frankly believe that's a waste of time. Those appeals just get automatically rejected. If you send an appeal where they ask for an invoice, along with an appeal, doesn't matter how. Shakespeareanly well your appeal is written. If there's no invoice, it's automatically rejected unless dumb luck they just don't even read it and they just accept it.
But that's very, very rare. we're not talking about sellers who for whatever reason don't maintain or don't have invoices, invoices aren't enough anymore. And in many cases they're asking for a letter of authorization or they need to make sure that your supplier, whether it's your manufacturer, whether it's your factory in China, whether it's here in the US, your supplier has to have a website that they can verify along with the invoice. So your invoice--
[00:04:30] Leah: An Alibaba store doesn't count as a website,
An Alibaba storefront never counts, never counts and there are some really terrible looking websites that it looks like either the seller built for the supplier or the supplier put up at the insistence of the seller, just because of this. And it looks like it doesn't even work as a website.
That is sort of an industry thing, you know, wholesale suppliers traditionally have not had websites. It's interesting because Amazon is almost like forcing, forcing that part of the industry forward, but it isn't actually that uncommon for a wholesaler not to have a website.
[00:05:05] Chris: That's true but it's 2022.
[00:05:06] Leah: But it doesn't mean they're not, it doesn't mean they're not a legitimate wholesaler. It just means that Amazon is not going to accept it because they're looking for the easiest way of verifying information. And for them, that's like finding a website.
[00:05:19] Chris: And why is Amazon so obsessed with this website stuff? It's because they need on their own to independently verify that you've got a legit source of that product. It could even be your own product, but it is an independently verifiable, not just you showing them stuff, they can do a Google search. They can look at the website on their own and see the kinds of items that you're selling, or maybe the same exact SKUs that you're selling on that website.
If you're a reseller you're buying from an authorized distributor and hopefully the distributor is listed on the brand's website, ideally. But what is this all about? Excuse me. I found a recent quote from David Zapolsky. So David Zapolsky's Amazon's lead counsel, one of the S team executives. I'll read this: "Since opening our doors in 95. Trust has been at the foundation of everything we do. Nearly 27 years later we are more effective than ever wink, wink at protecting customers, brands, selling partners and our store while we are proud of the progress we have made, we will not stop until we drive counterfeits to zero in our store, and we will continue to invest and innovate until we get there." That's what this is about.
It's their own KYC internal process of making sure counterfeits aren't sold. Everything's authentic. Everything's as advertised. That's the theory. That's the goal. In practice, not in theory. In theory, it's great to have zero counterfeit. In practice, that means constant rejection of invoices. Possibly without any explanation or reasoning behind it and consistently rejecting suppliers or their websites as non-verifiable, that's the part that Amazon hasn't explained why it's working so poorly.
And that's why sellers are so frustrated.
[00:07:04] Leah: Also, If there are so interested in getting counterfeits to zero, why do they regularly ignore abuse reports, showing counterfeit products being sold on their website?
[00:07:14] Chris: Right. And we should note that we've got sellers approaching us almost every day, showing us fake positive reviews that haven't been deleted, right? I mean, that's a form of fraud, to have fake positive reviews.
[00:07:27] Leah: Well, or just people selling counterfeit versions of their product or hijacking a listing so they can tell a knockoff version of a product that has many many fantastic reviews.
[00:07:37] Chris: Right? Knockoffs and counterfeits with five-star reviews. Mostly lately, we've been approached by sellers who aren't winning the buy box and are angry that knockoffs and counterfeits are winning the buy box.
So they have a lot more innovating to do before they get to zero counterfeit but hypothetically, that's why they're grinding up both private label sellers and resellers looking for invoices they can accept. Obviously, if the invoices are dated over a year, that'll be automatically rejected unless the investigator just doesn't notice that it's over a year.
[00:08:09] Leah: Right? So there are certain things that your invoices have to have. One of which it needs to be within that timeframe. Two, it needs to be for the right quantity of goods over that period of time. So you can't send in an invoice for 10 products when you've sold like a thousand products during the period of time that Amazon's asking for. Your information on the invoice needs to exactly match your information in seller central. That's one that we see people run into issues with a lot, particularly if they have multiple entities and maybe one entity is buying from the supplier rather than the same entity that's on their seller account. You also need to have item numbers. I always recommend using a UPC on the invoice because that's universal. Whereas the manufacturer SKU is not necessarily universal. You want a number on there that makes it very, very easy for Amazon to match it to what they have in their system. You could also use an ASIN, but, I think a UPC looks better in terms of it doesn't look like you got this invoice just to please Amazon.
[00:09:10] Chris: Yeah. So there's a lot of people who don't understand the whole UPC situation, right?
