Amazon: How Can I Reactivate My Seller Account After Suspension?

Written by Tegan Marlow | Feb 16, 2017, 11:00:00 PM

Selling on marketplaces is the perfect opportunity to boost your sales, both in your native country and internationally. With the wide variety of both specialised and generalist markets, online retailers are spoiled for choice. Of all the marketplaces, however, American giant Amazon is undoubtedly the most strict. It has always been one of the most stringent platforms and requires sellers to have a satisfaction rate of more than 90%. To maintain their privileges, Amazon sellers must comply with the rules established by the marketplace, otherwise their Sales Account will be suspended temporarily or permanently. Find out the reasons why your Amazon Seller account could be suspended, and how to reactivate it if it is:

Reasons your Amazon Seller account could be suspended

When you sell your products on Amazon you must ensure that you maintain a high quality customer service level, that matches up with Amazon's sales performance targets. If your customer indicators do not meet these objectives, your account may be suspended due to poor performance.

What are the Amazon Seller performance objectives?

Objective no.1: To have an order defect rate of less than 1% The order defect rate is the percentage of your orders that received a negative rating, an A-to-z Guarantee claim, or a service credit card chargeback. Objective no.2: To have a pre-fulfilment cancel rate of less than 2.5% The pre-fulfilment cancel rate refers to all cancellations of orders made, divided by the number of total orders over a given period. Objective no.3: To have a late shipment rate of under 4% The late shipments rate is the number of orders where the shipping has been estimated at 3 days or more after the order was placed, divided by the total number of orders for the given period. Note: If you do not meet the sales performance targets required by Amazon, the marketplace generally contacts you to give you time to improve your performance within 60 days of the first warning. Sales performance targets are not the only reasons for suspending your Seller Account. Your Seller privileges may also be revoked as a result of a breach of sales policies and prohibited content rules established by the marketplace.

How can I reactivate my account once its been suspended?

If your Seller Account has been suspended by Amazon, you will be able to appeal the decision of the marketplace by providing a plan of action. This plan will have to propose alternatives to resolve the problems that have led to the suspension of your account. To reactivate your account, follow these steps:

1.) Identify the source of the problem

You will have to determine if your seller privileges have been revoked for reasons of poor performance or due to violation of sales policies and rules regarding content prohibited by Amazon.

2.) Review your sales practices

If your sales performance is at the root of the problem, analyse your customer feedback and identify those that do not meet Amazon sales performance targets. If you are violating Amazon's policies, evaluate your sales practices to work out which ones are leading to dissatsified customers. Also check if your product catalogue includes items that could violate their sales policies.

3.) Write your action plan

The aim of your action plan is to show Amazon you've identified the source of the problem in your sales and/or inventory management, and to explain how you're going to solve it. The more accurate your action plan, the greater your chances of reactivation. For example, if you find you have a high pre-fulfilment cancel rate, you should look at your inventory management process. This may reveal that some of your products are going out of stock far too frequently. It's essential that you do not sell products that are out of stock. You can avoid this with Lengow's automated rules feature, that allows you to disable items from selling that have a low stock count. If you sell your products on different marketing channels, we advise you to exclude those with fewer than 5 items in stock. If your sales account has been suspended due to violations of Amazon policies, you must evaluate your sales procedures and inventory to determine if it contains prohibited content or restricted products. Once your action plan has been written, send it to the Amazon Sales Performance Team attached with your request to reactivate your Seller Account. Amazon will notify you within 48 hours with their decision. Note: It is not automatically guaranteed that your account will be reactivated after suspension.

To avoid a one-time or permanent suspension, Amazon encourages sellers to regularly check their performance via the tool available in their Seller Accounts. This tool provides data on all client feedback, making it easy to see if the retailer is meeting their objectives.

Note: An Amazon Seller account can be suspended more than once.

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