Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account

I sell 3d printed sleeves to attach an Apple Airtag to a Samsung TV remote. But Amazon thinks I am selling a Samsung device and has deactivated me for IP violations. My listings are very clear that this is FOR a Samsung device, and not an actual Samsung device. But Amazon's automated system can't figure it out. I am following their IP guidelines for compatible products (section 6C - https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GZUQ6GBBXQVHQKF2):

You can see one of my listings here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHZVVL1H

Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great.

Until last week, out of nowhere, my account has been deactivated.

To reinstate my account, they asked me to submit an authorization letter from the manufacturer or brand owner authorizing me to sell their products. Well, I figured, I am the manufacturer, so I wrote an authorization letter for myself, and even got it notarized for good measure, that I am legally allowed to sell these devices. But to no avail.

I have an option to "Submit new information." But have no new information to submit, and fear if I try submitting anything else, I'll be permanently banned or something.

The funny part is that on most of the products I have listed, I am losing money, just because of the FBA costs and the advertising costs. I lost about $250 last month between two of the variants.

The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies, and do most all my sales through my website, but do get a few orders a week through amazon for the book, and am now afraid the Amazon door is closed forever.

View on HN

Amazon Seller for 10 years here. I haven't had my account shutdown, but some tips that could help. At the top, your brand is listed as "Generic", this is because you do not have a brand registered. The way to have a brand registered with Amazon is to first get a Trademark for your brand. This will also help you fight against counterfeiters on Amazon that could try to sell their own version under your listing. In that case, they would need a signed letter from your brand. I don't know that it will help in your specific case, but it could give you more credibility with Amazon. It will cost a little money to get the TM, so that's a decision to make if it's worth it or not.

Have you tried just having a single trademarked brand in your title, rather than Airtag and Samsung or changing the wording at all? Something like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Samsung. How about targeting other popular brands like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Apple TV?

Here's another brand that has a combination of the above suggestions: https://www.amazon.com/AhaStyle-Protective-Silicone-Compatib... They use "... for ... compatible with", and they also have a registered brand.

> I haven't had my account shutdown,

You have been lucky so far, but there is no guarantee that luck will not run out tomorrow. The algorithms making these decisions are not open to review. They are opaque, and there is no way to know when something in your account might be flagged as suspicious.

> but some tips that could help.

I know you are trying to help, so thank you for that. So don't take this personally when I say this. I'm just frustrated with how things have turned out.

It is absurd that we have reached a point where people must rely on unofficial and unverified tips just to possibly avoid losing access to their source of income. It seems incredibly unhealthy for a market this important to be governed in this way.

I don't disagree with most of your comment, although I don't think my tips are questionable, they are well within Amazon's guidelines. I have been through counterfeiter issues on my account before and very familiar with the brand registry process. Changing listing titles also happens on a regular basis to chase trends in search results. My recommendations are pretty much directly from the cited guidelines in sellercentral.

Sorry, I didn't mean questionable. I meant unverified and I updated my comment soon before you posted yours. But looks like my "unverified" complaint was wrong too? Do you know if the seller guidelines doc is published somewhere? I tried searching but I see multiple results and cannot tell which one of them is the actual deal. Curious to find out what kind of guidelines they officially recommend. Could be a great resource for the community.

Is this the one? https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

No problem, I was trying to not take it personally.

OP linked the source, but you need a seller account to view https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GZUQ6GBB...

Here is the relevant section copy pasted (which his original listing is pretty close to adhering to, it's really just the second brand mention which I was concerned about):

" When making truthful statements that a product is compatible with a trademarked product. For example, if you offer a cable that is compatible with the Kindle e-reader, you can use the brand name “Kindle” to indicate that compatibility in the text of your detail page. You cannot use a logo to indicate compatibility, only the brand name. Any statement you make about compatibility must be true. If you want to indicate the compatibility of your product with a product of a different brand in the product title, build your product title using the format below, taking account of the Amazon Brand Name Policy. If you do not apply this format to your product title, your listing may be removed as potentially trademark infringing.

Title format for branded compatible products

[Your Product’s Brand Name] + [Product Name] + "for"/''compatible with''/''fits''/''intended for'' + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)

Examples:

Xandu USB charging cable, compatible with AmazonBasics speaker TonTon Sleeve intended for Kindle Fire Title format for generic compatible products

"Generic" + [Product Name] + "for"/”compatible with”/”fits”/”intended for” + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)

Example:

Generic Replacement filter for AmazonBasics Waterfilter A3

Note: When making genuine claims that a product is compatible with a trademarked product, use either of these terms that indicate compatibility as listed above, in the bullet point and product description as well. "

Thanks! Yeah, I'll go through Brand registry. I'm guessing I need to get my account reinstated first somehow though.

