EP #329] [ENG] - How to navigate Amazon customer support and suspensions - John Cavendish

EP #329] [ENG] - How to navigate Amazon customer support and suspensions - John Cavendish 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 1: Hello, guys. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the pleasant air related to Amazon FBA, private label, and e-commerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy. And today we bring you a very close friend of mine, John, a founder and CEO of Seller Candy, where they specialize on everything that has to do with figuring out, you know, all the troubleshooting on your Amazon brand. You know, we know selling on Amazon, every single day you wake up, you see the suspension emails, things that have to do with documentation, things that have to do with inventory loss, you know, all the headaches. That's where Seller Candy comes in for and make it, you know, very easy for you. So John, thank you for being here for a second time now. Welcome back. How are you doing? Speaker 2: Vincenzo, thank you for having me. It's always great to be back. But you are in a different location, so it's like we've been in a whole new place. Speaker 1: That's true, that's true. How's everything going on your side? Everything okay? Speaker 2: That's great. I had a baby, not me personally, but my wife had a baby. Things have been moving fast. It's crazy how quickly they grow and how little they sleep. Speaker 1: Yeah, I can imagine. I think it must be not easy to run Amazon businesses and not slip. Speaker 2: Luckily, we have an amazing team. I don't do any of the actual suspension stuff. Speaker 1: I feel you. I feel you. So I guess, you know, to start very quickly with an intro by yourself, just tell us, you know, who is John Seller Candidate and of course, we can dive into this topic. Yeah. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: So, hey everyone. Um, I'm actually, I've been based, I'm from the UK originally, but I've been outside the UK for a decade now. I'm living almost always in Vietnam. So I live in Vietnam twice. Oh, thank you. And I saw Vincenzo in Vietnam actually last time in person, I think when you were here. Um, I was running Amazon related business for the last decade. I was a seller for four or five years. Um, then I started an agency which became Seller Candy. And the reason that Seller Candy exists is that We believe that the worst part about selling on Amazon is dealing with Amazon. So we make it so you never need to talk to seller support again. So we have our own team of amazing ex-Amazon seller support agents, and we act on behalf of sellers to basically do everything in the back end of seller support, from creating and uploading flat files, which is the easiest stuff, to arguing with account suspensions, listing suspensions, and getting stuff back, because we do it all day every day. We've done over 120,000 support tickets in the last four years. Speaker 1: Wow, wow, that's great. So I guess that's a very good starting point, suspensions. You just mentioned that and we know the whole suspension landscape has been changing a bit in the Amazon space because Amazon's been very rough when it comes to that. Like we're seeing that they're putting a lot of emphasis lately on changing a bit the procedure, how they flag these things. They're using a lot of automation now. So I guess that would be a good starting point For today's podcast, which is, you know, how are you seeing the whole suspension situation shifting in terms of, you know, how Amazon is acting in terms of the appeals, how is Amazon acting in terms of the time frame it gives you to react, how harsh is Amazon becoming? What is your feeling lately with all the cases that you see on a daily basis with Seller Candy? Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, our main overarching thing at Seller Candy is that Amazon is getting harder. They're getting harder to get them to do what you want them to do. So it used to be a relatively simple ticket, like updating a listing, raising the appeal. It used to be bread and butter for us. It still is bread and butter. We do it all day every day. But it takes longer and it's harder. So our agents are saying is like, yeah, we have to argue a lot more persistently. We need to escalate more aggressively within Amazon's terms of service. And we need to Yeah, just be more proactive than we used to. Ever since I started Seller Candy in 2020, Amazon has got consistently harder to get things solved, which is interesting considering that things should get better over time, but actually it's just been getting harder and harder. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's something that Even myself talking to Amazon sellers and clients, it's such a headache because in the past, we've already been having so many issues. You're already trying to struggle with your PPC, you're already struggling with your inventory, you're struggling now with the brand-raising side of things, which we're also going to go into that. And now the suspension side of things, it seems to be tougher and tougher. What I want to go with this kind of intro, which is what we're trying to bring the conversation to is like how we prevent these things because It seems a lot of these things sometimes are very trivial that you don't even know sometimes you need certain kind of documentation or certain kind of things in hand to make sure your account keeps working as usual. So is there some kind of checklist you guys would recommend for these things? What is your advice when people ask you? Speaker 2: Yeah, if they want a guide or a checklist, we actually have a guide or a checklist on our site. I would send them to sellercandy.academy and we have this checklist and guidebook we spent the last five years putting together where you can download everything step by step how to get stuff done. We can put that below. And then it's just making sure you're actually looking at things. It's so easy with your business to get distracted by the day-to-day and not check. So, you know, whether you have yourself doing it, ideally you have a team member who's responsible because, you know, as always assign responsibilities across the team for checking account health, account health indexes, voice of the customer, just going through and checking everything regularly. Because things just pile up on you, don't they? And then you get there, you check it and you're like, oh no, voice the customer is way too bad. We need to do something right now before we get suspended and then we're going to have to argue with Amazon about this stupid issue, which isn't really an issue. