3 Surprising Reasons to Get Suspended on Amazon

What are some of the more surprising reasons why Amazon sellers get suspended? Former Amazonian and founder of ecommerceChris Chris McCabe explains in this article. Read until the end for a special video addition!

Suspensions come in many shapes and sizes, and often without warning, as we all should know by now. Amazon rarely communicates its decision-making process behind suspensions or rollouts of new initiatives to police marketplace sellers. But what does this mean to an Amazon business owner who needs to protect their asset at all costs?

Basically, you’ll need to be extra vigilant both in monitoring current suspension trends and taking care to avoid fitting the “risk profile” for a suspension-worthy account. Otherwise, you face having to scramble after the fact and sift through Amazon’s increasingly mundane account reinstatement process.

To help prevent this from happening, I put together a list of common reasons sellers get suspended on Amazon, including a few that might surprise you.

Top 3 Ways to Get Suspended on Amazon That You Didn't Know About

1) Late shipment rate – pre-confirmation of shipment suspensions.

We’ve received several emails a week for the past few months from sellers that Amazon has suspended for pre-confirming orders as shipped before the items are actually shipped out. This gravitated from a nuisance to a big-time no-no at Amazon in terms of account-level enforcement.

In many cases, sellers have outsourced management of their accounts to another company or have delegated their shipping operations to lower-level staff. Some tell us that they didn’t actually know the items had been marked as shipped before the true shipment was made.

That lack of knowledge presents a huge problem in Amazon’s eyes because it believes those sellers haven’t monitored their third-party services or they’ve manipulated late shipment account metrics by pretending to have shipped items on time. The items do ship, once they locate the product, but they shipped late. Nobody wanted to admit that to Amazon, of course.

These days, Amazon considers this a type of “code of conduct” violation and treats it accordingly by signing sellers out of their accounts entirely. Appealing is a lot harder without access to Seller Central, so many sellers must email in their appeals. And if you’re denied, you won’t be able to contact Account Health Services reps to find out why. When you’re signed out of your account, you’re “flying blind” and can’t communicate well with anyone.

Problem: There’s too much distance from Seller Account operations that could take the account down, and a lack of oversight over third-party service providers. Sellers often don’t appear to understand that Amazon views these types of practices as a betrayal of both its trust and the pact made with buyers when they buy from marketplace sellers. Accordingly, it punishes anyone who allows this to happen and aren’t always easy on sellers during appeals for this.

Solution: Execute more oversight over any outsourced services but also have a solid ability to vet them for their capabilities before you hire. Ensure they can rush in with immediate corrections when things go wrong before giving them the keys to your Amazon kingdom.

2) Unsubstantiated health claims/improper listing optimization activity that attracts Amazon’s bots.

Countless sellers have contacted us throughout the past year to show us ASIN suspension messaging consistent with unsubstantiated health or safety claims made on listings. They sometimes fail to understand that even if they’re not selling a pesticide, for example, they receive listing restrictions because they’ve added terms to their detail page content that matches up with pesticide product language. The Amazon bots pick it up, and of course, take the listing down soon after. Reaching for more sales, some brand owners stumble into listing compliance violations instead.

This can be avoided if it’s properly addressed before listings go live. The listings can certainly be reinstated once the offending text is removed and the catalog teams are properly contacted. But, Account Health still takes a hit initially, which isn’t great when you’re trying to avoid suspensions.

Problem: An optimization service or your own internal listing management systems failed due to a lack of due diligence during the listing creation process. Amazon disciplines everyone rolling out listing content without considering policy guidelines because it creates more work for them when sellers don’t come through. When in doubt, Amazon suspends to clean up marketplace listing violations that it believes never should have happened to begin with.

Solution: Before any listing goes live, compliance reviews must be completed to ensure that no violation text will attract restricted product teams. Also, consider how a failure to vet trademarked keywords could elicit an IP complaint from a rights owner. A comprehensive listing review process should be present to avoid hits to Account Health that could potentially take the account down if left unchecked across multiple ASINs. Scrutinize before you go live!

You can get notified of changes to your listings, including content and status changes, with SellerPulse by eComEngine.

3) Failure to review product packaging inserts for policy violations prior to use.

We continue to see sellers losing their entire accounts to sales rank manipulation or reviews abuse simply because their product packaging inserts include non-compliant offers, language, incentives, and more. Even after a couple of years of consistent account suspension actions by Amazon, sellers toe the line in risky ways that often result in ASIN suspensions, if not account-wide damage.

While I understand the need to maintain sales rank and keep your products visible and searchable, non-compliant inserts are not the way to go anymore (if they ever were). Some sellers hire marketing companies to create these inserts and assume that policy-abiding text will be used on them, if only because the service’s site mentions they’re “100% Amazon TOS-compliant” or something to that effect. Promises like that need to be fully vetted for accuracy, the same as with the hiring of any Amazon-related services or tools.

Problem: Many brand owners continue to use inserts that offer gifts, major discounts, or giveaways to buyers, resulting in positive reviews for products. They fail to understand that even if you don’t ask for a review, Amazon knows you’ll harvest mostly positive ratings out of this type of behavior. Anything that meets that criteria, therefore, is fair game for a suspension. Also, it’s very easy for competitors to buy from you for the purposes of reporting those inserts as abuse. In most cases, policy team enforcement is guaranteed. Amazon can also pull FBA sample inventory, open it up and see if the seller’s inventory contains those inserts.

Solution: Make sure you’re not using inserts that break policy, with 100% certainty. Other than that, you’re looking at removing all inserts from circulation until you can fully determine which ones align with Amazon policy enforcement trends and which ones do not. Don’t view your use of inserts in terms that are favorable to your marketing strategy, but unfavorable to Amazon’s need to enforce compliance with its product review policies.

Key Takeaways

Remember, Amazon looks great to the press and the public (and to the FTC) the more aggressively it polices review abuse and sales rank manipulation. Amazon often responds to reporter queries for comment by citing the number of suspensions it executed in enforcement sweeps. That speaks for itself because Amazon's wearing suspensions of sellers who break the rules as a badge of honor.

Overall, Amazon cycles through suspension trends regularly, with today’s focus sometimes turning into tomorrow’s forgotten enforcement actions. What does this mean for you as you do everything possible not to get suspended on Amazon?

Amazon sellers need to stay on their toes and not serve up ready-made suspension offenses to guarantee themselves clean Account Health, an absence of Plan of Action writing, and careful performance and policy reviews from the inside of their operations. Otherwise, Amazon teams come calling and you won’t want to hear what it has to say.