There's a bunch of services that charge to help you with the reinstatement process because they know what keywords to use to help you navigate the Amazon system.

I think they're worth reaching out to (I don't have one that I personally recommend as I've been out of that industry for too long). Because if things haven't changed recently then there's no "penalty" for waiting and the mistake most sellers make is rushing to put through a crappy response and they just make things worse.

Thanks! I'll look around and see if I can find anyone that specializes in this kind of thing.

I think people would be surprised what is on the internal seller forums. There is really like a huge amount of issues that Amazon fails to help with. Literally everything from onboarding to protecting sellers from refund scams.

I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

>I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

They do. Large 'first party' vendors have a completely different system, basically. Even large third party vendors have a more direct line to support.

Even pretty small ones do. My wife has worked at Amazon as an account manager both for 1P and 3P sellers, some of those don't even make $100K a year on Amazon but still have an internal contact.

Depends on the category. My brother runs an Amazon store that nets more than that but his category is one of the strictest on the site and he gets no support.

I mean those programs aren't free for 3rd party sellers, so if he doesn't pay I'm not surprised, but it likely doesn't have much to do with the category.

He would pay. They don't have anything to offer him.

What I've heard about having the "Premium" (pay) version of Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.

> I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

No clue how it is elsewhere but in Amazon India, the largest seller is Amazon itself which sells under a different name. That's their model. They were under scrutiny by the Indian Government [1] [2] [3] last time I checked. Keeps registering subsidiaries under different names.

So you are basically competing with Amazon itself, which also acts as a seller in their own store.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/amazoncoms-retail-p...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/tech/amazon-flipkart-india-an...

[3]: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...

When you look at a forum like that you have to realize that the actual scammers also post convincing complaints (omitting incriminating details). They likely outnumber the legitimate cases. It's all part of gaming the system.

This seems pretty unlikely. Running scams on Amazon requires quite a bit more effort than on Ebay, so the scams tend to be more professional.

Professional scammers are not likely to waste their time complaining on forums.

I used to work for a large Amazon Seller (>$100m per year revenue) who got automatically deactivated with no warning and it took them a week to get re-activated.

We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company - this was not the exact scenario so please treat with a pinch of salt)

They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.

> We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company)

Holy cow.

What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

Amazon right now feels to me like a large landlord seeking rent kicking people for no reason because they didn't like that some person spilled some water.

Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

> Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.

Yes it's bad, although I want to emphasise that I have changed the details significantly here - it was something like this, but this was not the infraction because I don't want the company to be identifiable by anyone. I’m also not sure if my example is an actual policy violation - but it was in a similar vein.

To be honest, the surprising thing wasn’t the ban on a policy violation (because they had violated a policy), it was how automated the internals of Amazon were and how slow it was to overturn.

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

its a very common fraud vector: redirect customers off of amazon, then fraud them there, and when the customer comes back to amazon to complain and get a refund, amazon has no idea what they are talking about, but amazon is still on the hook for making it right.

i recently left this area. id describe the business logic of the various policies as written in blood as responses to sophisticated attackers, but also, spaghetti written by pretty short lived PMs. its of course, hard for account managers to do anything, because there's also a history of account managers having colluded with bad actor sellers

fortunately, tons of the investment has been into fixing problems like "overly harsh" "opaque" etc, and just about all the tools needed to refactor the seller policies are in place now. that and tools besides a top level account banhammer

I expect what should have happened and what will happen in the future is that the one listing or feed gets removed, with a warning/issue to fix it, and the account only gets banned after repeated infractions. most things should be making a phone call to the seller already, if amazon trusts them. for something like that, amazon might also think the account was hacked

that said, all the above is only my opinions, not amazon's, and im not there anymore:P

>Amazon right now feels to me like a large landlord seeking rent kicking people for no reason because they didn't like that some person spilled some water.

At Amazon scale they have people firehosing water and complaining about it, people punching holes in the roof causing water leaks, people messing with the pipes causing water leak, it's a lot, so they just wrote "ban water on floor bot" which clears 95% of the scammers and 5% of the innocents who had a small spill. Which sounds innocuous but, again, at scale, 5% of the innocents is a damn lot of people

FWIW they got a lot better on this past few years, clearly someone high up finally got the memo.

We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.

Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...

Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible.

Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.

>We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees

You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.

That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.

Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.

We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...

