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I am a FBM seller with a GMV of $2 million. My account is 5 years old. However it was killed by my employee’s laziness artificially.
Hope I can receive some forgiveness from Amazon so I don't lose my account permanently. @Josh_Amazon(ID 16918900991)
If you can learn something from my experience, it will be very fortunate. I hope you don't have to go through the pain I've been through. I am so heartbroken and disheartened from this experience.
If you can give me any helpful advice, that would be appreciated.
I will share my experience and insights over the past few years FYI.
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When I started selling on Amazon in 2019, I was very poor and didn’t even have money to buy products. I developed products and wrote the listing carefully, and I always kept independent thinking. I never copied any product from others because I am confident at my smart. I never cooperated with any third party because I have no money at that time. I'm stingy.
1. About Products:
My best-selling products were discovered from negative reviews from my customers, because customers always said that my products were too thin. And rated my first product as 4.1
Then I emailed every buyer after I received new order to remind the product's real thickness in advance out of kindness. Some buyers were glad to chat with me. Then I discovered their needs and issued a successful product. Good reviews poured in.
It brought me a perfect record of monthly sales of $300,000 on 2021, and I was one-man business at that time.
2. About management loopholes and the root cause of our failure
Due to a lack of production capacity, so we gradually established our own factory to ensure timely supply. My family helped me a lot at the beginning, but the disadvantages of the family model were highlighted later. My father did not obey my management in the quality control process, and I could not change his cognition, which led to a high return rate(22%) and a sharp drop in sales rankings on 2022. This is one of my lessons.
The year 2023 was filled with arguments, and I became plagued by illness.
In the first half of 2024, I finally made up my mind to divest my family's control and push the factory towards formalization. During this period, I experienced fierce struggles and broke up with my family. Fortunately, my assistant stayed with me and the factory completed the transformation from a family workshop to formal operation. We established a strict quality management system, everything is getting better.
This is why I am very grateful to my assistant, so that when our account was deactived for the first time due to her violation of requesting customers to delete bad review, I did not severely punish her, even though her mistakes caused huge losses. I just asked her to handle the incident well.
This is my second lesson.
The third and most important point I want to share is: Management should not rely on the morality of employees, but on the strict system. Because character is unreliable.
I have great trust in my assistant Ting. I think she will definitely study Amazon's policies clearly due to the deactivation caused by her. She will also explained the relevant details to and shared the lesson with the new employees(At the time, I was focusing my energy on Amazon Livestream). Even though I specifically reminded her twice that after-sales and negative reviews should not be handled by new employees because they are more difficult. And she must teach new employees "how to communicate with customers" step by step. The task was assigned to her on August 15th, and the violated email was sent out by the new employee on August 16th.
When the account was deactived for repeated violations, I realized that she did not follow my orders at all. She directly handed over her own work tasks to the new employees, and did not give sufficient guidance and inspection.
What hurts me the most and what I can't accept is that Amazon cleared all my good 2000+ reviews due to several bad reviews was deleted? It's very very difficult to accumulate them one by one. I won't feel so sad if they are fake ones. However we don't have even one single fake review since I began my selling on Amazon. Now my account died without a corpse.
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Every step I took is fraught with difficulties. I thought I finally went back on track, but what came was destruction.
I can't cry a single tear at this moment, but I really wanted to end all the pain with death some moments. This account just like a child raised by a single mother. My five years of hard work day and night have gone up in smoke in an instant. I can pay for my employee' mistake to Amazon, but I don't want to pay with the future of the whole factory. Other employees lost their jobs and income. I feel so sorry and anxiety.
Really hope that some measures can take measures to reduce similar tragedies.
Pinned by community manager