EP #303] [ENG] - How to navigate Amazon suspensions in 2025 - Or Shamosh

EP #303] [ENG] - How to navigate Amazon suspensions in 2025 - Or Shamosh Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where I relate to Amazon FBA Private Label and Ecommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy and today we bring you another special guest. His name is Or Shamosh. I'm Or Shamosh and he's the founder and CEO of Asset Compliance Group, which is a company that specializes on anything that has to do effectively around issues that you might encounter with your selling journey on Amazon. This comes down to compliance, suspension, issues with your listings, things that we know are the worst nightmare of most Amazon sellers out there. So today we're gonna be having a quick conversation about, you know, what some of the things are happening lately around that era in the Amazon space. And also we're gonna briefly touch in terms of what is happening when it comes to potentially the opportunity to start exiting brands. Again, because I know Or has a lot of experience when it comes to also buying a brand. So I'm very keen to hear his take on that. So Or, it's a pleasure to have you in the show. How are you doing? Speaker 1: Definitely. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. A real pleasure to join. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. We just met actually two weeks ago in Prague. We had a lot of time. We were just having a quick conversation that we had too much networking and we had to take a break. But that's usually the case on these events. Like at the same time, you know, if you're not used to networking, it can get overwhelming very fast. But at the same time, we had such a nice experience. And we pretty much were networking with, you know, all the top people in the space. And also there were a lot of sellers there. So it was cool. So let's get started with the show. I think let's start with a quick maybe intro from you in case somebody don't know you. And then we go from there. Yeah. Speaker 1: Sure, wonderful. So my name is Or Shamosh. I've been around since 2016. I started as an Amazon seller and quite quickly, like, unfortunately, like many others, I got suspended. And I tried to look around for solutions to what I can do. Didn't really find any solution. Fast forward, started an appeal company. So being around providing appeal services for almost a decade now, dealt with almost 4,000 cases successfully. So there is that. In 2019, the company got sold and I founded an Amazon aggregator. It's still a thing. It's a little bit difficult. It's a complex niche, but it's definitely still a thing. We are around $20 million revenue, owning seven brands. And today I'm mainly focusing on helping people either avoid or prevent issues. That's our goal, I think, not to get suspended. That's the most important thing. And unfortunately, if eventually you are getting suspended, to resolve it as quick as possible. Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, I think, first of all, the aggregators, I think it's been such an interesting journey, right? I remember years ago, like there was such a big thing in the space. And now, unfortunately, there are not many left. And that shows as well, you know, the expertise that you're bringing to the table, because I think most of them had A lot of struggle when it comes to management and actually handling those brands. And a lot of them actually struggle a lot with suspensions and things like that, compliance. So I'm sure when you were doing the aggregator yourself, You had that like hidden card, we can call it, that gave you a huge advantage, you know? Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. That was a big advantage for us to being able to avoid most of the common issues that people face now. I think the issue with most of the aggregators was that they were financial guys. They weren't Amazon people. There were great financial guys who didn't know about Amazon's operations and we saw how it went. Speaker 2: Yeah. In fact, something I want to mention around that and just to jump on the top is I think that's where most people essentially struggle when it comes to Amazon is that the thing that having an Amazon brand It's like buying real estate that if the brand is already selling and performing, you just buy, you maintain and you flip it. But unfortunately, the detail and the real, I would say, unique element that will make the brand keep succeeding is how you operate the brand from inside. Everything from if you keep doing product development, if you're doing PPC and all of that. So that's something I'm sure we can have a conversation more down the line. And today's show. So let's start regarding the first thing that you mentioned, which is, you know, suspensions and everything people are encountering. I know this usually It's evolving, especially with the usage of AI and other tools out there than now that weren't present before. So the type of suspension and complaint issues that people are experimenting are evolving as well. Also, as Amazon makes their system more robust. So I guess what I'm trying to get with this is let's start with what are some of the maybe the new type of suspensions or issues you are seeing. So it's experimenting. That wasn't the case before. Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay, so first a little bit of a background about suspensions. We categorize them into three main things. There are the legal issues. Which are trademarks, patents, copyrights, things like that. There are the regulatory issues that are subject to regulatory bodies such as the FDA, EPA, DEA, selling drugs, selling products, selling foods, medical supplements, things like that. And there are the Amazon-wise issues, which are Amazon's guidelines. It's mainly so-called made-up rules, how you should write the title. Soon they will start to enforce the 200 characters title, how to write the bullet points, how the main image should look like. So there are mainly these things now. Amazon, I have a lot of things to say about how they are enforcing things, but fortunately, and I'm saying it as a very positive thing, they are improving themselves all the time. Now, I know getting suspended is a horrible thing. They don't communicate. They don't tell you what you got suspended for, but from the inside, from seeing literally thousands of cases over almost 10 years, And seeing how they change things, it starts to become more and more in favor of the sellers in regards to how they suspend, how they communicate. And also obviously the false positive flags. So the AI tools that they are implementing, they actually had them for a while now because algorithms are in the essence some sort of AI. But obviously now with all the changes, they are improving it more and more. So, so far, the algorithms scanned the markets. And suspended based on different tools. And that was horrible that had so many errors. People got suspended for nothing for so many false positive things. And with Amazon improving the algorithms, mainly with AI, I actually see an improvement and I actually see them suspending less. So that's great news for sellers, I think. And also, they are much easier with the simple appeals. For example, if you are, I won't talk yet about Section 3, about inauthentics, about supply chains, not things like that. I'm talking about the usual things that people can get suspended for. Most of the issues now these days can be resolved by yourself because Amazon made that process much more easier to do. And so these are the good news. Now, to your question, what I've recently seen, now that we have this background, and again, some people who might be listening to me will say, hell no, Amazon is horrible to deal with. I agree. I know. It's a nightmare. It's completely frustrating. The support is useless with all due respect. There are a lot of issues to resolve, but I'm talking about the trend of what I'm seeing, about how this improves, how We can resolve issues faster, how people by themselves can resolve issues, how less of false positive flags we are seeing. So overall, it's a trend. It is getting important, but obviously there are still the nightmare cases. So now that we have this background, The most common thing that I've seen these days are actually the second category that we talked about, the regulatory issues. Because the FDA puts a lot of pressure on Amazon to enforce either in the US and in the UK. In the UK, it will be the applicable regulatory body. And they mainly seen it on supplements because there were a lot of Bad actors who manipulated things, who forged certificate of analysis, who made up claims about their ingredients and things like that. And obviously, it's a supplement. You eat it. It affects your body. It needs to be highly regulated. And Amazon came and say, OK, stop. Let's not count anymore on third-party certificates and let's have it something internally. I won't get too much into the process of that but basically what happens is that these days I'm seeing so many issues with legitimate sellers getting suspended because Amazon is simply over enforcing now sure okay it's justifiable because there are many bad actors but unfortunately Amazon is carpet bombing it and it affects Everybody. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the issue with these things, and you mentioned some of the automations and the AI that now Amazon is using to flag some of these things, is sometimes I feel at the same time that's an opportunity to reverse engineer and prepare in advance to not get flagged by these systems. Because sometimes if you know what the system is looking for and you make sure you don't trigger anything, you avoid the suspension. So what I'm trying to say is, is there any kind of maybe checklist or procedure people should now do to go to, you know, a series of confirmations to make sure the listings are not going to flag or anything? Is there maybe a blueprint that you guys do internally as well? How you try to prepare in advance? Speaker 1: So that's a very good question because that's exactly what we are trying to teach people. Don't use our services. Don't come to us once you are suspended. Try to prevent those suspensions because most of them are preventable. So there are a few main things that are causing these suspensions that you need to know, but the common thing to all of them is keywords. And this is what I always talk about. Keywords are the number one thing that is getting you suspended. Will it be under the legal issues, regulatory or Amazon policy? Keywords. So you can get great index, so you will be on the top of the search and things like that. But you need to be very careful about what you write there. If we will take the example of the supplements that I just gave, if you will write medical claims, okay, for example, reduces anxiety. If you will write pesticide claims, antibacterial, and many other examples, you can get suspended as a medical product, as a pesticide. And no matter what your product is, you might get restricted. And if we will talk about the legal side, trademarks, for example, using competitor's trademark terms. If we will talk about Amazon's policies, okay, how to write