In mid July I received a notification that a listing was closed because of customer complaints. It said Action Required and prompted me to provide an explanation and remedy for them to unblock the listing.
I have had 3 attempts to contact
seller-performance-policy@amazon.com and every time they would take almost a week to respond and would respond with the following:
"Hello,
Thank you for responding to our request for information. However, we still need more information regarding your plan of action for this {Used item sold as new} complaint before we can reinstate your listing on your behalf.
Complaint Type: {Used item sold as new}
ASIN: XXXXXXX
What you can do
Email
seller-performance-policy@amazon.com and include a plan of action that contains the following:
1. What is the issue that caused the complaint.
2. Steps you have taken to resolve the issue and ensure similar complaints won’t happen again.
3. Any additional details you would like us to know."
All 3 times I answered the questions and provided the info they need. And all 3 times the same email back.
On the 4th time I just email the same thing I emailed the 3d time.
After about 4 days I receive my suspension notice, see the following:
"Hello,
We have removed your Amazon selling privileges because of buyer complaints about the items they received from you. Please see below for some examples of the listings we have received complaints about
:
Complaint Type:Inauthentic
ASINs:
(5 Asins listed here)
Complaint Type: Not as advertised,Used Items sold as New,Wrong Items,Missing Items
ASINs:
(12 Asins Listed here)
Blah Blah Blah"
Now, what's interesting about this is out of the whole list of what they brought up I only received 2 performance notifications in the past 4 month. The rest were just return requests and not real customer complaints. I checked my email record just to be sure.
Now I know better then anyone not to argue with Seller Performance, I wrote an Appeal addressing the issue and coming up with something they want to hear but also noting that we did not receive any performance notifications but 2 on the list. One of them was for authenticity, and it got triggered just because the buyer mentioned authenticity in his email. We followed up with the buyer on the issue and he wrote that there are no authenticity concerns whatsoever. The other performance notification was the only one I really deserve because we messed up and sent the wrong condition because we sell new and refurbished.
I am not new to suspensions and making new account. And I well deserved suspensions in the past. Put I kept it clean to the button for the past 6 month of selling. We do 150 order/day average. We have 100% Feedback, only 1 neg out of 485, seriously! Only 3 neutral. Defect rate is 0.22%. How messed up is that?
I sent the appeal late last night, it claimed 1 day for a response but we all know how that goes. I will update the post with any development.
Let me know what your thought are on this.
As of right now my plan is to wait for response from Seller Performance concerning my Appeal. If it is unfavorable, immediately wipe my systems, prep everything for a new backup account and go live once again. I will have to go 100% FBA though as I will not have featured merchant status on anything. It will hurt.
Meanwhile continue dealing with seller Performance, write a constructive email appeal to Jeff/executive department. It is my belief that with a through explanation to Jeff my account will be reinstated. The problem, is that takes 1-2 month. But it's never a bad idea to get reinstated and keep a backup account.
I never liked cheating the system, but I have got pretty good at it. Our intentions have always been to do fair work, however Amazon closes accounts for unjust reasons without cause. I do what I have to do to survive. It is very sad how much say small-medium sellers like us have to say against big corporations like Ebay and Amazon, plain and simply they don't give a ****.
Feel free to share guys, remember - knowledge is power.