Amazon Suspension?

If you've had your Amazon selling privileges removed I can help you to get your Amazon account suspension to get you back selling. I know it can be stressful when you get your Amazon Account Suspended, but I'm here to help with your account suspension.

I use 8 years of experience to tackle your Amazon suspension with expert appeals and plan of action letters. I know suspension is stressful and difficult, I'm here to help you. I'm a leading International Compliance Officer for Amazon Sellers, supporting the largest Amazon Sellers in the world with their Amazon Account Health. With 8 Years experience working full-time on Amazon Suspension & Account Health, $60 Million revenue under my management and $500 Million revenue reinstated for Amazon Sellers - this is the ultimate expertise for tackling your Amazon Account Suspension.

Ready for help with your Amazon Suspension? Contact me using the details below. Or read more about my services and being suspended on Amazon.

I'm a Chief Compliance Officer for Amazon Sellers. As a growing Amazon Seller you've probably scaled up many aspects of your business like staffing, accounting, warehouse, IT systems. However, so many sellers don't scale their compliance needs too. There's often millions in revenue dependant on having your Amazon account open and in good health. This brings every seller sleep less nights and stress.

I work with large sellers to help manage their Amazon Account Health & Policy Violations. This includes:

Suspected Intellectual Property Violations
Received Intellectual Property Complaints
Product Authenticity Customer Complaints
Product Condition Customer Complaints
Product Safety Customer Complaints
Product Detail Page Listing Violations
Restricted Product Policy Violations
Customer Product Review Product Violations
Policy Violations
Performance Notifications
Account Health Performance
Account Reviews / Velocity Limit Review
Account Suspension

That's pretty much everything that might come up and cause you to lose revenue.

I work with my clients on a monthly retainer basis. I access my client's Amazon Seller Central accounts using User Permissions, so it's totally safe and secure.

I access their account at least every 48 hours to record, fight and fix any new Amazon account or product issue. By taking regular action to keep on top of issues and handle them in-line with Amazon's policies, we're able to prevent bigger issues from arising.

Suspension is a very serious issue and a major worry for most sellers. By having a dedicated expert keeping your account in shape, you're making smart choices to protect yourself, your business and your staff. Think of it a bit like insurance - you don't want to need it, but you'll be very grateful to have it when the worst happens.

- I'm Chief Compliance Officer for over $60 million in revenue on Amazon
- I've reinstated Amazon Accounts bringing over half a billion dollars revenue back to sellers
- Over the last 8 years I've provided Amazon Seller Account help to over 2500 third party sellers
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Previous role: Head of eCommerce

Professional Bodies, Studies & Qualification:
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ICA Specialist Certificate in Conduct Risk, Distinction
ICA Certificate in Compliance, Merit
CGI Diploma in Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG)

International Compliance Association Member
The Corporate Governance Institute Member

I'm Joshua. I’m a serial entrepreneur that has worked on a broad range of projects. I've lent my expertise to the largest Amazon sellers globally, working for sellers, banks, service providers and governments. I've been running my own business, Suspension Experts, for the past 7 years. Since starting I’ve helped suspended Amazon sellers restore over $500 Million in revenue by developing custom action plans to get them back up and selling again. During this time, I also managed and grew $30 Million in Amazon revenues for my account management clients. Now as Chief Compliance Officer I tackle compliance for seller accounts totalling $60 million in annual revenue.

My wealth of experience means I'm privileged to provide expert guidance to sellers and take instant action on their accounts in all areas to maintain account health and prevent suspension.

From Suspected IP Violations to Restricted Products, we're ready to handle and advise on any and all violations you might receive in your Amazon Seller Central Account .In the past 8 years and with many other seller accounts on the books, there's little we haven't seen before!

Here's a few examples of issues I can help with:

Suspected Intellectual Property Violation
Received Intellectual Property Complaints
Product Authenticity Customer Complaints
Product Condition Customer Complaints
Product Safety Customer Complaints
Product Detail Page Listing Violation
Restricted Product Policy Violation
Customer Product Review Product Violation

Order Defect Rate
Late Dispatch Rate
Valid Tracking Rate

Section 3 of the Business Solutions Agreement

Generally, the only suspended account issues I cannot assist with are for related account (multiple accounts) & verification issues. Anything else, just ask if you're not sure.

‍When you get suspended from Amazon, you'll get a suspension notice which will tell you the reason for your suspension, you'll find the suspension notice in performance notifications. This will tell you why you have been suspended, such as for selling counterfeit products, customer feedback issues, buyer complaints or legal claims about your product listings. The list is long!Once you've been suspended you begin the Amazon appeal process. During this time your listings are removed from Amazon and you won't get paid any money in your account, for 90 days after the suspension notice. Even then, Amazon may hold your funds forever.This is why you need to try for account reinstatement and get it right. Many sellers try to appeal on their own, despite the huge pressure on their account being reinstated. You can't just open a new seller account, so you need to submit a very good series of Amazon suspension appeal letters.

