#379 – Expert Advice On Amazon Seller Compliance, Black Hat Tactics, & More with Chris McCabe

#379 - Expert Advice On Amazon Seller Compliance, Black Hat Tactics, & More with Chris McCabe Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 379 of the AM PM podcast. This week, my guest is Chris McCabe from e-commerce Chris, and we're going to be talking about everything that everybody always has a lot of questions about that suspensions. And what do you do when Amazon slaps you on the back for either something you didn't do? Or something that you may have done and you're trying to solve the problem. Got some great insights in this episode with Chris for you. And here in just a month or so, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit virtual edition will be happening February 21st and 22nd. You can go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com and get yourself a ticket for that event. You can do it from anywhere in the world. Got an incredible, incredible lineup of speakers gonna be sharing next level stuff. This is not what you hear on podcasts or in other summits. This is like $25,000 a year mastermind level stuff that's cutting edge. So hope to see you there. In the meantime, enjoy this episode with Mr. McCabe. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM PM podcast. Welcome to the AM PM podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Chris McCabe. Speaker 2: How you doing, man? So glad to finally have you on the podcast here. You've spoken with Bradley and a few others before, but you and I have never done a podcast together. Speaker 3: Hard to believe. It feels like I've been AM PMing for years, but this is our first, I guess. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, for those of you that are listening that don't know who this guy is, he's one of the top experts when it comes to actually helping you when you get a problem with Amazon. And he actually used to actually work for the evil empire, right? And then you came to the good guy side. Speaker 3: That's right. The evil, the Darth Vader people, um, seller performance. I used to work on that team. Speaker 2: What did you actually do for seller performance? What, what does that mean when you, does that mean that you were just reading these emails? Are we overseeing a team of people and things got escalated up to you? What does that actually mean? Speaker 3: I wasn't overseeing a team. The only time I oversaw work of other people were in training situations. When I had been there a few years and I had been promoted and I was looking at investigations, other seller performance, people were doing and, you know, saying, yes, do that. No, don't do that. That kind of thing. It was mostly doing what people would probably guess, taking listings down, sending policy warnings, deleting listings that didn't belong. Suspending accounts, of course, reading appeals for reinstatement, deciding if the appeals were acceptable, justifiable for reinstatement. And sending denials, of course, if they weren't. So as time went on, I'd read more escalations. I wasn't doing that right, right away. The the, you know, Jeff emails, so called executive seller relations, took me a couple years to start working on those because back in the day, you had to be certified and approved by your boss, and maybe even your boss's boss to be able to handle those. It's not quite the way it's a The way it's handled right now. Speaker 2: So what years were this that you were at Amazon? Speaker 3: So I started in 2006 in the A to Z guarantee claims, which was evaluating, you know, who's right, who's wrong, buyer or seller. Sometimes Amazon would just pay claims themselves back in those days, trying to establish trust by buyers and sellers in the entire marketplace. And then I moved to seller side in 2007. And I stuck with that for a good five, five and a half years up through 2012. Speaker 2: So in 2012, what did you switch right into doing the consulting and the stuff you do now? Or was there something else you did in between starting up the consulting company? Speaker 3: Yeah, I took time off is the short answer did a lot of world travel. Conventional wisdom back in those days was, you know, kind of take a year off and then decide what you want to do. Or when I did come back to the United States, I looked into working at some startups. I was living in Brooklyn. I was living in New York. So I was looking at different startups, you know, could I contribute in other parts of e-commerce? One of the reasons we're called e-commerce Chris is because my original consulting concept was going to be all facets of e-commerce consulting. It just immediately went in the direction of help me with Amazon, help me with Amazon. You worked at Amazon for so long, you helped people with this sort of thing. When you worked there, being an advocate for sellers on the other side of the fence, I would say it took three, four months for me to understand that I was going to be more of an Amazon consultant, not an all e-commerce consultant. Speaker 2: And what year was this? Speaker 3: So 2012, 2013, the rest of 2012 and 2013, I wasn't really working on much of anything. I was traveling. 2014 is when I started consulting. And 2015 is when I created the e-commerce Chris LLC. Speaker 2: I'd always think it's actually, you know, I, I got into some IRS trouble about 20 some odd years ago where I didn't actually, you know, I was growing my, growing a company and it's about 25 years ago now, I guess, growing a company. And instead of, you know, as you take money out of the employee's paycheck, you're supposed to give that to the IRS and you know, you match that. I wasn't doing that. I was actually using that to cashflow. And the IRS sees that as stealing. And basically it is, um, you know, cause they're, they're filing a return on getting a refund and I haven't paid it yet, but I was cashflow. And it's like, I always like, I'll catch it up. I'll catch it up. I'll catch it up. I was just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And the house of cards came crashing down on me and I had to actually go to somebody and they call it with the IRS, a registered agent. And that's, that's someone oftentimes those people actually used to work on the other side at the IRS and they were going after people to collecting money. Then they retire or get tired of working for the government or whatever and they flip to the other side and they're like, now I know how the inner workings work. I know exactly what to do. Now let me help you. So I found a guy like this and I think I owed like, I don't know, 200, it was like, it was about 80 grand or something originally 60 or 80 grand originally, but with penalties and interest and all the stuff, it was over 200,000 bucks. And this guy went to this, it was a chunk of change. And I went to this guy and said, what do I do? And he's like, look, how long has it been since they contacted you? I said, well, I had a offer in compromise and I did this and, and, It's been like seven years. He said, holy cow, it's been seven years. He said, you didn't hear this from me, but somehow you fell in through the system. You need to just lay low, uh, just lay low, you know, don't open a bigger bank account. Don't go buy a house. Don't do anything. Just, just lay low. And there's a rule. He knew all the internal rules. I get. I think it was at 10 years, actually, maybe it'd been eight or nine, it was because I only had to wait like a year. And, and then he fills out some forms, send it over to them. And the whole thing got dismissed. I never had to pay a dime of it. The entire thing. It's on my record. So I can talk freely about it now. Like they can't come knocking on my door. If someone's listening to this and say we want that it but he knew how to do it. And I think that's something that's important to note here with econ Chris. versus a lot of these other people is like, yeah, things might have been a little bit different back. You know, that was eight years ago, 10 years ago that you worked there a little over, but it's still the same principles. A lot of the same foundations are still the same. And the fact that you were there on the other side, going after people and now you're helping people, you understand it better than like the other 100 companies and consultants that are trying to do this. I believe you, do you think there's a lot of credibility or validity to that? Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I, I, We all, my whole team have had to stay current. Obviously, we're not using antiquated knowledge to approach some of these strategies, but the core themes and Amazon's view of the marketplace hasn't changed that much. When you talk about enforcement, when you talk about suspensions, what's justifiable, what's not, the communication is something that's changed a little bit. I would have I would be kind of passed out on my feet if I saw messages going out in those days that read like today's messages because I would not want to be associated with communication that is that opaque and gray and murky and just so. Speaker 2: So it wasn't that way when you were there. It wasn't these very vague, like figure out you did something wrong. You figure out and you tell us what you did wrong. We're not going to tell you. It wasn't that way back when you were there. Speaker 3: Well, all I can say is I thought, I thought it was bad back then. