How not to lose your account (or top ASINs) during Prime Day
by Chris McCabe | Jul 8, 2022 |
Prime Day, July 12-13, is right around the corner! This is the perfect time to refresh on a few key things so you can prevent a catastrophe on a day you’d prefer to focus on a revenue spike. Buyers have already proven their loyalty to the concept of a major summer shopping holiday. At least Amazon says it is, and buyers typically follow along whenever they have a chance to save big. They keep an eye out for great deals, alongside more willingness to spend. You want to take advantage of those sales instead of fighting off competitor attacks or wasting time messaging Amazon’s “copy and paste” responses when suspensions ruin your strategy, right? You could wake up on Tuesday the 12th to suspended listings, due to policy violations or sudden, condition, or item safety complaints. You’ll want to identify the types of attack strategies likely to be used now, not after they happen. Be ready for them with real preparation, don’t just pray that your competitors won’t attack. What can you do to prevent damaging attacks during Prime Day? If you prepare, you’ll be ready to counter any safety or counterfeit complaint that comes your way. Prime Day means you can expect an increase in anti-competitive behavior. Be ready for this!
What kinds of abusive behavior results in a successful attack against a listing? Whenever there’s a ton of revenue on the line, consider that many sellers and black hat services will attempt takedowns of successful products even more than usual. The fraudster shops know how to get listings pulled overnight, and to make it stick at least for 48 hours. That’s why they offer services like this to brands, helping them take out their competition on one of the busiest days of the year. - Fake negative reviews usually complain about health hazards, injuries, difficult to use or cheap or fake products that resulted in a terrible buyer experience, or similar things. Amazon’s automated scripts capture ugly terms and flag ASINs for review by an investigator. Those ASINs go under their microscope for a few minutes of review, then in many cases they move straight to suspending the listing without providing key details on “Why” – that’s always up to you, the seller, to tell them. The sellers or black hat services know you’ll eventually get the listing back, right? But they can easily keep you down for Prime Day to score more sales of their own products, in place of yours.
- Keyword Abuse is often a factor during Prime Day. It occurs when another party adds illicit words to a listing which implies that the product is a pesticide, a drug, “adult” or an illegal product, for example. Attackers understand that Amazon’s teams react to keyword attacks the same old ways as they did before this type of abuse became a main abuse method. Make sure you are monitoring your listings for ANY ASIN contributions you did not make, so you can catch and delete them before Amazon suspends you.
- Fake safety health hazard complaints often show up at the last minute to trigger a compliance review process. Buyers will load up their complaints with phrases to make Amazon believe they must take immediate action against you, and your ASIN, to protect the buying public. Have all invoices pre-vetted for verification at the ready, so you don’t have to scramble to put together information about your supplier or manufacturer. Asking for documents from suppliers can take awhile, if they’re not around to respond.
- Many brands contacting us during 2022 have been hit with counterfeit or authenticity complaints against their own brand. In other words, they’re accused of counterfeiting their own products. As straightforward and bogus as this type of complaint should appear, Amazon internal teams could spend hours, days, sometimes weeks trying to understand that you don’t fake your own branded items. It’s just a fact of Amazon enforcement life right now. As discouraging as that sounds, you should be able to knock down those fake complaints quickly. Understand how to escalate stuck appeals, and don’t wait to act. Hire out for the right kind of help.
- Amazon is in full crackdown mode on supplier websites, invoices, and any sourcing info that they claim they cannot verify. How long have you done business with your supplier or manufacturer, and how much of that info is online and independently verifiable? An invoice or supplier that Amazon accepted fully a few months ago may suddenly get rejected without any rhyme or reason to the denial. Amazon is typically obscure about why documentation or appeals get denied, so you will need to decipher their reasons for them. Make sure they have a website and look like an established business or manufacturer.
If Amazon rejects your supplier details or invoices for seemingly no reason at all, just to get your appeal out of their queues, then you’ll need to escalate. This unfortunately happens a lot these days, and Account Health reps have little to say about why it’s allowed to continue when you call in. Usually it means that the investigation was skipped or improperly executed. That pushes the burden back onto you to pressure them to do the work again.What can you do to Get Ready in Advance?
Have Plan of Action-style language ready to go to cover for any surprise item condition or item quality complaints.
