How Amazon Destroyed My Online Business
Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace where you can sell or buy almost anything that comes to your mind. How does Amazon work?
If you are thinking about selling products on Amazon, especially arts and crafts from Asia than you have to do a lot of research to make sure that you are not violating any rules and policies set by Amazon.
We have come across a story of a person who was selling arts and crafts from Asia on Amazon and got his account. His story goes like this: he had been selling arts and crafts on Amazon for over 13 years. Than one day he got an email notification that all of his listings have been removed and that his account was permanently banned from selling on the site because he did not meet minimum seller requirements. He was doing an adequate job, and this could be verified because he said 98% positive feedback from his customers and over 20,000 transactions. He also has two small business New York that are working for over 10 years so he surely knew how to conduct his business well.
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So after he got his notification he tried to call Amazon, and he waited for 30 minutes only to be told that’s his business was no longer wanted and that he could not appeal this.
The worst thing is that he did not receive any previous notification that this was going to happen. He contacted a person from the Amazon leadership team who also confirmed that no emails were sent to warn him about what was going to happen to his account. What he got as an excuse was that Amazon does not have to call his customers about what they’re planning to do.
He decided to check his account history and he found a message from January that stated that he was not meeting minimum seller requirements and that’s said that his PayPal funds might be held up because of this reason but it was nowhere stated that they would ban his account without any appeal. He had received the same message in March again.
According to the message there were two requirements that he was not meeting:
1. His minimum picture size was not large enough
2. He was not uploading his shipping information to Amazon fast enough ( even though it
was nowhere required that he needed to enter all shipping information on Amazon)
He knew that Amazon was pressing its sellers to ship their items through their shipping service and he knew that they wanted to make the site more mobile friendly which is why there were certain image requirements, but he did not believe that these were good enough reasons for his accounts to get banned permanently.
Even though he did not agree with Amazon’s decision, he didn’t manage to get his account back, so he lost his business and everything else.
Resources:
http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=AMZN:NSQ