[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. This is a hotel room edition here with Chris McCabe covering some of the trends we've seen in Q4, but also, what I see happening heading into the new year, which I think are some troubling trends I need to understand. Some strategy in terms of why some brands are approaching appeals or abuse reporting or even threats to their account.

Like an account suspension, they have 72 hours to appeal it to prevent it. , I'm kind of mystified, I guess this'll be an episode where I just give a little rant about mistakes I'm seeing, but they're not that hard to fix. A lot of it is just don't do what you're doing in terms of, everything from letting your SaaS core rep, if you're paying for one, an account manager, letting them write an appeal for you or open an internal ticket lobbying internally on your behalf, but [00:01:00] with the types of content that really only generate a response that says, we'll get back to you in three days, or maybe five to seven business days. Sometimes. Without the brand appealing it anywhere else in the interim.

Seven days, eight days, nine days of sales lost at this time of year. Presumably at this point, competitive is so fierce on Amazon at any time of year. You're just losing revenue that could be useful for rising fees in the new year for ad costs in the new year for paying for help from either an agency or a service like ours when you need it.

There's also just been a trend of that I've seen and it's odd to see it at this time of year, a lot of waffling between, and just indecisiveness between, should we stand pat with the kind of appeal we put together ourselves, or the kind of appeal that,, they hired a service. Service in quotes. The thinking was, well, since we've hired somebody, then that means we have to send [00:02:00] in whatever they give us. Well, when it doesn't work, we end up kind of picking up the pieces and seeing the blowback, and we start with an assessment, which is, well, what have you sent in so far? If you're doing it yourself, I suppose you've justified that because you've had past success with an ASIN reinstatement or with some sort of appeal for a policy violation.

You somehow countered past performance notifications successfully. So that makes a little bit more sense to me. If it's an account wide risk, it still doesn't make sense, but at least I understand why you take a crack or two at it. I don't understand the logic of whether you paid a service or a friend or whoever.

You compensated for their quote unquote work. I don't understand why you feel so obligated to send it in no matter what it looks like. If you look at it and you can tell it's subpar, and I've spoken to numerous of you who have paid for services, and then they go through it and they say one of two things.

Either I could have done this [00:03:00] myself, or this isn't going to move the needle. I already know it's gonna be rejected, and then they send it. Anyway, hope against hope, I suppose, motivates sending it just to see what happens. And maybe you're thinking, well, if I get a response at least, maybe that takes it in a different direction.

But you've seen the responses that doesn't really work anymore, right? It's always copy and paste generic. And you can't count on submitting any X, Y, Z appeal. And then calling account health and saying, well, we just sent this in so we could. See what happened, and then we'd call you to see why it was rejected, because half the time they don't even really tell you why it's been rejected.

I've done numerous podcasts and LinkedIn posts about that. If you're leaning on account health reps as your crutch, then the crutch is gonna be kicked out from under you pretty quickly. So mistakes like that, in the new, what I call the new competitive environment, but the 2026 Amazon selling environment will not tolerate being [00:04:00] indecisive with what you send in, or not even just waffling on what to send, but changing your mind every five minutes about how you wanna approach the appeals process. I see lots of fits and starts and maybe account health reps tell them one kernel of info and then they rewrite the whole thing based on that, the word of that one rep, just because they're tired of calling in over and over.

These are people who their brands have lost significant sales in November and December, and sometimes their sales uptick begins in October and it's really October, November is their biggest window. And that's a crucial 21 to 24 day stretch. And if you're just spending it with getting denied on appeal and also just losing sales rank, being less relevant.

In your category at a peak time of year. It's not just Q4, right. This also applies to prime days, which is more like [00:05:00] prime week, but a few prime days in the summer can make or break the revenue for your quarter. And playing fast and loose with that by trying to jam through appeals that are kind of halfway there.

Even after a decade of doing this, I just don't understand the business owner logic there. Part of what I wanna talk about this week is to invite, comment, and to plea for your help, for my understanding on the recklessness or the indecisions that lead to subpar strategy. And some of these account health investigations or account health warnings do lead to an appeal that they have to submit to keep the account active at all.

The first message might not say you have 72 hours to appeal, but it's coming shortly thereafter. If you've got a few unresolved performance notifications that amazon seller assistant haven't helped you navigate through, the [00:06:00] appeal challenge trick that they came up with lately.