Be ready to explain the “root causes” that you’d expect to receive in a fake attack, which could mean anything around unsafe items (personal injury, health problems, problems from misusing a poorly described product, for example) or fake counterfeit claims, even if you’re the manufacturer of your own products. The way Amazon Product quality and Notice teams behave these days, any Private Label seller of their own branded products needs to be ready to defend the legitimacy of their own products. Automated scripts have proven unable to differentiate between resellers of other brands and sellers of their own brands. So be ready for that “buzzword” style attack and have appeals ready to go.How to escalate is just as important as where or what you submit
This is a complex topic, but for the purposes of Prime Day let’s make things simple. Don’t call Seller Support or Account Health teams for hours on end, unless they’re giving you viable, actionable information on why Amazon cut your listings down out of nowhere. Consider that Seller Performance investigators could take days or even weeks to read the contact correctly, let alone to provide a meaningful answer. If they don’t want to take the time to review your appeal, you’ll need to bump things up to their superiors, stating plainly why you’ve been forced to escalate to their higher-level squad. Understand who in the food chain is responsible for what types of marketplace management, and get their attention. At the first sign of a generic, canned denial response (or worse when there’s no reply at all) push past the teams that took action against your ASIN. Take it higher and get managers to review the team that took the action. If that means pestering executives to take responsibility when Executive Seller Relations swats away your legitimate appeal, then so be it. Don’t rely on one exclusive method, create a hybrid escalation of multiple paths, if possible. Make sure you always mention the teams you’ve already contacted to resolve the matter, be it Brand Registry, Account Health calls, compliance teams, Seller Performance or VP-level Amazonians. Give the dates you’ve contacted them, documents attached, and the nature of the appeals they completely ignored along the way. Explain that without their help, you’ll lose a ton of money.What Are Sellers doing to rectify Catalog abuse and Listing Sabotage?
–Why Can’t Amazon protect, or help me protect, my own brand? Speaking of Brand Registry, Amazon years ago began pushing the concept of brand protection teams to give sellers the confidence they needed to launch new products. Instead of offering more protection and helping sellers avoid the nuisance (or worse) of listing attacks, brands keep contacting us to say they’ve been hit with various attacks that took their listings down. Catalog abusers or an extremely well-connected services may sabotage brands by getting images replaced, detail page text removed or swapped out, categories changed, or they find themselves completely deleted. You see dog pages, on Prime Day, when their competitors sell through their units like crazy while you struggle to fix it. Amazon has no real solutions for this. –What do I do when Amazon ignores my requests for help? In nearly every instance, people waste time going to Seller Support or general email queues for relief, but many get “stall” replies that put them off while it is “reviewed.” Brand Registry has taken to sending these out during peak periods as well. Where does it all end? If you can’t get immediate action that removes improper ASIN contributions stemming from sabotage, go straight to the escalation queues with immediate demands. Escalate via Brand Registry, Catalog, and the abuse teams. Not sure where to send each new escalation? Take it to high level VPs, asking for them by name as needed, while laying out a timeline of all the places you’ve been with good info and no relief. Force them to act where their direct reports fail to do so. There’s lots of public info out there now about who runs what escalations process at Amazon, so whether those execs are testifying in front of Congress or quoted in national media, ask them or their direct reports to resolve the mess you’re in. Don’t be shy! –How do I report Abuse? Do I need to know exactly what and who it is, first? Have you confirmed from order patterns or tactics used who your attacker is? Are the attacks happening to every other seller of similar products in the category, except for one? That’s a good sign of who is behind it. But it’s not enough, on its own, to report abuse to Amazon execs. Gather up all that intel and get ready to report them while you appeal for reinstatement. –Does Amazon even know what’s going on, or understand how to stop it? Listing sabotage is well-known by Amazon internal teams now, and the solutions do not present themselves easily. If they transfer your case all over the company, trying to send you off into another team’s queues, put a stop to it right away. Don’t let them put you off or come up with an excuse not to act. If they don’t know how to fix it, or don’t care about an audit showing their ineptitude, find some Amazon “adult supervision” and insert them into the appeals process. And don’t let them get away with avoiding you. Email them, asking for management-level Amazonians to conduct an actual review so that you don’t waste Prime Day simply trying to be heard. By escalating to abuse teams, brand registry, Andy Jassy, Doug Herington and others all at once, you’re increasing the chance that Amazon takes real action to help you. Need help? We’re here for you 7 days a week. Contact us for help in resolving your issue quickly. 
