Amazon enforcement has reached unprecedented levels in 2024. Even 8 and 9-figure sellers are getting suspended, and Amazon's "two strikes and you're out" policy means there's virtually no room for error. If you sell on Amazon, this episode could save your business.

Amazon's tolerance for any form of manipulation is at an all-time low. The cost of non-compliance isn't just a warning anymore - it's permanent removal from the platform. Even if you think you're playing by the rules, the rules have changed, and they're being enforced by AI that doesn't give second chances.

We sit down with Chris McCabe, former Amazon employee with 5.5 years inside the company and 11+ years helping sellers navigate suspensions and enforcement. Known for direct, no-nonsense advice that saves businesses from permanent bans.

—

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

Chapters: 

(00:00) Intro

(01:40) Overview of Amazon Enforcement and Review Manipulation

(06:12) Reporting Abuse: Best Practices

(11:42) Identifying and Avoiding Review Manipulation Tactics

(23:11) Grow Subscription Revenue with Loop Subscriptions

(24:16) Common Mistakes to Avoid and Additional Considerations

(30:44) Understanding AI Takedowns

(33:39) Improper ASIN Mergers

(36:04) Amazon Policy: No Gray Areas

(38:50) Navigating Appeals Effectively

(45:22) Drive More Revenue with Post Pilot

—

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 
• Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact 

Relevant Links:

• Chris’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mccabe-2646555
• Ecommercechris: https://www.ecommercechris.com/
• Amazon’s Anti Manipulation Policy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G8CXDFT9GLRRSV3G
• LOOP: http://loopwork.co/
• PostPilot: https://postpilot.com/

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

I think Word is finally getting around

that you can't just use generic templates

to appeal that you can't

use chat GPT to appeal.

I think Amazon's catching AI use in

appeals and they just throw them away.

Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to

the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.

We want to take just a minute and tell

you a little bit about my agency OMG

Commerce.

Now we work with some of your favorite

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We'd love to schedule a complimentary

strategy session with you and with that

back to the show. Well,

hello and welcome to another edition

of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.

I'm your host, Brett

Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce.

And today we are talking

about an absolutely critical

topic,

Amazon enforcement and how

to keep your listings live

and available for shoppers to purchase

your goods and how to avoid suspensions,

how to navigate if you do get suspended.

And I probably need to tell

you if you're an Amazon seller,

but it is gnarly out there,

and even the best sellers,

even eight and nine figure sellers

are not immune to having issues

impacting the visibility

of their listings. And hey,

we got to think about this,

like the retail shelf, right?

You can't sell anything and Walmart if

your products are all yanked off the

shelf. And while that may not be a reality

in the physical world all that much,

it absolutely is on Amazon. And so

today I've got a returning guest.

He's a superstar. He's all over.

If you're in the Amazon world,

you probably know him. He

has e-commerce in his name.

Chris. Chris McCabe is

joining the show again.

We caught up at Prosper Show in

Vegas, I guess months ago now, Chris,

but you've been traveling the

world. I've been speaking at events,

and we just now are able to record.

But welcome back to the show and thanks

for coming on and how's it going?

Yeah, no,

I always enjoy speaking to you

about these types of topics,

and we always have good feedback

and comments from people

that hear it and see it and who

are concerned about these things.

Things are good. This is

a hectic, busy summer.

Sometimes summer gets a little quiet,

but prime day coming early. Everything

I think is different this year. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes, we just finished Prime Day,

but I know you'd mentioned to me

sometimes right after Prime Day, there's

an increase in suspensions and listing

takedowns and things like that.

Amazon's maybe a little cautious about

doing that during prime day or right

before it, but afterwards they're

looking at it. And then of course,

we're prepping for Q4 basically right

now and for the next several months. And

so ai, I mean, Amazon's going to be

enforcing things sometimes with ai.

And so yeah, we need to understand

what are our risk factors?

What are the things that

could take down our listings?

What do we need to be aware of,

and then how can we mitigate

things if we do get suspended?

And so you had shared with me several

hot topics that I want to dive into

because these are mission critical for

all Amazon sellers or brands that are on

Amazon. And the first one

is review manipulation,

and then this is one that we all

understand from, hey, our competitors,

especially we've got overseas competitors,

we we're probably confident that they're

doing some shady things as far as

reviews go,

but it's something that really Amazon's

trying to crack down on getting rid of

spammy manipulative reviews and ratings.

And so walk us through what are

the things we need to be aware of?

What is Amazon looking for and what

could get us into trouble in terms of

review manipulation? So.

It's kind of classic, good news,

bad news. The bad news being,

I'll start with the bad news

first. Penalties are harsher.

Reoffenders are generally speaking,

not considered as eligible

for reinstatements.

