How to Prevent Amazon Seller Account Deactivation
Address ALL violations and warnings immediately. Do not let them hang on your account health for long. Every warning can lead to account deactivation. We provide an appeals service which, for a monthly fee, will take care of addressing these policy violations to keep your account in good standing. Just click here for further information.
If you have been frustrated waiting up to one year for your trademark to be registered, relief is in sight. Amazon has changed its brand registration policy. Now, instead of submitting an application to the Brand Registry after your trademark has been registered with the USPTO, you can submit it after you have applied for the trademark, using your application serial number.
A trademark application is not something you should try to do yourself. An expert should be consulted, who will search your potential mark and advise if you have a chance at registration or not. A professional can also respond to office actions from the USPTO and otherwise save an application which is initially refused. If your mark is accepted by Amazon’s Brand Registry during the application process, it will not retain its status with the registry unless it has been officially registered with the USPTO, which is a long process. We can help you with this. For further information, see our intellectual property law and trademark page at: https://www.amazonsellers.attorney/ip-law-for-amazon-sellers.html Several days ago Amazon US posted an Important Announcement for Drop-Shipping Policy.
Many Amazon sellers already had a chance to comment on this policy and note that nothing new was announced, but at least one positive aspect was found by everyone: the drop-shipping policy has become more clear and straight to the point. We should take this chance to examine the entire policy, its meaning in general and important details, that you should not ignore when you choose this business model. So, let’s start! The policy starts with this statement: If you fulfill orders using a third party, a practice known as drop shipping, you must follow all Amazon policies to ensure a consistent customer experience that easily identifies only you as the seller of record. EXPLANATION: you need to make sure that a customer buying the product from you on the Amazon platform will receive an item, which will state yourself as a seller. This is very important for Amazon, and this is a reason why Amazon prohibits drop shipping from other online retailers (like Walmart for instance), as Amazon clients would receive a product with a Walmart label and next time will go shopping directly there, skipping this “unnecessary stop” at Amazon marketplace. It is fine to source from Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, or Bed, Bath and Beyond, but you cannot drop ship from their online site directly to customers. Amazon does not want customers ordering from their site to receive something in a box with Walmart or Home Depot written all over it. The next paragraph states another important aspect: As an important reminder, all violations of the Drop Shipping Policy can break customer trust. As a result, any violation of our Drop Shipping Policy will negatively impact your account health and your ability to fulfill future orders using our Merchant Fulfilled Network (MFN). EXPLANATION: This means, that if Amazon somehow finds out or suspects you are drop-shipping from other retailers or suppliers who keep their labels on the package, your account might be deactivated and you would need to go through several rounds of appeals to explain yourself, or to use professional services like ours to resolve things faster. But we would like to make sure you understand the difference between the brand label and the supplier label. When an Amazon buyer wants to buy a branded product, let’s say “XXX”, the product must state the brand name, as customers expect to receive exactly this branded item. The supplier label must state YOU as a seller, and not any other third-party. Further Amazon explains the exact prohibited actions: The following drop shipping methods are strictly prohibited on Amazon:
Drop-shipping is a very beneficial strategy:
But in order to have all these benefits, you have to assure Amazon that you are a reliable and responsible seller, acting partly on behalf of the marketplace. The old and the new policy provides the details, you have to consider to be trusted. Put yourself in Amazon’s shoes and you will understand, that they don’t want the products to be delivered to their beloved customers from their competitors. The last part of the policy pretty much repeats the above statements, except the one: If you fulfill using drop shipping, you must strictly adhere to following requirements of our policy:
We wish you good luck with your business on Amazon and as always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to turn to us. At least once a week, we come across an Amazon seller whose seller account is deactivated for forged or manipulated documents. Most of the time, the seller has done something innocent like changed the quantity of an item from 1 to 10 by simply adding a zero. Innocent, right?
If you are a “supplements” seller, then this article is for you! From the beginning of December, Amazon has attacked supplements sellers, asking to provide more supporting documentation about their products.
Dealing with Amazon’s Seller Support Team can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes they will reject your appeal without telling you, and other times they will send you the same rejection template, over and over, without being specific on the reasons your plan of action was rejected. The Account Health Team is the closest one an Amazon seller has to Seller Performance, and you can actually speak with them by phone.
To keep the company not only afloat, but also to move it forward to new successes and achievements, you need to fight. Business is a fight. Daily, routine, and never-ending. The same for Amazon. But what kind of a fight is Amazon taking every single day to protect their customer’s experience?
We receive many clients whose Amazon seller accounts have been suspended for having a related account that cannot be used to sell on Amazon because of receiving the wrong information from Amazon Seller Support. These Amazon sellers have received the “green light” from Seller Support to open a new account, and, once the new account has been created, it is immediately suspended for being related.
Amazon recently, in an attempt to help third-party FBA sellers avoid customer condition complaints, gave some gratuitous advice that sellers find to be incomplete and, indeed, irresponsible. Condition complaints, which often spill over into inauthentic complaints, due to customers receiving items that were not in the condition they expected, can often be solved by implementing programs to quality control inventory intake, order fulfillment, and packing your FBA inventory to send to fulfillment centers. However, there is a lot of mishandling within Amazon warehouses that these new guidelines do not account for.
Because of its customer-centric approach, Amazon cares more about the customer experience than anything else and will suspend your seller account and remove your selling privileges if you receive complaints about the following.
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