Comment by nikkwong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikkwong | Hacker News Reader

Maybe silly question and probably OT but do sellers have any rights to sell on Amazon's platform? I had been selling for years and seem to have some benign error which has caused my seller account to be deactivated (Yes literally a benign error, I think it's because I accidentally used my personal email (rather than business email which was my main seller account) to register a seperate seller account years ago and according to Seller TOS you can't have two accounts—so even though I never used the accidental account, I still got deactivated). Further, Amazon has an appeal system for exactly this offense but for whatever reason they never respond to my inquiries.

I've appealed everywhere I could, emailed jeff@amazon, but never get a response from anyone anymore; probably for being so annoying on the issue.

Do sellers have any rights? For the record this has basically ruined my business. I started selling online (on my own site) in 2015 and started selling on Amazon in around 2017 and around the time of the pandemic basically all of my sales volume shifted from my website to almost all of it on Amazon. What they've done here is great for consumers; but now they control the rails and people aren't doing as much ecommerce shopping if outside of Amazon's walls.

Obviously they have done nothing illegal by destroying my livelihood like this, but, it feels weird to have no recourse for a violation that has impacted my life so deeply. I wouldn't even ponder the idea of bringing the law in to help remediate my situation here but wonder if anyone may have any thoughts as to otherwise.

My seller account got banned because they retroactively added some <$1fee, and then automatically banned the account because the fee was "past due". I paid the fee, but that wasn't enough to get my account reactivated. All communications I sent seem to go into a black hole, tickets I opened were closed without any resolution, etc.

The thing that finally did it for me, was when I went to cancel my AWS account. The AWS get rep got involved, and my seller account magically got unbanned within a day.

Because I read the Amazon Business Services Agreement and was aware of the single account clause, I inquired about this very issue when both running my mom’s business on Amazon and setting up a different account for a friend. Seller Support was very polite and direct in saying it would only be a problem if the two accounts were selling the same or similar merchandise. My take is they don’t want sanctioned sellers sneaking back on the platform. Anyway, now they face the Smurf Attack of Chinese sellers with 5&6 letter names and apparently they can’t keep up with it.

I'm sure they are inundated with people trying to game the system and they can't keep up with it.

Still, they should have an escape hatch for sellers like me who are highly motivated to fix these issues and willing to go to great lengths to do so. I live in Seattle so I've played with the idea of barging into the HQ and start asking random strangers to help me. I know I am not the only one in this category and it seems ridiculous that they have recourse no matter their level of effort.

Before barging into HQ, email me: (email in bio)

Can’t making any promises (this isn’t my job) but I can try to get this in front of somebody.

Couldn't thank you more. Unfortunately I am having a hard time finding your email. Do you think you could reach out to me instead? nikk at getfractals dot com

Thank you!!!!

Got you fam

Nope. Your experience mirrors mine. They should probably be broken up.

Yes; I would not be so adamant about supporting this idea if it weren't for my own personal experience.

I'm not sure if there are any serious proposals on the table on how they should be broken up; but I could imagine different companies that act as a gateway to selling on amazon. These companies would compete to offer the best experience to sellers. Someone more centralized higher up would regulate the companies that act as a gateway.

Amazon is so big that in my opinion it needs to have some incentivized structure that looks something like this. What they are doing right now is not fair and it is not working.

After appealing and not getting a reply, did you contact them via web chat or phone and ask about the status, and request that things be escalated?

Yeah. I often call them actually. It's nice to finally be able to get someone on the phone, but they're really unhelpful unfortunately, even when asking to escalate. The general answer is "the team that handles these matters is a black box and we can't contact them; we can't write to them; we can't walk to their desks; we have no way of communicating with them".

Apparently the only way to get in touch with this team who's banned my account is through a form that they don't respond to.

The people on the phone are nice; I beg, bribe, offer to send chocolates; but their response is always the same. They really seem to have no way of contacting this team. The only other avenue is the jeff@amazon outlet which doesn't respond to my emails. I've emailed that address maybe 4 times total about this issue; the first time they did respond and seemed to get me pretty close to resolution; but then stopped responding half way through. The follow up attempts to jeff@amazon after the first stopped receiving replies.

Maddening! I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've felt stressed out in my life; but this is one of those rare occasions because I feel so powerless.

Wish you could have seen the product I was selling. It had an average of 4.8 star reviews; over 300 which had been submitted. All real customers. I was so proud of that.

Thanks for the response though!

I think soon, we're going to have to (sadly) get legislative for things such as this.

This path has been taken in some jurisdictions, for things like deleting customer data, accounts and more.

But it has been proven again and again, that offering paid services with zero customer support, is seen as a plus for many corps. I presume the logic is, support costs big, better to lose a small percentage of clients, than support them all fully and reasonably.

Some cite Chinese sellers, fraud as the problem. No, that's not the problem, the problem is not dealing with cost, and this issue, in a reasonable way.

We have centuries of common law, and legislative backing which essentially states that consumers, clients, businesses must behave in a certain way with one another.

Amazon is trying to game the system, by ignoring these covenants, and creating process and conditions which purposefully denigrate these concepts.

So glad someone found a way to mess up their perfect little plan to keep consumers, and clients out of court.

Consumer rights are not something to be optimized, mitigated, reduced.

More thoughts ; we've been through this forever. Think of all the lemon laws for car dealers , manufacturers, as a result of just plain scummy behaviour.

It's all the same thing. Act scummy, and we'll make you stop.

Sorry but can you not just create another legal entity to sell? I mean creating a small business should be straight forward in USA right. Am I missing something?

I wish. I think that would just create more headaches since they scope the account to the person.

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