[00:09:15] Leah: Well, I mean, that's a whole other topic that I don't want to get into here, but a universal identifier that Amazon can check is what you want on the invoice. And it needs to be an itemized invoice. I mean, so, so it can't be like I bought a lot of products and it included all of these different things. It needs to be itemized and it also needs to have the contact information of your supplier. So not just their address, but also direct contact of whoever your sales person is. So their direct email address, their direct line, phone number. Ideally it has their website listed on the invoice as well. You need to have all of this information. Otherwise Amazon rejects it as unverifiable and yes, we will inevitably have people tell us that they submitted something that didn't have it and it was accepted. We're not saying Amazon's consistent. I think we are consistent in saying that Amazon is not consistent, but overall, this is what they're looking for in order to accept your documentation.,
[00:10:13] Chris: There are so many different facts and details that obviously they could miss that one or two are there and reject it or miss the one or two things aren't there and accept it.
I mean, that's always going to be the case. Not having a link to the supplier website on an invoice has been used as grounds for rejecting an appeal and rejecting the suppliers as unverifiable. So imagine if they've accepted your supplier as verifiable in the past, but they suddenly say it's not, then they've set a precedent for rejecting that supplier going forward. What if it's your only supplier?
[00:10:46] Leah: Right. Well, and a lot of people are like, oh, I'll just add that. Don't you add that to the invoice, go back to your supplier and say you need this information on your invoices and have them reissue the invoices don't make changes to the invoices because of Amazon thinks that you're tampering with any of the documentation that's just asking to be permanently deactivated because essentially that's fraud in terms of Amazon.
[00:11:10] Chris: That is fraud and it's risking the entire account. It's not just risking the ASIN.
[00:11:15] Leah: Don't add information. Have your supplier add correct information to the invoices.
[00:11:20] Chris: You know what? There's so many people that have been permanently banned for doing that. And haven't gotten reinstated, at least the ones that have contacted us. I kind of forgot about it because I assume that's become common knowledge. I shouldn't assume that. Any tampering with documentation is a deal breaker. They assume you're not safe around their buyers, right? They assume that you're a bad faith actor. It is kind of striking how many people we talk to that are surprised at that, but it's a code of conduct violation.
[00:11:49] Leah: Well, it is essentially fraud. Especially, you know, there are those services where they'll get you a real invoice that was issued to somebody else and then change the information to your information. It's amazing how many people don't realize that that is actually fraud.
[00:12:03] Chris: Right. And we're aware that Amazon's aware of some of those websites, they just haven't knocked them off or reported them or sued them yet.
[00:12:11] Leah: And I mean, honestly, It's pretty obvious. We've seen them. They're pretty easy to spot. Other ones we've seen is where people put a fake address and you look up the address and it's like a church or something else. Well, this is obviously fake.
[00:12:25] Chris: That's what I mean. I don't see that as much anymore because I think that failed a hundred percent of the time. Amazon, if you want to use the word tightened up, I mean, not really, but change their SOPs to teach the investigators, to look at this stuff faster and in a bit more detail. They miss details all the time, but really they're trying to motor through this work as quickly as possible. In terms of why would this be rejected? And then you call account health and account health has absolutely no explanation for why they rejected it and nothing's been annotated, it's because they took a quick look at something or they pretended to take a quick look at something. It's one of those two things. Clearly there's no audit trail. Clearly there's no specialized team to go back and review investigation quality. I'm sure Amazon will dispute that anytime they hear me say it, but there's no evidence of a quality process. There might be a process.
[00:13:17] Leah: No, it seems that the only thing that anybody is being judged on is speed. So it's a lot faster to say no, than it is to actually investigate and reinstate somebody whose listing or account or whatever. It seems that more and more of the teams are just being judged on how quickly they resolve cases and resolve often just means rejecting for no reason, with no notes.
[00:13:41] Chris: Yeah. And I don't think a lot of people who approach us with help wanting help writing an appeal. I don't think they understand it's not just how you write the appeal. That's why a lot of people are kind of just grabbing templates online and copying and pasting it. It's not just what's in the appeal and supply chain documentation doesn't matter. We're still hearing from people who think, oh, well it's just an invoice. An invoice is an invoice. I don't have to think about that anymore. Yeah, three or four years ago. It was kind of like that. It's been years since that change, you need three things. Verifiable supplier, complete detailed acceptable invoice and the appeal written along the lines of what they expect. If you're missing any of those three things, you could be denied. And as you can imagine, Leah and I hear from people who are rejected five, six times doing this, you know, on their own.
[00:14:30] Leah: Well, and we're not just seeing it on inauthentic items or conditioned complaints or IP complaints anymore. We're also seeing it in terms of getting approved for brand registry. If you don't have proper invoices, we're seeing them deny brand registry applications. So, it seems to be more and more often, they're just defaulting to supply chain documentation in their processes.
[00:14:53] Chris: And just to conclude, I'd love to say we throw open the doors and you'll look at invoices for our listeners. And so with I, we do look at some and we are quick to identify the flaws, but scrutinize these things yourself if Amazon's rejecting it and they're not telling you why, and you've really done your research in terms of calling account health or going over the invoice yourself with an expert. And you're still not coming to any real answers or solutions, let us know and we'll take a look, but generally speaking, don't wing it and keep a keen eye on this stuff. Have internal compliance officer or manager who goes over your documentation, make sure you have documented. Do not be caught off guard or surprised when Amazon asks you for this stuff. Letters of authorization, we talked to resellers every day that don't have these things. So yeah, we're here for you, but get it as close to completed as you can first before you put it in front of us.
