10 Things To Avoid Amazon Account Suspension In 2021

Amazon suspensions are one of the most frightening prospects for vendors working across all operational scales on Amazon. The scarce help offered by the support staff at Amazon and the sheer amount of experience needed to interpret Amazon suspension letters is an incredibly frustrating experience for selling there. For this reason, it’s better if all sellers just kept in mind why Amazon bans people—so they can avoid an Amazon account suspension in 2021.

Once they understand the reasons for their suspension, they can actively take steps to prevent a suspension later down the road. This post is a detailed guide to avoid Amazon account suspensions, with reference to the reasons for Amazon account suspensions.

Reasons For Amazon Account Suspension

eChannelHub wrote an exceptional piece on the reasons that cause Amazon seller suspension, which offers the perfect introduction to a guide on avoiding Amazon account suspension. The short of it is that you must keep your customers happy, so they keep coming to Amazon to buy products off the platform. Any step that risks putting Amazon’s customer relationships in jeopardy is likely to get you suspended.

Specifically, Amazon bans people for the following reasons:

You Keep Getting Negative Reviews

As an Amazon vendor, you have to meet Amazon’s really strict performance standards if you hope to survive with the stiff competition. One commonly used indicator are customer reviews, which Amazon keeps track of to check whether you’re pulling your weight.

While the occasional negative review is understandable—consistently getting bad reviews is a surefire way to get your Amazon account suspended.

You Didn’t Abide By The Fair Pricing Rule

Before it was known as the Fair Pricing Rule, Amazon’s pricing policy was known as the Price Parity Issue. According to this rule, you had to sell your products at the lowest price compared to your product prices on other selling platforms. It was a way to make sure that Amazon always seemed like the cheapest option and kept increasing its eCommerce market share.

In March 2019, they removed the Price Parity Issue to replace this with their Fair Pricing Rule. Under this new rule, you don’t have to to sell your products at the cheapest rates—but Amazon reserves the right to remove the one-click-to-buy button from your listings. So, while you won’t necessarily have to sell your products below cost; Amazon can still choose to make your products less preferable to the buyer than your competition.

Many sellers are pretty peeved about this replacement, saying that it hasn’t improved their situation than when the Price Parity Issue was in place. However, those who refused to lower their prices were suspended because they could no longer sell at the same levels.

You Were Diverting People Away From Amazon To Other Marketplaces

As a rule of thumb—whatever happens on Amazon, stays on Amazon. No vendor can redirect their customers from Amazon’s marketplace to their eCommerce platforms or other selling platforms. After the latest communication guidelines were implemented in November 2020, you aren’t even allowed to talk to customers about anything besides order fulfillment issues.

Anyone caught violating the communication guidelines or trying to divert customers to different online marketplaces is looking at an immediate suspension.

You Were Messing With The Reviews Process

There are numerous ways people can violate the review process guidelines on Amazon; some vendors solicit positive reviews, others bribe customers, and some even fake them. These reviews play a significant role in determining your future performance on Amazon and even whether you will be allowed to sell there in the future. For this reason, Amazon is very strict about keeping the reviews legit and the review process transparent.

If you ever interfere with customer reviews, Amazon might ban you from its platform forever. So, you should think twice before employing a strategy like that to boost sales.

You Had Duplicate ASINs

All product listings on Amazon are assigned an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). Sometimes intentionally or otherwise, vendors register different product listings that point to the same ASIN and slow the customer’s decision process. The resulting confusion makes it much more difficult for the customer to decide which product listing is authentic and which one they should buy.

So, before Amazon bans you for duplicate ASINs, you should make sure that all your listings have a unique ASIN assigned.

Violations Of Amazon’s Code of Conduct

Amazon’s code of conduct is a list of rules that all sellers must abide by. It’s a fairly simple document that lists a total of eight rules that you absolutely cannot break. You can find on the Seller Central forum, and it’s worth giving it a read to know what not to do if you don’t want to get your Amazon account suspended.

10 Ways To Avoid An Amazon Suspension in 2021

Reports from the industry indicate that Amazon is looking at another great year in sales because of Covid-19. Until the pandemic is brought under control, eCommerce will continue to thrive and take all eCommerce retailers along for a ride too. This is more so for Amazon vendors because Amazon’s where most money will be made.

Therefore, you must take the following steps to avoid an Amazon suspension and continue making massive profits in 2021.

1.   Make Sure You’re Not Gouging Prices

Price gouging has created a lot of noise across Amazon marketplaces—the eCommerce giant is also pursuing a federal law against it. Back in the pandemic’s early days, about 3000 Amazon vendors were banned for unfairly raising prices for medical equipment. Since that incident, Amazon’s been keeping a close eye on the market for someone looking to make a quick buck off the pandemic.

Price gouging is the exercise of significantly raising product prices when demand for said products spikes due to unusual circumstances. Amazon raises both ethical and internal policy violations to ban people without a second thought in these situations.

To avoid a suspension or a ban in this situation, make sure to double-check your pricing and inventory before setting up your product listings. Additionally, make sure that everyone in your organization knows the consequences of price gouging and keeps track of product listings to avoid a suspension.

2.   Thoroughly Read Amazon’s Communication Guidelines

Ever since Amazon updated its communication guidelines, there’s no breathing space for Amazon vendors for even the slightest deviation from the script. Amazon has set out a pretty clear outline for how all correspondences with customers proceed and even for correspondence styles.

