Amazon Policy Myths That Sellers Still Believe

Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I'm Chris McCabe here once again with Leah McHugh, who is stuck in the snow bound northeast this week, presumably under piles of snow. Maybe not you personally, but on the other side of that wall. Is that fair to say?

Leah: Mm-hmm. Yep. I am looking at it right now.

Chris: Great. You had a nice morning walk in the snow drifts. Fortunately, I'm out in Seattle where it's sunny and clear. So anyway, we are here to talk compliance once again, but most importantly to talk to shout from the rooftops that you'll be joining us as a speaker presenter running a session at our New York Meetup, which is February 12th.

We'll include the link in the notes here. It's in Midtown Manhattan from seven to 10:00 PM , and it's a New York meetup that we've been running for, I think four years now. And you've presented on similar. Themed topics for Camp [00:01:00] eCom Prosper Show. We've done workshops together at Prosper Show but can you give just a quick rundown of your interactive sessions? Since we don't really talk at people, we talk with them at the events we do now and nobody does that better than you.

Leah: Yeah, so it's less of a presentation this time and more of a quiz. So we'll see how well our attendees know Amazon policies, because I'm only really talking about the policies that I've seen people be suspended for this year for breaking. Or last year, I guess I should say, in the last 12 months. So, yeah it's a quiz so people can test their own knowledge because generally those gaps are where people get into trouble.

Chris: Yes, and I've talked a lot recently and not so recently about the appeals gaps and mistakes where people use non-compliance trained personnel or higher, I don't know.

We've seen some interesting stuff, marketing agencies to handle their compliance case work where [00:02:00] the right types of documents are never researched or investigated, let alone submitted.

Leah: Yeah, I've also had a number of people who are the compliance person for a company, but have no prior compliance experience.

Chris: Yes.

Leah: So, yeah.

Chris: Well, I have a theory on that as I always do. I think those are the people. It's like we need to open a case. Well, who do we have in-house or externally who opens cases for us when there's troubleshooting to do restricted product problems, any kind of policy flag and so they go to their case opener, right? And that over the years, has somehow become the defacto compliance representative or investigator or actioner, and those things just blended and merged the same way that a lot of people think appeals and compliance and legal issues are all rolled up in the same ball with no distinction.

Leah: Yeah. I also wouldn't [00:03:00] be having a lower level team member answering legal things. But you know, that's just me.

Chris: Amazon does it.

Leah: That's that's true. And that's why a lot of their templates have incorrect legal information in them still after what, five years of them sending them.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I'm hosting a Q and a with an Amazonian and we're gonna talk through some things, some struggles and challenges brands face.

That internal Amazon teams can help out with, but you're gonna be covering the slips and falls that people are still making even after five, six years of educating them one-on-one because there's just still a lot of misinformation out there.

Leah: Well, yeah, I think until Amazon is consistent in both its enforcement and its review methods of this stuff, people will always have incorrect information about it.

Because well, my cousin's friend did it and it worked. Is is always a story I get to hear about.

Chris: [00:04:00] Yeah. But I mean, outside the appeals, we talk about that all the time on here.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Um, what examples from case work, even if it's across categories do you expect, or what kind of questions do you anticipate getting?

Leah: Well, I'm the one asking the questions.

Chris: But questions back, you know, assuming that the people who you're talking to need help and are not doing things correctly, what are kind of the top one or two things you're anticipating being asked about either in the networking sessions or during your session.

Leah: So I usually get asked about their competitors doing it. Like, how are we supposed to compete if everybody else is doing it, but we're not doing it or my competitor got away with it and how come I can't get away with it? Or, my competitors are doing it, how can I report my competitors? Those are the usual questions that I get. Other than that, it's also how to get Amazon to review the information when you are actually sending the correct information. Those are those sort of the usual questions I've been getting. But just going back to the compliance stuff for a moment, I will say one new thing that I have been experiencing with clients, [00:05:00] is that a lot of people are using AI to answer these question.

Which, not specifically to Amazon, but to, to, well, I'm sure they are doing that too, but I mean specifically to educate themselves and what's been interesting is that I've had a few people actually reference regulations to me like, oh, this regulation was updated in 2022.