[00:15:50] Leah: Right.
[00:15:51] Chris: All right. Thanks Leah. Talk to you soon.
[00:00:07] Chris: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions with Leah McHugh, and a client of ours, Keith Gregory of Hyland Labs. How you doing?
Good. And I'm glad you came up with this idea and approached us to talk about what we're talking about today. Compliance craziness. Amazon did a big sweep asking for certificates of analysis and compliance documentation . Was it two years ago when they initially initiated that?
[00:00:38] Keith: They started talking about it about two years ago and rolled it out around January, February 2021.
[00:00:44] Chris: 2021. So maybe 18 months ago. And we just want to catch up on this topic because we know that certain brands, especially lesser known sort of Phantom brands have been proven to be, or shown to be misrepresenting the potencies of their dietary supplements, that's one issue we're going to talk about today. And the other is just Amazon's lack of follow-up in terms of auditing, they might request a COA on your way in, right? But never check back in or pull random samples of products in FBA to check their potencies later on down the line, unless there's a buyer complaint, right? Maybe we'll just start with that. Do you think it's even just by a buyer complaining, Hey, this product, wasn't what it was cracked up to be. What, what it was supposed to be as shown on the label is that where this all starts?
[00:01:30] Keith: I don't think most consumers in this space would necessarily even know of a product met label claim or not. And I think that's the real danger here, is with vitamins and supplements. A lot of the times you're, you're taking them from a active stance, so it's not, Hey, I'm sick and I'm taking something to cure or prevent because we're selling supplements. You can't do that. We're doing things to better your life from a proactive standpoint. So a lot of times people wouldn't know if the product wasn't what it claimed to be and unless there's somebody out there, you know, policing that, checking that and making sure, you know, the products are selling are actually compliant. There's nobody safeguarding the consumer here.
Right.
That's the real danger, I think.
[00:02:13] Leah: Yeah. And it's interesting because I think that a lot of the new compliance checks that we were seeing were being pushed by greater scrutiny by the FDA. I've certainly seen in my work a lot more FDA warning letters, specifically mentioning products that were sold on Amazon or what verbiage they were using on their Amazon page. I guess my question to you as somebody in the industry is what would be the next step? Is it the FDA that needs to push for greater scrutiny? Is it Amazon? Is it both?
[00:02:46] Keith: I think there's a burden on everybody, right? Certainly Amazon as the host of this marketplace share some responsibility in this. Right?
And I feel like they've kind of done the bare minimum as far as saying, okay, we're going to require a C of A for a new product before we allow it to list. Right? Which is and they did step up that requirement. Cause it used to be, you could list anything on Amazon and the dietary supplement category, and then there was no requirements, right?
So at least they're requiring a third-party CFA now to say, okay, this product does indeed have what it says it is. And then even further, like in some categories, male enhancement categories, those kinds of things. They're requiring further testing to show that there aren't adults rated materials in some of those products, but where they're falling down is, you know, as soon as a product has submitted at CFA, further lots that are being submitted further, you know, shipments into Amazon and those marketplaces, they're not testing again.
There's no random sampling across the marketplace and so It creates a conundrum , as when you're in the industry and you see products selling on Amazon at below market price, of some of raw materials that are in there. Right? So those of us that are in the industry, we start to question, okay, well, what's the integrity of that product?
We don't know this brand. You don't see this brand on a store shelf anywhere. I can't go down to the local Kroger and buy this. So who's policing that? And the way we started this conversation was Now Foods came out with this big study where they went and they randomly bought 24 different products and the person in space on Amazon, and they sent them off to a third party lab, ISO lab to test them.
And what you find out is there's only three out of those 24 products that actually met or exceeded label. Some of them, it was non-detectable..
[00:04:37] Chris: And we've heard this a lot in the supplement space, a lot of sellers who are new sellers jumped into it because Amazon wasn't mandating compliance documentation. Right? It's not the same thing as in selling in a retail store where the process was different. Amazon seemingly was playing catch up or building this from the ground up. And there was a history of misrepresented product for years in the supplement space, right? I mean, the supplements became known for that kind of behavior.
[00:05:06] Leah: We would also be appalled to know how many people contacted us, who were already selling supplements who did not know what a CFA is or how to get one, or had ever had one made for their supplement problem.
[00:05:18] Chris: And so why should it be your burden, Keith, as an established player in this category, in this business to do all the buying and testing it yourself? Why wouldn't Amazon assumed some of that burden? Why is it up to a supplement seller to conduct all this due diligence, right?
[00:05:36] Keith: And the reality is, is the FDA would say it is the brand's responsibility to have. So if you look at 21 CFR, part one 11, which regulates dietary supplements and vitamins in the United States, it very clearly it says, if you're going to sell a brand, regardless of the marketplace, You need to have third-party certification on what's in that product, you have to have a CFA for every lot of product you sell to say, okay, this is what my product is. It lays out pretty clearly what you have to test in that product. So if I'm the FDA, I'm going to put the burden on the brand. Which is probably why Amazon has said it's not necessarily our job to police this, but at the same time, the FDA does not have the resources to go out and police all of the different brands that are on Amazon and Amazon doesn't make it easy to know who those brands are. Right? Like you can go and find out somebody might be selling that product, but it may not be easy to contact them or ultimately figure out who they are either. So regardless of the regulatory piece, it's hard to sometimes track down who these people are and who's selling on that platform.