>They already take 50%+ of our revenue for all expenses

As mentioned my revenue is far smaller, so I need larger margins. My total marketplace fees plus shipping spend in 2025 was 26% of revenue. My net margin was 28%, but the metric I focus on is margin on COGS; that was 60% in 2025 and 54% lifetime.

Hearing your account and that of another seller with close to seven figures revenue makes me think I should aim for smaller margins. Not as small as yours, but maybe 10% smaller.

>We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...

My Walmart revenue equaled Amazon's in 2025.

I've thought about opening my own website. On the one hand my multichannel software already supports such, so it would be from that perspective just another marketplace. On the other hand, besides the additional cost and hassle, I keep coming back to how difficult it is to match the Amazons and Walmarts of the world in terms of customer reach.

My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%, but our typical unit pricing is <$30 so the FBA fees and base fees/unit sold hit hard.

We make ~30% before labor and net 10-20% after everything so it works OK. Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.

Our Walmart store is pretty sad, cross product lines we sell between 1-10% of our rev on Amazon :( ... but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit.

> My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%

45% for me in 2025.

>but our typical unit pricing is <$30

$59 ASP in 2025 ($63 average revenue per sale).

>Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.

Yes, that's the impression I've gotten of the marketplace megasellers, of 10% margins being the norm. Not quite the old dotcom joke of losing money on every sale but making it up on volume, but you know what I mean.

>but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit

That's interesting; I would have thought that Amazon would have more sellers across price points. Walmart has more Chinese sellers with gibberish brand names than before thanks to a noticeable loosening of application criteria, but still fewer than Amazon. Are competitors at your price point not present on Amazon but are present on Walmart? Or they are present on both, but for whatever reason (advertising, FBA/FBM differential) your listings get relatively more visibility on Amazon?

For my product niche, Amazon has (many) more buyers at my pricepoint and value prop (moderately well-designed kitchen gadgets at a price point between your run-on-the-mill gadget and OXO).

Maybe I also know how to SEO better on Amazon vs Walmart, but not sure! ¯\(°_o)/¯

> For my product niche, Amazon has (many) more buyers at my pricepoint and value prop

I see. Thank you for the comparative rundown; very interesting.

> The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies

Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :)

First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead of "for... Samsung TV remote".

I've been doing Amazon for 13 years and have a team + a few brands I own in the ecosystem -- just some basic tips:

1. Get brand registry (or find a maker buddy and put it under their brand) for listing control. Generic is not the way to go for listing control -- you need brand registry. Then you can edit away under your own brand.

2. You shouldn't be losing any money doing this. If you're doing 3D printer stuff you should expect your cost to be like 5-10%, Amazon takes 40-50% between all fees, ads around 10%, and the rest is labor/margin... and if your numbers aren't there you need to figure out what's wrong.

I have lots more thoughts but I realize this can become an essay haha. Feel free to ping me if you need some help, loved your books. :)

===

Edit: I don't think you're at risk of getting banned, but you might need an escalation to a higher level support (a captive or escalations specialist within Amazon).

Edit 2: I had some extra downtime to look at it, my approach to resolving the issue would be: a. You should first try to clearly indicate you're a product accessory and not a Samsung-branded product; review sellercentral best practices for SKU naming but it's gonna be something along the lines of "compatible with Samsung TV remotes" b. If you get stuck here for too long, I would first remove all reference to Samsung for now from the listing and make it a more generic accessory, acknowledge the brand confusion, reinstate your store, then create a case to add Samsung back into your listing (and be sure to have this case handy if you get future problems so you can reference back and show you're doing this the right way). c. Phone support works a lot better in recent days than email/chat support. But since you're deactivated I'm not sure if you get access to this.

I would love to hear all your thoughts. Send me an email?

My personal email is rot13’ed when you click on my username :)

This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com

Sent. Thanks!!

Don't use other companies brand names in your product titles. Regardless of what other people get away with. Regardless of what is in the Amazon fine print. Don't use trademark logos in your product images. Make your own brand name. Make it "compatible with" in the product description.

I agree that this would be a much safer route.

Yeah, this would be safer, but is anyone going to find the product if it's listed as "MyBrand attachment sleeve for location sensor and TV remote control." instead of "Attachment sleeve for Airtag and Samsung Frame Remote Control?" I kind of doubt it..

I don't know how to appeal the deleted account, but regarding not triggering this check again...

Emphasize your own brands and model number, and make the other brands more clearly a description, in the Amazon item title?

