Being an Amazon seller involves many risks. When your product is just starting to gain momentum, follow-up sales may come unexpectedly. Just when your listing has just gained a foothold, it is suddenly complained of infringement and removed from the shelves. You have finally chosen a good product, but you are frequently teased because you tampered with the cake of the category leader. I believe all old Amazon sellers have a deep understanding of the above setbacks. But the above-mentioned setbacks are all temporary and can be overcome. There is a kind of setback that may lead to the end of your Amazon career. This kind of setback is: the store is blocked. To make a living on Amazon, your store is the foundation of all your means. Without a store, you lose your foundation. Closing a store is also the most severe punishment Amazon imposes on third-party sellers. There are many reasons for store closures. Today Mike will share with you some of the more common store closures in recent years. I hope this article can help you overcome these Amazon account management pitfalls. 1. Product-related reasons 1. Product quality problems The product quality problems here refer to situations in which customers suffer serious physical or property losses due to defects in the product itself. On Amazon, general product quality problems will not ban the account, but serious product quality problems will lead to the closure of the account. I remember that in 2017, a seller of light strip products caused a fire during the use of the product because the supplier violated the regulations by using accessories other than those in the contract. The customer later sued the store. Not only did the seller's products be removed from the shelves, he also faced high compensation, and finally the store was closed. 2. Selling fake goods actually overlaps with the later infringement part. Fake goods may be imitating other people's brands, or they may be passing off as inferior products. Selling counterfeit products is relatively rare on Amazon. Six or seven years ago, selling fake brands had become a tool for getting rich, and many sellers made a lot of money. But now, with the tightening of seller rules and crackdowns, there is basically no room for fake products to survive on Amazon. 2. Account-related issues 1. Account association Among Amazon’s major sites around the world, there are currently 8 sites where Chinese sellers can independently apply for accounts. Let me explain one thing first: the so-called account association refers to the association of the same site. That is, Amazon does not allow the same seller to open more than one store on the same site. If you use one set of information to register for different sites such as the American site, European site, Japanese site, etc., this is allowed by Amazon's rules. Now Amazon's policy will even strongly encourage you to build multiple sites around the world. The more sites you open, the happier Boss Bezos will be. But on the same site, such as the US site, the same seller is only allowed to register one store. Amazon will use corresponding technical means to analyze the big data information of each store, and use this information to determine whether there is a relationship between these stores. If your store is determined to be related, and one of these related accounts is closed due to violations, then all your stores may be wiped out in one fell swoop. Nowadays, there are more and more stores being closed by Amazon, so store association is still a relatively dangerous thing. For knowledge about account association, you can read this article I wrote before: If you want to avoid being banned, you need to know Amazon’s account association 2. The account review fails. But for new sellers, after registering the store, there is still a long way to start. It's far from over. Today, as platform rules become increasingly strict, what you are most likely to encounter after registering an account is a sudden account review. Although the probability of new accounts being reviewed is not 100%, the probability of new accounts being reviewed is getting higher and higher. Eight out of ten new stores that my seller friends have recently registered have had their accounts reviewed. If you fail to pass the account review, the life of your store will come to an abrupt end. For account review skills, you can read my previous article: How can Amazon sellers quickly pass account (store) review? (Complete solution) 3. The store’s performance exceeds the warning value. Under the “Performance” column of Amazon’s seller backend, you can see the detailed performance of your store. There are three performance boxes here, the first one is "Customer Service Performance". The main performance of customer service performance is the "order defect rate", which is the sum of three specific values. The three values ??are "Negative Feedback", "A-Z", and "Credit Card Claim". The target for this order defect rate is less than 1%.

The second is "policy compliance performance", which is also known as "policy compliance" in English. This mainly depends on whether the seller's store has received any complaints about the product. The following 8 situations are displayed in Chinese. The third is delivery performance, which mainly considers FBM self-shipping sellers, and FBA sellers can be ignored. When your above-mentioned indicators are outside the warning value for a long time, Amazon will take a series of measures such as suspending sales rights on your account. Therefore, paying attention to your account performance in real time is also a necessary task for Amazon sellers every day. 3. Operation-related reasons 1. In-site messaging violations Because Amazon does not want its customers and sellers to have too close a relationship, Alibaba Wangwang-type communication tools like domestic Taobao do not exist on Amazon. Of course, this actually greatly reduces the customer service workload of Amazon sellers. Amazon sellers do not need to be in front of the computer to respond to customer questions like Taobao sellers. So, as an Amazon seller, how do you communicate with customers when problems arise? The answer is Amazon’s on-site tool—on-site messaging. However, on-site messages are not a place for sellers to do whatever they want. There are strict content restrictions on the sending of on-site messages. Amazon only allows sellers to communicate with buyers on site on specific issues. Specific questions are limited as follows: The rules for sending in-site messages are that they cannot contain any product links. This must be remembered. On-site messages containing product links will trigger Amazon review. In addition, private contact information, such as phone number or email address, cannot be included in on-site messages. Information such as phone number or email address will also be directly blocked during the sending process of on-site messages. In addition, some sellers have inquired whether they can attach some review information to the in-site letter. In fact, this is not necessary. Amazon’s order page in the backend has provided sellers with a button to request reviews, so sellers no longer have to take the risk of asking for reviews via in-site messages. In on-site letters, words involving "review", "positive", "five star", etc. are all sensitive words. Anyone who sends such on-site letters runs the risk of being judged to have violated the rules. 2. Transfer customers to other places. Many sellers will put some customer service cards in the packaging of their products. On these cards, in addition to some instructions for use, there may also be some words asking for comments. We call these cards review cards or customer service cards, and there are a large number of sellers offering similar products on Taobao. When writing the content of the review card, sellers must remember not to put product links from other platforms or addresses on the card. In other words, don’t try to direct Amazon customers elsewhere. Amazon’s rules clearly state: “It is prohibited to use any advertisements, marketing messages (special offers) or “calls to buy” to guide, prompt or encourage Amazon users to leave the Amazon website. Sellers who include these contents on their customer service cards may be subject to Therefore, it was judged to be a serious violation. 3. Review fraud is a common topic, and it is also a topic that happens every day. This is not to say that everyone should not do reviews. This may also be unrealistic. However, during the evaluation process, everyone must pay attention to the security of the buyer's account. In addition, there is also the issue of review rate. If the review rate is too high, it will also cause the Amazon system to be vigilant. 4. Category mismatch mainly refers to the fact that sellers deliberately place products in other irrelevant categories during the process of uploading products. There are many motives for this behavior, which may be to avoid the review of the original category. It may also be to choose a category with less competition so that it is easier to occupy the bestseller mark. However, the penalties for this kind of behavior are generally low, and most of them are just forced to return to the original category. 5. Product infringement. On the Amazon platform, infringement is a very serious violation. Amazon generally takes strict measures to deal with infringements, ranging from products being removed from the shelves to being shut down directly. Some of these infringements come from self-inspection on the Amazon platform, and some come from sellers. Complaints, and some are crackdowns from professional anti-counterfeiting law firms. As long as your product is suspected of infringement, it will be difficult to survive on the platform. There is always a way to make your infringing product disappear. Therefore, sellers need to do something before the product is launched online. Preliminary anti-infringement operations are very critical. Amazon has many rules and red lines. We will continue to summarize them in future articles. I hope the above content can bring you a little gain.

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