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: Never knowing that we would inhabit this universe we're in now, which is, Just there's no point sending this message. This message says nothing. You can read through the lines, you can read the tea leaves a little bit and figure out if it's a yes or a no. Because if they tell you you're reinstated, well, I mean, you don't need much information after that. If they don't mention the word reinstatement, I guess you can figure out you've been rejected. But whoever's signing off on today's messaging, I assume it's deliberate that they want it as vague as possible. They hate having any outsiders, any sellers quote themselves back to themselves for, Hey, this doesn't make sense. Or, Hey, what are you trying to say? They don't. have any interest in that conversation. Speaker 2: Is it just, is it so big and just such a, they're dealing with 2 million with a 2 million active sellers in the US or something like that? Just, it's just so unwieldy that they have to do it that way? Or is it deliberate that they do it that way? Speaker 3: I think it's deliberate. I think they know that they don't have training capabilities. They don't want to spend A lot of time invest a lot of capital on quality training of seller performance team investigators and others as well to the extent they would have to to make those people meaningful communicators. And they know that they're making work for themselves by communicating poorly and then you have to call in and then you have to open a case. They had to create a whole team account health services as a buffer between sellers and my former teams, right? Account health services didn't used to exist. They didn't create that team just because there's an account health dashboard now that didn't exist before. I mean, that's part of the reason. But imagine creating this whole team just because the messaging that's written down in a performance notification doesn't tell you anything and doesn't, I mean, not only does it not help you, it doesn't clarify anything. It's mud, clear as mud. It makes more work for you. Of course, the sellers tell you every day it makes more work for them, but it makes more work for Amazon. You would expect them to care for selfish reasons. Hey, we're making X number of hours of work per employee per week. Because our messaging is so. You know, generic jargon useless, but they know it is, right? It's not like it's a mystery to them, us, anybody who participates in the marketplace can look at a message like that and read it and say, this doesn't say anything. So they're aware of it. They don't have the incentive to change it, really. I mean, do they? They would prefer to build a team that you call into who can maybe interpret what that message means or doesn't mean. The problem is you call into account health reps, And you get seven different answers about what that single message meant or didn't mean. And some of the misinformation you get from account health reps makes you make a mistake in terms of what you send in next. Or you might even spend all day revising an appeal based on what one person tells you. I mean, it just keeps spinning at that point, right? It's not just making more work for people. It's like garbage in garbage out at that point. Speaker 2: So how do they train people? Like when you went in, I may be different, a little bit different now, but how did they, they just throw you to the fire and say, these are the SOPs look, try to match this up. Or does there, because a lot of the people that are doing this, they have no clue about the other side. They don't know what it's like to be a seller or what it's like to, You know that their whole livelihoods on the line here or they're supporting an office of 50 people. So how do they, how is the actual training or is it just, there's just too much to know and that's why, like you said, that's why it's so generic. Speaker 3: There's a lot to know. There's more to know now than when I was being trained. I had really good training. I think I kind of got lucky. One of the people that trained me back in the day, you know, works with us now. So, you know, obviously, he knew what he was talking about. And I kind of got lucky that I was rubbing elbows with him. I had some other people who ended up working 10, 15, 17 years at Amazon who also trained me back back in those days. So they don't really have I mean, they do have veterans who stay that long. It's increasingly rare, but there are people who stay with the company a long time, but those are like S-team executives, people at the higher echelons of the company. These days, people move on a little quicker. The SOPs, I think, just weren't updated often enough. I think people were sort of just thrown the SOPs like, hey, read this and learn this. There isn't a lot of auditing in terms of, hey, after a year, do you really understand that SOP? Or did you kind of start wandering away from it? And maybe your account annotations aren't so great anymore. I mean, is anyone really evaluating the quality of account annotations when investigators make a denial decision on an appeal? Also, I don't think they emphasize, hey, this is a business. This is a company that we've invited in one way or another to be on this marketplace, to serve our sellers, to sell their items, and we are making business critical decisions that could impact the life of that business. They've lost that. That piece was omnipresent when I was working there. We talked about it in weekly meetings. We talked about it on individual seller accounts, whether it was yes or no on reinstatement. If you wanted a second opinion, you'd run it by a colleague or maybe a superior, and maybe they would have a different opinion than you would. And you wouldn't really, I mean, I was training for months. It wasn't like I was thrown into, I was thrown into the email queues at some point, but people were still watching what I was doing. I mean, do they have that oversight now? It doesn't seem like they do. If they do, the auditing quality is so low that it's not really valuable or significant. You've seen seller support cases, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh yeah. Speaker 3: It's like, obviously they're not interested in quality of those teams or the delivery of information. Speaker 2: Don't they have a KPI? They have to hit so many per hour or something like that. So they can't spend a lot of time on each one. Do you know what that number is or have a rough idea of what that might be? Speaker 3: Not for support. For seller performance, I had to get through, I don't know, 13 and a half, 14, 15 of them an hour. Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Speaker 3: Yeah, I kind of was lucky in some ways, because a I had wonderful training by people who had been there like a decade before they even met me, who had been there at the beginning of the marketplace. I think they understood some of my strengths. I didn't have a lot of e commerce experience, but I had fraud prevention, fraud investigation experience from other companies, and they kind of knew my strengths and weaknesses, and they knew where they had to devote their time with me. But we also had managers who understood like, hey, this is one to learn from. This is a use case that a couple of us didn't quite understand. We know we're going to get 200 of these over the next 10 days. We're going to talk about it in the team meeting, take it apart, analyze it. It was before the marketplace became so rush, rush, rush. Let's just make sure we get through the day. Let's just make sure we throw bodies at a problem without knowing if it's the right bodies or if they know how to solve that problem. Speaker 2: Speaking of those bodies, where does it start when someone, when I get a performance notification or if I just happen to open up a case about something, the first level is pretty much based in India for the most part, right? Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, with the work that we do, with the kinds of appeals we have to work on, the kinds of brand registry, whatever, reinstate nascent troubleshooting we do, we don't work with the case system much. The case system for support is primarily like account compromises, technical issues, you know, There's a glitch with my image. Can you get me to the catalog teams? Very, very specific stuff. We don't rely on or use the case system with any of our clients for any major league impact. I'm losing thousands of dollars a day. My ASIN is down or appeals stuff. And we try not to rely on anything we're hearing from the account health reps either. I mean, occasionally, yes. But the case system, lion's share of that is in Hyderabad. But technically, those are global teams, you know, to keep the keep it 24 hours. Speaker 2: Is it true? There's a team like there is a team in what South Dakota that and a team in Costa Rica, you hear these things like, oh, you try to speak Spanish and you'll get directed to the Costa Rica team. Some of that smarter call during these business hours, you might get the South Dakota team talk to a Western person. So there is some truth to some of that as well. Speaker 3: Yeah, well, Costa Rica, there are also some strategic account managers, their SAS core. It changes over time. There used to be no account managers in Costa Rica. Now there's several, you know. Speaker 2: So when it's performance based is like what you said you guys are dealing with. Is that mostly people for someone selling in the US market? Is that mostly you're dealing with someone based here in the United States? Speaker 3: We deal more with the account health teams than support. So if we're talking about account health services, that's what I meant to say. Speaker 2: That's what I meant to say. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Speaker 3: That's fine. So for account health services, calling later, and those are global too. You can easily get someone in India as most sellers hearing this can attest to. You want to call later in the day to minimize the chances you get somebody in India for account health. I've gotten to the point And, you know, I've listened in on and participated in, I don't know, thousands of those calls at this point over the last few years. We've gotten to the point where we just tell people if you get somebody in India, hang up and call back for account health issues, because you might get generic information, you might get them reading from a script, you might get misinformation, wrong information that will only hurt you, not help. It's one thing if you don't get any help, but if you get negative help, that's even worse when you're talking about an appeal. I have had some India reps that I've quizzed and talked to who knew their stuff cold and they were good, but those are so few and far between you can't count on that. And if you're going to be on a 10, 12, 14 minute call, some people are on 40 minute calls. You need to make sure you up the odds that you're talking to somebody who at least has a chance of knowing what they're talking about. So, East Coast time, call later in the day. If you're on Pacific time, try to call mid-afternoon, I guess, something like that, to increase the odds that you don't get a rep who's based in India, because I just don't think they're reliable enough. There are some US reps that aren't reliable for other reasons, but your odds of getting Usable info improve and when I say usable info, I'm talking about somebody you had an appeal denied. You don't want to pat on the back. You don't want their coaching. You don't want their genetic generic plan of action advice. You need to know one thing, which you should be able to find out within two minutes, whether or not they're going to tell you, not 10 or 20 minutes. Speaker 2: I get an email, you know, we had this problem with selling hand sanitizer in 2020 and I had a business rep from business development. He was in charge of, he was business development for travel or something. And when COVID hit, he got moved over to the COVID store and was in charge of like the whole COVID store. They had set up this special COVID store and we were a hundred percent approved. All the way up the ladder to legal, signing off on our labels at Amazon, the whole nine yards. But we were constantly, constantly, constantly, constantly shut down on our listing. And I had his speed number, I had his phone number, I had his home phone number. He's like, call me anytime. It doesn't matter. And he was on our side and he was going to bat. This guy was like, look, this is the type of client that we want on our, on our, on our platform. They are doing true branding. They're not fly by night. They are FDA. They're all this quit effing with them, quit fucking with them. And the system kept doing us like, isn't there a toggle you can switch that says, leave them alone is unfortunately there's not. I said, yeah, there is Nike. Doesn't go through this shit. There is a button and he's like, well, yeah, there is a secret button somewhere, you know, but most of us don't have access to that. Speaker 3: We used to, so this is an important thing to answer your old question about how did we view sellers 10 years ago or something. We did consider how long they had been on the platform. I don't think anyone thinks about that or cares about that anymore. We did look at their revenue level. Have they responsibly shown they can sell 10, 12, 14 million a year and they haven't really created headaches for buyers, for Amazon, for other sellers? That should be a point in their favor. And this has just gotten lost along the way. It's kind of lost in the background noise. I think they pay lip service to it, but they don't make business decisions that make sense anymore that are logical to the rest of us who have been in business for as long as we have. Because somewhere along the way they got tunnel vision with like certain elements of an SOP and they forgot about is this a trustworthy seller or not? Speaker 2: You know, I think some of that is branding though. They're going to do that with Nike or with a big international brand. But if you're XYZ Chinese seller with some strange brand name and even if you're doing a hundred million dollars a year on their platform, they don't, I don't think they really give a shit because if they knock that guy, if they take you off, Uh, and you might've been doing something you shouldn't have been doing. Maybe you deserve to come off, but if they take you off, there's 26 others waiting to take your place. Uh, and you're not Nike and you're not going to go out to the press. You might complain to the Chinese press. Like some of those did a couple of years ago when they took a bunch of big ones up. Speaker 3: 50,000 accounts went down. Yeah. Speaker 2: Some multi billions dollars worth of revenue. But Amazon didn't miss a beat. Didn't miss a lick. Uh, there's some other people just took their place. And a lot of those guys are right back under a different name or different, whatever they're rebranded. Yeah, they just, yeah, most of those are all back. So that's a problem. And I don't know how you fix that when you're as big as they are. And that's where we need people like you that are advocating for us. So what are you seeing that's like, What's something that people shouldn't, a couple things here, what are some people, people come to you, you get a call at midnight one night, oh my God, my account's down, I'm doing 80 grand a day, help me, help me, help me. Uh, probably frantic people and, and you look into it and they're actually doing something they shouldn't be doing. They claim they're not, but they actually are. What are some of the things you see there? And then we'll take it from there to the flip side is like, what are some of the things that you see that Amazon thinks people are doing and they're not doing? They're totally innocent that they get problems with. What are a couple examples that you are seeing over and over and what are some advice you may have on how people can, sellers can deal with this stuff? Speaker 3: Yeah, and of course, suspensions of accounts, if we're just talking mainly about accounts right now, are trendy, right? There are things that Amazon's willing to do in August, September, and even October, that they won't necessarily do in November and December when things are really kicking, you know, they'll kind of back off for a while. Historically, they've done that in Q4. But related accounts are the ones where we see all the head scratching. They're still kind of, after all these years, after all these tool improvements, SOP improvements, so called, we're still amazed at some of the ridiculous investigations they do where they conclude that two accounts are related even if they haven't really had any data points that align between them for like four years, you know, you could probably almost guess that maybe it's just, you know, like a service provider that they were using four years ago that maybe they share with another account, or I mean, they just don't make intelligent business decisions. Speaker 2: Related accounts. So like I have, like, there used to be a thing about people say, don't always log in from a VPN and never, you know, never log in when you're traveling or something like that. And because you, if you have multiple accounts that they're going to tie them together, I have five different seller central accounts. Two of them are not active, but three of them are active. I don't have a problem switching around between them. Service providers don't have a problem switching around between them, but I did Seven or eight years ago, I was one of my companies, I was buying a lot of hard drives. And in the hard drives, I could get them back then for like 39 bucks. And I was putting data on them and then reselling them for like 400 bucks. It was a service where I would load it up with a bunch of data, then sell it as a package instead of downloading it from the internet. And you were limited to buy like 10 per account or something, people had limits on. So I just had multiple accounts. And they figured that out and they shut