So if they've been warned or suspended

for review manipulation in the past,

they should not be experimenting,

dabbling, grabbing a gimmicks,

looking at hacks.

They found out about at some event

somewhere they should be super

compliant, extra compliant,

extraordinarily compliant because they

should consider themselves on their last

go. Don't.

Tow that line, avoid that line.

Just be above board. Yeah.

Yeah. There's very little

wiggle room left anyway,

whether you're a offender or not,

and I can get into that in a second.

This is still kind of the

bad news answer. I mean,

the good news in terms of abusive

competitors is it's 10 times better now

reporting them for abuse

if you do it correctly,

which is not support cases, not

random calls to account health,

not waiting for your SAS core

manager to report them for you.

That might be part of it, but I mean,

reporting abuse and seeing action

is higher now than anytime I can

remember. Wow. Yeah.

So maybe we can double click on

that because I'm confident. I mean,

this is the thing that I hear

so much. Of course, at OMG,

we help clients grow on Amazon, and

so as we have new brands coming to us,

they all complain about those Chinese

sellers with fake reviews and stuff like

that. So what's the proper way

to notify Amazon that, hey,

these sellers are manipulating reviews.

Take action. And there's more

than one way. Historically,

it was emailing escalations to senior

management or executives at Amazon or

their staff, their support, their direct.

Reports. I just texted Jeff.

I just texted like, Hey, Jeff,

hope you're not on the yacht,

but take a note of this.

Jeff started.

That's why Amazon execs can't really

ever complain if they get direct emails

from people. Jeff himself was the one who

began that trend, or isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

Practice of the,

Jeff had Amazon email and Jeff had

eight or nine back when I was working at

Amazon, and we got the so-called

Bezos escalations. Of course,

you don't hear about

Bezos escalations anymore.

Jeff had eight or nine assistance

and he had eight or nine email

addresses, right? Wow. And

most people didn't know those.

They mostly knew Jeff B at

Amazon or Jeff at Amazon,

which of course now has morphed into a

generic email queue just like writing the

seller performance.

But Jeff kind of began the

trend of emailing directly to S

team execs,

or let's just say senior management

because there's only three dozen s team

executives,

and getting them to delegate

directly to mid-level management or

higher direct reports that they work

with to have a senior level senior

quality review as opposed to

doing abuse reports to seller

support cases 90 something

percent of the time,

that's useless.

No follow-up, no proper review.

That's just marking something like it's

been worked on, but it hasn't. Yep. Yep.

So we don't do email cues. We

don't used to do that a lot.

There used to be multiple abuse reporting

email cues, and they were hit or miss.

It was worth doing because

sometimes you would hit,

maybe other times you would miss and

you'd end up escalating it anyway.

But if you do it properly,

there's been no time that

I can recall. I mean,

actionable step number one right

here is report abuse early and often,

but do it the right way.

Don't send volumes of attachments or

info or don't write three page emails

unless it's very fact and data-driven,

something that they can use to decide if

they're going to enforce or if they're

going to ignore it or if

they're going to transfer it.

But usable value add info.

If it's just mushy comments

and complaints, and I mean,

you can complain a little bit

in the first sentence or two,

but the rest has to be factual.

This is not prose or emotional

or this is not an essay. No,

this is let's get right to the

facts and make it easy for you to.

Make a decision. As time has gone

on, people have had some success,

lesser success,

but some success with Twitter

posts tagging certain people.

LinkedIn has kind of been the dark horse,

which is kind of coming up

on the rail on the leaders.

LinkedIn's been used a lot more in

the last 18 months, I would say.

So reaching out to select team

members at Amazon on LinkedIn,

is that what you mean? Just.

LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Post LinkedIn.

You're publicly complaining.

But also the great thing about

LinkedIn is first of all,

there's a lot of high level Amazonians

and high level people like us on LinkedIn

who are watching this stuff, but you

can ask for help describe a problem.

You can be factual.

You can tag people who are relevant

both inside the company and maybe X

Amazon like me, but you get

a lot of eyeballs on it.

You get a lot of people who care about it,

maybe people who don't

have an exact answer,

but people who are resharing it elsewhere

where other people might see it that

the original post didn't get to. So,

and LinkedIn's the only real

proper channel for professional

posts of anything business related or

work related, but also Amazon related.

I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn too,

so people are tagging us about

posts I do and about their problems.

So it's changed. I mean, as time goes on,

people are sharing more

things publicly anyway.

Maybe this time next year people will

be doing YouTube shorts and doing it

and tagging people. Got it.

So we're going to keep a factual,

we're going to keep it fairly brief.

No long prose.

We're going to consider posting even

on Twitter slash x posting on LinkedIn

and tagging appropriate people, even

former Amazonians like yourself.