  FooCorp TagTeam S (sleeve mount holder to attach Apple AirTag to Samsung TV remote)

(Background on a simple filter: On eBay, it seemed like someone told counterfeit sellers that all they had to do was to copy&paste the string "For" in front of the brand name and model number, and then they could sell counterfeits. And sometimes black out the counterfeited brand name in the photos. So an item title might be of the format "For <brand> <model>", and mean it's definitely a counterfeit or knockoff of "<brand> <model>".)

Very familiar: https://www.revk.uk/2026/01/amazon-copyright-issue.html

And yes, more info is pointless, see https://www.revk.uk/2025/11/more-useless-amazon.html

If it's anything like eBay, just open another account. I've had 2 eBay accounts randomly closed for no stated or discernable reason. I've just opened new accounts. Now I have separate buyer and seller accounts so at least I have an account with history, if/when my seller account gets locked.

Sell on Walmart Marketplace instead.

Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.

Don’t worry this guys a hero, and has lots of endorphins. He’ll find a way.

I understand the problems described for Amazon, though that doesn't make Walmart good or without the same or different problems and advantages. What is Walmart Marketplace like for sellers? And how is the sales traffic, relatively?

I used to sell on Amazon, and Walmart Marketplace reached out to me to convince me they could offer me a better seller experience than Amazon.

I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.

Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.

Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.

It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."

I sell on both platforms.

>Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.

Walmart charges less in two ways:

* No monthly membership fee.

* Seemingly random fee discounts, up to and including 0%. More than once I've sold an item early in a day, then sold it again later that day with a different fee percentage.

>Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund?

When Walmart refunds a customer, it takes from the seller's reserves exactly what was paid for the sale in the first place. No more, no less. It is Amazon that charges sellers a "refund processing fee".

While Walmart definitely has its issues, there are also many virtues vis-a-vis Amazon. It is worthwhile selling on both. My 2025 Amazon and Walmart sales are equal.

This was 3-4 years ago, so it's possible that they've improved since then or that the rep I was speaking to was misinformed, but at the time, he told me there was no fee advantage on Walmart Marketplace, and I tried to be polite in my reaction of, "Then, why would you be an attractive alternative?"

The refund structure has always been in place in the going on five years I've sold on Walmart. The random discounted fees have started in the past year.

Some reasons for switching are in the OP and in other comments in this subthread. What about those?

The OP talks about being locked out by Amazon, and the comment I responded to above talks about being overtaken by scams.

Edit: you say it too:

> I hated dealing with Amazon

Yet the comments in this subthread all talk only about costs - they say the costs are the same so why switch to Walmart? Aren't the reasons already given?

I can give you perspective as a customer. I can't imagine they treat sellers any differently. I quit Prime (after spending tens of thousands over the years) and Amazon immediately started treating me like a third-class citizen. Free shipping is normally 5+ days. Lots of mysterious shipping delays that never happened before. Obscene amounts of dark patterns trying to get me to sign back up for Prime. Literally every checkout flow is a maze where I have to ensure I don't accidentally click the wrong thing or I'll find myself on the hook for a subscription.

I started giving more business to Walmart. Free shipping promos are just that, same dollar threshold as AMZN but items often arrive in a day or two (sometimes same day). They arrive by the date stated. Free shipping is the default selection. Experience with third party sellers has been good. They do shill Walmart+ (their cheaper Prime equivalent) but it's not obnoxious and no dark patterns. They do have the Chinese products but for some reason they do not pollute the search anywhere near as bad as Amazon. It's easy to filter out third party products with one click. I know stuff I'm getting is not counterfeit - they seem to have much better control over supply chain than AMZN. Many products are drop shipped direct from the manufacturer.

Unfortunately the Chinese flea market junk is Amazon's bread and butter so they have intentionally made it difficult to exclude it.

The downside is Walmart's site is a bit rough around the edges but lately Amazon is doing a great job of destroying their own site in multiple ways - like removing the ability to print real invoices, removing the ability to effectively filter third-party sellers in search, etc.

Big nod. I've been trying to register our company to sell customized products. It's been quite an ordeal with document rejections etc, and at the end they just said the rejection is final. No support, no appeals, no transparency. Yet those ALLCAPS companies seem have no troubles.

> Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great.

They may have a filter for people who exceed a certain number of flags?

That’s the first thing that jumped out to me. He was flagged multiple times, tweaked the listing and passed. But it may not be a free pass every time. Eventually multiple flags added up to something - a ban. So may not be Samsung per se as anything special just hitting some flag limit.

Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from the inside, etc. etc. Be happy that your financial loss was limited.

edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590

Surely that's enough money to go to small claims or something?