the bullet points. Not with all caps. How to write the title. I think what I want people to understand is that Keywords are across all of the different categories of suspensions. And if you will incorrectly write things, your entire product will get suspended. And it doesn't matter what your product is. Let's again stick with the supplement example. It doesn't matter if you're selling anything else, whatever product it will be, you can get classified as a supplement. You like what how can it be and I'm always given these examples from things that I have on my table I have like let's say this tissue paper. Okay, this tissue paper can be a pesticide product. It can be a medical product. How can it be? It can be. How can this computer mouse be a medical product? It can be. If you're saying this mouse pad supports your wrist, great, that's okay. But if you're saying that it prevents some medical issues, carpal tunnel, I don't know how to call it, the medical issue with your wrist. Okay, so if you're saying it prevents it, congratulations, you are a medical product. If you are saying that this tissue paper is antibacterial, congratulations, you are a pesticide. No, it's not a pesticide. Yes, it is. By definition, by law, not by Amazon, by law, by regulation, the keywords that you are writing are getting your product classified as something. And coming to Amazon and say to them, now it's a mouse pad. Sorry, no, it's a medical product. So this is what I want people to understand. Their product isn't only their product. It's also how they present their product in their listing, in their packaging, label, Q&As. If they respond to a question or if they respond to a customer and say, yes, it prevents the disease. Okay, so you're a medical product, you are a disease, and so on. And to avoid it, first you need to understand it. And if it doesn't happen to you, don't go ahead and tell Amazon, look, you're making a mistake. It's a tissue paper. Sorry. No, it's a tissue paper, but it's also a pesticide. It's a mouse pad, but it's also a medical product. Because this is how regulation works. It's classified zero product as a whole, based on everything, not based on what the product is, but also how you promote and present it. And now that you understand it, If we talk about AI, let's continue with AI. I think that today AI tools are catching most of the issues and that's great news. We are today almost in the end of March and as of today It catches about 70% of the issues that we catch. Let's see what happens in one week. Let's see what happens in one month. I'm sure it will rise to even 100%. But as of today, it's a great and it's an amazing starting point. So I don't see any reason why people shouldn't do it. Go ahead to ChatGPT, go ahead to any of your favorite AI tool, Cloud, Google, Gemini, whatever it will be, paste in your listing, send him your title, bullet points, description, or A plus, the backend search terms, images, that's your listing, packaging images, labels, everything you can send, everything you have, how you promote or present your product, Copy-paste. Hey, you don't even need to elaborate too much. I'm an Amazon seller. I want you to review legal, regulatory issues. No, no, no, no, no. Don't get that. It knows already what to do. Hey, this is my listing. Can you search for any prohibited terms, for any violations? I can assure you that there are some things that it makes up, sometimes it marks wrong items, so have some common sense, don't count on it yet. Speaker 2: That's a big mistake why people don't get the suspension fixed, because there is AI. Which is good to get to the heavy lifting and everything, but they just don't check the outcome of it. They just copy-paste it. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we are not there yet. I mean, it's a feature with all our amazing ChatGPTs, or again, any other tool. It's a very, we need to understand in the context of AI, the AI revolution, AGI, that's the big thing here, where we are headed towards. It will happen in two months, in two years. No one really knows, but you will see eventually and all the people who are creating and developing these things, they are saying that AI, what we see today, is a very, very, very small feature. So with how amazing it is, Let's try to put it in perspective. It's a feature. It's a very amazing and incredible feature, but it's a feature. So don't yet, and again I emphasize yet, because I don't know what will happen tomorrow with a new, I don't know what. Yeah, so yet. It does 70% of the work. So try to question and have some common sense. Let's again talk about the prompt that we are saying, hey, please check my listing for any violations. Then ask him, are you sure? Okay, nice. Can you please rate the risk? Can you please rate for me how severe the violation is? Sometimes it will tell you one out of ten. Okay, so why did you even mark it? I don't know. So have a conversation trying to investigate further, trying to see and You can even implement some risk analysis. Okay, this keyword is my highest ranking keyword. It brings me so much traffic. And I estimate, based on competitors that I'm seeing, based on whatever the AI tool said, based on what experts said, that it's somehow of a middle risk. Five out of ten. There is some risk of suspension, but Amazon didn't start enforcing yet. Okay, so it's up to you how risk tolerant you are, how risk tolerant you want to be. Do you want to remove now the highest indexed keywords who brings you all the traffic? While there is somehow of Middle risk your call you will tell me look. It's it's my only product This I