my other accounts down. But what is it that they're looking for? Speaker 1: What is a related account? Speaker 2: I thought it was always like, if you're selling the same thing, if you're trying to sell... Speaker 3: That's multiple accounts. So related accounts, I mean, like being related to a suspended account. Speaker 2: Oh, okay, okay. Speaker 3: And a lot of the ones that we work on, I mean... Speaker 2: Okay, so like if I get, since I have three accounts, my three accounts, if I got suspended on one of them, they may put two and two together and say, oh, this is the same guy that's running these other two. Okay, okay. Speaker 3: It's not just IP address. If they just see an IP address in common, then they're probably taking, treating it like it's a strong relation, but it's actually a weak relation if it's IP only. But generally speaking, sometimes they're just not using logic and they're not using timelines in terms of, oh, there's a relationship between these two accounts. I mean, I don't know, are they signing into the same two accounts from the same computer every day? Yeah, that sounds like a strong relationship. Was it four years apart? Maybe not a strong relationship. Somewhere along the way, the logic behind relating accounts, because obviously they don't want people getting suspended, evading that suspension by just creating another account. That's the intention. That's the intention of the policy and I think most people can understand that it's pretty logical. And then of course, if it's like, well, a family member, sometimes you try to argue, well, that's my uncle, that's not me, but Amazon doesn't know whether it's you or your uncle and they don't care. It looks like you got somebody else to start an account for you and you're selling the same stuff or the same brand or from the same address, the same location and so forth. It's not a convincing argument. But there's a lot of screwy decisions being made where accounts are clearly not related Our heart goes out to the people who get stuck trying to appeal that stuff. Fairly simple, straightforward. Amazon doesn't want to hear it. Amazon rejects the appeals. Amazon won't say why it's being rejected, all that ridiculous stuff. When we have to intervene and get their escalations going for something that they really probably didn't or shouldn't need us to do, I mean, related accounts is one of the things that's kind of just, why are we still so far in the dark ages on how this information can be evaluated? This is not the early days of the marketplace. This is not 2011 or 2008. It's like, what's going on? Why can't we get past this seemingly easy hurdle? The things that you were saying in terms of things sellers are still doing to get themselves into trouble, I mean, it's cyclical, you know, it's trendy. Sometimes Amazon forgets about product review abuse for nine months at a time. And then all of a sudden they're hot and heavy on it. But those are things that I think some sellers think that just because they haven't heard that there's been a mass purge of suspensions, they think that maybe Amazon doesn't care about that, whatever it is, that kind of compliance anymore. And they either go back to something they were doing before and they get reprimanded for that or caught again for it. Or they just assume like, well, Amazon is so busy, and I haven't heard about it. So maybe they're just finished with that. They're not going to suspend people for that anymore. Or, again, using the example of reviews abuse, they forget that hiring a third party service or a consultant or a marketing company, whatever, You're on the hook for whatever they do on your behalf. If they do something non-compliant, you can't go to Amazon and say, Oh, I found them on the service provider network that you guys have. So I'm not responsible for what they did. They're responsible. You can't finger point. You're still on the hook for it. Or if you just went on their website or had a phone call with them and you said, Hey, do you follow Amazon's rules? Are you TOS compliant? If they just say, Oh yeah, we are. Or they put something on their website that doesn't really mean anything to Amazon. Amazon doesn't care. They care about whether you are following the rules because the buck stops with you. You pay the ultimate price if something they were doing. It gets you suspended. Now, back in the day, like a couple of years ago, you could squirm out of that by saying, look, we fired them. We can document when we terminated them. We don't work with them anymore. We understand everything they do or were doing that was wrong. These are the fixes we have in place. These are preventative measures. You could neatly lay that out in your plan of action and Amazon would take it. The problem is, especially as we saw in Q4 recently, They're much less tolerant of that kind of they see that more of an excuse now not an explanation or not a justification now. They come back and say, oh, you know what? We've seen a bunch of you that we've had to suspend because you worked with this company. Tell us more about them. We're not interested in you anymore. Maybe we'll give you a chance to come back. Maybe we won't. We want to go after those guys and we're going to use you to do it. So they kind of turn you into like a stool pigeon of sorts. And they're trying to address They're trying to attack the problem at the source, right? Amazon used to have no relationship to Facebook, no relationship to groups on Facebook that helped people fake reviews. Now, they work with Facebook directly. Well, how did that happen? Well, they decided they wanted to attack the problem at the source, and they realized that a lot of the Facebook groups were responsible for it. Well, they can't punish Facebook. They have to go to Facebook, work with them to identify who's behind the groups. Get them in the court, sue them, get them out of business or whatever. They're using the sellers as human shields to get to the people who are promoting the bad practices. That is not something they were doing two years ago. Speaker 2: That's not just meta though, right? Don't they have a relationship with PayPal now and a few, several of the others too, right? Speaker 3: I think it started with Meta though. I don't remember them. And I am by no means taking credit for this, but I was one of the people two, three years ago, who was kind of banging my fist on the table. Why is Amazon not working with another giant tech company like Facebook to help solve some of this out? Because I think i was quoted in a couple articles about it so i can go back and prove that i talked about it then the bottom line is somebody heard it somebody took action somebody decided. We're treating the symptom not the disease well what's the disease the disease is sellers need sales rank sellers need positive reviews some of them don't know good ways of getting them. Or they're not willing to wait for, you know, positive experiences from buyers to play itself out. They want to take a shortcut. So, I mean, some progress is made with this stuff. The message for sellers, anyone listening to this is be careful who you work with. Be careful. I mean, first of all, you don't want to pay somebody for a service only to have them get you in trouble and get your account suspended. I mean, that's a really nasty experience to go through. Speaker 2: What about all the search find buy companies? You know, that was a hot thing for about two years. And then Amazon kind of a little over a year ago kind of said, Hey, this is not allowed anymore. It still exists. They're just not as out there as much. But, and those companies would always say, we've never had a single one of our people, we don't know what you're talking about. We've never had a single one of our people suspended for us doing a search, find, buy. And for those that don't know what search, find, buy is, there were services, you know, there's some that were legitimate, like rebate services, but there was a, there was a side of it, rebate key. And there was others that were just straight up, you pay us $15. We got somebody, we have a Facebook group, or we have a many chat group, or we have, A group of people, moms that will go and buy your product. You give us $15 as a service fee, or sometimes more than that, depending on supplements. And you give us whatever the price of your product is, if it's 20 bucks or whatever. So you pay us $35, we'll get these people to go buy your product, search for whatever keywords you want, so you rank. And then write reviews on them. And that got cracked down on it still exists. But how big of an issue was that? Did you see a lot of people getting suspended back then? And do you see that still continuing now off of that? Speaker 3: Well, I mean, first point is the service or the company that you pay can disappear, they can declare bankruptcy, maybe or their business dries up and they made a nice score of money for a couple of years. And then they move on to something else like no one pays them for, you know, they get a bad rep, nobody pays them anymore. There are no consequences, of course, and they move on. Nowadays, it's a little bit different because the FTC