No, you don't need Amazon Sellers lawyer for most suspended accounts. The issues that cause most suspended accounts are Amazon's rules, not the law. If you do break the law Amazon will immediately suspend your account and it's very unlikely you can sell again.

If Amazon suspended your account then the department that deal with this is Amazon Seller Performance. If they could receive a customer satisfaction score themselves, it would be very low. Since the poor seller performance support means many sellers and even us experts can struggle to get their seller account reinstated because the appeal letter is not read properly (that's why we commonly use bullet points).

If you'd like help getting your account reinstated, then purchase our services today for expert support and guidance.

Amazon Account Health is a hotly searched and discussed topic among Amazon Sellers. Account Health is often confusing for sellers and recently has experienced some changes, like the new Account Health Rating. It is essential for sellers to maintain a healthy account health rating to avoid suspension, stress and other selling issues. Many Amazon account ratings are 'At Risk' regularly, causing stress due to Amazon Health.

In this guide for new and old sellers, we're explaining everything you'll see in your Amazon Account Health dashboard so that you can tackle issues better and know when to worry or get expert help.

If you'd like help managing your account health, achieving a healthy account health rating and even getting protected from suspension with Amazon's new Account Health Assurance, then our team at Seller Assurance are here to help. Check out how here.

Order Defect Rate
Order Defect Rate (ODR) is the oldest and most popular of the Amazon account health metrics as it can cause a quick suspension. The ODR is calculated as a percentage of your orders that had a defect; a negative feedback, A-Z Claim or Chargeback. This dissatisfaction rate needs to be below 1% of orders and is one of the toughest targets Amazon sets compared to other e-commerce marketplaces.

The target is 1%, but Amazon does give some leniency and may invite you to provide an explanation for the ODR above target without suspending your Amazon Seller Account. So if you check your account health page and it shows a high ODR, don't panic, you may not get a suspension immediately. Even so, to ensure your account status remains healthy it's important to keep an eye on the metric. Let's take a look at the contributors towards the Order Defect Rate.

Negative Feedback
This Feedback refers to the feedback that buyers can leave for sellers. This is different from Product Reviews. You can view your 'Feedback' in the Performance menu. Poor feedback often affects seller fulfilled orders because they are given bad feedback for shipping issues. FBA sellers do not have this issue, because Amazon takes responsibility for the shipping and remove any feedback that sellers leave about shipping issues.

The key to avoiding this feedback is to provide great service, so that customers don't have anything to complain about; provide great customer service, to quickly resolve any issues that do occur and finally; request removal of any feedback that violate Amazon's policy. That is product reviews instead of the feedback being about the seller, or a feedback containing personal details or offensive language.

A-to-Z Guarantee Claims
A-Z Guarantee is Amazon's buyer protection, it means that if a buyer has any issue the seller doesn't resolve, they can invite Amazon to review the issue and issue a refund. Some buyers can abuse this system or simply never contact the seller. You can appeal decisions if you don't think the buyer should be refunded, but winning one of these cases does not remove the claim from your metrics. There's no way to remove a claim once it has been made, you just need to make every effort to give no reason for a customer to complain.

Chargeback Claims
Less common than the others is Chargeback claims. This is when the buyer contacts their card issuer to dispute the payment or reverse it, such as because they didn't receive the item. These can take a long while to resolve and are hard to win, but fortunately are very rare.

Account Health Rating
The new Account health rating is a score of how safe your account is from suspension due to a build up of minor violations. A major violation can still cause immediate suspension and the Account Health Rating doesn't include the other sections of account health, like customer service and shipping performance. Successfully fulfilled orders increase your score and violations and complaints reduce your score.

Sellers start at a score of 200/1000 which is the threshold for a healthy account. Below 100 and you are likely to get an account deactivation. This shows the importance of looking after your account health rating, since if you are suspended for a low rating the only way to sell again is to resolve all the violations causing your low rating. Let's look briefly at the sections that make up the rating, showing how your account health stands.

Suspected Intellectual Property Violations
These violations are automatically generated by Amazon's systems and applied to your selling account. In the most simple form, it's checking for discrepancies between the brand name of the product and the use of trademarks elsewhere in the listing. If you are using a trademark in the title or image but that is different from the brand name, this is a 'Suspected' issue - since it's not a human complaint.

These violations can be difficult to remove from your account health page, but most are fixed by deleting the listing and acknowledging the violation. It's often very hard to edit the listing after it has been removed to resolve the issue and keep your listing active. You'll see these violations on your Amazon account health page often if you have a large inventory.

Received Intellectual Property Violations
These are IP complaints that have been submitted to Amazon. They may be for copyright, trademark, patent, design right or other issues. You normally receive a performance notification with the details of this policy violation including the contact details of the rights owner that made the complaint.

Sometimes these are genuine complaints, sellers make mistakes and can run into issues that ultimately can cause the removal of selling privileges. However, Amazon does not check these complaints, so the system is often abused by competitors and you will receive a rights owner complaint that is from a random person that does not own any of the IP. These can be tricky to fix in some situations if you can't provide some documents to prove you are permitted to use the IP in question.