You can only use three of those every 180 days. That hasn't done the trick. That's kind of staving off the inevitable if you are just buying time. I can understand why a stall might be important. In the midst of Q4, you're coming up on Black Friday. But that's a short term strategy, right?

It's not a long term strategy. And I understand there are a lot of brands out there kind of playing hopscotch between different agencies. And they're focused on revenue because there's huge, significant challenges to revenue now, and there will be even more in the new year. So I understand the need to try different people and to see what works. I don't recommend just experimenting or guessing or ChatGPTing your way to happiness in the appeals process without really having a strong idea of what you're gonna do next. If that [00:07:00] fails, who you plan to escalate it to. Within Amazon, people start getting desperate and I've sometimes told people, look, I think you dug yourself a deep hole. You have to kind of burn it down to the ground and get back to basics here and redirect Amazon's attention away from everything you've sent so far, and prove to them that you understand the issue. Now, back to square one, you didn't understand it before, or you were working with somebody, you didn't understand it before, but that's the past.

This is the present. You still need reinstatement help. You still need a proper review of your appeal. And you've changed your ways and motivate them if they're refusing to acknowledge that you've even sent an appeal, if they just keep sending you the same generic message over and over, we know why and how that happens.

But if it comes to an escalation email, at least you can make the argument. Once you put together a proper appeal, then it goes to the right place you can make the argument [00:08:00] that you've amended your appeal and you've changed your ways. To the point where they can justify spending time on it. I guess that's maybe one of the biggest gaps in understanding brand owners have.

If you send them something that they can tell either with their eyes or with their tools was automated, AI retread, chat, GPT Nonsense. They don't need to justify spending time on it. And that's why you hear and see so many people saying, we're going in circles. We've been getting the same message over and over and over.

I mean, that's their way of saying, look, if you keep sending us this, we're going to keep spamming you back with generic denials. If you send something that's right on target, I can usually tell within, I don't know, 45 seconds to a minute. When people send me copies of these things, I can tell if they're in the neighborhood or not, and if they're not in the ballpark on where the appeal should be with a few tweaks.

\ If it's obvious to me, it's also obvious to somebody who [00:09:00] reads\ 12 or 13 of these an hour. And also Amazon employees have an incentive to deny, right? We've spoken numerous times throughout this year, all the various incentives they have to deny appeals. You would think it'd be easier for them to just accept some cookie cutter appeal, some template you grabbed, put together a slapped some masons into it and called it good just to have fewer submissions, just to have less work, right? That's not exactly how it works, of course. They have to make it look like they're making life hard on you if only to make it look like they're actually reviewing these and doing some work. So give that some thought. Feel free to give me some feedback on how you approach this whole, whether it's ASIN level or account level.

How serious you take it from the outset. Does anyone just say, this is a rote exercise. Put my VA on it and we'll be good. Does anyone say. Let's get a professional grade review of an appeal we did, and then decide what we wanna do. [00:10:00] Does anyone decide the stakes are too high? And come to us first in the new year?

But I just don't see much margin for error in the future on Amazon with some of the sloppiness, some of the disorganized content. I've read at least two or three appeals this week where I couldn't even tell what they were trying to say. I think some of that is just edited ai. And maybe that's fixable if you just put a bit more time care and attention into it without leaning on that crutch from the outset.

But the other part that kind of annoys me, but also alarms me is people not taking escalations seriously and sending emails to the same old, tired Jeff email or the equivalent other senior management at Amazon where it looks like regurgitated content recycled from your previous appeal, your buddy's previous appeal.

, Something based on a YouTube [00:11:00] video. I'm not sure what , I can understand why Amazon people, especially higher level, higher up types, don't spend time on that stuff. It's no skin off their nose to just throw it away on your side. You're distracted by the stress and you're life is hectic until that's resolved, you're losing the money from the sales and you're losing sales rank and I just don't see a bright future for brands who.

Don't understand that they have to kind of approach this in a smarter way going forward. Thanks again for listening in. I'll do another episode, week of Christmas, to talk about some dos and don'ts from this year, some highs and lows from this year, A bit of a year end episode. But in the meantime, hope everything's going well, and always come to us with any questions.

Thanks for listening.