is very involved in this stuff. This is one reason why Amazon's chasing the companies and the service providers themselves, because the FTC started going after some of these companies and suing them or outing them or whatever, because it was obvious that they were just helping fake online reviews, which is a form of fraud, which is against the law. And it's hurting consumers, right? The FTC has to take an interest in that. So we did see a lot of sellers getting busted. I would say it was they were overly trusting, you know, they went to an event, they went, they joined a group, and word of mouth told them, hey, I got a bunch of reviews from so and so. They were just kind of riding along on the say-so of another seller or maybe even a service provider or a consultant and maybe they didn't ask the consultant, hey, are you getting a piece of this action to recommend these guys? Is there a reason why you're so pro promoting these types of services because it seems like they're a little shady, a little iffy? People weren't really doing due diligence. They were overly trusting, maybe a little bit gullible. And it's like, again, whichever consultant you're believing, or whichever seller you're talking to, maybe that other seller is doing the same thing you're doing, you'll be suspended and they won't be suspended. I mean, enforcement at Amazon is very, very inconsistent. There are people out there doing exactly what you're doing. You get in tons of trouble and they get a policy warning or they get like some quickie call from account health saying, we need you to write a quick plan of action in 72 hours and include a couple of these things in it and tell us what we want to hear and then we'll go away. Sometimes they will go away. Obviously, if it gets rejected, they won't go away and they'll suspend you too. But it's all over the place. Some people run through the raindrops and never get wet. And that's just the way it goes. I mean, what happens to one seller doesn't always happen to another. They could be using the same playbook. Speaker 2: So you're seeing one of the big topics out there is inserts lately. And you know, there is some people that do manipulation on inserts where they'll put an insert in and they'll say, if you if you like the product, go leave us a five star review at this link on Amazon. If you don't like it, email us. Or there used to be old ways where we would, back in 2016, there was a tactic where we'd say, if you like the product, leave a review, click this link. If you don't like it, click this link. It would go to seller feedback because we know we could get those removed. And all those things Amazon does not like. There's no question about that type of stuff. We're putting five stars down at the bottom of your inserts and leave us an objective review, but there's five stars that look like it's Amazon on the bottom. You should not be doing any of that. But some people are also saying now that you should not be putting Directing anything off of Amazon. And I know that's the fact on Amazon. Like if you're on Amazon or doing the email correspondence with a customer, you should not be directing them to your website. You should not show your URL and your product packaging, your photos or anything like that. But in a package insert, if I've got a package insert and I say, go to my site to get a warranty or go to my site, I've got all the accessories for this product. Or if you join my VIP club, you know, on our Shopify site, you get this. There's a lot of people that are saying, Don't do that. That's against the terms of service. You'll get in trouble. And I'm of the opinion that even though Amazon's wording may be able to be interpreted that way, that's not the intent of it. And that's not what they're going after. Because big brands do that all the time. They have inserts. We buy a new Sony keyboard. It has an insert. It's totally fine. But there's a lot of gurus in our space are saying, don't ever do that. Don't ever do send them anywhere else, except back to Amazon and insert. Can you clarify what you've seen on that just so people can hear it from someone that's probably dealt with some of these kinds of issues? Speaker 3: Yeah, it depends on what's on the insert, of course. No one said every insert is the worst thing in the world. I think there was anxiety and panic around inserts for a while because of the sheer number of suspensions and people forgot about is one insert different from another. A while ago, having five stars at the top of the insert didn't really mean much. Now it means everything. I mean, you can definitely get suspended just for that. We can say that's nitpicky and petty. Amazon thinks you're tipping the scales by having the five star. Speaker 2: You're psychologically influencing. Speaker 3: I mean, the contact us if you have a problem, if you're happy, leave a review that went out a long time ago, right? Because so many people got suspended for doing that. No one's willing to do that anymore. I still see it occasionally, but very infrequently. The warranty stuff went away because people weren't just redirecting buyers for warranty purposes. They were mixing in other language, other messaging that talked about discounts, that talked about special offers, or they sent you to a page on their website that mentioned a warranty, but also mentioned other stuff. That's where the warranty stuff got tricky. And it kind of polluted the whole warranty conversation to the point where now Amazon's just heavily suspicious of the use of the word warranty on inserts just because of so many bad experiences with so many sellers who are trying to use that as a gateway to other things. And sellers were, I mean, you know, just as well as I do. Sellers were trying to kind of use the warranty to open this wide variety of conversations with buyers and Direct them over here. I mean, QR codes, really it takes you somewhere else, but it's not just that you're going somewhere else. It's what do you see when you get there? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's what's on that landing page. I mean, I have an insert in my, I sell calendars on Amazon seasonal. I've been doing it for 20 some odd years. It's one of my product lines. I have an insert in every single calendar on Amazon. It says, congratulations, you've won a free calendar. Just pay $10 shipping and handling. You get a random calendar and I get rid of my excess stock, my excess stuff that way. There's nothing about reviews, there's nothing about a warranty, there's nothing that says go to the website and buy it or send us a check in the money, in the check or money order in the mail and we'll send it to you. And it's a, it pays for itself and I get names, I get leads off of it. I've never had an issue with that, but I'm not doing anything around warranties or ratings or reviews or anything to that nature. Speaker 3: The word free, use of the word free is not risk free. It doesn't actually, the biggest misconception to answer your question a different way that we saw in Q4 just now and then that we see ahead in 2024 is do not assume that just because you're not asking for a review, That you're okay to give product away or heavily discount product. That's not true. If you net or create a cluster of positive reviews because you're giving product away, Amazon will probably start the investigation by identifying that data cluster, but they will enforce that. They will take action on it because you're not supposed to give product away They assume that you know that if you give product away, you will have a net positive of reviews, which is considered tipping the scales. Speaker 2: What's free? In my case, it's free plus shipping. You're paying 10 bucks. Speaker 3: I get that. But there are a lot of people offering freebies. Speaker 2: Exactly. And then they come back a week later or a month later and say, hey, I hope you like that. Please leave us a review. There's a review mention or implication. Speaker 3: They view it as compensation, though. I just want to, I mean, it's not that you're paying people to leave you five star reviews. Which is considered, you know, terrible. And of course, something they enforce. This is considered an incentive by Amazon policy enforcement. Product review abuse teams. Speaker 2: Yeah, but yeah, in my case, I'm not I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not doing I'm not worried about it. Because I'm not doing anything on that side. And if they ever somebody somebody ever came and I've never done anything black hat at all. I like to know what the hell is going on. You know, I've been to Meetings of whether it's 20 black hat, the most black hat people in the building that you've ever seen in this thing. I'm like, my eyes and my ears are open. I'm like, my mind is blown on what they're doing. I'm like, holy cow, how do you have all these SOPs? And how do you know exactly what the limit is? Don't do, you know, 13 is a threshold. Don't go to 14 on whatever it may be. Speaker 1: They have it all down. Speaker 3: Those people had Amazon SOPs. They were just paying bribes to employees to get internal info, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they had that. Speaker 3: We know what was happening now from the guilty pleas and the indictments from last year. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's been some big indictments and some big things that have come down on that. And I think even one of the people that was indicted basically said, uh, F you. Speaker 1: Um, but it's, uh, went to Guam or something. Speaker 2: There's one in that big case that's still in India that they can't find. Speaker 3: Um, but yeah, there's international fugitives, fact of life, but it's not so much that you are going to get in trouble. It's that somebody who's gunning for you might, Make a report a couple of years ago. Nobody was even knew there were abuse Prevention teams let alone that you could report abuse now. Speaker 2: It's Coming out. Is that where that it's how does Amazon if I got it? Let's go back to the insert thing if I'm putting my insert in there and it's saying Get a free bottle of my supplement for you know in exchange for review or whatever is Amazon in their warehouse randomly just opening stuff up to see what you're doing or is it They randomly looking at the reviews where someone put a picture of it and talked about it and that just catching those words or is it somebody actually report a competitor most likely report title telling on you. Where are these leads coming from? Speaker 3: I mean most people that are reporting the abuse, they're buying from competitors. If you're making a valid report, you can buy from a competitor. It's not just straight up, you know, nefarious anti-competitive behavior. They take a picture of the insert and they send the picture to abuse prevention teams. Speaker 2: I know people have done that and it just goes on deaf ears. Speaker 3: They're probably doing it just by opening seller support cases or doing you know first rung of the ladder stuff and that will often fall on deaf ears. It's unfortunate that happens. But people who understand how to escalate this stuff, it won't fall on deaf ears. And they'll put the abuse prevention teams in position to take action on those accounts. Because they can go, I mean, you know, most, most of our clients, at least are 100% FBA, they can just go open up your inventory, and look at the insert themselves. I mean, it's not that difficult. The people who are reading your the abuse report aren't the ones opening it. But obviously, they can Do it internally. Speaker 2: What's the way to do that? Is there I know there's some links that are like abuse at this and abuse at that, but the abuse probably gets abused. Speaker 3: I mean, they're not going to take action if it's not a valid abuse report, if it looks like you're just sniping at somebody. We've heard of cases where they faked what the insert was like through Photoshop. They tried to make it look, well, they could say like, here's our order, there's a real order number, but the insert wasn't the one that was in there. They might've monkeyed with it or something. And maybe the person that opened the package and looked at the insert didn't notice that it wasn't quite the same thing. So, I mean, that has happened, but. If it's a valid abuse report, yeah, they're going to take action if they think your inserts are resulting in an unfair competitive advantage, you versus your competitor, or if they think you're deceiving buyers, negatively impacting buyer experience in any way, or if they think you're creating risk and problems for Amazon itself. I mean, Amazon's under the microscope right now. There's a reason why you keep reading articles or hearing about FTC and Amazon in the same sentence. Um, this is a big deal. The FTC has been cracking down. I think it was 2018 was the first time they came out with, Hey, there's a lot of artificially inflated product reviews on Amazon, or there's a lot of reviews, abuse on Amazon. It's been, you know, you're talking five, six years at this point. Speaker 2: So that's 2016, October 3rd, 2016 was D day. And this, that was back when, uh. Speaker 3: You remember the exact date, I'm very impressed. Speaker 2: I remember that date just like Pearl Harbor Day or that was the death day for Amazon sellers because on that day, Amazon said no more incentivized reviews because in the old days, it was no problem, give the product away for free or for a penny or whatever and as long as someone put a disclaimer in the review that they got this and this review is in exchange for their honest opinion for a product, you're totally fine and then FTC came down and it went away overnight. Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's a good point you make about the honest review. That used to irritate the hell out of me because if it's incentivized, it's by definition no longer honest. Speaker 1: Right, right, right. Speaker 3: So the idea that like, well, we did incentivize, but we only asked for an honest review. I was so grateful when that whole thing went away. And it doesn't really come up anymore, because it never made sense to begin with. And Amazon should have shut that down a long time ago. Speaker 2: And they wiped a ton of reviews away too off of that. Speaker 3: You know, what's worth mentioning about review wipes is they over wipe reviews. Sometimes they send emails. We're working with some brands who had a couple of ASINs where gray area, you know, there was heavy enforcement by Amazon abuse prevention teams. It was kind of a border borderline case, but they said, well, we're going to take your reviews away for a couple of ASINs. And then they ended up deleting them all. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of fact-checking in terms or double-checking in terms of, did we take away too many of the sellers reviews? We end up doing appeals for people like, hey, Remember this message you sent us? It's right here. You mentioned one ASIN, you deleted all the reviews for all these other ASINs. Do you have a reason for that? Do you have an explanation for that? And they were calling into account health or emailing executive seller relations or whatever. And the messaging coming back from Amazon was kind of like, I don't know, we'll go look into that. And then they would never get back to them. Or they would restore the reviews. We saw lots of crazy stuff in Q4 like that, where it was just like, they overstepped the bounds of their enforcement. Speaker 2: Sometimes the reviews mysteriously show back up too. Speaker 3: Sometimes they pop back up. I mean there are some people that hire us to report reviews abuse and Amazon takes them down for a day or two and then they pop back up and we have to do it again. Amazon never explains. Speaker 2: How does that pop back up? Someone just overrides somebody? Speaker 3: Good question. How does that pop back up? Lots of interesting internal questions I think around how sometimes that happens. Another big thing that's happened since I left and in the years since the indictment, which was in 2020 for. Consultants and service providers who are found to be paying bribes to employees, whether it was reinstated seller accounts that were suspended or attack one brand at the behest of another brand. Amazon was forced to silo their teams even more than they already had. They were already internally communicating poorly with each other. They were already very siloed. Amazon's famous for this, both inside the company and outside. They had to silo everyone even further and limit their access to certain kinds of information. Like account managers complain about this all the time. You mentioned earlier the account manager who showed the seller a copy of an internal message because they were so fed up and frustrated. Well, account managers are increasingly dragged into the fray for why is this happening to me? Am I being attacked by a competitor? Is an employee at Amazon doing something they shouldn't be doing against me? Well, Amazon had to keep account managers away from certain kinds of information because some account managers were being incentivized externally by other illicit factors and players from sharing info that they shouldn't have been sharing. And not just account managers, I don't mean to throw the SAS teams under the bus. There were lots of people working at Amazon who were doing things they weren't supposed to be doing. Financially incentivized or otherwise, so Amazon had to limit their access and keep their eyeballs away from competitor information or sales reports that they shouldn't have been viewing. Speaker 2: One of the things I always wondered was, you know, when a lot of these cases came down, these like the 2021, some of the others, a lot of the data You know, back when the brokers were actually selling, you know, you could get PPC reports and all kinds of stuff before Amazon started showing, you know, they're revealing more of that now with brand analytics and some of the different reports because they almost had to. Used to, you had to pay for that from somewhere on the inside. And that was always coming out of India or China. Why did the people, I never understood, why did the people in India or China have access to US stuff? Shouldn't that have been siloed? U.S. only and India only or something