[00:06:43] Leah: Well, and unlike in a traditional retail relationship, there isn't a whole lot of due diligence done before the products are listed. I mean, products that are being sold in the store, somebody knows who is selling those products and somebody knows where to find that person, if something goes wrong, Amazon not necessarily.
[00:07:02] Keith: Very true again. You see that across all categories on Amazon, but certainly in this space there's a lot of opportunity in the supplement space. I went through and pulled the numbers for maybe 12 of the products that were in this test a nd you're talking about $2 million a month and some potent products, you know, so twenty-five million dollars a year. People are spending on products that aren't what they claim to be. It seems like a pretty big deal and that's just one small sub-sect of products on Amazon. it's not one of the biggest categories. It's not vitamin C you probably see the same thing pervasive in a larger category.
[00:07:38] Chris: We've worked with vitamin C sellers, supplement sellers who had to report products where the labels didn't match the contents of the product at all. And had to report that to Amazon, which leads to my next question, because I was thinking of the vitamin C examples, and we've worked with people in that area, that category, Amazon has kind of had to be pushed to take action on those sellers.
Amazon wasn't necessarily pulling the products, testing them, sampling them themselves until they were really pushed hard. So do you think that's what it takes at least in this day and age? Do you think Amazon has to be almost arm-twisted, or coerced into testing this stuff in order to take more of an interest in the bad buyer experience created by sub-potency products?
[00:08:25] Keith: I think they certainly have a responsibility to either provide more transparency around products or require a greater burden on people selling on the platform. Right. And I say that as a seller, not really loving the current burden that we have to go through sometimes, but in order to ultimately protect the consumer, either Amazon has to randomly sample products, right? And you can argue about whether that's truly their responsibility or not, or you've gotta create a bigger burden where every time a seller sends in a new lot of product, they've got to provide a CFA, which I don't think that would be unheard of. Right. I as a brand owner already have a responsibility to make sure I have a CFA for every lot of product that I have. Why not just require me to send it in? You might have a harder time if somebody wants to sell FBM. But you know, that's a different ball game.
[00:09:18] Chris: Well, the alternative is Amazon just waits until they get a letter from the FDA mandating certain actions, right? Which is how it currently appears to be. So they could either just stand pat and keep waiting for letters from the FDA. The difference here is that Amazon's always professing that the number one goal is the best buyer experience and online commerce it's online, shopping possible. So if you're sitting around waiting for letters from the FDA, telling you to take down all these listings and pull all these items out of FBA, then you're not providing the best buyer experience by definition, right?
[00:09:54] Keith: No. And I don't know how you can possibly sit there as Amazon and say you're providing the best buyer experience when the number one selling product in this category where that was tested they sell over $500,000 a month in product that's less than 60% potent so, okay, how, how is that providing a good consumer experience? The people are basically buying junk, right?
[00:10:17] Leah: I don't even think they would need to create new SOPs. They own Whole Foods. Whole foods has pretty much been known since the beginning as being one of the highest burden of proof in terms of getting your products listed in there. So they probably already have the SOP is with Whole Foods. They're just not using that on the marketplace.
[00:10:35] Chris: Yeah, it's not scalable. It's not adjustable enough and convenient enough for their needs.
[00:10:42] Keith: So the supplement space has some of the highest PPC costs of any space on Amazon, right?
So you start cracking down on some of these sellers and all of a sudden you're cutting into your revenue big time.
[00:10:52] Chris: Right. Though the financial disincentives we don't even have to go into because we already know that they're there, but what kind of traction do you get when you refer any of this or report, any of this to Amazon compliance?
[00:11:06] Keith: So, when you look at NOW Foods who started this kind of self policing program in 2017, every time they go through one of these categories and create these reports, they send it to Amazon, they send it to the FTC and there's been very little action of any kind that you can tell from it.
I think Amazon gives it a little bit of lip service, but they're not taking action in the category. They're not doing anything to make it a better experience for buyers. It's just making it I think harder for reputable brands that are trying to do the right thing to be competitive in this space and actually get their products in front of consumers.
[00:11:42] Chris: And Leah can tell you, we've taken on client cases where people have hired us just to escalate this type of abuse, because they've already reported it in maybe 92% of the cases that the people who come to us have already tried reporting it through established Seller Central regular channels. Most of them got absolutely nothing back that indicated that it had been reviewed or that any action was taken. Obviously they can tell if the listing is still up, that no action was taken, but they don't know why. No one explains that. And we have to use the escalation process just to increase the odds that it's reviewed. Right?
[00:12:19] Leah: Yeah. Or more public forums to try to sway consumer decisions in terms of Amazon decisions.
[00:12:28] Chris: Which in itself means if you have to escalate it, I mean, a lot of sellers and brands don't even know how to escalate a complaint or an abuse report like this. Most sellers, I would argue, don't know how to do that.
