This post is by Chris McCabe, owner and founder of ecommerceChris, LLC, an Amazon seller account consultancy.
Over the past four and a half years, we’ve worked with thousands of sellers facing the pain and anxiety of Amazon account suspensions and listing blocks. One constant remains: sellers will do anything in their power to avoid going through it all again.
What’s the best way to protect yourself from Amazon’s investigators poking around in your account? Identify threats before they do. If you find complaints about item quality, for example, then you can take remedial steps before it blows up into a major problem. Or if you are missing targets on key performance metrics, you can uncover and address the failures behind that.
The steps below will help you devise a complete plan for protecting your business and allow you to grow safely to larger revenue and higher sales, year over year.
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Amazon seller health check principles
Before we get into the detail, here are three guiding principles to keep sight of throughout the process.
Don’t pick and choose what to review
Review your WHOLE account, not just vanity metrics. Having good metrics is great, but if you’re ignoring performance notifications, you’ll miss potential threats to account health.
With your own account review you want to give yourself a thorough risk assessment. Try to analyze everything you see from the Seller Performance team’s perspective.
Follow actions all the way through
You need to identify useful, preemptive actions that you can take right now to protect your account. In Amazon’s current enforcement climate, you can’t take half-completed actions or let notifications fester without research and response. That equals an increase in risk that few can afford.
Build it into your business
Make reviewing your account a standard operating procedure (SOP). Put it in your schedule as a recurring task, document the process to follow, and use tools like checklists to make sure it’s done completely and correctly each time.
1. Product quality and operational review
Start your health check with a review of product quality, which will naturally lead into a comprehensive review of your business operations.
What caused any ASIN-level listing suspensions in the past? Were appropriate steps taken to assess those problems? What could cause product quality complaints in the future?
Look at the following areas:
Listings
Are your listings accurate, or could buyers misunderstand what they are getting? Are you using variations correctly? Check your content for misleading details that lead to buyers reporting receipt of “not as advertised” items.
Documentation
Make sure you have supply chain documentation that Amazon considers acceptable. To cover for any potential complaints about authenticity, it’s best to have letters from your suppliers, too. You never know when Amazon may ask for invoices, even for your own private label products.
Operations/training
Make sure that anyone who touches your Amazon account knows what they’re doing. There are many policies to learn when you’re managing an Amazon account. Have proper training in place, and policies listed at individual workstations and on staff member desks if necessary.
Otherwise, you risk making mistakes that get you suspended, and in my experience, many of those could have been avoided with an SOP which ensures employees get it right the first time.
Customer service
Reply to those buyer messages quickly! You may have taken the weekend off, but missing a message and replying later than the 24-hour mark means missing metrics targets.
Also, the longer the buyer has to wait for your assistance, the more likely they are to complain to Amazon. That means you’ve increased the chance a negative buyer experience that turns into a performance notification and a suspended ASIN. You want to prevent unresolved notifications from piling up at all costs.
Product handling and packaging
Are the items you sell likely to be damaged on their way to buyers? Whether you’re using FBM or FBA, you must make sure the kinds of products you sell are well protected by the packaging you use.
