Amazon Operations Made Simple for 2025 Growth with Lesley Hensell – Episode 43 of the Agency Operators Podcast

Amazon Operations Made Simple for 2025 Growth with Lesley Hensell – Episode 43 of the Agency Operators Podcast Speaker 2: Welcome, everybody, to the Agency Operators Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Lesley Hensell of Riverbend Consulting. Nice to meet you, Lesley. Good to see you here. Speaker 1: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Speaker 2: Awesome. So Riverbend Consulting, been around a little while. I've seen you guys in the space quite a bit. You guys do the hard work. All the stuff that it's a little dirty, right? Sometimes because you're dealing with suspensions and listings going down. I mean, you're basically meeting sellers at a time when they're just like really upset and having a hard day because they're just frustrated dealing with like the Probably the most difficult thing that Amazon can throw at you. So before we dive in, I would love to hear a little bit about your story. What made you want to start and kind of co-found Riverbend Consulting? What led you down that path to opening that business and how has it been over the last couple of years? Speaker 1: Well, that's a great question because so many people say, of all the things I could do around Amazon, you do the thing I would not want to do, which is true. It's a really rough part of the Amazon ecosystem. So way back before I was involved in Amazon, I was actually an old school business consultant. And when I say old school, I mean like working for a regional accounting firm, Working on SBA loan packages and helping people to reorganize their operations and fix their production line and, you know, the really boring kind of stuff like that that I find very exciting. It's really fun to me. Most people wouldn't love doing. And then I actually got into selling on Amazon for several years. I have a special needs kiddo who is now a young adult, but at the time was not doing well in school. I decided to homeschool him, but that would mean my income for the family was gone. So I found out about selling on Amazon. And so while homeschooling him, we started a family business selling on Amazon. And then one day he was ready to go back to school and I was like, okay, what do I do now? And I'd been to a few Amazon conferences and met people who'd been in trouble and they needed a plan of action. Well, plan of action is something I've written hundreds of before in my other career life. So it just seemed like a really great fit. To be able to do the same kind of work for people selling on Amazon as I've done for traditional businesses before. And then one day I was introduced to a client who was panicking. He sold health and beauty, had a really great thriving business. Amazon had suspended him. He had tried to write plans of action. They had failed. And I got him back up in one appeal letter. He was so happy. He said, I've got to meet you. We've got to turn this into a bigger agency business. So we did. So that's my partner, Joe Zalta. And seven and a half years later, we have 100 employees at Riverbend Consulting. And we have helped thousands of clients to get their ASINs and their accounts back up and selling. Speaker 2: Wow, that's amazing. I love that story. So, I mean, it's very organic, right? You start out as a seller just out of necessity and then you have a problem or you meet somebody with a problem and then you're just like, there's something here because we're not the only ones dealing with this. So interesting how an industry can be created just as like a byproduct of You can almost call it like inefficiencies within the Amazon ecosystem, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure at this point you guys have seen everything. So just curious, so you guys only do audits and deal with like kind of suspensions on that kind of level or you do more? Because I'm just wondering what do 100 employees do? Speaker 1: The vast majority of the work that we do is in the account health space. We have people who come in, we call them our walk-in clients, who come in because their account is suspended or one of their hero ASINs is suspended. But we also have clients who are larger sellers or they sell in a particularly challenging segment and they just don't want to deal with account health. So, they've completely outsourced it to us. We can get access to the account and to the right email addresses for them. We do everything. It's completely hands-off. We learn about their business, what the problems might be, and then whenever Amazon takes down an ASIN, we appeal it, we do the executive escalations, we keep their account healthy, and that way they don't get suspended. So, imagine you're in a space like supplements. Or you're in electronics, anything that's really competitive, you have ASINs go down every day. So that can keep a lot of people very busy. We also do customer service messaging for people who don't want to use the Amazon customer service messaging, which is a lot of sellers because honestly, it's not great. Auditing, like you said, reimbursements for people, especially on inbound shipments. But most of the business is just keeping those accounts healthy and running. Speaker 2: How about unauthorized sellers? Speaker 1: So you mean keeping them off of listings? Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems to be a big issue that we run into a lot. Probably the number one, we don't run into as many suspensions as much as we do, hey, there's somebody who's winning the buy box who just somehow found our product through the chain of random liquidations or just like the supply chain gets kind of leaks somewhere and then they just end up with like 20 units and or a hundred units or a thousand units or whatever it may be and now they're kind of like winning the buy box and we want to get them off because it's a recurring problem. That's what we see more. Speaker 1: Right, we've done some work with clients who have unauthorized sellers, especially if it is more in the counterfeit space or selling generic wrong product. For someone who they're actually selling legit product, we usually refer those to partners and to law firms because there's a really fine line you got to walk there. If someone is selling legit goods, it matches and it's in good condition, there's only so much you can really do. It's more when they're selling in the wrong condition or selling the mismatched products that you can really go after them legally and ethically. Speaker 2: Okay. So just dishing out those cease and desist letters, you can't just do that, right? I mean, there could be some legal backlash if you just go that route, right? Speaker 1: Well, and we've seen it with sellers and even with law firms. We had a client that was a law firm who lost their brand registry access. And it was because they had been too aggressive with the cease and desist they were sending through the messaging system outside of brand registry. And then inside brand registry, they were reporting products that were actually a match. They were reporting products that they weren't counterfeit. They weren't in bad shape. There was nothing wrong. They just didn't like it that people were selling. So if they want to do that and they want to send someone a cease and desist letter snail mail, go for it. But if you want to get really aggressive and threatening through Amazon's messaging system, you're going to find yourself in trouble. And if you abuse brand registry, you can lose brand registry. So that's why you really have to walk that line with brand registry. Brand registry suspensions are challenging just like everything else. We do a lot of those suspensions. There is a crazy thing though. Amazon also suspends people's brand registry or they limit their usage of it. So you might not be able to add a new brand or add new ASINs or Add new users because they'll say you're being abusive in brand registry and they limit your ability to use it. But so much of that enforcement is false positives. And a lot of it is like some other guy you don't know who happens to have the same set of brand registries you do. And so they think that you're working in tandem and that guy's abusive and you're not. And so they'll suspend your brand registry or your ability to use it. So we do quite a bit of work in the whole brand registry space, helping people get their privileges back. Speaker 2: So in many cases, you're just seeing it being a situation. It's not even their fault. It's just a residual effect of some other action happening and then nobody even knows what's going on until you start diving in. With that being said, is there some type of secret sauce? Is there any trick here like knowing somebody inside of Amazon or is it really just shining the light knowing how to communicate with them efficiently so you're getting the job done or maybe a little bit of both? Speaker 1: It's really knowing how to work their systems and their processes, and I'll tell you why. A few years ago, there was a big scandal and quite a few prosecutions of people in the Amazon so-called consulting space. I say so-called consulting because, I mean, if you're paying people bribes to get what you want, is that really consulting? No, I would argue it's not. So what these consultants had done is find people inside Amazon who were willing to take cash payments. To do their bidding, and that could be to reinstate an account or to shut off a competitor's account, take down competitor's ASINs, turn yours back on, give you permissions or ungatings or whatever it might be for cash payments. Some of this was to Amazon employees in China, in India and in the United States. I mean, it was everywhere. And there are people who now have felony records and ankle monitors and home confinement because they took part in this. So because of that, the, hey, I've got a friend at Amazon is really dangerous. Like the employees at Amazon don't want to do anything to quote unquote help anyone because they can get in trouble. It could look bad even if you're not doing anything wrong. So really, almost all of what you need to accomplish with Amazon in the seller performance world, you can do going through the right channels and with the right escalations. It is really frustrating. You feel like you're beating your head against the