How many times can I get my Amazon account shut down? Many!
I’ve had another ‘interesting’ week. I had a whole other topic planned to write about – and then Amazon informed me that my account was at risk of being deactivated. When I looked into this, it was due to negative feedback on a delivery… which was fulfilled by Amazon. I’m biting my tongue right now… Let’s get right to the helpful stuff.
Should you find yourself in a similar situation, here’s how you go about resolving it.
1. Find your feedback
On the left-hand side of your screen you’ll see your customer feedback score. These are your customer ratings and should be about your service – not your products.
If you’re FBA they should mean very little (as they don’t appear on your listing), but, as I found out, they do affect the health of your account. If your order defect rate is above the target (of 1%) you run the risk of being shut down.
Note that if you sell in multiple marketplaces, you have a score for each.
You can see every comment here, the order number it relates to and the score (out of 5) you’ve been given.
If you feel that any are unfair, the next step is to…
2. Contact Seller Support
Go to ‘Contact Seller Support’ and select ‘Selling on Amazon’. One of the ‘Quick Actions’ is to ‘Manage Customer Feedback’.
You need to provide the Order ID of the feedback you want removed (see above). You then need to select ‘Other Customer and Order Issues.’
Explain your reasoning, ensuring you use the words ‘remove the review’ as this brings up radio buttons asking if that’s what you’re requesting.
Hopefully, your negative review will be gone in less than 48 hours and your account will be in full health once again.
Bonus tip – remove feedback from your product listing
You can also remove negative feedback from your product listing if you feel that you are not at fault.
For example, I had a customer comment on the time it took for her order to arrive. Now, that’s out of my hands (as I mentioned above), so I asked Amazon to remove the review.
An email to Seller Support, with the ASIN and a screenshot of the review was all it took. It was removed in less than 48 hours.
I would imagine that it’s much harder to get emails about your product removed however, Amazon do state:
Comments about your shipment experience, packaging, pricing, product availability or alternate ordering options are also not about the product and should not be shared in Customer Reviews or Questions and Answers.
You can read Amazon’s full review policy (for the UK site) here.
Stay on top of this by checking regularly
Now I know this can happen, I’ll be keeping an eye on my feedback (and product reviews) and requesting for them to be removed as I see them.
Is this a good use of anyone’s time?
Here comes the rant I managed to avoid at the beginning of this post.
I try not to dwell on this, but since Amazon knows I’m an FBA seller, it does feel like I was made to jump through hoops a little. I mean, they placed a warning on my account, I phoned in a panic and I was asked to email them following the steps above. Since they know all of this already, it does seem unnecessary that I have to email and tell them. I’m unsure why they couldn’t look at the review themselves, establish it was out of my control and remove it. However, like so many things we encounter as Amazon Sellers, it is what it is.
Just a final thing – remember all of this only applies if your orders are Fulfilled by Amazon.
Let me know how you get on!