But what else are we looking at

doing? Who do we reach out to?

Who do we notify to support

to report nefarious review

manipulation?

Yeah. The abuse prevention teams

at Amazon for obvious reasons,

are largely behind the curtain.

So essentially you're reaching

above them to somebody who's high

enough that they probably report to

them or report to somebody who reports

to them,

and their skip level would be

somebody who would get eyes on it.

But you're generating attention for

something that's not just impacting you.

That could be happening to

other sellers, to other brands.

Creating bad seller experiences,

creating less faith in the

marketplace. I mean, Amazon.

Yeah, bad customer experiences. Exactly.

Ultimately the biggest risk.

Here. Yeah.

Ultimately it results in, well,

whether it's fake reviews or just listing

content that's been misrepresented

category abuse,

it results in buyers not being able

to find things want to pay for.

It involves buyers being

misled, misinformation,

taking them down the wrong

path. It's bad buyer experience,

which Amazon exists to provide

the best buyer experience.

And on top of that,

legitimate honest sellers get

punished when abuse goes unreported or

enacted upon.

So Amazon has their own interests

in protecting everyone's

experience,

and it's not just their own financial

interests because sales would be hurt,

their own reputational interest and

their own integrity of the marketplace at

stake,

and also it just makes it harder

for them to pitch you services, Hey,

pay us 5,000 bucks for an account manager

who's going to help you expand your

selection and create accessories

for your product. Well,

you're less likely to do that if you're

fighting a two or three front war all

day with competitors with bad reviews

that don't belong there with listing

sabotage,

especially coming out of a peak

sales period like Prime Day. Well,

what happened during Prime Day,

I did a lot of posts on

LinkedIn about category abuses.

People were showing up

randomly in the wrong category.

People's listings were vanishing.

Intentionally meaning?

Meaning people found that one of their

competitors sneaking into or someone

sneaking into the wrong category

on purpose to try to get sales or.

Or competitors pushing you an

example into the wrong category.

Oh, got.

That. The famous example is your

products wind up in the adult category,

which is like what I call search Siberia.

Very hard to find your products, and

that's maybe a competitor saying, Hey,

I know what to do with my.

Competitor.

I'm going to put them in

the adult category. No one's

going to find it. Got it.

Right.

Elicit as in contributions sometimes

through a vendor central account,

sometimes through other means,

but there's a variety of ways.

This is a well-known,

extremely understood problem

that crops up every prime day.

It's just a little bit disheartening

that it happened this prime day too,

but it'll come back in Q4,

so you have to be on your

toes and aware of that.

I like how you started this off by

saying there are peak enforcement periods

like a month and a half before prime day,

and then as soon as prime day ends or

Q4, like Black Friday, cyber Monday,

all of a sudden the enforcement

teams pounce with, well,

we waited until this period passed.

Now we're going to start enforcing

all this stuff. That's true.

Bad ASIN merges always a hot topic.

People are constantly getting busted

for merging ASINs inappropriately or

reporting their competitors for doing it.

They ease off on the pedal with the

enforcement right before Prime Day or Q4,

and then they dive right back into it

because they want to clean catalog.

They want to stop these

types of practices.

Yeah, yeah. Totally makes

sense. Just to circle back,

I want to make sure we close the loop.

I don't think we ever fully landed that.

So we can post on LinkedIn,

we can post on Twitter.

A lot of the enforcement team is

hidden behind the curtain, so to speak.

How do we reach out to them

or who do we reach out to,

or is that a little more elaborate

than a podcast lends itself to.

I mean,

there's too many names to count in

terms of s team executives or senior

management, but that's what you're

wanting to reach out to an S team member.

Those are emails. Those are direct emails.

Got it, got it, got it, got it. Yeah.

Yeah. I'd love to rattle them off

right now, but that would take a while.

And that might not be the best.

Approach. You have some good

clicks on the podcast for that.

That's true though. Yeah.

Want all the to Amazon st.

You can't send the same

thing to 15 people.

That's what sellers, that's

their number one mistake.

Customized.

Content. Depending on your audience,

depending on where it goes,

you're probably contacting the people

who do different things at the company

that have different types

of staff supporting them.

So you don't just say,

well, they're high level,

so we're going to send the

same thing to these 15 people.

That's not going to produce a good result.

And they're also going to see annotations

on your account that show you've sent

the same exact thing to other people,

so they can just say, oh, great.

I don't have to do anything here.

Somebody else got the same email.

They'll take care of it. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's a major

mistake people do. Got it.

But in terms of,

I know you want to circle back on

the review manipulation mistakes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think

what's interesting here too,

so as we look at the review

manipulation mistakes, one,

these are things for us to avoid, but two,

these are things that we could be looking

at for our competitors to be able to

mention or potential, so

kind of dual angle here,

what should we avoid and what should we

be looking at that our competitors might

be doing?

