Guest post by Kev Blackburn from Life Success Engineer
In today’s post, I want to share my recent Amazon account suspension experience and give you an insight into what to do when the worst happens and how to stay calm and act throughout this distressing and uncertain time. In this case, we had a restricted ASIN within our inventory and even though we were not selling this ASIN, it was still in our inventory as inactive which resulted in a dreaded Amazon suspension!
8th September 2017: The Suspension Notification
On the evening of 8th September 2017, I’d just shared a great meal with my mastermind group as we get together once every month to enjoy some downtime and relax. At midnight, shortly after we were coming out of the restaurant, I got a notification on my mobile phone.
Amazon had suspended our account due to having a restricted ASIN within our inventory. The emotion experienced at that time instantly reminded me of what I had known from the very beginning — this is Amazon’s business and we must ensure at all costs we comply with Amazon’s policies. The emotion then turned to confusion trying to remotely understand how and why this has happened. Being out of town and past midnight, I had to make the decision to simply go home and go to sleep. One thing I did know is you do not want to rush into anything with Amazon and I was another 2 hours away from home, which meant I was not getting to my laptop until around 3.00am/4.00am. At that time, there is no point trying to understand where we had a system failure.
9th September 2017: The Investigation & Appeal
Waking up very early after only sleeping four hours, I immediately got my laptop out and a strong coffee.
Amazon had clearly given me instructions:
Before we can consider reinstating your selling privileges, you must close or delete all restricted product listings from your inventory, and provide us with a detailed plan that identifies the cause of your violations and how you will ensure compliance with Amazon policies in the future. We will then review your plan and determine whether you may sell on Amazon.co.uk again.
Starting from the beginning, I investigated our Performance Notifications and soon realised that we could have prevented this only a couple days before.
We had received a notification from Amazon stating this ASIN has been restricted. Unfortunately, this slipped through our system and although we put this on a restricted ASIN list, we did not delete the inactive listing from our seller account.
Below is the full appeal we submitted to Amazon, which detailed our plan of action and how we would prevent this happening in the future.
10th September 2017: The Wait & Multiple Streams of Income
All of Sunday the 10th, we waited for a reply but we got nothing from Amazon. At this time, you must continue to stay calm. My focus entirely throughout this day
My focus entirely throughout this day was to continue to build the multiple streams of income I had started from the very beginning. I know this was a possibility and therefore I had already built other streams of income I could fall back on. I have a FREE Life Success Accelerator course that shares all other streams of income I have started.
11th September: Appeal Response & Reinstatement
In the early hours of the 11th, approximately 48 hours after being suspended, we received a reply from Amazon. Thankfully, it was good news — they had reinstated our account and we were selling again.
Big Lessons to Take Away
I summarised my experience in the video above but I did take some get lessons from this experience:
1. You must always comply with Amazon’s policies and act swiftly to all performance notifications.
2. You must try to stay calm throughout this time. You need to step up and be a leader in your business taking the required action to resolve.
3. You must take responsibility and get to the root cause of the system failure to prevent it happening again in the future.
4. You need to state very clearly to Amazon what your plan of action is as per the information that Amazon has given you.
5. You must share your experience with your team and others so we can all learn from this together.
6. You must always work to build multiple streams of income.
To learn more about getting started with Amazon, check out The Ultimate Step By Step Online Arbitrage Guide To Making Money With Amazon.
Related: What to Do If Your Amazon Account Gets Suspended
About the Author:
My name is Kev. In 2015, I took massive action and started a business on Amazon. Within 6 months, I quit my full time Electrical Engineer job and we have now gone on to sell over £1,000,000 worth of physical products. We created a team of virtual assistants and physical employees, which gave my family the freedom to build the lives we wanted. On my Life Success Engineer blog, I share my journey and everything I have learned along the way. Read my story or check out my YouTube channel.
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