[00:12:38] Leah: Well, and this is something that a consumer wouldn't necessarily realize, a consumer isn't going to take their supplements to a lab to make sure that it's as potent as it's supposed to be. So it's not a consumer facing issue, which usually means that it gets ignored until pushed by a regulatory body or the media.
[00:12:58] Keith: If you look at it from Amazon's perspective, if somebody is doing 22,000 units sales a month and they get one or two complaints on that, Amazon looks at that as a great seller.
[00:13:10] Chris: A victory.
[00:13:12] Keith: They're not seeing the fact that, oh, that product is complete garbage, and they're basically just people that are throwing their money away on it. But that's the reality, you know, you take some of these products that whether it's completely just mislabeling or just outright fraud. I mean, I don't know how you take, you know, some of these products that were in this test that had non-detectable levels of the active ingredient, or less than 50% of the active ingredient and say it's anything other than fraud and that's what you're seeing pervasive on the site. And it shouldn't be the responsibility of other brands to point this out to Amazon. I think that's kind of the point, right? Amazon should be doing something to protect the consumer in this regard. But you're not going to end up, you're not going to end up with a class action lawsuit regarding supplements against Amazon.
If it was a toy, that some of the people's children were buying and we were having a problem with it, Amazon would be treating this very different.
If the category manager, undoubtedly is aware of this. If the people who are responsible for managing this category, don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the authority, or don't have the support of their superiors to implement new SOP and new solutions for this. We can all agree that it probably won't happen. So what other suggestions, what are other ideas are there that we could suggest to Amazon knowing that we can't just lay this at the feet of the category manager? Is it really just people writing letters to Andy Jassy? What other concepts do you think haven't been touched yet that could be brought into this?
The reality is the solutions are there and they're already part of the regulatory framework of our industry. It's getting Amazon to kind of enforce some of those compliance issues and all they have to do is require that CFA for every lot of products that send in and then actually have somebody trained on the other side that can review it. So I think sometimes there's a challenge there too, where we send it, and it's very detailed, analytical paperwork and whoever's reviewing that doesn't quite understand it. It's not always the same format. There's hundreds of different labs out there with different formats.
So you do have to have somebody competent that can actually review that stuff on the other side. Otherwise it's just paperwork for the sake of paperwork, which I know Amazon doesn't love. But There's things in place already. They just need to be enforced in this space, and from a consumer perspective, know who you're buying your product from.
I think if you're somebody that's taking supplements and you're buying them on Amazon, do a little research, do these people sell anywhere else other than on Amazon?
[00:15:41] Chris: We're always preaching everyone on this podcast. Don't believe everything you see, hear or read. So that goes for consumers and sellers. Of course, too. All right, Keith, thank you so much. This is really interesting and really important. Thanks for speaking with us today about this. Is there anywhere you want anyone to reach you directly, if they have examples like this that you want to show to Amazon, or would you prefer that they reach out to us with that information?
[00:16:09] Keith: They can reach out to you guys and you can share with me, that would be perfectly fine. If somebody wants to reach out to me directly, they can reach me at keith@highland-labs.com and they can probably find me on LinkedIn too if they try real hard.
[00:16:23] Chris: Alright. Well, they know where to find me and Leah. So thanks again for joining us for Seller Performance Solutions. We will speak with you next time.
[00:16:31] Keith: Thank you.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers. This is Leah McHugh from e-commerceChris. I am here of course, with the e-commerceChris, Chris McCabe. And today we are speaking to Priyanka from Seller App talking about Amazon PPC, which is something that I feel like I've had more conversations about PPC this year than like any other year.
[00:00:27] Chris: We've had brands come to the Seller Velocity Conference, of course, for several years in a row now, but we're expecting many more conversations about PPC this year than any prior year.
[00:00:39] Leah: Yeah, it seems like everybody's kind of figured out that it's now a pay-to-play platform. So Priyanka, I'd be really interested in hearing what your top predictions and trends that you're seeing are for Amazon PPC in the next year.
[00:00:54] Priyanka Bohra: Absolutely. It's a great question, Chris. And I think I see multiple of them. Number one, being programmatic advertising our advertising experts actually foresee that programmatic advertising will be on the rise in 2022. And as google actually continues to limit third party cookies and search query data advertisers really need to rely on, first party data to ensure that successful advertising strategies actually get executed. As a company that holds data about shoppers buying habits, I would say Amazon's advertising will really evolve to be more powerful. They also would be encouraged to use Amazon's programmatic platform to really target and automate their ad placements and campaign performance.
So for sure, that would be number one for me. Other things that I also see more personalized advertising, getting a lot of, you know, thought there also another trend that you can expect in 2022 is the increase in personalized advertising across the entire marketing funnel. So gone are those days when sellers really used to target their keyboards and expect success.
Now, advertising is really increasingly becoming data driven and you're really making informed decisions out of the data that you gather. So meaning that consumers really tend to see that ads are relevant to their searches and shopping behavior. So therefore we can really expect increased engagement there among the shoppers, and really this brings us to our third point as well, adopting more sophisticated targeting options. With the amount of data that's available on Amazon, the e-commerce giant would really come up with more personalized ad types like OTT video ads, et cetera, and targeting options that are more customized ads for consumers, I would say interest. And if utilized properly, this will really ensure that you grow as a brand. But video ads will provail. So video ads are also very, very popular among the gen Z population and a study by Google shows that seven out of these 10 gen Z-ers said that watching videos will really help them feel very connected.