I live in Seattle, and in WA state that would put it beyond the limit for a small claims case. Idk, I tried to contact lawyers to take the case and they sent letters to Amazon which Amazon never responded to. I was also going through a pretty serious health battle at the time and so couldn't really devote full attention to it. Now that things are a bit better, I feel like it's so far in the past that I don't know if I would have a reasonable claim so I sort of just let it be.

In general that kind of money is well above the limit for small claims.

statute of limitations passed, exceeds the small claims threshold, and unwinnable and more time and money on lawyers

I imagine you had good reason not to, but this is a situation for a lawsuit. Did you sue Amazon to get your money?

Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.

I feel like if you've made a good-faith effort to start the arbitration process they require you to do, and they ignore you, that is grounds for a lawsuit. And I doubt a judge would look favorably upon Amazon in that case.

You're totally right. At the time I didn't have much money for a lawyer, but perhaps I should look into it again now.

Good luck for the lawsuit. I read your story and I read some other horror stories in here as well.

How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :< I hope you are doing okay right now man.

I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)

One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.

The TOS is worded in such a way that it's almost impossible for them to lose. The best legal minds who are paid 7 figures write these things to be impenetrable. Arbitration is slow, time consuming, likely to not lead to desired outcome. Retain a lawyer just means more money and time down drain, and these companies laugh at legal threats, knowing it it ever got that far they would still win either getting the case dismissed or attrition.

That was basically my sentiment and the sentiment of a few lawyers I consulted for it. I lost so much money in the entire process overall it hurts to think about.

I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.

What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.

I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.

Suppose that an overseas scammer wanted to sell a copy of your product. Would they be begging Amazon to reinstante some closed account? No, they would be using half a dozen accounts to present identical listings.

when in Rome ...

this is the correct affect. you lose money while they win an imagined IP violation, then someone posts a copy of your item with text that avoids their system and they make money there too.

*smh*

Every time I hear a story like this (and there's one like every month) I wonder how we ended up here. The internet was meant to be this place where anyone could set up a website, run a business, and reach customers directly. Instead it has turned into a collection of walled gardens, where your existence and livelihood depend on the whims of an opaque algorithm.

Luckily in my country Amazon does not have the level of market control it has in the US and some other places. People still walk or drive to local shops and when they order something for delivery they usually do so from their websites.

But reading many of these HN threads gives the impression that in the US and elsewhere Amazon controls a huge share of the market. If it functions as such a powerful exchange for both merchants and buyers, should there not be regulation to prevent injustices like this?

We ended up here because certain people realised that there is oppertunity in exploiting the window of time between "I trust that you are selling this in good faith" and "This is a scam and I will drag your name, and any of your associates in mud". The internet enabled people to just 'make up names', and keep exploiting this.

So rather than investing time and effort into investigating, we just built faceless tools to punish anything that looks even remotely suspicious, and ignore any appeals, and if a few (or a lot) of folks just trying to make an honest living get caught up, then oh well.

Even if you try selling direct, your payment processor takes on this role, with varying degrees of trigger-sensitivity.

> Even if you try selling direct, your payment processor takes on this role, with varying degrees of trigger-sensitivity.

I agree but I hate payment processors sometimes as well and they feel very rent seeking in nature (akin to amazon) to me as well, I definitely wonder if stablecoins with good on/offramps or proper VISA support might actually help the end citizen but I am a bit worried because Stablecoin's on crypto and most crypto's really scummy so I also don't want to give things like this way too much attention.

Time will tell perhaps

If I remember correctly, they might be fined a lot.

But when the only punishment for crime is fine, then crime becomes legal (and even preferred if doing the crime actually makes more than the fine)

Amazon also does malicious compliance. Yes they are following the law but they are trying to stoop as evil foolishly low as possible while still following the law and sometimes they don't even follow the law but get out of free jail card by paying some fines and oh did I mention, lobbying?

I completely agree with your message. We might need a better alternative to Amazon but one of the reasons why I sort of prefer Amazon sometimes is that you can get a 5% discount on all products if you have a decent credit card and pay bills on time on all products in my country, there are special cards just for amazon and also some cards which pay 5% on all online payments.

On small businesses this is not really possible.

Theoretically if one keeps money in a short term market fund or somewhere safe and uses this or other apps, they can probably safe upto 5% on all expenses, (uses credit cards and then pays the bills on time)

Combine this with the bloody fact that Amazon's tos's requires you to sell the cheapest on amazon, there just ends up being no competition.

Oh wow, I saw your book in a twitter video (and reposted) just yesterday and thought that was the coolest thing! It's a real shame it's not available on Amazon because of this nonsense. Best of luck getting reinstated!

edit: typing is hard

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