New features to help you monitor your account health

#1

Your business is important to us, and we are constantly innovating to build powerful tools and services to help you grow and manage your business.

Maintaining account health is an important part of the selling experience, and we’ve been listening to your feedback about how to better manage your account health. Today, we are excited to share the latest innovations that we are launching based on your feedback.

In the coming months, you will start to see new features on your Account Health page. The first of these is that your Account Health Rating (AHR) will be displayed as a point value based on a scale of 0-1,000 (in addition to the color that exists today ), enabling you to see how close you are to the various thresholds that move your AHR from green (Healthy) to yellow (At Risk) to red (Unhealthy, where your account is at risk of deactivation).

The Account Health page will also display the degree to which any violations impact your account health, allowing you to prioritize addressing those that are most negatively affecting it. Note that the AHR does not change Amazon’s existing policies, but rather aggregates violations of certain Amazon policies into a single score that shows your overall account health status.

As a result of these new features, we have created a new AHR Program Policy . To learn more about the AHR, go to Account Health: FAQ. If you have suggestions about how we might improve the AHR, please share them via the Account Health category in the Seller forums. Our team of Account Health specialists is routinely monitoring these posts for opportunities for improvement, as well as posting answers to your account health questions.

Nearly bankrupt: Amazon hasn't paid us in over 6 weeks ($21,000+ owed),
Voice of the customer off on one of our products
Ok I am tired, please help, UNBELIEVABLE, its one after another!
#3

Any additional visibility into our account health is welcomed. I hope the next goal is to provide account support specialists the ability to gain more insight into why an IP complaint appeal isn’t granted. When multiple account health specialists agree that you have provided everything required but your appeals are denied time and time again, the system needs to be urgently addressed.

Own your brand, own your business
#4

Link Says …

"We want to help you maintain a healthy account, and we provide a number of resources to help you understand our policies. In the event that your account health starts to degrade and becomes eligible for deactivation, we may call you to offer personalized support.

We encourage you to ensure your Emergency Contact phone number is up to date. You can check if the number listed under Emergency Notifications is accurate by visiting the Notifications preferences page."

  • Why doesn’t the Notification page have a Notification Option for “Violations”?
    It would be useful to have them go to a specified account so the can be immedately addressed instead of having them mixed in with the other emails.

Stopping false IP complaints would be at the top of my list.

  • Vetting the complainant
  • Punishing the false complainant
  • Providing sellers with more information on the complainant other than just an email address. That usually never gets answered or goes to a dead domain.
    ex/ brand.registry.infringement1@gmail.com is not the brand owner of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.
#5

What are the factors used?
Number of years selling?
Number of orders processed?

For example /
If an item gets a “counterfeit complaint” or “used sold as new” it makes sense that
if it gets 1 complaint out of 10 sold it should hold more weight
than if if gets 1 complaint out of 10,000 sold.
or is 1 complaint = to 1 complaint?

#6

Stop accepting violations from free email accounts. Seriously. No brand uses free email accounts.

#7

@ABC_23 Not only this.
Each complaint has to be accompanied by documents that the plaintiff is authorized to do so.
In regards to “fake” and “counterfeit” claims…instead of amazon contacting the sellers and asking for POA…amazon should contact the buyer to provide more details why they think so…
Amazon monitors not only reviews and feedbacks but also messages between sellers-buyers…some words activate hungry bots…
Let the buyers provide more details, and than contact the sellers.

#8

Amen. Sellers should be innocent until proven guilty. If someone submits a claim, force the submitter to provide proof of activity that is against TOS, rather than ask the seller to provide proof of valid activity.

#9

Over all, I agree. But as we all know Amazon will do it’s best to not assume any kind of responsibility that can be litigated against.

Of course, it’s current method is terrible. The Arbitration clause limits sellers abilities to do anything about it, and still be a seller on Amazon. Taking Amazon to court is a Class Three violation of the ASBSA and even if you win, they can legally suspend you or simply terminate the account.