And because you really don't have any tangible way of really looking into the product, but video ads do come very close to representing that product. So Amazon will likely improve options for advertisers to use video as part of the funnel. And images are great, I would say, but video I think play a far bigger, higher role.
[00:03:37] Leah: Yeah even with organic traffic video is so powerful. We've, we've heard some pretty amazing stats of people who've added unboxing videos to their product detail page.
[00:03:48] Priyanka Bohra: Absolutely -- Yes, that's great. That's great way of showcasing your product.
[00:03:53] Chris: Who would have thought, like, I would have thought, why would somebody watch a video of taking a product out of a box, but it just shows I'm the wrong? Well, it just shows the wrong perspective.
[00:04:08] Priyanka Bohra: I think it also creates a lot of engagement right? And creates that awareness among the target audience. So I think, it's a great way of showcasing your product.
[00:04:17] Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And I think as more and more of these tools become available and more and more people are using advertising on Amazon, automation, I think would potentially be something that's going to become more and more important. Is that something that you're seeing where people are really understanding that there are benefits to Amazon advertising automation?
[00:04:37] Priyanka Bohra: Tons and bunch, right?
I mean, business automation is the buzz around the town. You know, we talked about CPC. That's another bus that we talk about. The CPC rates are rising. That's kind of a topic of discussion altogether, but absolutely. Yeah. Managing the PPC performance. You know, the campaigns is one of the most important yet also time consuming activities for sellers.
So it's more like a double edged sword, so to speak and optimizing your PPC campaigns requires you to monitor your bids, keywords, campaigns, very, very regularly meticulously. So we need to optimize and ensure that your ads stay profitable and in line with your campaign goals. And this can be daunting.
If you have a huge product portfolio with the complexity of advertising rising, advertisers now actually look for PPC optimization tools that are offering automation capabilities to really help them achieve their goals faster & like never before. And thanks to of course the tools you'll be able to save hours reputative workflows manual labor, manual effort and direct your efforts into strategizing towards your campaign goals. Also in other areas of your business, like product research, inventory management. And basically other marketing activities. So I think it is extremely vital and imperative for your business to grow.
[00:06:10] Chris: And there's different kinds of automation. Right? What are the key differences between say machine learning based automation and a rule-based automation?
[00:06:19] Priyanka Bohra: Sure. Sure. I think that's a great question. And so the key differences that I think between machine learning based automation and rule-based in terms of, I think advertising controls, ML driven automation really gives you low control versus a high amount of user control for rule-based automation. Also when it comes to really boosting your ROI or return on investment ML driven automation uses historical data to achieve optimum results while in a rule-based automation advertisers will need to give manual bids, like manual input.
So in terms of ease of use, I would still say that ML driven automation tools gives you complete hands-off automation experience for sellers. However, the rule-based one would also offer good control over campaigns, but sellers should also have minimum knowledge of campaign management. So I think that's also one of the reasons why we've developed, you know, an app like seller app, which kind of gives you the best of both worlds approach kind of thing. So using ML algorithm too will really optimize the bids, harvest new keywords, and really add negative keywords, which means better ad position, lower ACoS and of course an increase in sales, along with the higher return on ad spend. So you can really track and improve your ROI and optimize the metrics that matter the most to you to grow towards your business .
[00:07:50] Leah: Do you find that a lot of sellers use a hybrid of both?
[00:07:53] Priyanka Bohra: I think it's important to do that. I really recommend that you do, because you cannot just leave it on, like set it, forget it kind of approach. As I mentioned, there are custom rules that you can use. You can also, you know, if you're targeting keywords, you can actually automate it and find those keywords through automation and use them manually. So it's kind of a hybrid mix approach. I would say. Absolutely.
[00:08:19] Leah: I think that was maybe where in the past with some of the earlier tools like this, people got in trouble where they would just set it and forget it. And it would end and be a complete waste of your ad spend.
Yes because they're not looking at the positive keywords, which are converting for you. You are not being cognizant of the negative ones which you want to kind of eliminate. So all of these things kind of come in play and we talked about automation. That would also give you a lot of time to look into these aspects of your client's account.
[00:08:50] Chris: Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today about these crucial important topics for PPC. We appreciate it.
[00:08:58] Priyanka Bohra: Thank you. And thanks for having me here was great talking to both of you.
[00:09:01] Leah: Yeah. Thank you so much and we will link all of the information so people can get in touch with you, about your tools and how you can help sellers with our ads.
[00:09:09] Chris: Terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.
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Advertising in the Amazon space is more important than ever as it is one of the most fundamental ways to drive white hat traffic to your page. In this podcast we talk with Destaney Wishon of BetterAMZ about the importance of advertising, what new advertising tools she's excited about and the best ways improve your ranking on Amazon.