Yeah, and if you see

anything I'm about to say,

if you capture screenshot,

collect evidence, live links,

whatever it is, of any of the

things we're about to talk about,

that's abuse reporting. That's

exactly what I was just talking about,

and no better time than the

present to report these things.

They take it very seriously.

I cannot recall any other prior period.

I've been doing this for 11 years,

by the way.

I can't remember any other period

where 11 years and former Amazonian.

Which we failed to mention at the

beginning of the podcast, but you.

And a half, yeah, five and a half

years at Amazon, six years before that,

so 17 out of the last eight,

I did take a year off.

Understandable. 17 out

of the last 18 years,

but I don't remember any period

that's been this long of one

particular suspension type,

continually enforced week in,

week out for these many months. Prosper

is when I last saw you in person.

I would say this started in March,

and I mean there's been a

little bit of an ebb and flow.

Not every single week is as heavy as

the week before to the week after,

but we've been consistently

getting suspended.

Sellers or the threat of suspension,

as you've probably heard,

many sellers are in the account

health assurance program,

so they make you appeal. It's the

same process. They make you appeal,

but to keep your privileges active,

they don't suspend you upfront.

But this topic's been hot since

March. I mean, that's four months.

That's a long time for

one suspension type.

Usually it's like four weeks of the

peak. It's kind of the bell curve.

People kind of clean their

act up for the most part,

and then in the Amazon

eases off a little bit.

Most suspension types follow

the traditional bell curve

where there's a little

tail in the beginning where

they're sort of ramping it up.

There's the big bump in the

middle, and then as word gets out,

people get suspended, reinstated,

some get suspended, not reinstated.

Then it kind of tails off over the

course of a few weeks. Not this time,

not this year. Yeah.

Well, I mean, this has got to

be the biggest issue though.

I know this is something that all the

soldiers talk about or complaint about

this, but even as a shopper, I'm like,

I want to be able to trust the reviews,

and if I start to get the hint that

these reviews have been manipulated,

now what am I trusting? I'm not

trusting the whole experience,

and so totally makes sense. So yeah,

what are some of the things we're

looking for here or trying to avoid.

And unfortunately,

several people are still doing most

of the things I'm about to say.

Now I realize a lot of the tricks

and techniques are in a cycle.

They get trendy and then they

go away. Remember, years ago,

rebates were a big hot thing,

and then those completely went away

once a bunch of people got suspended,

a couple of people are trying to

weave rebates back into it now.

Inserts hot topic, then it goes cold for

a while. Maybe there's thing you were.

At the tail end of that bell

curve, and so it's like, Hey,

we can maybe fly into the radar, but.

I would argue that it's no longer

trendy or cyclical anymore.

I think now you cannot

recycle these old tactics,

which sending postcards like

physical mail to people is just

dead. No one should be

doing this. I've seen,

I don't know how many messages I've been

on calls with Amazon enforcement teams

calls sometimes of my own calls

with other sellers on the call.

They are not interested in

any mail going to buyers.

The messaging's been extremely clear,

and all the suspension notifications

don't use residential addresses.

Don't send physical mail for anything

that's not essential to the order.

They don't want people harvesting

emails through QR codes on inserts.

I've had a lot of arguments

with people about, well,

what if the QR code takes you somewhere

where they don't ask for a review or

where they don't give any

product away? First of all,

tons of sellers are still

giving product away,

and all you have to do

is scan the QR code.

It takes you straight to a page

where there's giveaways and I'm

kind of amazed and shocked. I'm still

having conversations about, well,

what if I give product away,

but I don't ask for a review?

That question has not been relevant for

way over a year. I don't know.

Countless suspensions

have been for people.

It doesn't matter if you asked

for a review or not anymore.

That's completely not relevant

if you're giving product away.

Yeah, no giving products away. No.

No giveaways.

No physical mail.

Period.

Amazon assumes you're going to harvest

good reviews from giving product away,

so I still see people doing the, if

you're not happy, contact us directly.

Here's our email. Here's our phone.

If you're happy with the product,

please leave us a review. People

are still doing that on inserts.

I thought that was dead two years

ago. Still happening. Still.

Happening. Now, I'm assuming

one exception could be,

I'm assuming on the postcard

thing is if you're using Buy with

Prime, right? We got a few

sellers that also sell D two C,

so on my Shopify store, if I'm doing Buy

with Prime, I get all that information,

right? Amazon's fine with me

having all that information.

It happened on my site,

but Amazon's fulfilling it and

doing the merchant fee with that.

I'm assuming we get all the data so we

could mail to those customers, correct.

They're our customers.