wall sometimes, but Amazon has this escalation culture. They actually like to hear from people in different executives, different executive groups. They want to hear your problems. And correct their internal processes by hearing from those problems. So that's how we help clients. We help them to write the best appeal possible. And then if it doesn't work, we escalate internally at Amazon until we get someone to fix it. Speaker 2: Okay. And that's the situation with any case, regardless of what the issue is, right? Whether it's like a listing down on a countdown or even just a problem with your listing. That you want to get resolved. It's the same situation where you're opening a case, waiting for a response. Usually the response comes back not giving you the outcome that you want, right? Nine times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100. And so then at that point you say, all right, Amazon, could you please escalate it? And then hoping that you get somebody that's maybe U.S. based or maybe that does understand your problem and you just kind of repeat that process back and forth until you get the resolution. Speaker 1: And that's where we skip to using email addresses instead of going through cases. Because when you ask Amazon, like when you ask an employee at Amazon to escalate through cases, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, or they refer it to the wrong team. I had something in my own account last week, it was so frustrating, and they referred it to the completely wrong team and then sent me a message that was like, we can't help you, you sent this to the wrong team. I'm like, oh, I didn't send it to the wrong team. Seller support sent it to the wrong freaking team. I didn't do it. So I actually then wrote a lovely email to my first line escalation address that we use internally at Riverbend and you know what, the next day they fixed my problem. So, yeah, and it was an obvious error. What was nice about, okay, so I have to tell you what it was because everyone will be like, oh, I've had that happen or my friend had that happen. You know how we have the new Inform Act thing where you have to go confirm and so you read, they call it recertify every year? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So what you really do is you like look at your address and you say, yeah, it didn't change and you click recertify. So I did that on time like I was supposed to and they suspended my account and said I didn't verify. And the crazy part was there was even a screenshot I sent them where it showed the little green check mark saying verified, verified, your verification was complete. So I got on chat and said, hey, hey, you said my verification is complete. Here's the screenshot. And they said, no, you didn't do it right. You didn't give us what we needed. Here, click this link. So I clicked the link. It took me to a screen that said you're verified. Went in this circle two times with them, asked them to escalate. They sent me to some team that had to do with software. And I'm like, what are you even talking about? The software team? I have nothing to do with. So then I wrote an escalation and said, this is crazy. I've been a seller 15 years. I did the recertification. You've locked down my account. And the next day it was turned back on. Speaker 2: So ridiculous. It's almost like you're like, Am I talking to, it can't even be a robot because the robot would understand. It's almost like it's just like the lack of competency or training or something, right? It's very confusing. I've seen situations like that so many times where there's just like you feel like you're going bananas because there's just no logic there. This thing with the Inform Act, in my opinion, is very extreme because everybody gets a deactivation notice at the top of their account because they didn't, like you said, they didn't click confirm that they're still living in the same place. I mean, some of these policies are just absurd. Anyhow, I wanted to ask, given all that you're seeing right now with With the cases that you manage and just the different people that you speak with, I'm curious, what do you see 2025? How do you see that playing out? Is there going to be a lot of change in terms of how Amazon's working? Because last year was a really big year. We saw a lot of new fees come in and other types of regulations that seem to be getting tighter in some ways because the playing field is changing. Macroeconomics are playing a role as well. So I'm just curious, you know, what are your thoughts on how 2025, how do you think we're going to end the year? Speaker 1: Well, I heard through a little birdie a few weeks ago that Amazon is actually reorganizing all of its enforcement departments globally. And over the last couple of years, one of the things that sellers have seen a lot more of is this enforcement where Amazon says you're selling stolen goods, even if you're not. They call it all kinds of different names. They label inventory with different things, but they're trying to shut down stolen goods on the platform, which there's a lot of. I'm sure you've all, everyone has seen the news stories where there's all the people