Why Your Amazon Appeal Keep Getting Denied

Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions. I’m Chris McCabe. I’m here with Leah McHugh, and I say welcome back because you’ve probably heard our voices before. If you’re new welcome. Presumably you’ve heard us talk about all range of things going on. This particular summer has been brutal.

Leah: Heck, I know It’s like this, this time of year every year.

Chris: it’s been like this, it’s been like this back into July. I mean, granted most of this, this can be kind of a state of the union heading in the Q4 version, but granted a lot of the cases are review manipulation related. I know you don’t work on those, but you’ve had some pretty wacky compliance cases that we’ve talked through too, where amazon comes back to you and says, we don’t know how to fix this. What do you think?

Leah: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of that this year actually.

Chris: Yeah. And so I’ve had that too with [00:01:00] a couple of recent ones and I wanna use that as a jumping off point for, appeals are getting tougher, escalations are being vetted in very particular nuanced and sometimes extreme ways.

I don’t really see a future where sellers can do their own appeals unless it’s straightforward stuff. Prove how you’re not related to this account. We related you to, okay, here’s some documentation or looks like you’re buying from the brand. Prove you have a letter of authorization. You provide that straightforward, easy layup stuff.

Anything with any degree of complexity or nuance I’m seeing, I know everyone’s in love with reading posts about AI all day, and I know everyone’s in love with ChatGPT, so I’m not gonna bother saying, don’t mess around with this stuff. Go ahead and mess around with it. Do not base your appeal on it. Don’t assume that we’ve all agreed that we’ve entered the arrow where AI appeals will go in [00:02:00] and Amazon won’t be able to tell that you wrote an AI appeal or that you didn’t write it and they don’t like it.

Number one, they can tell. I assume you know of tools that detect ai.

Leah: I mean, I can generally tell when reading something, so I assume Amazon can, but there are also tools to detect it. Yes.

Chris: I can tell too, because we are getting emails from sellers that are clearly written by ChatGPT. And so I’ve been telling people, look, if you’re gonna write to anyone at Amazon, and by now people love emailing different people at Amazon when they have account suspensions or takedowns. . But an email, if you’re gonna send an email to like somebody in senior management or an executive, unless you are assuming that that person is using AI to read your email and to reply to it, you should assume it’s being read by them or someone close to them. Right? So if there’s any remote chance that your email is going to be read by a person, you should not be using [00:03:00] AI in any part of the appeal. Any part of the escalation because that’s a one way ticket to nowhere.

Leah: Yeah.

Chris: You’re just setting yourself up to fail.

Leah: I mean, if it’s obvious to them, then I think they just don’t take you seriously. They’re like, you’re not actually doing this.

You’re just sending us regurgitated nonsense sometimes. So yeah, it’s just asking to be ignored. I think also, just going back to your other point about it being more difficult for sellers. I don’t think it’s just because Amazon is getting stricter on some things, which they are. I think it’s also that these teams are getting a lot leaner and a lot less efficient and are still judged internally on how quickly they resolve cases.

And the quickest way to resolve a case is to deny a reinstatement. So it’s not a logic exercise, right? They ask for this, I submit this, problem solved. A [00:04:00] lot of times you really have to fight to even get what it is that you’re submitting, reviewed, and why would you hand them an excuse to ignore you in that situation?

So things like using AI or saying that everybody else is doing it as part of your appeal or escalation, or sending them all sorts of unrelated documentation that has nothing to do with what they have asked you for is just giving them a reason to ignore you and they don’t even need that excuse at this point, so you need to make sure that everything that you’re submitting is as top quality as possible.

You may still get rejected because it isn’t being reviewed properly, but that’s where you need to be able to have that impeccable track record so you can escalate it higher up to say this isn’t a me problem, this is a you problem, and this is something that your process is not handling correctly, because otherwise you’re just never gonna get a response to anything.

Chris: Well, I think [00:05:00] it’s ironic that people complain. You know, no one’s reading, we need a person to read it. No, people are in the process. No one’s reading it. Well, you can’t complain about that if you’re not acting like a person yourself. Right. So, and they can tell whether it’s inflection, whether it’s in sentence structure.

