You might be able to skate by with only a few buyer complaints turning into policy warnings or listing removals.
But you should be worried if you’re not doing everything in your power to fix whatever’s going wrong with your inventory, your picking and packing, your listings, or your ability to resolve order problems with buyers. Find these before Amazon does because you may save yourself a world of financial hurt, and time, by not having your account suspended. Don’t assume that because your metrics are solid you have nothing to worry about. You always have something to worry about.
I’ve seen great, high revenue, perfect metric sellers who were taken down over a few policy warnings from buyer complaints that hinted at materially different products. You may be unlucky with the investigator that winds up looking over your account. You may have someone inexperienced, badly trained, or someone in a hurry who fears making a mistake by letting you sell. They can best protect themselves, if not buyer experience, by taking your account down.
No one is regularly looking over their shoulder in terms of audits or Quality Assurance and asking them why they were so overly cautious. No one tells them they cost the company commissions revenue. In fact, according to internal sources, auditing appears to be spotty at best. You can’t count on a lead or senior investigator suddenly, independently discovering an error and rectifying it. You’re going to be on your own and it can be tough to make Amazon listen when you’ve given them all they’ve asked for and they still can’t decide what to do with you.
Once you understand the rules of Amazon’s game, then a lot of this makes sense. Play by their rules, not by anybody else’s. They don’t mind losing you to other e-commerce sites if they have to deal with complaints against your inventory and resolve order problems with buyers. They don’t lose sleep over individual account loss, even higher revenue ones, because to them you can be replaced tomorrow.