who like go into all the CVS's in California or in Southern California and steal everything. Well, they don't take it home. They take it all to a warehouse and they sort it and they sell it on fricking Amazon. That's what they're doing. And so Amazon is really trying to shut that down. And that's why you're seeing a lot more requests for like chain of custody on your invoices. And they they are asking for invoices more often. And telling people their invoices aren't acceptable more often. So this reorganization, I'm interested to see how that works because there's another thing at play here that's going to affect all of Amazon, not just enforcement. And that is their return to work decree. So last year they told everyone they have to go back to work in an office. And there was a lot of pushback, especially since some people at Amazon We have worked remotely since way before COVID. And many of them work in locations where there are no Amazon offices. So they would have to relocate in order to be in an office and Amazon is not paying for their relocation. Which is crazy because like someone approved them to move to Minnesota or wherever where there's no office, right? Or like I know people who live in I'm from North Dakota where there used to be offices and now there aren't. And so to maintain their employment, they would have to move with Amazon not paying for it. So, and then I think, you know, a lot of people are like me. I've worked from home for like 25 years. So I, I don't, I don't understand this whole office thing. I know other people love it all forward if you like it. For me, I'm like, what is this office idea? They're going to have a lot of people leave. And unfortunately, it's going to be their experienced people when they find different jobs, they're going to leave. So I'm, I'm really unsure. In past years, I've had a lot of opinions. How are things going to go with enforcement this year? This time, I'm kind of at a loss. Because if you say you're going to reorg globally, but then a lot of your people, you're either riffing them by laying them off by saying you have to return to office and you know they won't, or you really think they're all going to come back and they're not. I'm just not sure how they deal with that. I am guessing they're going to do a lot more automated enforcement. And the bad thing about that is that the false positive rates are crazy high. And as much as everyone wants to say that AI is brilliant and machine learning is awesome, a lot of this is very subtle. As you all know, people get ASINs taken down because someone files false complaints against them. Competitors lie about them. There's a lot of subtlety to this. You also can't assume that all invoices look the exact same as past invoices that have come from a certain vendor. And so you use a machine to compare the two and say, oh, this one's fake. There's so much more complexity and subtlety to it. I really think it's going to make the whole escalation function a lot more important sadly. I really don't like that. It hurts everybody. It hurts average sellers. An average seller should not have to call me and pay me to help them with one of these basic issues, but that's what ends up happening. Speaker 2: Crazy. Yeah. I mean, I think their approach is just, all right, we have way more problems than we have employees, so let's just throw this automated system at it. Obviously, things are not going to always work out. A lot is going to slip through the cracks, and so a portion of those people will just accept it, and a majority will not, and then they'll just start reaching out through cases, and we'll just catch them that way. And that's easier than going the other way, which is like our employee team is going to go out and try to deal with these cases manually from the very beginning. Although that's what we would like, that's just not possible with the size that they are. So I understand that. Hearing that so much of their experienced staff is going to be probably going away, that just adds so much more difficulty for everybody. I agree. But It's politics. When you get to that type of size, what can you do? Anything else that you see for 2025 that really stands out to you? Speaker 1: So it is so important more than ever that people really keep their accounts squeaky clean because of all the things we just talked about. And there are a few tasks I would recommend. That everyone hates, but I really think they're super important and you can have a VA do some of these. One of them is Amazon has to be super aggressive right now about things like recalled products, safety issues. It's still winding through the courts if Amazon is ultimately who you sue if you buy a product that hurts you on Amazon. Right now, as it stands, the answer is yes, that hasn't gone to the Supreme Court yet, but they're kind of gearing up for that and then being ultimately responsible. Because of that, they are going to be really aggressive on enforcement for things like recalls. So if you sell something or if you sold something in 2024 and you're not going to sell it again, you need to delete that from your inventory. If there's like one piece of advice I can