Whether it’s just, they’ve seen, I mean, imagine anytime you’re filtering things through ChatGPT and I had a couple sellers tell me, well, I really did that just to clean up the writing because my writing isn’t fantastic. Okay, great. You had your reasons when they see it, and you have to put yourself in the brain of the audience that you’re sending it to.

If it’s going to have any value when they see it. If they see something that’s very, very similar to what many of your peers have already sent them, right? And everyone’s using the same emails and everyone’s appealing the same kinds of problems, maybe not the same exact problem.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Chris: What do you think you’re biasing them against helping you, so what do you think the reaction will be when they’re like, okay, [00:06:00] well this person really didn’t have the interest, or didn’t have the time, or didn’t have the help, or didn’t have the wherewithal.

To give me something that I can use to justify the positive action I might take on their account. That’s what you’re setting them up to do is to help you.

Leah: Well, and again, I have been able to identify other firms appeals for quite a while. I can usually identify who wrote it or where it came from.

Yeah. And I’m getting to that point with AI as well. And if I’m getting to that point and it is not my job to review other people’s appeals all day, every day, I am pretty sure that Amazon can identify that too.

Chris: Of course they can.

Leah: So again, you’re just giving them an excuse to ignore you when they already want to ignore you.

And with the escalation process. People don’t really still don’t understand. Even though I feel like I’ve had multiple rants about this over the years, the escalation process isn’t just because you don’t like Amazon’s [00:07:00] answer or because you just wanted it to have happened faster. The escalation process is where you have the opportunity to say, I have done everything that you have asked me to do, right?

I have followed. You still didn’t the path, and you aren’t doing what you are supposed to be doing. So if you give them any reason. Within your appeal process for them to be like, well, no, you didn’t do this. Actually, we asked for this and you did this. Then you’ve just wasted a whole escalation path, which you now may not be able to get back from.

Chris: And to borrow from things we’ve talked about in our emails from some sellers, half an answer is the same as zero answer.

If they give you bulleted lists, and I get that everyone is at the point now where if it’s not in a bulleted list, they’re having trouble understanding it. But if you only give them part of it, part of the answer because you failed to read the message from them. And I’m being serious about this.

I’ve had long zooms where I just had to read [00:08:00] emails to people because they hadn’t read them all the way through.

And their fragment of an understanding of what Amazon asked them for resulted in a fragment of a response in the appeal. And I’m spending half of my Zooms 15 out of 30 minutes just saying, you left out this, you left out, this, you left.

Well, my VA was working on it.

Leah: Well, even as simple as when they give you the checklist on your account health dashboard, and the checklist says like, you’re acknowledging the violation and the ASIN won’t be reinstated. How many cases do we have where people just check those off, not realizing that’s what they were checking off, and now they don’t understand why their ASIN hasn’t been reinstated?

Chris: Well, this year I’ve learned a lot about why people are admitting and acknowledging things. It’s not just that they don’t want to do the work to dispute it. I think many disputes are getting rejected. I think disputes are getting rejected more often now than they were six months ago. Number one. Simply because most appeals are getting rejected overall, but also I think account health [00:09:00] reps are kind of in a very sloppy, disorganized, I don’t care fashion telling people to admit things and acknowledge things like this pain will all go away. I think they’re more likely to, I think they’re more than 50% likely to do it now.

Leah: I’ve had a number of sellers who have checked off those boxes, not realizing that they were admitting guilt while doing so.

Chris: Yeah, but I mean, we can’t, back when they first rolled it out, of course people were doing that in spades because they just wanted it all to go away.

Now they’ve got people on account health calls saying, want this to all go away? Do you want this pain, this nightmare to go away? Just acknowledge it.

Leah: I mean, maybe that’s the differences that I’ve been seeing that for a very long time. Maybe it’s on cases.

Chris: Well, I’m specifically speaking to account health reps who have kind of gone off the rails at this point.

Seeing that I’ll be sitting down with a bunch of them at accelerate. Maybe we should release this episode after That’s over.

Leah: Yeah. Hi guys. Yeah.

Chris: Or, or week of when, when everyone’s in Seattle. But a lot of [00:10:00] it’s, I’ve been on those calls misleading, inaccurate info. It’s not the old complaint of, I called six times three people said dispute. Three people said acknowledge. Yeah, of course that’s been going on since the beginning. Now it’s kind of like they don’t sound like they really, it sounds like the account health reps know there are no consequences or repercussions for giving you bad advice, giving you bad guidance.