That's a different deal.

What they don't like is that you're using

private info data about

buyers for your own purposes

and a lot of pure Amazon.

Buyer.

And then like email

harvesting QR code here,

enter your email. We'll send you a,

we'll subscribe you to our newsletter.

That's what a lot of people

do. We'll send you a product,

we'll send you information about new

products. Somewhere in that funnel,

you're eventually giving them something,

maybe later asking for a review.

Somebody told me the other day,

they're only asking for a review way down

the road after they send three or four

emails that have nothing

to do with anything.

Your competitors can see all of this.

The reason why none of these marketing

tricks that are ancient already anyway,

the reason they don't work anymore is

because your competitors are getting that

information. All they have

to do is buy from you.

So unless you're somehow lifting out

and picking out those particular people,

which I know you can't

do no way to do it. Yep.

All they're going to do is take

screenshots of it and report it to Amazon,

because I can't tell you how many

sellers have told us Amazon can't see our

funnel. Amazon can't see this.

It's like Amazon can see anything your

competitors can see and take pictures of.

Yep.

That's why this stuff doesn't work.

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Yep.

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Okay, cool. So that all makes

sense. Avoid all those things.

What else are we avoiding from a

review manipulation standpoint?

What are we looking at our competitors

to maybe catch them in the act?

People are, I mean,

some of this is they're hiring a third

party service and they don't vet them for

compliance.

People are hiring marketing agencies or

services who handle their messaging with

buyers like customer service for them,

and there's been things even

appearing in buyer seller messaging,

not even an email right there

in the messaging that says,

if we help you with a refund or

we help improve your experience,

can you change your review.

From.

A three to a five? You can't do that.

You can't ask people to change. Can't.

Make that request.

Nope. You can refund people all you want.

You do not ask them to change their

feedback, their review, their rating.

Some people might do that on their

own, but you can't make that request.

People are still making that mistake. Now,

I understand some of them are newer and

they don't understand that that's been

banned for a long time. Whether you're

new or old, doesn't matter to Amazon.

They're supposed to treat everyone the

same when it comes to policy enforcement,

and then again, I kind of mentioned

this a minute ago, but do not re-offend.

Don't be guilty of one of these things,

and then you're guilty of another type

of review manipulation, and you think,

well, we weren't doing

the postcards this time.

We were doing illicit

language on inserts. I mean,

that's, you're playing

with so much fire there.

That you have to repeat offender,

just like the court system, right?

Okay. I didn't rob,

but I sold drugs. It's.

Fine.

Well, that's the court system is

typically three strikes and you're out.

This is two strikes.

Yeah. Got it. Got it.

It is court of Bezos.

Much less common now, chassis, I

guess. I mean in 20 17, 20 18, yeah.

There were people who got busted two

three times, wrote a plan of action,

got reinstated. They almost never

ask for a plan of action anymore.

I'm sure most sellers know that because

they don't want to read them anymore.

They don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Not reading.

That they want troublemakers off the

site. If they mark you as a troublemaker,

it probably means that they

think whatever you're selling,

someone else can sell it in your place.

Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's very true.

Who don't give them administrative

headaches and problems. Yeah,

that's how they view it.

That's how they view.

It, and if you think you're too big

to mess with, no you're not. I mean,

unless you're Nike or something, but

obviously know there's issues there, but.

Yeah.

You're.

Not too big. You're not too big. You

mentioned eight, nine figure sellers.

The second you said that a minute ago,

I thought of some nine figure sellers

we've worked with on these issues and we

were able to help them. Amazon kind of

told them right before reinstating them,

we're giving you an extra shot

out of the kindness of our hearts,

but you probably shouldn't be.

Reading between the lines was We

probably shouldn't be doing this.

We will give you one more shot,

but this is an exceptional case.

It's not just because

you're a nine figure seller.

It's because we've

decided that you presented

us a strong enough appeal

and you sound sincere and

we're just tired of talking about this.

But they take another strike. No way.

They're getting that back in way.

And there are nine figure sellers

that have lost their accounts. I mean.

It's crazy. It's crazy. Interesting. Cool.

What else should we be avoiding on

the review manipulation side and or be

watching for?

Yeah, no, just be careful

with hiring a group that says,

we have a bunch of influencers who are

going to buy your product and promote it

and talk about it. Some influencers

have been trying too many products,

leaving too many five star reviews and

the influencer themselves themself is

probably a problem,

and if you're just paying a service who

has a group of them and works with a

bunch of them over and over,

you might not even know that

that particular influencer

has been a problem, And

Amazon in the past,

Amazon would just delete all the

reviews that that influencer left,

but they're doing more now.