like that? Speaker 3: Well, the India teams, I mean, a lot of marketplace management, seller performance and beyond happens in India. Several teams were slowly, gradually shifted over there over the years. That started when I was still there, actually. But There's a misconception that this was all coming out of India and China. A lot of it was, but there was plenty of it happening with Seattle based teams too. And that was in the indictment. I mean, I don't know how many people sat down and read either the 38 page initial indictment or the sentencing that was this year or the guilty pleas and everything in between. It was clear that there were Seattle people involved. Those are financial crimes committed on US soil. And that's why the US attorney's offices were getting involved. To an extent, maybe they can get involved in things that are happening with overseas employees of a US-based company, but that's a lot harder to take action on. I mean, a lot of employees were simply terminated. They weren't really prosecuted for doing this, which is another thing a lot of people in the general public don't understand that maybe one or two employees were, you know, given a prison sentence, but not really. I mean, you're talking about hundreds to low thousands of employees globally, minimum, involved in this stuff. Speaker 2: Well, there's a big one they made a case of back in the last summer. Was it in Atlanta or something? There was someone. Speaker 3: Well, that's a case. I mean, there are other employees who are just simply stealing from the company, which has nothing to do with marketplace sellers or third party sellers. Yeah. There have been some employees that just rerouted returns and money into their own pockets. That was those people. Those people got long sentences, I think. What was interesting about the bribery corruption case was not only that It never went to trial, of course, everyone pled guilty with minimal fines, minimal jail time, prison time. But also, you never got to find out answers to all these questions like, were there executives in Seattle taking bribes that were six or seven figures? If you look through the indictment, and you go through a lot of the other anecdotal info out there, yeah, of course, that was going on. Speaker 2: What about all these guys like this is coming out of China, especially right now that they're doing like mirroring and shadowing accounts and they're doing all this crazy stuff. Does Amazon have enforcement teams that are going after After that as well, or is that just wait, they got to wait for someone to abuse. You know, there's vine, vine review abuse going on right now. And one of the strategies is for a while is, you know, send in 10 different accounts, 10 different products of the same product and put them on a different ASINs, give review 30 reviews on each and then merge them together into one. Shiny sellers, especially that have 10 accounts and nine of them are burner accounts. And the last one is the main account that keeps squeaky clean. What is Amazon doing? On those fronts, are they proactively trying to take steps? You would think they could flag these things pretty easily. You can look at a review and see if it's Vine merged because it's got seven different UPC codes on it. It's easy to spot. Speaker 3: It is. And maybe they don't have the tools, technology, they definitely could. They're a technology company or if they want to call themselves a tech company, they could devote sufficient engineering resources. Speaker 2: I mean, they're doing AWS on NFL games where they can tell you freaking something in the moment. I mean, like this guy just ran the speed and you know, whatever. I mean, they can do it if they want to do it. Speaker 3: They can do it if they, I mean, it's a trillion and a half dollar company. They can do it anyway. It's not like the technology doesn't exist. If they have the motivation, they can do it. I think the review harvesting, I mean, it is ridiculous that you can see listings that have been merged where the sixth, seventh, eighth page are reviews for a totally different product. I mean, that's so basic. You would think that they're kind of embarrassed by that and they're going to take action on it. The reason so many people are doing it is because enforcement has been light and lax and a lot of people are getting away with murder with that. They are taking action on some of it. If anyone's listening to this and wondering why they're not taking action on more of it, all I can say is use escalation channels because if you're doing low-level reporting on that, you're incentivizing Amazon to ignore you and you're wasting your time. And it hurts me to say that some people are really organized, put together lots of great spreadsheets and data and screenshots, and they're flushing them down the toilet. They're not using them in a way that gets it in front of the right people. So... If you send an email to abuse prevention teams, I mean, that's a starting point. And you have to persevere. You can't send one email and say, why aren't they doing anything? They never do anything. I'm going to forget it. And I'm going to give up. If Amazon thinks you're going to give up after one attempt or even two, let's say, then they'll ignore you because they're hoping you give up because they want you to go away. And they don't want to be buried in these. What you have to do is say, no, we're not going away. And if the team that's responsible for this, this is kind of a basic escalation concept for anything you're trying to do, even reinstating suspended accounts. If the people, let's say seller performance responsible for this, aren't reviewing it, aren't doing their jobs, go to another team and say, we've already been where we were supposed to do. We did what we were supposed to do. We gave you everything you asked for, or everything we know that we're supposed to give you, nothing happened. No one did anything. Somebody transferred it. They passed the buck. No one audited investigative quality. No one kept their eye on the ball. Everyone just kept going without even noticing that there was a huge gap in enforcement. So go to other teams, go to other executives, go to other people in the company who are responsible for maybe even multiple parts of managing the marketplace and tell them we were forced to go to you because XYZ didn't do what they were supposed to do. That alone is an escalation that would You know pay dividends if of course you go to the second team they don't take any interest go and go up another rung on the ladder eventually you'll find somebody who's interested that the people who report to them directly or the people who are adjacent to their teams. Aren't doing a good enough job to make their lives less miserable and now that's spilling over into them right. It's kind of like two countries are at war and it's spilling over into a third country. And now that country's life is miserable because the two countries are fighting with each other and it's dragging in a nearby country. Same concept at Amazon. If they are going to have to start reading those escalations, they have to spend time on it. They have to see that if they ignore an escalation, that it comes back on them negatively. Then they're going to be more interested because they're motivated in solving the problem, right? Everyone's motivated to make their lives less miserable. So if they find a way out of it, they're going to go back and try to solve it, you know, at the source. Speaker 2: So e-commerce, Chris, when someone calls you in the middle of the night, freaking out, what are some, what are a few of the big things that you help people that are listening deal with? So if they get into this situation, what are three, four or five of the main things that you guys are really adept at helping people work through and solve? Speaker 3: Yeah, we can help quickly with identifying the source of the problem. If they're not being clear about why they're suspended, sometimes people get two different messages in their performance notifications about why they're suspended. If they're not able to squeeze it out of account health reps, we help them do that. If they need an escalation just to determine what the hell is going on, we know how to do one of those quickly. It's not so much about rewriting plans of action anymore. I mean, if that's really what's going on, And they've done their due diligence and they figured out that their plan of action is where the battle will be fought. And it's missing a few things. Yeah, of course, we've done millions of those. We can sit down with them, help them rewrite it, get it in front of the right people, get it solved faster. The difference with us, I think, is that you come to us expecting that it's going to take days instead of weeks to fix or hours instead of days, depending on the nature of it, especially, you know, just coming out of Q4. If it really is something that takes weeks, Which I guess occasionally that's the case. You're talking about one or two weeks, not six weeks, not eight weeks. And I want you to call me in the middle of the night. This is a strange thing to say. I would prefer you do that