convince people to follow, it is to clean out all of the old stuff that they don't intend to sell again. I'll tell you why. If you leave an ASIN in your inventory, even if it's got a quantity of zero or it's closed, but it's still sitting there, Amazon assumes you intend to sell it again. If they had ever been a seller, if the people who ran this organization were ever sellers, they would know that is not true. We're just lazy and we leave it there. Or what if we get a great deal? Yeah, we'll sell it again. But we're not thinking of it as we intend to sell it again. We just don't clean it up. When you leave it in there, you're at risk for IP violations, you're at risk for recall notices, safety violations, all kinds of things that come up with this product in the future. They will enforce it on you even if you haven't sold it for three years. So you're just asking for issues. So clean out all of that old stuff. And I know for some of you who are like me, once upon a time, you've got like dozens and dozens of pages full of products you haven't sold in years. Just delete them all. That's really important with the We're going into here and also, like you said, where Amazon just doesn't have time, they're just going to enforce against everyone. They're not going to take the time to write the script to say it's only sellers from this period of time to that period of time. They're going to say, oh, this ASIN blew up. Everybody's out. You don't need that in your life. That's really important. Sellers, and in a lot of cases, their agencies too, have got to have a really good repository for documentation. Now, I've been a small business owner of one kind or another for more than 15 years and I know that all of y'all are like me and we all suck at filing invoices and having them neat and clean and scanning all of our receipts. We're all terrible at it because we want to go make a deal and make some money, right? Speaker 2: That's it. Speaker 1: But you've got to find a system. So make 2025 your year to find a system, whether that is when invoices come into your inbox, you auto sort them into a certain folder if you know it's your invoice from your vendor, right? Or when you have actual paper receipts and documents, you put them in a box and someone takes them somewhere to get them scanned. Or you mail them to one of those services that scans them. I don't care how you do it because I promise Amazon is just going to get more aggressive about documentation, including safety, all of your testing docs. If you sell anything that goes on or in the body, you've got to make sure all of your testing is up to date. Most cases, that's two years or three years. Can't be older than that. You've actually got to have it. It's not enough to have done it at some point in time. You have to produce it so you can send it to them. So this is so, I mean, if you can even call it advice, it's so boring and it's not what anyone wants to hear, but you've really just got to document the heck out of everything you do because they're getting super aggressive and their version of aggressive is show me your papers. So you better have papers to show. Unknown Speaker: Wow. Crazy. Speaker 1: This is like the most boring thing ever. Clean out your inventory and find your invoices. But seriously, I can tell you from the experiences I have with clients on the phone crying, which is like a weekly occurrence for me to have strangers, new friends who are new clients who are on the phone with me crying because their account is down. You do not want to lose your livelihood because you couldn't find your stuff. That would just be really stupid. And I think that is someone who sometimes can't find their stuff. So this is not me pointing fingers at others and not back at myself. But the better organized you are, the better off you're going to be. You can't just wait till it's time to file taxes to get all your stuff in order. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm guilty of that. I'm trying to fix all that as well. Having a team on the accounting side and finance side helps a lot. Having good infrastructure from the software side has helped me. So, personally, we use Sellerview and A2X for our accounting and Sellerview is just kind of like the hub where we're keeping everything, including like, yeah, as soon as I get an invoice, you know, send it to my people, they'll upload it into Sellerview and it's just like nicely, neatly organized there with all the rest of the cogs and everything. Having systems is the best way to get anything done. Otherwise, you're just like, Oh, I got to remember. I got to remember. And then you don't remember because something else comes in, then you lose the momentum and you get out of rhythm. And then you're just like, Oh, it's already piling. Oh, it's already piling. That's how we don't get stuff done. To your first point, actually, the reason why I said earlier, it's a crazy thing is because I had that experience not in the U.S. and Canada. I have a shampoo company. I shipped some units out to Canada some years back. I tried to sell over there. I sold through some inventory and then I never sent again. I think it was just the price