Now they're harshly punishing the people

that hired the service that used the

influencer,

so be very careful and vet those

services and talk to them about their

influencers or talk to them about

their methodology and tactics,

because a lot of times Amazon suspends

the seller account and they're not even

that interested in you as the seller.

They're trying to get the guy or the

woman behind the screen who's helping

you because they know that that service

is working with a lot of sellers and

they want you to name names. They

wanted, where did you find these people?

What's their methodology? And I

saw some sellers appeal saying, oh,

this was our methodology.

We hired the service,

and Amazon declined the appeal and

wrote back and said, no, no, no, no.

We know what your methodology was

already. We want to know what they do.

We want to hear what you

paid them to do because.

We can going after the

service providers and the.

Influencers.

Interesting.

Why they've been prompting

all these sellers to name

names and they see the same

service named over and over and over,

and they start circling them. Okay,

so these people the problem. Yeah.

Yep, yep. It's finding the

drug dealers, right? It's like.

Okay.

I can find that, but I want to find the

drug lords here and then go after that.

I mean, maybe the last word on

this be just document everything.

They more or less guide you

into terminating the service,

so have it in writing, have a contract,

terminate them with a dated

signed letter and keep

track of that stuff because it ends

up being attached to your appeal. So.

Interesting. It's.

A much harsher landscape. This is not

two years ago where you just apologize,

say, I'm sorry, take responsibility.

That's ancient history with this.

Yeah, yeah. It's like the teacher

that's fed up with the students.

These folks names are like, I've had

enough two strikes, and you're dead.

You're dead to me, so totally makes sense.

Anything else on the review side

or should we transition to ai?

Yeah, I think we should

go to the AI takedowns.

The last part about the reviews is

just Amazon has their own selfish

needs and reasons for

wanting this to go away.

People have bashed them for not having

reliable reviews on the site, so

it makes them look good

to say they're finally.

Taking action, which

is actually good. Yeah.

It makes them look good to say

they're punishing wrongdoers, so.

Don't play.

Into their hands.

Exactly. So AI takedowns,

what are those and what do we need

to know about them to avoid them?

Some people are just getting Amazon

bots to take their listings down because

they've got improper wording in a title

like you're using trademark keywords

or if it's a consumable product, they're

using disease claims, health claims,

unsupported claims. Those are just,

those people are trying to

rank by inserting certain

keywords or certain terms

without thinking about how they might

be triggering Amazon's AI to take their

listings down until they can prove

that they have products that have those

qualities or just might be

they're being triggered.

They're triggering

restricted product bots,

so some of that's just low hanging

fruit. Keep an eye on compliance.

Don't just be going for sales and throwing

whatever words you can think of in

there.

Then there are AI type problems

where you are either improperly

classified by Amazon in terms

of what category you belong in,

or you suddenly wake up and you're

in a totally different category.

I was talking to somebody recently who

they moved from the home category to the

media category, and they didn't

belong in there at all. Well,

somebody had made some illicit ASIN

contributions and triggered what

maybe in the old days would've

been a manual review by a person.

It's more likely to be an AI review now

by Amazon, and Amazon started asking.

Them for, explain that, what

is it? What is an elicit ASIN.

In there?

I'm putting in terms which make it look

like you're selling a certain type of

product, which you're not. Got it.

Amazon starts asking you for, I mean,

there are people who were

selling Tupperware or books

or other types of products

who were suddenly being asked for things

typical of consumable products like

compliance documentation and

testing from ISO certified labs,

and that was all because

an abusive attack.

Somebody tried to make it look like

your product belonged in a different

category. Got it. There are all

kinds of ASIN contributions.

You should have the strongest level

of contributions on your own ASINs,

of course,

people make illicit contributions and

try to update product pages with certain

types of information. I mean, there's

a lot of different ways they do it.

There are a lot of

illicit tactics out there.

Sometimes it's social engineering

where they get somebody at Amazon to do

something that shouldn't happen,

but you have to kind of have the right

tools and software in place to catch this

so that you're not completely oblivious

when people are tampering with your

detail pages,

but also you have to understand what's

happening to you instead of just calling

account health or calling support and

complaining and saying, this is all wrong.

Amazon screwed up.

A lot of people spend time blaming Amazon

for something that a competitor did.

Got it. Got it. Yeah,

and when you start an

interaction in complain mode,

you're potentially less

likely to get help.

What about improper ASIN merges?

I know that's something

you mentioned to me before.

That's something that some of

our clients, we help merge ASINs.

There's some valid reasons to do it,

but what is an impro ASIN merger?

Maybe contrast that with what a proper

AON merger is and why you would do it,

but why should we avoid the improper?

Oh, no. There's plenty of

reasons to merge ASINs.