#10

@SUNDANCE. Thanks for your question. Your Account Health Rating (AHR) increases as you successfully fulfill orders and past successful orders are factored into the AHR. They are an important factor in the score, but they do not eliminate the risk of policy violations or performance defects. However, once you have addressed and resolved the violations, your AHR will update and the negative impact will be removed. You can improve your AHR by addressing outstanding policy violations via the Account Health page in Seller Central, either by appealing them or disputing them if you think we made an error. In both cases of a successful appeal or dispute, we will reverse the policy violation and its corresponding impact on your account health. Your AHR will also increase as you successfully fulfill orders.

#11

Hi @Jessica_Amazon,

If I can speak frankly…

That’s a bunch of cr@p.

Most sellers who frequent these forums have a lot of experience, and have been selling on Amazon for a long time, and probably know more about how Amazon works - at least from a seller’s perspective - than those of you with the Smiley’s and the A’s next to your names.

When we pose questions here, we’re looking for PhD-level answers, or at least 4-year college level answers. Our knowledge level is already far beyond the standard grade-school level answers Amazon provides, like this -

Your Account Health Rating (AHR) increases as you successfully fulfill orders and past successful orders are factored into the AHR.

Let me reword what you said. ‘You do good and you don’t get punished’. We’re all adults here - who doesn’t already understand this. :roll_eyes:

It would be helpful if you could address the specifics that @Sundance asked you. I’ll reword his question, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’ve misunderstood anything.

What is the formula that Amazon uses to arrive at this new ‘point value’ for AHR?

In other words, if my number is 973, how did you arrive at that?

Please explain the math.

Is it:
(Number of orders in the last 180 days) + (number of years active on the platform) - (number of suspected IP violations) - ((number of received IP violations) * 10)

What is the FORMULA used to arrive at our score?

Frankly, I find ‘Account Health’ to be generally meaningless, and I typically ignore mine, because Amazon is incapable of identifying whether I’ve actually done anything wrong. Since I can’t trust their assessment, why would I care what it is? To me, jumping through all the hoops they put in front of me is a waste of my time, why would I bother?

If you want people to believe that you’ve ‘improved’ anything, then you need to explain it. Not in BS general terms that don’t actually say anything, but in concrete, specific terms telling us how it’s going to work.

#12

Your "sample " formula needs to be somehow changed…
number of years active on the platform------this number can be not more than 23…
Number of orders in the last 180 days-----this number could be in the thousands…
Adding the very small number to the potential very large number is meaningless…
Let’s work on a better, more complete formula ideas…

#13

Your "sample " formula needs to be somehow changed…

I wasn’t suggesting that be the formula, obviously. :laughing: I was merely providing an example of what I meant by the type of “formula” I wanted @Jessica_Amazon to provide.

#14

@racingroxstore
The only reason I responded late at night was because you expect “PhD-level answers”…
But your sample was at much much lower level…
Good night.
BTW, even if we don’t know, and amazon will not reveal the formula (and the hidden components), this should take into account somehow the current feedbacks (with very little weight), and replace the feedback system which represents less than 1% of sellers total activity on amazon.

#15

In most cases, the maximum number of repeat violations is five for infringement-related policies and two for restricted products policies.

When Amazon changes a policy concerning a new ingredient or a new trigger word for a claims related restriction, is there going to be a grace period that the seller will have in order to make an appeal? When Vinpocetine and NAC were added to the restricted ingredients, there was no warning and some sellers were reporting that they had hundreds of listings fall into restricted. There is a stark difference between a seller attempting to create a new ASIN on the marketplace and one that has been selling a particular product on Amazon for half a decade and the ASIN suddenly has an ingredient that became restricted. While I understand that there will be weighting of the infraction based on a number of factors, is this something that is being considered?