These are serious violations and you don't want higher severity repeat violations, so it's essential to be careful when listing and prompt to fix and violations that arise. Check infringement related policies if you are unsure what you can and can't sell on Amazon.

Product Authenticity Customer Complaints
This type of complaint means that someone has complained the item they received from you is counterfeit. You need to provide an invoice and evidence of supply chain to show that you have an authentic item. Amazon may verify your supplier through research or calling them. If you sell inauthentic products this can lead to account suspension. Ensure your invoices contain all the information Amazon request and submit via your seller account.

Product Condition Customer Complaints
These are complaints about the condition of items, often damaged or expired. You usually need to submit a plan of action to explain why the customer received the item in this condition, how you have fixed the issue, and what you are doing to stop it from happening again. Sometimes an invoice for the product or images of your stock is helpful to show you do have the correct condition product. These are not as serious as some of the other violations, but are still important to address.

Food and Product Safety Issues
This covers product recalls and general safety concerns. Sometimes it's hard to work out the reason Amazon has removed the product, but it generally links to a customer complaint, even if not about an order you supplied. Generally Amazon will request some certification or product testing to show your item is safe. For own brands, this may be worthwhile, but for resellers it's very hard to do. It's common to have outstanding policy violations in this category if you cannot supplier the necessary documents.

Listing Policy Violations
These relate to listing policy and are straight forward. With the number of measures Amazon has in place to manage the listing process, these are not very common as it's hard to list something and violate the listing policy. You should successfully address these by editing the listing and following the guidance found in seller central.

Restricted Product Policy Violations
These are listings with policy violations of Amazon's restricted product policy, which is a vast list of products, categories and ingredients or components that are not allowed to be sold. Unfortunately, there's no full list of what's allowed and so it is easy to accidentally list a restricted item.

In most cases, you just need to delete the listing and accept the violation in your seller account. If you think your product does not apply to restricted product policy, you can write an appeal to explain why. It's important to resolve these violations promptly to avoid any issues as some of these can contribute to your account heath rating.

Shipping Performance
This section covers everything related to shipping and is only relevant for sellers fulfilling orders themselves. FBA-only sellers will not need to pay attention to these metrics. These are the 3 on the main page, but there are other options to view on-time delivery rate for tracked orders.

Late Shipment Rate

After you receive an order you have a set window to dispatch the order, usually 1 or 2 days. If you do not mark in Amazon Seller Central that you sent the order by the expected ship date, you will receive a defect on this rate. You need to maintain a rate below 4% to avoid a suspension. It's important sellers maintain this rate by having capacity to ship orders and providing the shipping confirmation. You can use order management software to improve this process and to help prepare orders faster.

Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate
Cancellation rate is important and needs to be kept to a minimum. There should be no reason to cancel an order, but in the small number of times this may happen, such as you have only 1 unit in stock and it's discovered to be damaged when you go to pack it, then it needs to be below 1.5% of total orders. You need to cancel the order before issuing shipping confirmation posted, so if you are using a order management software that confirms the order when you print the label, you may not be able to cancel.

Valid Tracking Rate
Valid tracking rate means that for orders you sent tracked, how many packages had a working tracking number. This stops fake numbers and shipments. The order needs to arrive by the estimated delivery date and have a valid tracking number, if you're offering a tracked delivery service.

Third party sellers can also qualify for a Prime seller fulfilled orders badge if you maintain very good metrics and then you have to use a tracked service for delivery, offering next business day delivery. Your on time delivery rate will also be important for this.

Speak to an Account Health Specialist
This feature allows you to speak to dedicated account health specialists at Amazon. Sometimes you receive a notification that your seller central account called and it's this account health specialist team that will call you. This team is different from seller performance and they have limited access to information to help you in complex cases.

However, they are more specialised than seller support and can be a useful resource to support sellers if you are unsure about what something means or what you need to do. If you are selling in other worldwide stores than your own, then remember the time zones may mean the team isn't available in your normal working day.

Account Health Assurance
This is Amazon's latest addition to account health and can help prevent account suspension based on policy violation issues. Account health based metrics and accumulated policy violations can be the determining factor causing a suspension. This assurance means that Amazon will work with you to resolve the issue that would cause a suspension, before they suspend you. This is only available to sellers that maintain a AHR of 250+ for 180 days and have a valid phone number on their account.

Our services here at Seller Assurance/Suspension Experts can help you with all the issues discussed here and can help you to attain the Account Health Assurance that will prevent you being suspended if you run into trouble.

There's many other metrics to be aware of, especially for FBA which hasn't been covered here, check out other posts for information on Amazon business invoicing policy and Amazon business customers, negative return feedback rate and invoice defect rate. As you can see, there's lots of policy and metrics you need to be working hard to maintain, not to mention the documents for tax and accounting purposes, knowledge of applicable laws etc. It's hard work to be a sellers.