Hi All,
We’ve been selling on Amazon for many years now. We rarely reach out to support because of the terrible experience it always is. I could get into it in detail, but I’ll save that for if anyone asks the sickening tactics we’ve been subjected to by base level Amazon selling “support.” We also almost never post on the forums for fear that Amazon will look at it negatively. (It’s disturbing realizing that they have such control over your resources).
Anyway, 3 days ago we learned our account had just been deactivated for that new INFORM act incompliance. What’s crazy is that we double AND triple checked that we submitted all this information, strictly for this reason. We even called “support” and confirmed it was all they needed and that the verification would finish any moment.
What happened was that someone called and ensured we uploaded everything necessary for the INFORM consent act. Then a month or so went by and I noticed the identy verification still said “pending” or “in progress.” I checked that out (about 2 weeks ago this was) and saw that for some wild reason they now required that the drivers license of the contact person of the account have the same address as the business registered address. This doesn’t even make sense because we’re a corporation.. what if the business is in a location other than your residence?
But whatever, luckily my partner’s address matched on her license and we submitted it immediately. But then suddenly, 2 weeks later, this happens. Customers are reaching out wondering if we’ve stopped selling on Amazon. So I go and check the INFORM act notice and click “(in progress)” again and it says it now wants us to RESUBMIT the bank statement, even though it’s exactly the same as the one we’ve already submitted.
So I do this, and NOW the verification finally completes. But it says that our account will be reactivated within 48 hours. I’m sure you can see where this is going. During this time I called and spoke with multiple “account health support specialist” who all did absolutely nothing, even though many of them SAID they filed reports or escalated the case, etc. Lo and behold, it’s well passed 48 hours and our account has not been reinstated.
So again, I call the worst customer support service (Amazon) I’ve ever experienced. The guy does his 3-5 minutes of research, tells me I’m right and that they’ll have to escalate this to the team that can help.. also mentioning I should wait another 24 hours.
Meanwhile, we’re losing an enormous portion of our cash flow. Additionally, now that our website is the only place to get our flagship products, tons of those customers are now being forced to come to our website to purchase, making it so we have to manually fulfill all these orders. So, not only is Amazon hurting our cash flow signicantly, they are losing their own customers to us because of it!
If I was an Amazon executive and I saw this, whew, I would be furious with my company’s service. I just don’t get their inability to accomplish one minute, simple, straightforward thing like reactivate an account. It takes one click. There’s no long process to fix this. It’s just that no one is doing it.
What’s even crazier is that we have TWO seller accounts for the same business. (Yes, we have a valid necessary reason for this and have cleared it with Amazon years ago). But why then didn’t our other account not get deactivated? It had the EXACT SAME original documentation but wasn’t flagged or rejected or subjected to all this extra scrutiny. Who decided this account was the one that needed deactivating? It almost seems targeted with how ridiculous this is.
Regardless, we are obviously very upset that something so easy to solve has taken this long, causing a massive loss to our business. At least we’re getting a ton of new customer data for the first time since Amazon’s actions are sending them all to us.
All this to say, I hope it is back up by tomorrow, but Amazon’s support has not instilled any confidence in that timeframe whatsoever. I’ll let you know what absurdity happens next.
Pinned by community manager