This is mostly for people who

want to harvest reviews to

boost. I mean,

maybe you've got a bunch of unsold

inventory for a particular ASIN and you've

got another ASIN out there with better

reviews and you're trying to boost the

visibility by putting them together.

Maybe you sold out of one asin,

which has all the reviews

and the ASIN with very few

reviews. You've got a bunch

of unsold product, right?

You're trying to take advantage of all

the reviews on the other ace. Got it.

By pretending like it's the

same product when it's not asin,

separation is a lot more common now

where Amazon sees what you're doing and

they go in there and

they re separate them.

Does Amazon improperly separate

asin? Sometimes? Of course they do,

but a lot of the separations are valid

because sellers are trying to merge them

for their own sales rank. It's a form of.

Review manipulation. In

some cases. It's a form of.

Most commonly review manipulation. I

mean, the other merges are, of course,

people are taking over zombie listings,

some other listing out there that has

a bunch of reviews where it's kind of

floating free and disembodied

from whatever it was,

and people go in there and

get Amazonians or using other

tricks,

merge their product with that listing

because that listing has all the reviews.

That's why you have a lot

of buyers complaining.

I went to the older reviews

and they're all about shoes,

and your product is a salad spinner. Why

are the product types different? Well,

because two listings that did not belong

together at all were merged together,

so people are still, I mean,

I think these are just hacks and

gimmicks and they belong to a mastermind.

They go to an event. I understand

where these ideas come from,

marketers and services and agencies

and lots of people out there are always

trying to come up with the next fad.

Yeah,

it's the fun thing to talk about that

gets people coming back to a mastermind.

It makes your service appear more

valuable if you're an agency, but yeah,

these hacks, tricks manipulations.

It just isn't going to work. And one

of the other things you mentioned,

you alluded to it earlier,

but you talked to me about offline

is no real gray areas anymore,

right? It's very black and

white with Amazon right now.

Do you want to unpack that a little bit?

Well, certainly with the review

manipulation, there are no gray areas,

and if you look at the policy,

which hopefully you can

put in the show notes here,

totally pretty black and white.

There isn't a lot of people try

to talk themselves into that.

There is a gray area,

but my main word of advice there is

don't talk yourself into how you think

Amazon's policy should be interpreted.

Focus all your energy on how does

Amazon interpret this policy?

Yes, yes. How are they interpreting

it? How are they enforcing it?

That's all that matters. Understand

that and plan accordingly.

And if you aren't sure,

you can talk to me because we

do this stuff all the time.

You can talk to some people

at Amazon. Now, granted,

some people at Amazon don't know.

Well, obviously don't ask support.

Don't ask account help.

Don't ask any lower tier staff if you

have an account manager who can run some

stuff down for you. If you go to events

like Amazon Accelerate in Seattle,

you can probably bump into or meet up

with some people who work for Amazon

who can explain some of these

things to you at seller cafe,

but don't make assumptions.

I still see a lot of people assuming

that their interpretation is gold or

they're just looking for

more wiggle room. Well,

isn't it kind of different

if you offer them a warranty?

That's a big one with

the inserts, right? Well,

what if the insert just talks about

warranties? I don't know down the road.

Do you ask them to leave a review because

that's not about the warranty anymore.

That's why say there aren't any real

gray areas and when you're suspended for

this stuff, which is kind of

a little bit late to learn it,

but if you're suspended and you start

talking to those teams yourself,

you start realizing very quickly, oh,

okay, we can't do that stuff anymore. Oh,

okay, whatever I heard at this event or

in the mastermind or post it on YouTube,

I used to be in the dark

myself to an extent.

Where are these ideas coming from?

I don't understand why so many

people are making these mistakes.

That's the two or three

years ago version of me.

Now that I've been to some of these

events where I've seen people on stage

talking about this stuff

or I see it on YouTube or

Instagram or wherever.

Now I know that it's just sellers

who are looking to boost sales or

sales rank or boost their visibility are

consuming this stuff and not questioning

it. I mean, now I kind of understand.

Totally. Totally makes sense. Awesome.

Any final rapid fire

tips before we talk about

how people can work with you?

Because obviously you're the one we

recommend if they're wanting to prevent

issues, but certainly if there are

issues and how to get reinstated,

you are the guy and your team is the team,

but any other rapid fire tips before we

talk about how people can work with you?

I have so many with appeals.

I think word is finally getting around

that you can't just use generic templates

to appeal that you can't use chat GPT to

appeal.

I think Amazon's catching AI use in

appeals and they just throw them away.

You can't appeal over and over and over

and expect them to read an infinite

number of appeals and you have

to show them that you take it

seriously because they think you don't

care about your suspension or your brand

or your business if you send

in appeals that your VA did

for you or whatever.

I'm not saying every business owner or

CEO is the best communicator or writer,

but it's not just about communication.