#16

If any of the Amazon mods are reading this thread, pretty much Sundance has totally nailed some of the major issues.
The false IP claims from gmail/free addresses are getting out of hand.
Unless you have tried to appeal these claims, you do not know how difficult it is for a person to actually read the emails/invoices correctly.
IMHO if the person making the claims does not answer the counter claim it should be dismissed. A company making a genuine claim would answer the counter claim.

Also we have seen a huge rise in scamming customers. (see the “Refund pls.” threads)
They will often say things like “not genuine” or “came used” because they know how it makes small sellers panic, who often will just refund even if it’s clearly false.
The people writing the algorithms need to take into account how many of the items the seller has sold to happy customers vs the one complaint.
They also need to grade the customer! (I know there has been talk of this and the buyer been marked as risky)
If the customer is deemed risky by Amazon, then the seller should be allowed to cancel without a metrics hit.
Most Amazon customers are excellent, and we love dealing and interacting with them but just like in any walk of life there are scammers and crazy people who make crazy claims.
In virtually every case, the customer is always believed over the seller.

#17

So in theory, a new seller would be at a starting value of 200 - minus any “violations” so what would get me 1000?

Selling for 5 years approx so what would this give me?

Policy Compliance

[ Target : 0 Issues ]

Account Health Rating Beta

Healthy

Fulfilled by Seller and Amazon

Suspected Intellectual Property Violations

0

Received Intellectual Property Complaints

0

Product Authenticity Customer Complaints

0

Product Condition Customer Complaints

0

Food and Product Safety Issues

0

Listing Policy Violations

0

Restricted Product Policy Violations

0

Customer Product Reviews Policy Violations

0

Other Policy Violations

0

Policy Violation Warnings

0

#18

I’ll be fair on Amazon and say, at least in respect of media categories, they have massively tightened up fake filings. However, to set up Account Health Support process in 2018… and proceed to shutter sellers based on totally fabricated and fake complaints is a travesty of history, although with large corporations you have to accept it does get frustrating.

With IP complaints, Amazon does have legal considerations to take into account. However, no court is going to determine that it’s unlawful to take the most basic and reasonable steps to verify the identity of the filing parties and whether they have legal authority to be doing so.

One problem encountered has been manipulative complaints from other Amazon sellers, usually the fake “Amazon only” brands… the ONLY motivation for those complaints was directing money/sales into their own accounts. Pure manipulation, nothing else to it, and that’s what is still happening judging from the forums, although not so much in the media categories it seems.

I think the problem was, sellers were seen as a pawn in the game - closer to a negative threat than a positive opportunity. We also had a ridiculous situation where an Amazon staffer talked about shutting down the entire 3P platform, which again gives the impression sellers are seen as more of a figure of fun to be derided - and if they are getting hit with fake IP complaints, well, so what?

#19

When will we as sellers be able to rate amazon, for late receival of shipments, misplacing inventory, amazon shipping orders to customers 7+ days after order, shipping wrong items to customers, shipping orders in flimsy packaging that an FBM seller would be in violation of Amazon TOS. Seller Support, not being of any support, and the list goes on…

How low of a rating would Amazon actually receive?

#20

You are not going to get the actual formula from them. That’s actually good an bad in my opinion. If the formula is known to all then those that can abuse it can walk right up to the line but still stay on the good side. This metric is more about them being able to produce a single number that they can use to rate us. Companies have been doing this for a long time now - Amazon being in the forefront. This will make it even easier to automate all of their processes and take out humans in the decision making process. Just a bunch of if then statements in the code that determines the outcome of some crazy policy they have implemented. You get a return for some entirely different product that you don’t even sell but it gets charged to you > sure input all the pertinent info here (ie please be our data collector) > submit claim > return request $10, your companies sales on amz $5,000,000, your fancy new AHR is great than 900 > sure have your $10 back after we ask 5 more “verifying” questions that you already answered in step 1

#21

has alot of flaws to begin with, it allows random sellers to accuse other sellers of counterfeit with no proof…instead of asking for documents that allow you to sell the item, they treat you like a criminal