And I had to be like, that is not a law that has been made up by whatever AI you're using.

And it certainly wasn't updated in 2022 because it does not exist. So that's something to keep in mind when you're doing this. AI might be a tool that you use, but make sure you're actually fact checking that stuff. Yeah. 'cause you don't wanna, you don't really wanna quote a fake law in your appeal.

Chris: I'm assuming that's finding its way into appeal templates already.

Oh, I'm absolutely certain Amazon has received AI written appeals that reference just completely made up fake laws. Well, it begs the question, are there times [00:06:00] where. The Amazonian on the other side isn't even questioning it. They're like, oh, I guess I'm not familiar with that new law and they reinstate the ASIN based on that?

Leah: No. See, this is actually one of those scenarios where those teams not being that well-trained, actually probably works in Amazon's favor because they just have a decision tree. So if it doesn't fit into that, they're just gonna deny it.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I've been saying this for a long time.

I think any responsible brand owner is going to have to learn how to push past the first one or two responses themselves into escalation territory quickly, because you don't want the AI talking to AI war to decide whether or not you get your ASIN back.

Leah: Well, and I think the mistake that a lot of people fall into, which I get why, but I think the mistake that a lot of people fall into is that if something gets rejected.

Instead of just kind of doubling down on what they [00:07:00] submitted, they'll just submit more of other things, right in the hope that that will somehow get better reviewed and my inclination with Amazon is, unless it's absolutely necessary to add length. You wanna make things faster and easier to review.

Chris: Yes.

Leah: Not give them more information to review that's less relevant. And so that's where I see a lot of people run into. They just submit longer and longer and longer appeals in the hope that they're gonna hit on the right thing. And they're actually reducing their chances of that even being reviewed by making it more long and more complex.

Chris: Yes. Like the five or six pager legal letter that we read yesterday.

Leah: Yeah. I mean, or even just even

Chris: with two pages of filler that were unrelated to the project.

Leah: Yeah. Or just, you know, attaching additional documents in the case, in case that might like hit on the thing that Amazon is looking for. Even to the point where the, their forms give you the option of appealing [00:08:00] multiple ASINs at the same time, you are actually less likely to get anything reinstated by giving them more to review in one case than you are by separating them into separate cases because they're going to different investigators. It's easier and faster for them to review one ASIN and they're allotted time than it is for them to review say 15 ASINs in there allot of time.

Chris: Yeah. It's interesting. I was talking to Bopyo Park who's the creator of Seller Advisor. He's the co-host for the New York meetup on February 12th, in Manhattan. But he's got a separate meetup for AI discussion.

And I was talking to him about people need fact checking and you need another pair of eyes, you need a review process for anything you look up on ai, whether it's about appeals, a lot of appeals info is dated from two years ago.

If your AI tools or chat are scraping 2-year-old information, it's probably out of date. And not useful anyway. But I was arguing, well, you know, you wouldn't just go [00:09:00] to chat GPT or AI tools to get advice for how to fix your marriage. You'd introduce a human element of review there?

Leah: Well, it's, I think people are actually using AI for that.

Chris: Well, that's my point. And then I said, you know, and like to cure your pet who is sick, you wouldn't just AI that like, because it's too, I mean, among other reasons, it's too important to just trust blindly whatever you get out of ai. But then I started realizing the course of the conversation, oh wait, people are doing that already.

Leah: Yeah. Well, and I think, I think the thing that a lot of people don't understand is that it's a statistical model. It's not giving you, we've looked at all of the information and this is the most accurate information. It's, we have looked at all of the information and statistically speaking, based on all of that information, this is what we see the most of.

Chris: Yes.

Leah: And so that does not necessarily mean that it is accurate, and I would argue that the longer this goes on and the more AI created content there is the less accurate. It is going to [00:10:00] get, yeah, because it's just further regurgitating incorrect information. I've even had people where they, they email me something and I'm like, where did you even find this information?

And I tried to like follow the AI prompts that they use to get it. And it was referencing a Walmart internal policy as a legal requirement for something because AI doesn't distinguish between what sort of a source it's pulling it from. It's just like, this seems like the closest thing to what you're talking about.