cannot get it suspended. Okay. I'm with you if it's high risk again in some cases you would want to take it you in some cases you wouldn't but I Make informed decisions. Try to understand what suspensions you are subject to, what suspensions you can face, and then try to decide if you want to face them. If you do, it's fine. Some cases we tell clients, we tell people, okay, for example, variation violations. They put together prohibited variations, the mouse pad and the mouse. It's not strictly A valid variation, but if you're telling me, look, this is what's getting me most of my traffic. Okay, let's understand what you can get suspended for and then take an informed decision. Speaker 2: I know, I know. Something I want to add out of that as well is a lot of times you have to sometimes play on the career area. Of course, there are certain things could potentially lead to a suspension, as you mentioned, but it's calculated risk. Sometimes it's a matter of risk-reward, like a variation example. It's clearly breaking TOS, but then there are some people that get away with it and benefit from it. But you need to understand what is potential ramification. And before even doing so, understand how you need to fix the issue if that triggers. The suspension, how to navigate it, because That's the other thing. People experiment with a lot of things when it comes to that, but then they don't know how to fix it. Exactly. Unknown Speaker: Exactly. Speaker 1: So that's a big thing because some cases, some situations are not resolvable. So you need to, okay, if we tell you, we, other, it doesn't really matter, other firms tell you that they can't resolve such issues. Okay. So you don't want to go there. You don't want to take that risk because If you do, go ahead and be my guest. These are things that you want to avoid. But if you come again to us, to anyone else, and we tell you, look, it's something we can resolve with a 90% probability in one or two days, okay. So getting suspended is not the end of the world. But again, if you know that you're facing it, if you know that it might happen to you, you need to understand what are your risks and then make calculated decisions. Speaker 2: Awesome. So now to start coming to a conclusion, I want to bring the conversation of brands and exit because I know that the market is reactivating on that side of the business in terms of, you know, brands getting now potentially put back into the market. There's more activity from an investment point of view. So what is your take? Do you feel that the market is reactivating, still slow? What is your feeling? Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously it's not as before what happened is was the There was this aggregator bomb who... Anyone could raise hundreds of millions of dollars. All the big financial guys. Again, with all due respect, they didn't really know what they are doing Amazon-wise. They are great business people, great financial guys, but not Amazon guys, not amazing operators. What you need to be in order to buy 200 brands together. Some of them did it. You need to be an amazing operator and they just weren't. I personally know the CEOs of... Many companies, many aggregators, the big ones that came to Chapter 11, and I think that, among other things, this was their biggest mistake. Now, to understand the market, I will give you, again, a little bit of a background. What happened is that many of them raised a lot of money in debt, and it wasn't called to money. It was raised all together. And once you are raising everything together and not calling to the money for each acquisition, you pay the interest for everything. Okay, so you raise $100 million at an interest rate of, let's say, 10%. You pay the 10% from day one, not only when you call it for each acquisition, but for the entire $100 million. So in order to be able to pay the debt, the interest, You need cash flow, where you will get it from, from acquiring with all the $100 million. So you have to rush and use all of the money and buy more and more and more brands, because if you will be delayed with it, you don't have any funds to pay the debt. So you bought everything that moves You bought everything whether it's very good or not. You didn't do proper M&A. You couldn't migrate it fully and implement it in your system. You didn't even have time to fully build systems and you end up Acquiring 200 brands, 150, 20 brands. It's impossible. It's impossible to buy 20 brands together and operate them successfully, no matter how good you are. Speaker 2: Especially because each brand has its own complexity and its own dynamic. And it's not like a copy-paste, so it's like you need to develop a unique procedure for each of it, right? Speaker 1: Exactly. And you're not really an aggregator. Neither do we, by the way, because by definition, aggregator is when you take common things, for example, the suppliers, and you aggregate them. You use the same supplier for all, same country, same specialty knowledge about the niche, but you're buying completely different niches. Completely different brands. Nothing is shared between them. Sure, you have your logistics manager, your PPC manager who's controlling all of the brands, but it's not really aggregating. So there is that. And then what happened is that the multipliers ended up Skyrocketing, X7 Multiplier. I mean, come on, we all know the risks and Amazon, it doesn't really worth X7 Multiplier, unless you are a substantiated brand who has actual presence, even if you're only Amazon, it's okay. But if you're not really a big brand, you don't want X7 Multiplier, but Everything got solved for x67 because everybody had to buy and buy. Speaker 2: It's impossible to make the money back at that point. Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly. But it raised all the way up to that because people had to buy. They didn't have any option not to buy. They were forced to buy to serve the debt. So then you bought and bought and bought, whatever mode. So people just raised their prices. So then it slowed down because many big, the biggest ones, I filed Chapter 11 and then it went all the way down to x2 multipliers, which is somehow reasonable. I think personally, not as a professional opinion, the proper multiplier for an Amazon business, again, not brand, Amazon business, x2.5 free plus inventory. We are talking about SDE or EBITDA. So you take the profit and you multiply it by three, let's say. And today I see the market coming back to life either with new private players that are buying the liquidated assets from the aggregators or just new and smaller boutique firms Who are Amazon people, not financials, but Amazon guys who successfully built their own brand and they are making it larger by acquiring. You can launch new products or you can acquire successful products. Speaker 2: So what is your expectation, you would say, the multiple, to conclude, that people maybe can aim to get this year with everything going on? Speaker 1: I would say something. It really depends on how complex you are. Brand is to operate, how many SKUs you have, how many suppliers. Are you only Amazon USA, also UK, also Shopify, Walmart? For some people, it will be a good thing because you diversify the risk. So you're not only Amazon and you're not only USA. You're also Europe. You're also other marketplaces and regions. For some, it will be good and it will raise your multiplier. For some, it won't be good because It gives them more headache and they want only Amazon USA. That's what they know. That's what they are good at. If they are the Amazon players, that's what they like. So shop around. Try to look around with many different people. And I will say you can expect from two to four. Speaker 2: Okay, thank you. I think something I would like to add out of that, to that value you just added there, is I think this is also the year, correct me if I'm wrong, that people are looking also for brands that go beyond Amazon. So I think the conversation are shifting to what are you actually doing also outside of Amazon to protect myself? Like are you doing TikTok? Are you doing Walmart? Are you doing DTC? Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: That's something that's going to be very important as well. Speaker 1: I agree. I completely agree. Again, there are the boutique ones. Again, I just now dealt with such a case. We also do M&As a little bit. Unknown Speaker: We do diligence. Speaker 1: We do the migration. So, I just handled one for someone who makes around $80 million a year. It's an Amazon seller and they look to expand and they are only Amazon USA. So they told me, look, I don't want TikTok. I don't want Shopify. I don't want Europe, I want Amazon, I want USA. Okay, that's them. I do agree that most of the new equity players that are around, they do like to diversify the risk by having something off Amazon as well because Amazon eventually is a risky business either on the suspension side or on just where the market will go to. It can go to anywhere. So people do like to diversify the risk. So I would say do have other marketplaces or regions, but make sure they are extremely easy to operate. Because if they only take about 5 to 10% of your sales and 90% are Amazon USA, Make sure that the amount of work that you should invest in those other niches is reasonable. People, brands and companies that had about 50% of their time invested in the Europe marketplaces. That made no sense. They had like, if I remember correctly, 12% of their sales were Europe and Amazon UK and Germany and Walmart. But 50% of their time went into it. It didn't make sense, so they weren't able to exit their business. Do diversify, but make sure it either makes sense in the sales side or the time side. Speaker 2: Thank you, Arso. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for all the value. I appreciate it. And I'm sure there's going to be people that, you know, is going to want to have a conversation, a deeper conversation about this with you. So how people can reach out to you, continue the conversation, potentially work? Speaker 1: I think I can share my screen and show how they can contact us, but basically just look up my name, Or Shamosh. You will find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, whatever you feel comfortable with. By all means, feel free to contact me for whatever you want. We rarely charge for people. We only take cases when it's justified and when you actually need us. So feel free to contact me for any question you have. I will be more than happy to help you. No need for anything. So please do try me. And if you want, I can share my screen. I think you should be able to see it in a minute. Just scan this QR code or reach out to any of these places and I will be happy to help. Speaker 2: Thank you. It's a pleasure. So thank you so much for your time and hopefully see you soon at upcoming events. Yeah. Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Vincenzo. It was a pleasure. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: Bye bye. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomc.com where you can get your first consultation for free. Or find us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at ecomc.