We all know Q4 is a crazy time of year. It's difficult to decide where to hone in and devote your attention, money or time. In this Episode we speak with Norm Farrar of Private Label Legion about the advantageous power of influencers & other brand building techniques to put your best foot forward this Q4 season.
Amazon has been "simplifying" the appeal process for some policy violations, in order to lighten the caseload for their investigators. Chris and Leah discuss this change, and what sellers need to know before you submit these new types of appeals.
Marketing your brand off of Amazon, not only grows your brand, it can also grow your Amazon account. We talk to Drew Himel from Consult PCR about best practices for communicating with your customers and building your brand's base.
International logistics can be complicated at the best of times. Add global supply chain disruptions and an increased demand for ecommerce, and you're likely facing delayed shipments and extra demand to get your inventory where it needs to be. We spoke to Rael Lowethal from Zee about what sellers can do to streamline moving their products internationally.
As we swiftly head into the deep end of Q4, we're all getting busier. And Amazon isn't exempt from that. But how should you manage things on your end, as Amazon response times get longer and longer? Leah and Chris discuss how you should plan for Q4 to mitigate issues caused by slow moving Amazon teams.
2020 accelerated the adoption of online shopping by as much as 10 years, but successfully expanding into onmi-channel ecommerce takes a lot more than simply listing your products everywhere. In this discussion Kunal Chopra discusses different omni-channel strategies such as brand building and expanding to different marketplaces.
Get your products on the shelves of 1000’s stores all over the USA.
You already know who your online consumer is, but who is your B2B retail customer? Get expert tricks and tips to discover how to find your B2B audience to sell your products beyond your existing channels.
Optimize everything, relentlessly.The everything store has the shoppers, but it also puts your product next to EVERYTHING. Without a strong brand strategy, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd of products all trying to compete for the same customers. You need to leverage the flywheel to not only boost sales, but build brand awareness and loyal customers.
What do ClickFunnels, Purple Mattresses, Squatty Potty and Poo-Pouri have in common? Viral videos by the Harmon Brothers! With over 1.4 BILLION views, Harmon Brothers are masters at creating great marketing videos. Chris speaks to Theron Harmon about the process they use to create entertaining and informative ads that brand and sell
Andrew Waber of Teikametrics joins us to discuss the best practices for advertising your growing brand. We discuss the importance behind key word use and having a solid campaign structure ready to go so your listings can soar.
The quality control process can be a black hole. Even with inspections, issues can easily slip through the cracks.
We talk to Sajag Agarwal about how to create a quality control process that actually works. And why you need to create these procedures to minimize returns and negative reviews.
A lot of Amazon sellers tell us it's all they can do to keep their heads above water. As soon as one problem is resolved, another one pops up. Sound familiar?
There are so many things that can go wrong in any given day, and it seems like the more money you make, the more problems you have to deal with. But it doesn't have to be this way!
Carlos Alvarez joins us to discuss how he has efficiently grown 52 successful businesses! Get insights into lessons learned and tips you can take away so your own businesses run like clockwork.
Emma Schermer Tamir, a listing optimization expert, joins us to discuss tips and advice for Amazon Seller's navigating the Amazon space. It can be very easy to pay attention and follow suit of what your competitors are doing with their listings, but we go over the best and safest practices to follow with your Amazon listings.
In our experience the ASIN variation policy is one of the least understood areas by Amazon sellers. Unfortunately, the way Amazon words their policy warning ASIN Variation Misuse, leads a lot of sellers to believe that no action is required by them. We discuss the steps that sellers should take to protect their listings and account.
We've seen it all on Amazon, from fake reviews to faking brand approvals. Recently we're spotting more sellers using third-party services to provide fake documentation, not realizing that they are committing fraud. Ultimately, Amazon will hold you the Seller responsible for the conduct on your account, regardless of whether it was you or someone faking the documents on your behalf.
If you're flagged for an authenticity investigation and aren't able to get documentation deemed acceptable by Amazon, you'll likely find yourself unable to get your inventory out of FBA OR get your funds disbursed. This leaves you stuck, with no product, no cash, and Amazon threatening to dispose of your inventory. Then what?
Category Listing Reports are one of the more useful tools available to sellers, and most don't know what it is! We use these reports to vet cases, identify abuse, all the way through to strengthening plans of action. Sellers should be using these to protect their accounts. BONUS: they can simplify your listing management.
Dealing with an account suspension is difficult for most sellers. Even more difficult is getting suspended for the same reason twice. Amazon only gives you so many changes, and that second reinstatement is hard to achieve. How do you prove to Amazon that you've REALLY implemented a plan of action to prevent future issues when you already failed to follow through on your previous appeal?
Working capital issues can shut down your business. As we see the costs of selling on Amazon increase and the speed at which Amazon disburses your funds decrease, it's more important than ever to have additional funds available. Often the times you need funds the most are the times that you have the least access to them. Plan ahead to make sure your business can stay afloat in an emergency.
Many sellers confuse the appeal button with an ongoing email thread between them and Amazon. We go over the correct steps during the appeal process so sellers don't waste attempts and can solve their issue quicker.