The document itself is pretty extensive and requires a separate piece on its own to break it down—but for what it’s worth, here are some of the salient features of the guidelines:

• You can proactively approach your customers under the following circumstances:
  • There are issues with order fulfillment. Only get in touch with a customer if you cannot fulfill the order.
  • You must facilitate a returns request from the customer and wish to provide them with information to complete the return.
• If you wish to speak with customers for things other than order fulfillment, the permitted correspondence conditions are:
  • You require more information to complete the order.
  • Invoices need to be sent to customers.
  • You wish to ask them to leave a review of your products.

3.   Never Interfere With Your Competitor’s Listings

It’s every man for himself on Amazon; this means that you cannot interfere with your competition under any circumstance. On Amazon, you’re supposed to play fair—which means that you mind your own business if you hope to stay on the platform for long.

There are a few implications of that statement:

• You shouldn’t refer to competitor products on your listings.
• Your product listings must be unique.
• You must not violate any intellectual property rights whatsoever.
• You cannot ever ask customers to leave bad reviews for your competitors.

These underhanded tactics are all too common on Amazon, and the respective authorities do not look kindly upon anyone who uses them to get ahead. Make sure to enforce ethical competition practices in your workforce, and leave the competition along to focus on your listings only.

4.   Always Use Unique ASINs

Whenever you update your inventory, make sure that you have unique ASINs in place. The way to check if you’re accidentally duplicating ASINs is as follows:

Step 1:  Go to Inventory

Step 2: Go to Manage inventory

Step 3: You will see a Potential Duplicates option on top of the page, click it

Step 4: Follow the instructions listed on this new page to check for duplicate ASINs.

Make sure to follow this procedure whenever putting up a new product listing to avoid suspension issues related to duplicate ASINs.

5.   Do Not Solicit Reviews From Customers

While it’s important to have good reviews from your customers on Amazon, you cannot ask them to give you positive reviews. Therefore, you should train your customer representative teams to:

• Speak neutrally when asking for reviews.
• To speak in a manner that never gives Amazon a reason to think that you might be interfering with the customer’s judgment.
• To take good reviews with bad ones and never try to stuff your product reviews with only positive reviews.

6.   Keep A Close Eye On Your Performance Metrics

Maintaining consistently excellent performance metrics and account health are crucial to avoid an Amazon account suspension. You can check your Amazon account health through the Amazon Seller Central homepage, under the performance tab. There, you’ll find listings of the major KPIs that Amazon looks for when assessing your performance—these include:

• Customer Service KPIs
  • Order defect rates
  • Negative feedback rates
  • A-to-Z Guarantee claim rates
• Product Policy Compliance
  • Number of intellectual property violation complaints
  • Number of product authenticity complaints
  • Number of product condition complaints
  • Number of Product safety complaints
  • Number of listing policy violations
  • Number of restricted product policy violations
  • Number of customer product review policy violation complaints

The customer service KPIs are by far the most important metrics to worry about. Amazon expects you to meet the following standards when it comes to customer service:

1. Maintain a <1% order Order Defect Rate (ODR)
2. Pre-fulfillment cancellations must be kept below 2.5%
3. Late dispatch rates must be kept beneath 4%

7.   Clamp Down On Negative Reviews

If you’re getting negative reviews all the time, it might be an opportunity to take a closer look at your production processes and supply chains. You should closely follow the customer satisfaction patterns identified through your product reviews to see where the problem lies.

Once you pinpoint what part of your supply chain is compelling people to present negative reviews, take the appropriate steps to overcome the shortcomings. Make sure to move fast because Amazon won’t wait long before they suspend you for getting too many negative product reviews.

8.   Keep Track Of Amazon’s Policy Updates

Amazon doesn’t wait until all the vendors on the platform have read its notices before changing its policies. Always keep up-to-date with the company’s policy updates to avoid getting caught off-guard and accidentally violate one of the new policies.

This is especially true for people selling restricted products on Amazon—you never know when your listing might be classified as prohibited.

9.   Apply Stringent Cybersecurity Protocols

Given the recent surge in data breaches and cybercrime aimed at organizations like Amazon, you must keep your cybersecurity protocols on point. While it’s not common for vendors to be targeted in the first place, but Amazon doesn’t keep any liabilities and will be sure to ban you if you report multiple security lapses.

Train your employees in cyber-safety steps, keep your passwords protected, and closely manage your account authorizations, so you know what happens through them.

10. Never Offer False Product Information

Honesty is the best policy on Amazon—a rule that Amazon expects you to extend to all customer interactions. Make sure that you provide detailed information for your products like:

• Safety warnings
• When and how the product can be used
• Manufacturing information
• Accurate pricing

Be completely transparent on your product listings, and you should be good to go.

Conclusion

Maintaining your seller privileges on Amazon seems difficult sometimes because the platform has a habit for just jumping out with a suspension letter when least expected. It’s not that Amazon wants to make you squirm; it’s a strategy to make sure that sellers never make the same mistake twice. So, while you can’t blame Amazon for its surprise-tactics when it comes to suspensions—you can still take steps to avoid an Amazon suspension.

If you follow these rules and keep it 100% with your customers, Amazon is unlikely to ban you. With these pointers in mind, let’s make 2021 the year where you make the most of the opportunities that Amazon has to offer.

Author Bio

Vanessa Marshal is an Amazon suspension appeal consultant working with Seller-Performance. She is an ex-Amazonian herself, with over 10 years of experience selling on various Amazon marketplaces.