No one’s gonna call them out for it.

Leah: I’m gonna defend account health here, which doesn’t happen often.

I think that there is a lot of confusion in the higher level teams. And that is trickling down to the frontline teams because I’ve also had escalations where the higher level teams are asking for information that has never been asked for that type of an issue. And when I ask them why they’re asking for that and not something else, they have no idea why.

And then that information is submitted and then they come back a week later saying, actually, no, we were [00:11:00] wrong. We need this other information. So I think, I think there is confusion from the top down. I don’t think it is the frontline team’s fault. Necessarily here.

Chris: Now if you weren real, which doesn’t make it better,

Leah: but you know, I just, I felt like I needed to defend.

Chris: Well Account health reps still have a personal choice not to make things up, not to repeat something they’ve been saying all day to all kinds of sellers in all kinds of situations.

Leah: Well, right, but my point is, is that I don’t think they necessarily are always making it up. I think they’re getting bad information from the higher level teams.

Chris: If you wanna really look for fault, you could, you just keep climbing the ladder and going higher because the fault starts at the top. Yes. But in day-to-day operations, I mean, that’s why we’re not living in two, three years ago, you know? Right. In apology, take responsibility. This is why I say back in the days of writing a plan of action, some sellers, maybe many sellers had experience with it after a while.

And they could DIY [00:12:00] in the post POA age where POAs are rarely asked for, you almost don’t even hear the phrase anymore.

Leah: Yeah. I kind of sometimes miss those days. They were much easier.

Chris: Well, they were easier because you weren’t hearing all this dispute, only all this idea of you can’t present an improvement plan.

You can’t just present preventative measures. All of that’s out the window and in the new post POA age, I don’t think most sellers can do appeals. I think the DIY notion that we started this discussion with, I think it’s gone too far. It’s not just AI or ChatGPT. There were lots of people who were buying cheap copy and paste cookie cutter templates online and modifying them. I mean, that stuff doesn’t work. A lot of the template mill companies, I mean, I don’t even hear about them anymore. No. I assume if they’re not gone, they’re on their way to being gone. And that is like, basically most of the people, when you hire lawyers, they’re using templates most of the time too.

There is [00:13:00] no point sending a template. Escalation that hasn’t been customized. Right. It’s got some basic, fill in the blank. Complete waste of your time and money. So yeah, if you have a DIY strategy, like we’re gonna do this ourselves, and most people are coming to us with 3, 4, 5 denials in hand before they speak to us, which is alarming and troubling because

Leah: it makes our job a lot harder at that point.

Chris: It’s a steeper hill to climb. And you can at least. Run something by us and then decide to do it yourself after talking to us. But you can’t keep a foot in both worlds. You can’t say, I’m gonna pull the desperation emergency cord only after I get rejected six times. I mean that.

Leah: Then email every Amazon email that I’ve ever been able to find.

Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. We’ve entered an age where that’s just not going to work.

Leah: Yeah.

Chris: And for the love of God, please just stop. If it’s not working, if you’re clearly stuck, don’t go [00:14:00] from nine appeals submitted to 19 and then say, well, I’m still stuck. I mean, you knew you were probably going to stay stuck if you kept doing what you were doing.

I think there, some of this is for maybe a later discussion later in Q4 for next year, but. Every seller is going to understand that three outta four times, they shouldn’t be doing it themselves. That’s my prediction for next year. And that might extend the ASIN appeals too, depending on how those shake out.

Leah: For what I work on, the ASIN and the account suspensions are very similar. Not a lower standard at the ASIN level particularly. ’cause in compliance now we see a lot of accounts shut down just because of one ASIN being flagged.

Yeah. So there is actually not that much of a difference between the account and the ASIN level. On the compliance team side of things. Performance is, yeah, perhaps a little bit different.

Chris: So. To conclude, if you’re thinking of doing this stuff [00:15:00] yourself, you should at least run it by us. Maybe not every appeal you’ve ever written, but give us a clue into what you’re facing.

It’s already a pretty difficult process and it’s getting difficult for everyone.

So I’ll end on that Happy note. We will catch you next time after, after accelerate I guess, I’ll talk to you.

Leah: Sounds good.

Chris: All right.

Leah: Bye