instead of appealing something seven, eight, nine times completely the wrong way and letting six, seven, eight weeks pass, waiting to hear back from teams that have no interest in solving it. And then calling me and saying, here's my shovel. I dig myself a really deep hole and now I want you to dig out. Bother me early in the process, whether it's a phone call or an email, show us, even if you don't hire us to take over everything initially, show us what's going on, get a quick assessment. We've been through everything that could possibly be going on under the sun thousands of times. I can give you a quickie assessment. These are your choices. If you're deciding to handle it yourself, then fine. You're making a conscious business decision to handle something yourself and you just need some coaching and suggestions and advice. We won't take it personally if you don't want to bring us in, but don't say I want to handle it myself. Send in six or seven terrible appeals and then call out for help and say, well, I changed my mind now that I've been final worded. Now that Amazon doesn't take me seriously. Now I want Chris to fix me. I might be able to fix you. But why not involve us early in the process where we can at least give you your options? You know, one good thing about again, coming out of Q4 and being into early 2024. One of the great things about Q4 is that so much is on the line and the typical client we have is selling so many thousands per day of each ASIN or on their account that they bring us in earlier in the process because they are losing so much money and they are afraid That Amazon is drowning in appeals. I mean, everyone appeals twice as often, twice as many issues in Q4, right? That kind of makes it more likely that your appeal will be lost and misplaced and confused. And Amazon is very disorganized and inconsistent, right? So at least the good thing about Q4 is that people kind of hand us the keys to drive a little earlier in the process. But think about the value in doing that year round, not just in Q4, because Amazon won't take you seriously if you go to them and you send them an appeal and they look at it and within two seconds they realize you're guessing or you don't know what's going on or you're getting advice from somebody who's guessing and doesn't know what's going on. They're not going to bother reading it, right? You're disincentivizing them. from taking you seriously, which means they're not going to spend time on the appeal. So that's kind of one middle of the night call is, you know, make sure your damage assessment fits and makes sense before you start hastily planning how you're going to fix it. Speaker 2: So when I call you, what am I what should I be depending on the case? Is it a simple thing as as low as 500 bucks and a complex thing is five or 10 grand or what's a what's a range? Speaker 3: Not 10 grand closer to five if you're that's that's our full project rate in terms of priority hiring us to take over. 500 bucks. Yeah, we have one hour consults for this is, you know, interpretive services, strategic assistance. This is what's going on. Figure out if you want to write an appeal. If you do want to write an appeal, consider putting these things into it. The initial information is just show me the performance notification, which is the messaging Amazon sent you when they announced the restriction or announced the deactivation. If you've already appealed it, show me that. If you've already called account health to figure out what the hell is going on or why your appeal was rejected, tell me what they told you. Make sure you push them for rejection reasons or denial notes, not just some generic story that they give everyone when people call. So those three things, that's the best place to start. A fourth question would be, is this the first time you've been suspended for XYZ? Is this the first time your ASIN has gone down for XYZ? Because if it's a recurring problem, then obviously that impacts your strategy. If it's the fourth time it's happened, maybe something's going on that you need to address operationally. So those are the key pieces for what we start with. And then, yeah, we believe in self-determination. If it's something you think you can appeal and you've appealed successfully before, maybe you can use some components of a previous appeal now. Don't assume it's the same exact thing. Make no assumptions. That's another word of caution. Speaker 1: So, Chris, I think we could sit here. We've been going at this for over an hour. I think we could sit here probably and talk about this for quite some time. Speaker 2: There's so many aspects and avenues to go down. Speaker 1: But if someone wants to reach out and consult with you guys or hire you if they got a problem or to get ahead of a problem, what's the best way to do that? Speaker 3: Yep, so our intake form, our inbox is support, S-U-P-P-O-R-T at ecommercechris.com. That's a great place to send us copies of suspension notifications. You wrote an appeal, you want to take a quick look at it, send it there. I don't recommend people send us mountains of attachments. It's usually better to just show us the initial basic info and then we can tell you what we want to view from there. But yeah, I mean, what we are known for not just escalation strategy and high level strategies. We're also known for being responsive and for being attentive to the urgency because we've seen all those nightmares. We've seen the train wrecks. And even if you don't end up hiring us to fix something, I'd rather just know the nature of your situation and keep you away from bad decisions early in the process so that you can go make an informed decision. And there's nothing wrong with just running stuff by us quickly. We're happy to help, especially if you're a frequent listener of the AM PM podcast, that's a good thing to put in the subject line of an email. You know, maybe I'm a bit of a traditionalist. People do message me on WhatsApp and so forth, but email is a great way to start because you can put something like that in a subject line, account suspended, frequent listener, AM PM. I know that I need to get eyes on that. Contact quickly and respond, you know, if I can't respond right away within a couple of hours or at least before the end of that business day. Speaker 1: Awesome, Chris. So support at ecommercechris.com is the best way to reach out to him. Speaker 2: Chris, looking forward to maybe seeing you in May at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, and or at another event out there somewhere. Speaker 1: I really appreciate your time. Speaker 3: Seller Velocity Conference. Speaker 2: That's right. Speaker 1: Seller Velocity. Speaker 2: When is that? When's the dates on that one? Speaker 3: May 1st and May 2nd, New York City. Speaker 2: May 1st and 2nd in New York City. Speaker 1: So check Seller Velocity, May 1st and May 2nd in New York City. Speaker 2: Chris's event that he's doing, which is going to be, you got a pretty good lineup of people coming to that, right? Speaker 3: Yep. Yep. Bradley. Hooray. Speaker 1: All right. Unknown Speaker: Bradley's for one. Speaker 3: Um, and, uh, Liam McHugh speaking, she works with us on, she does types of consulting. No one does, which should be of interest in terms of brand registry, troubleshooting, listing and compliance, product and safety compliance. A lot of things that sellers assume they understand, maybe don't always understand. Um, Emma Schirmer, Tamir listing optimization. And Janelle Page is going to be our, our MC. Speaker 1: So awesome. Speaker 3: Oh, that's going to be wonderful. Speaker 2: And Janelle is the MC. She's speaking in Hawaii too. She's a hoot. Speaker 1: So here's an MC is going to, that's going to be a, everybody kick off their shoes and going to have some fun. The energy is going to be good. Speaker 3: Can't wait. Speaker 1: I can't wait, Chris. Speaker 2: Appreciate it, man. Speaker 3: See you soon. Speaker 1: So much to know when it comes to what's allowed, what's not allowed on Amazon, how to deal with it when you've either done something you shouldn't have or maybe you haven't. Maybe the competitors reported you for something. That's great information from Chris. Be sure to check out e-commerce Chris support at e-commerce chris.com. If you've got any problems with your account a day or night, they can help you out. Great guys over there at that company. Got another really killer episode coming next week with someone that is a billionaire actually has sold crazy amounts of companies. It's just a serial entrepreneur in products and digital stuff. It's going to be an awesome episode. Anybody that's an entrepreneur does not want to miss this episode. Give me some great stuff on mindset, on how building teams and a whole bunch of cool stuff. So don't miss next week's episode. Before we do that, I've got some words of wisdom for you. This is a filter that I use sometimes when I'm making decisions. I always ask myself, how much can I influence the outcome after the initial choice is made? How much can I influence the outcome after the initial choice is made? Have a great week. We'll see you again soon. Unknown Speaker: Music.