It's about having a strategy.

You want this to feel human and to

have the right strategy, but yeah,

you want them to believe that your earnest

and you are going to make a change.

You're not going to be a repeat

offender, that type of thing.

Yeah. I quiz people all the time when

they say, well, if this doesn't work,

we're going to try escalating it,

and then if the escalation fails,

then we'll call you back and I say, okay,

so when you use the word escalation,

that means something very specific

in the Amazon appeal space.

What do you mean by escalation?

Nine times out of 10,

it's their kind of muddled hazy idea

of basically using the word escalation

on a phone call with account health or

putting the word escalation in a Dear

Jeff email, really outdated, not useful,

and that worries and scares me

because you only get so many cracks at

escalations and similar to

what we said a few minutes ago,

if somebody opens an email from you that

you send straight to them or their team

and it says, escalating blank

reinstatement of our account,

and they go in your account annotations

and they see that you've done prior

escalations, probably not that

well, then they'll say, well,

this has already been escalated.

So I don been escalated and got

rejected, so why would I do any.

Different? I got rejected, so either A,

why do I need to read this at all? Or B,

they're biased against reinstating you

because they can see how many people

rejected you previously. So.

No.

Has see appeals, no, shoot

first ask questions later.

I don't blame people for thinking two

or three moves ahead and thinking about

let's start filling in some

notes or a potential escalation

if today's appeal fails.

I don't begrudge you that,

but that's at least a strategy.

Be.

Willing to change your customize or

modify that escalation. Don't just say,

we wrote this three days ago

and now we have new information,

but we're going to send the

same thing in as an escalation.

That's not how this works. Totally.

Makes sense. Totally makes

sense. Awesome. So Chris,

when should someone reach out to you and

what services do you provide and then

how can someone reach out to you?

Yeah, I mean our, first of

all, how do people reach us?

Support at eCommerce?

chris.com is a good place to email

us summary info include messaging

from Amazon. You don't have

to send us the phone book,

just the suspension notification.

Maybe your most recent appeal and

background or summary info is usually what

people do. Reach out to

us early in the process,

do not appeal five or 10 times and then

show us a bunch of failed appeals and

then show us a bunch of generic canned

messages from Amazon rejecting you.

I assume those people are doing it

because they don't want to pay the cost

associated with hiring us,

but think in advance about the

time lost and the money lost.

If you appeal that many times,

that means you've, I mean,

I assume you're not sending

in five appeals in five hours.

It's probably five appeals in five days.

Well,

how much do you lose in five days?

How much do you lose in five weeks?

People are still coming to us in

week six after they've lost six

figures,

and all I can say is I don't understand

that thinking come to us a lot

sooner. Even if you don't hire us

right off the first phone call,

we can evaluate and we can

at least level with you.

We're known for being direct

and blunt on this stuff.

We can at least level with you,

waste time with sales pitches.

We level with you on what you think,

think your current status is before we

even talk about what we would do to fix

it. So reach out to us early and yeah,

it helps to make a higher or not higher

decision early in the process too,

but it depends on the

particulars of course.

Got it. Got it. Awesome.

So e-commerce chris.com,

email support@ecommercechris.com. Also

sounds like you're on LinkedIn. LinkedIn,

so people should follow you on

LinkedIn also X as well, I assume.

Yeah, LinkedIn.

I'm on there every day and

all the usual social channels

at amz. And Chris,

C-H-R-I-S is social, so Instagram awesome.

Yeah, check it out.

We'll link to that in the show notes

and then Twitter also will link to that.

Yeah, I sent Twitter earlier

policies. I meant X, sorry.

Yeah, it's all the same. Sort of think

that people will call it Twitter forever.

Twitter slash x. I dunno. I finally got

in the habit of sort of saying X first,

but I didn't like it in the

beginning, that's for sure.

Yeah.

It's tough, so it's tough,

man. It's tough. Well, Chris,

thanks again for coming on.

Thanks for helping people keep their

products live and their accounts in good

standing with Amazon so we

can keep making money there,

keep our products on the shelf.

That is the first step in the name of

the game of trying to dominate on Amazon,

and so I'll link to everything. Also,

if you share that links to the policy,

I'll put that in the show notes as well,

the review manipulation policy.

And so with that, Chris, thanks,

man, A ton of fun as always,

and look forward to seeing

you at the next Amazon event.

We run into each other at.

Exactly.

Yep.

Thank you.

Again. Awesome, and as always,

thank you for tuning in.

We'd love to hear more from you

if you found this show helpful.

If you know someone who is in

Amazon purgatory or Amazon,

hell send 'em this episode. Let

'em know about e-commerce, Chris.

If anyone can help, they can.

And with that, until next time,

thank you for listening.

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