“We sued a Chinese company on Amazon and they are now extorting us.” | Hacker News Reader

“We sued a Chinese company on Amazon and they are now extorting us.”

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13 pointsikeboy7 comments

Amazon only seems to care about counterfeits for a certain protected class of seller. I sold DVDs about 7 years ago and bought them from legit sources and sold no counterfeits.

I had nearly 100% positive reviews and would bend over backwards to help any customer with any issues. What I believe now is a competitor purchased a DVD, filed a claim that it was a counterfeit, and even told me that they were going to 'punish' me in their comments.

Before I had a chance to even resolve the issue, my account was permanently banned. All of my messages to Amazon support went to an automated department and I was rejected outright.

To this day, I can't even open an Amazon seller account in another industry or login to a companies seller account without the account getting banned.

I now have a business that does millions of dollars in revenue/year (different industry completely) and Amazon reps have been hounding me for months to open up a Business account. I always tell them I will do it if they can resolve my seller account issue and the response is always the same: "That's not my department" and they stop emailing me.

It's scary that there is really no recourse if a company like Amazon bans you for life. As we get more reliant on companies like this, there will be a class of people that eventually won't even be able to buy anything.

You can take them to arbitration. I've heard anecdotally of people who got reinstated that way. Multiple stories of people I know personally.

That said, my own account was permanently blocked after false counterfeit complaints and I'm currently entangled in a lawsuit against the companies that filed those complaints. Legal process is rough. Takes time and costs money and is emotionally draining even if you have a strong case.

That ship has sailed. It taught me a lesson not to base any business on any 3rd-party platform.

If I ever start a business on a platform again, my goal will be to move away from it as soon as possible.

Amazon is a horrible company and although it's tempting to sell products on their platform, they will only steal your business from under you.

Sounds like amazon is also to blame for allowing this behavior on their platform. Getting $$ from someone in China might be difficult from a legal standpoint.

Worth taking a look at the proposed law by this person, linked downthread. One of the proposals is to require all foreign sellers to have insurance to cover any legal judgements. This would effectively solve that issue, and insurance companies would presumably do some kind of verification to make sure companies aren't fly-by-night, which would cut out a lot of bad behavior.

It's really not hard to get crappy insurance. What's hard is getting that crappy insurance to pay out when there's a problem.

If the insurance is required to pay any judgements against the company, they will pay. The system works for car insurance - you must carry liability insurance if you drive.

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