didn't work out or whatever it was. But the listings were up. And for years, I just kept getting all of these like regulation notices, violation notices. And I'm just like, what do you guys want from me? Like the product doesn't sell over there. And that was the reason why I was just, the listing was just kind of hanging there. They don't know whether I'm gonna ship in or not. So they're just like, all right, let's, you know, you get piled in with our enforcement messages. And so Canada and they have their own health system over there. So there's certain paperwork that you have to provide I want to ask you something. So there's in the back end of the listing, I'm very fascinated right now with back end of listings. Why? Because the algorithm is changing. I see it. And intent-based search is coming in. And I'm trying to always find ways to kind of get ahead in terms of how can we optimize for that new change and all of that. So same thing, there must be some way to get ahead of Amazon with the regulations. Some listings have the ability to upload some documents. the backend ahead of time. So before, you know, they're going and asking you for your SDS, you're uploading it into the backend. So then they don't have to ask. Speaker 1: Highly recommend, especially if, like you mentioned, you can create some kind of a process where you have a VA or someone who, like if you have batches that are delivered with new testing, right? A lot of people who do batch manufacturing for things in any kind of a consumables area, just have that VA upload the new one every time. It can Let's eliminate some problems. And, you know, imagine, if you will, that you are someone at Amazon Enforcement in the safety group and you have three different listings served up to you and with, you know, potential safety issues. And one of them already has all the documents uploaded in the back end that you can just glance at. And then the other two have nothing. Which ones are you going to pull the trigger? Make it easy for them to ignore you. And the way you make it easy for them to you, you never want Amazon's attention. And the way to make it easy is just to serve up those documents to them. And it's kind of the same thing with the account health dashboard. You know, actually go in there once a week, depending on the size of your account, if you're huge every day, but you know, most of us normal people go in there once a week. And if anything has popped up where there's a complaint or they took down an ASIN, always respond. Even if you don't have exactly what they want, always respond. Years ago, I would tell people don't do that because it was actually better if you didn't have the best documentation or you didn't think you would get the ASIN back up, just let it go. Not the way things are right now and the way they're enforcing now. Always respond. Make it clear you're a real person. They're very invested in getting rid of accounts that aren't real people or that aren't people actively working the accounts or that are a front for something else. So if you are uploading your SDS sheets, actively, then you're not just a front for something else. Okay, this is where you have to you have to think like a bad guy. So most of us in the business world, we're not thinking like bad guys. But there are a lot of bad guys out there who use Amazon as a money laundering mechanism. And anyone who's watched a good mob movie knows that the money laundering mechanism needs a front. Right? You're a concrete company. You're a restaurant. Restaurants, laundromats, ironically, Great fronts for money laundering. Well, Amazon is also a great front for money laundering, but you need a product or two. You need some legitimate business in there. So when you're active in your account, you're actively managing things, you're changing up your listings, you know, they're just going to pass you by because you don't look like some bad guy. And I know that sounds nuts to people, But y'all, there is extortion on Amazon, money laundering on Amazon. There are threats of violence via messaging between sellers on Amazon. There is all kinds of crazy. So the more non-crazy and normal business guy or gal you look, the easier it is for them to just leave you alone. Speaker 2: I love that. I mean, that's as simple as you can put it, right? And I've seen some of that stuff like on LinkedIn or somewhere else. There's crazy stuff happening. I mean, there's people standing, I remember during COVID times, people were standing at ports, waiting for like, that's my container, and then paying off dock people. Or like there was stories about huge trucks of like supplements being stolen. And then you remember that story? And then they were like tracking it down, which warehouse it was. It was like a whole investigation. And it was, I mean, they're selling millions, right? Like whenever there's money, like think about, I always think about like, there's places in the world where they would do really bad things for small sums of money. And here you have Amazon, which is processing billions. And so naturally, it's just gonna attract that type of thing, right? And it's not that hard to sell on Amazon. I mean, it's