How To Survive Selling on Amazon in Q4

How can you protect yourself from a holiday season suspension? 

You don’t want to spend your time writing appeals to Amazon’s Product Quality team when you should be busy managing sales. They may take a long time to answer you and when they do, the quality of that reply may be sorely lacking. Then you have to start all over again.

Given the sheer quantity of account suspensions, sellers must take preemptive, self-protective measures. 

Check Yourself

Remedy immediately any causes of excessive cancellation of orders, increased buyer negative feedback and late shipments (or marking orders as shipped when they have not yet gone out) to prevent permanent damage to your selling reputation. Seller Performance teams zero in on sellers who miss the metric targets because shipping on time, not canceling orders due to lack of inventory, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback are considered essential to success on Amazon. Holiday peak is not the time to experiment with sales you might not be able to complete in an efficient, timely manner.

Ask yourself these questions to reduce the odds of attracting unwanted Amazon policy team attention this holiday season:

• Do you get back to your buyers ASAP when they report order problems of any nature to you? Buyers may complain directly to Amazon if they’re unhappy and you fail to respond quickly. This includes weekends and normal “off hours” from business.
• Did you respond in detail when Product Quality warned you for a potential policy violation? Once you’ve ascertained why your buyer complained about item quality, you must email and ask Amazon to annotate your account that you’ve taken serious steps to resolve the matter
• Did you make sure you submit quality, professional, easy to read, and detailed invoices without missing information? Lapses here will make it a lot harder to have your invoices approved. If rejected, you won’t be able to list against those ASINS again
• Do you have any problems with commingled FBA inventory leading to buyer complaints and automated warnings for an item that is another seller’s, not yours? Do you have any warnings from “resellable inventory” from the FBA repackaging programs? These can lead to buyer complaints about item authenticity or condition and warnings will multiply. Make sure FBA only has stickered or labeled inventory of yours
• If you’re “piggybacking” on already created listings, does your item match 100% to what the product detail page says? Are there any variances that could be reported by buyers as material differences between the item listed and the product they received?
• If you sell consumables, are there any items sitting in FBA warehouses that are nearing their expiration date? If so, have you put in Removal Orders for those products?

If you are suspended by Product Quality, you need to finish a self-completed account review as soon as possible. This team struggles to cope with a high volume of appeals from sellers with suspended accounts and/or suspended ASINs that cost them thousands in sales each day.

Once suspended, it will feel like an eternity passes while you wait for a response. You will need a solid Plan of Action identifying the reasons that buyers complained about the quality of your products. Specify solutions to these problems with details and a proper strategy for implementation of new steps. Remember that investigators often churn through several emails per hour by simply answering that they need more information from you.

Every minute your account is suspended or your listings are blocked you lose money. 

Get your FREE guide and save yourself time and money by giving your account a checkup now.

This post, How To Survive Amazon’s Holiday Peak, originally appeared on ecommercechris.com.