We discuss the District of Columbia filing for an anti-trust based lawsuit against Amazon and why we think seller's aren't necessarily talking about this. Chris and Leah share what they find the most interesting about this on going case and whether it will spark a reaction in which other state's follow in the District of Columbia's footsteps.
Dropshipping is a common business model used among sellers. We go over the best way to use dropshipping as a selling method on Amazon and what to avoid to ensure that you don't put your account at risk.
New sellers on Amazon tend to use their newness as an excuse for issues they run into with their account or in hopes of earning some sort of leniency from Amazon. We discuss the correct approach new sellers should be taking rather than using excuses and essentially admitting to being too new to fully understand the correct plan of action in order to reinstate their account and listings.
More and more of the cases we're working on are due to abuse- where another seller is attacking the account. In these cases, just fixing the listings, or responding with a POA isn't enough. You need to report the abuse, to hopefully get Amazon to put an end to it (or at least create a paper trail for the next time it happens).
The hot new thing in the Amazon space is Aggregators. About 55, venture-backed aggregators have popped into the Amazon space, looking to buy up Seller accounts. We're huge advocates of doing your due diligence, and in this episode we're talking about why that's so important on both sides of buying and selling Amazon Seller Accounts
Moira Weigel, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center/ Harvard Law School and Harvard Data and Society researcher, joined us for a far-reaching discussion of technology’s impact on behavior, and in our case, how Amazon’s expanding influence is taking over the lives of so many business owners, globally. She’s looking to talk to sellers about their Amazon experiences, both with their competitors and with Amazon itself. That may mean you! We discussed her writing project in-depth and the various kinds of seller situations she’s already pored over in the course of her work. She’s covering a lot of ground, as we discovered, in this conversation. Looking forward to having her back!
In this episode, Leah and I cover one of the more worrisome trends in the consulting space. Using the concept of “White labeling” services, a company contracts out the work that you’ve just hired them for, without making it clear who is working on your account. It is up to you to know who you’re paying, and for what level of skill. A company that also offers numerous other services may be the jack of all trades, mastering none of them. We delve into this phenomenon, and how you need to approach the problem.
We've been fielding UPC questions from Sellers ever since Amazon changed their GTIN policy in 2016. What do you do if Amazon tells you your GTIN has already been used? How do you add a GS1 GTIN to an old listing? What if Amazon won't recognize your prefix as matching your brand? We spoke to Michelle Covey of GS1 US to get the best troubleshooting steps for these common issues.
ASINs are getting suspended left and right for “potential” (read: often imaginary) Intellectual property infringement violations, and sellers are searching for answers. You need strategies to defend yourself against this automation and human error combo! Opening cases with Support or sending emails to Seller Performance won’t get you anywhere, unless you enjoy copy and paste generic “responses.” Every kind of seller, both private label and resellers, need to learn up on these to resolve appeals properly. Mistakes cost time, energy, effort, and make you frustrated! We discuss all manner of cases and reinforce the methods for identifying true fixes for this.
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Product liability insurance isn’t just something to think about, or a ”nice to have” if you’re a private label brand owner on Amazon. You need to have it! We spoke with Matt Lovell of WELL Insurance in this episode to go through the main questions and confusion he sees from Amazon sellers pushed to provide copies of their liability coverage by certain dates. Final reminders were recently sent, too, and most dates suggested deadlines in the near future if not already passed. Matt spoke with us about every seller’s best practices and what their next steps should be.
Amazon finally put measures into place in the past several months and executed the kinds of things you’d expect them to, in order to sure a safe buyer experience. Leah and I have worked on numerous cases with sellers who didn’t understand these new processes nor Amazon’s compliance document expectations. In this episode, we discuss the nuances of effective communication with Amazon teams and what missteps to avoid.
In this episode, Leah and I cover the key differences between Amazon’s “Account Health Services” team and the “Seller Performance” team. They may sound like they’d cover the same ground, but if your account or listings get suspended, you quickly understand that they are far from the same thing. We dig into what these teams are there for, who staffs them, and how their work influences (and sometimes undermines) the reinstatement appeal process. We also cover how much you can trust the information they provide, and how to know if it’s accurate.
We understand that many sellers want to talk about a dire situation like suspension on the phone, and that Amazon won’t always clarify your next steps. But understand the limits of each, as we explain here using specific examples from our work.
Amazon takes more enforcement actions these days to prevent fake reviews because they face external pressure to do so. In this episode, Leah and I walk through the sources of those policy suspensions, and why we believe sellers think they can get use giveaways, rebates, and other incentives to "game the system." Old shortcuts to success may be mentioned in groups, classes or videos, but they have a big cost.
We receive nearly daily reports from Amazon sellers who have been hit with a listing suspension due to “Used Sold as New” complaints from their buyers. In this episode we delve into the main seller confusion around what Amazon really means by “used sold as new”. Amazon’s misleading jargon often sends sellers down the wrong appeals path.
Amazon is inconsistent in its enforcement of policies. Looking at other sellers' behavior isn't an accurate measure of what's allowed, or what isn't. Seller mindset is an important factor in what determines whether an account is successful, or gets into trouble for unknowingly breaking the rules. We discuss what you need to do to cultivate a winning seller's mindset.