hard to make money on Amazon. It's not hard to sell necessarily. As long as you have a product that has some level of demand existing, you build a basic brand, you hire somebody to help you, you can move the needle to some extent. Most of these companies are losing money, but they don't care because they're just trying to funnel it through. I've heard of people in China using Amazon as a way to actually buy up real estate in the US. And kind of, you know, just like funneling. It's crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah, there was what you mentioned about the supplements. I actually have a client. That is a long-term client of ours, a really great company. And they have, it's not really supplements, but it's in that health space. It's like something you'd buy at the drugstore. And they fell victim to the scam where people are somehow getting the paperwork from a carrier. So your stuff lands at, it's usually at Port of LA. And that's where a huge amount of this has happened. So your shipment lands at Port of LA and you hire a carrier who's going to pick it up and they're going to take your container to an Amazon warehouse. Well, somewhere along the way, someone gets that information that the carrier would give to get the I'm here to get the container. So the sheet that they provide to say, I'm here to pick up this container. And then they'll even, you know, the little, the little numbers and letters, it has like a license number and the numbers on a truck. They'll even put those on a truck. They'll just buy those stickers at Home Depot and stick them on the truck and they'll go pick up someone's load with the paperwork and leave. And so that's what happened to my client who had launched a new product and it was the first load of a brand new product but with a nationally known brand name, which was the killer. It was the first load of it going into an Amazon warehouse. So he doesn't have any and all of a sudden there's 25 sellers. So, whoever stole the goods then did whatever they do, what swap meets online sales on Facebook Marketplace, however they get rid of this stuff, right? And sold it off, you know, multiple cases to all these different sellers and so we had to work with them to get through to Amazon Global Security to get all those listings taken down and we got, I'm sure many of those companies or the sellers accounts were suspended because they couldn't show anything. It was literally bought off the back of a truck, right? But this scam of how they're stealing stuff out of these shipping yards, it is now common. There's even an entire task force with the LA Sheriff's Department because I have another client I've been working with on the same issue, same thing happened to them. There's a task force with the LA Sheriff's Department just around this. Speaker 2: Crazy, that's how common it is. Speaker 1: But how hard is it for the guys at the shipping yard when they've got the document, so they're probably using some insider that they're paying off to give them the document through the exchanges where these guys post, I need this load, and they bid on the load. So they're either getting it there, probably from some insider, and then they go put the fake numbers on the truck. I mean, how do you detect that? Speaker 2: Yeah, fire everybody and hire new staff. Speaker 1: I guess so. It's absolutely crazy. So yeah, who knew that the dark side of Amazon could be so sexy, but there is some interesting stuff that goes on. So the more you look like just a normal person trying to make a living, the better off you are. It's just like on X, formerly Twitter X. They even tell you when you're waiting for them to verify your account. If you actually interact with other accounts and you like things and you comment, we know you're real, so we'll verify you faster. Think of it that way. It's the same thing. You just have to look like a real person who isn't trying to rip anyone off. Speaker 2: And with AI, I mean, it just gets even crazier, right? Like the risk of not being a real person goes up exponentially. So I think that'll just become more and more important. Okay, so key takeaways. Be a real person. Try to be under the radar. Don't do anything weird that might raise red flags. I mean, I think that's an obvious one, but just be as normal and basic as you can and delete all of your dead listings out of your catalog and be compliant. Speaker 1: Manage all your documentation. Get all those invoices in order. Have stuff where you can find it so you can answer them timely. Speaker 2: Cool. I mean, these are some great nuggets of gold, Lesley. Thank you for sharing with us. Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me on. Speaker 2: It's been great talking to you. Any final comments or thoughts you want to share before we close the stream? Speaker 1: I know there are a lot of folks out there who feel discouraged right now because there has been so much change at Amazon. But as someone who's been in the ecosystem for 15 years, I can just tell you, there's always change and there's always a way. So just go find your way. Speaker 2: Thanks, Lesley. I appreciate it. Thanks everyone for watching. Take care. Bye now.