О бизнесе "с нуля" в 2015г. Снимите, наконец, "розовые очки"!

If nothing else comes of this post, I hope that other sellers can learn from these issues and not make the same mistakes and missteps we have.

A little bit about us: We are what we think is a fairly large seller on Amazon. in the last 2 years we have more than 8M in sales and nearly 150,000 orders. Our Metrics are Amazing and we have over 18,000 feedback with a lifetime rating of 100%. We do have a few negs but with all the positives it rounds up to 100%

Our growth has allowed us to open 2 warehouses in TX and SC to better fulfill seller fulfilled prime orders and we have grown to 15 employees. We pay a living wage and provide health insurance for our employees. We started this company in the garage of my house. We have received numerous loans from Amazon lending that has helped us grow and like so many, now find ourselves devastated that our business is in a sincere risk of being destroyed and the Amazon loan repayment is nearly impossible without the Amazon sales. In hindsight, putting all our eggs in Amazons basket, looks like a massive mistake.

We are now in a whirlwind of 7 revisions to the plan of action. The reason given for our deactivation is
“Used sold as new”. Lets get this out of the way. We have NEVER sold anything used EVER and NEVER will. We were instructed to work with the account health team whose sole purpose is to help us understand the issues and make sure the plan is worded correctly. On the surface, this sounds amazing. However, with each denial, we get a different person and they tell us the opposite of what we were just told. We are basically a ping ball getting smashed back and forth from side to side.

(Provide more detail - provide less detail - include asins - why did you include the asins - use bullet points - uses sentences. etc.)

I will also add that we are not 100% innocent and have made missteps. It all started when bots deactivated 18 (of 1834) of our listings over a 30 day window. Our first mistake was not immediately acting is if this was a Inferno burning out of control. We assumed since our metrics were so good we would easily be reinstated to the listings. In most cases, we are the manufacturer and the brand on the listings. Product feedback on these listings is 4.9 or higher.

We were given a performance notification that said, We have deactivated some of your listings. We are reviewing your account and we will call you in the next 24 hours and if you don’t answer, your account may be deactivated. We were also given an option to click a link and call for an immediate review with the Account Health team. We chose this option. During that call, they gave us insights into the deactivated listings and suggestions to what we needed to do going forward. We received the discussed email at 10:32 AM on 10/31 that clearly stated we had 72 hours to file our plan of action. Our account was still live at this time.

First mistake, I had to go pick my son up from college and didn’t file the plan immediately. Here is where it goes downhill fast. On November 3rd at 8:05 AM we got our entire account deactivated. I was literally about to hit the send button to file the plan when I got the notice. They deactivated us before the expiration of the 72 hours. Before everyone jumps on me, I readily admit I should not have gone to the wire and should have filed earlier. I just didn’t have all the receipts and needed to get some from our manufacturer in China for the materials and the time difference forced me to wait. I did not want to file an appeal without everything they asked for.

The biggest issue with the “used as new” reason for deactivation is that we sell a lot of ATV vehicle plastic windshields. They all have very thin protective film and can appear scratched until it is removed.

In our plan of action, we addressed these issues completely and did a very deep dive into our metrics, messages from customers, return request reasons and NCX Voice of the customers. The biggest issue we can find is that the customers are choosing the wrong reasons when asking for the return. They choose reason such as Defective, bad website description. I assume they do this inadvertently or possibly because they think they wont have to pay return shipping. For the record, we never charge restocking or return shipping fees. We just consider it a cost of doing business.

Below you will see the 3 replies from me. One reply with the original request and the 72 hour warning and second, will be their latest request for more information and lastly will be our latest revised Plan of action. We even got a response saying that we should email pq-policy-transfer@amazon.com our latest revision. We thought this meant we had been escalated and finally might be getting back on. No such luck: We got a response from our requested appeal that said… You have filed this request to relist your asins to the wrong team. then gave instructions to file back through seller performance. I cant help but wonder if people even read these emails when they are sent in…

I don’t know what more I can do to satisfy the concerns that seller performance has. I am 100% open to any suggestions from any of you or maybe even a moderator who could chime in to give guidance.

I haven’t slept in days. The thought of laying off our staff, some that are single moms destroys me inside. The possibility of not being able to repay the loan combined with what we do with the properties we purchased to run this business and what will we do with all this inventory has me thinking thoughts that should never enter my mind.

In closing, I know I will probably get slammed from some of you and that is ok… if I get just one reply that helps or teach one other seller to learn from our mistakes, this post will have been worth it.

Current status at time of writing:
Discussion with Account Health Team and they agree that we have a good plan and have addressed all the concerns. They have resubmitted to Seller performance for a 2nd review. No response yet to that revision. Still deactivated.

Вот текущий скрин. Чистая тут - ровно четверть. Причем это спад и серъезный . раньше лучше было.Вот сижу думаю как длобавить охвату кроме амазона

А Вообще конечно, лучше изучить пару стеков технологий и свалить в Сан_франциско.. так чтобы вкратце..