Chris: Yeah. I did a previous episode on this and I think we talked about it once on here, but a lot of people are searching. Probably using ChatGPT, what's the likelihood of resolving the appeal? So that's scraping info, which people are only gonna post online if they weren't able to do something successfully.

Right. If they weren't able to figure something out. So all the information coming back is negative about whether or not they can appeal it.

Leah: Right. And a lot of times it's [00:11:00] outdated information too. So bad information, it's outdated information. We already know there's a ton of bad information on how to deal with Amazon on the internet we're just now. Scraping that and having somebody presenting it or having something presenting it like it knows what it's talking about and so that's sort of the thing that I have been running into with people generally before they hire us. Although sometimes they, they question my appeal with something they got from ai and I'm like, that's because what I wrote is real and what you have there is made up.

Chris: Right. Right.

Leah: It's interesting though because I am finding myself fact checking other people's AI a lot, which is not something that I expected to be part of my job description.

Chris: We're all doing that now.

Yeah. Anything else you can teaser throw out there in terms of things you plan to hit people with from either your presentation or?

Leah: So yeah, we're gonna be talking about Amazon's policies.

I'm also going to be talking [00:12:00] about some of their zero tolerance policies, which we did talk about a little bit last year. We sort of haven't really talked about it as much lately. but mostly around the fact that there are a lot more suspension types where Amazon is not asking for an appeal, they're not giving you an opportunity to appeal.

The only thing that they're asking for is a dispute. Which means one, you need to know those policies so you don't actually accidentally break them and get in involved in the zero tolerance policy, but you also need to be familiar with them because if you are incorrectly accused of breaking one of these policies, you need to know what it is and you need to know how to defend yourself against it, because that's the only path forward is to prove that you didn't do the thing that Amazon said you did.

Chris: Right. Right.

Leah: Sending an appeal actually hurts your chances because usually appeals admit guilt for doing something, whereas with a dispute, you are disputing the allegation that you did anything in the first place.

Chris: Yes. This will be a hot topic on February 12th when we do the meetup. We [00:13:00] can get into another episode of admitting to things and people still writing done

Leah: episodes on that.

Chris: People writing more, but it's still occurring partially because people are searching online and getting aI recommendations to write a plan of action when one hasn't been asked for. So we're gonna have to just keep doing episodes on that until the fire goes out.

Leah: Yeah, I mean, I think it's also just like sellers have been so trained at this point to just do what Amazon tells them to do. Yeah. That they think that they just have to say that they did wrong and that they're gonna fix it in order to get things fixed.

But sometimes that is the worst thing to do. And I mean, I would argue in general don't admit to something that you didn't do. Just, just like general advice.

Chris: Yep.

Leah: But I think a lot of people are so trained, like that's just the fastest way forward and they don't actually read what it is that they're agreeing to and that ends up causing more problems than it helps.

Chris: Right, right. And just in closing, we've got liz Herrera, hurricane Liz is also gonna be [00:14:00] there talking about TikTok shop, like I mentioned, Bopyo will be covering ai. I'll be introducing people to Andrew Smith, who's our sponsor. He's going to be talking about communication with buyers compliant communication, with Amazon buyers and brand promotion and marketing and so forth.

And also I'll be doing the q and a with, Amazonian chris Berry talking about additional offerings and measures Amazon's putting into place in 2026 to help brands sort problems grow, deal with whatever might be going on within their particular category and help them succeed. So we are honored that you're going to be a speaker and we'll be kind of blasting out on the airwaves that you'll be joining us.

I'm glad you're back from Thailand to be able to do this event in New York.

Leah: So happy to be back from Thailand so happy.

Chris: Yeah. Well, the Thai food was better in Thailand, but what are you gonna do?

Leah: Yeah,

Chris: yeah. All right. I'll catch you soon. Any questions about Leah's [00:15:00] talk or the event in New York?

Anything compliance related or anything else that you've got going on that might not be going so well? Reach out to us, put it in front of us. Go to eCommerce, Chris. We've got the WhatsApp number there, and also you can email us at support@ecommercechris.com. See you next time.