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. And now when it comes to Dealing with suspensions and all of that, what is your take on AI? Because I feel one of the reasons why people are having such a tough time as well doing appeals with Amazon and so on is because a lot of people are using ChatGPT, copy-paste kind of responses, not only for suspension, also for appealing things with listings. Inventory considerations, and that's why people are now reaching these roadblocks because everybody's using the same copy-paste response for ChatGPT, right, and working with professionals like you, and then they encounter themselves on a place where, you know, they just dig a deeper hole. So what is your take on people that are just blindly just copy-pasting ChatGPT responses and just making it worse? Speaker 2: I mean, I have a whole, what do you call it? A whole like world problem with the people copying and pasting ChatGPT responses. It's like, you know, like when the next generation have like the iPad kids, everyone's complaints about the iPad kids who are not going to be able to interact with humans properly. I feel like if we're not careful, we're going to have the ChatGPT kids who just ask AI and copy and paste the answer. And then AI will reprogram all of us. And then, you know, then we've entered the twilight zone and everyone is programmed by computers and we do what the AI wants. But, you know, all joking aside, I think, like, AI is, at the moment, anyway, it's as good as the information you put in. And the problem is AI scans the entire internet. So it's got the good stuff in there, which is somewhere, but it also has all of the old stuff and the BS and the stuff from, like, the sketchy online courses. It has everything. So, yes, it has the right answer in there somewhere. You just need to find it. So if you know what you're doing, you could definitely use AI to write a good response, but it's the same as you writing yourself and just as a way, when I'm using AI, you dictate what you want. You say, please organize this in a way that makes sense to me, and then it can write it for you. But it's only as good as the information you put in. And Amazon only cares about Ticking their boxes. That's the thing you need to remember with Amazon when you're doing anything. All they care about is tick boxes. So arguing with them doesn't work. Telling them that you're right and they're wrong doesn't work. All they need to want to know is that you accept the issue. You've done this immediately about the issue. You're going to do this going forward about the issue, and they're not going to hear about it again, basically. So you can either be right or you can be wealthy or rich. I know, I know. Speaker 1: And now when it comes to this whole situation as well of, you know, I guess which is another thing I wanted to bring to the conversation is like, yeah, it's not only being used heavily across, you know, suspension and all of that. I think that's also one of the main reasons why people is also getting listens, they're surprised or taken down because if you're blindly just copy pasting a listing that you do in ChatGPT and you use a keyword that you shouldn't be using or mentioning something that you shouldn't be saying, That will lead you then to a suspension very fast and that's where effectively you can end up on the scenario where you end up on a roadblock. So what I'm trying to say here is when we start to understand, especially from a Seller County perspective, just to make the example here, what are some of the things that Amazon is looking for in terms of what things you should be using for your titles or the backend to avoid suspensions. Is there some kind of then a guideline that you would say even you guys would recommend people to use when they use AI tools to make images, to make copy? Like how you make sure this AI people is using out there? It's not leading people to suspension because I feel a lot of the AI people is using out there doesn't have a clue about what are the terms of condition, doesn't have a clue of what you can say or you cannot say. So how you guys mitigating that as well? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're right on you like the especially with I don't know about you have used any of those AI email response tools. Super great. It helps you draft a response to email immediately or just draft one and put it in your Outlooks. But I read through them. I've even cancelled mine today. So I read through it and it hallucinates so badly that I can't even use it. It's like, It makes that like, oh, you'll find everything at this page on our website and it's gone. That would make sense if I did have a page on my website that said that. I have nothing to do with it. Sounds like a great response though. So yeah, hallucination is the biggest issue. If someone asked me how should I use AI to create my listings, I would recommend that they use an AI listing tool. Like Zonguru's AI research tool, pretty good. Um, it might still hallucinate semi-compliant stuff. So you still need to really review it and check that it doesn't say anything, but it's not going to say cures cancer or whatever, whatever else ChatGPT will say in order to write the best possible copy that's going to sell this product. Speaker 1: I know, I know, I know. Speaker 2: The best one actually for that. I was trying to rewrite one of our website. And that was for our old product, Refundify, where we help people with refunds. We don't do that anymore because the whole debacle in the Amazon refund system. But I said, can you just look at all of our competitors and write a better website? And it said, okay, cool. It looked at all the competitors in the industry. And one of them said that they've been a billion dollars in refunds. And that's cool. And it said, ChatGPT said, we do a billion dollars a day in refunds. Speaker 1: I know, I know. That's the thing. That's why it's so dangerous. And I see this, like people even come to us and we do audits. They have so crazy statements sometimes on the listings, the images, like, man, like, you are lucky that somebody didn't sue you or, you know, like, that's the danger. Like, sometimes I try to I try to fill holes in the information that you might have with facts that actually don't belong to you. And that's where things can get dangerous very fast as you just described. Now, going back to the whole situation of case studies, case support with Amazon and all of that. What is your take as well on how Amazon is implementing significantly more AI in their site? Like I feel lately, I don't know if you feel the same. I'm getting more and more AI responses so bad from them. So it seems like now you're also trying to Play the game to get through the AI to actually end up with a real person, right? It's almost getting more AI driven as well. So how are you guys trying to mitigate that as well? Because now it's reaching a forward. You're using ChatGPT from your side. There isn't the all internal AI to automate certain cases and it's AI fighting with AI, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, the AI wars. I think it depends. I mean, from my point of view, if they did actually allow AI to auto respond, at least you're in a quick feedback loop. You don't have to wait 12 to 24 hours for response. Hopefully AI should be, you know, generatively fast. Amazon's always sounded like a bot, haven't they? At least for the last five, six years, because they use a thing called workflow. So when a support agent is sitting in the Philippines or in Central America and Costa Rica, They get your response, they go through a workflow, like a decision tree, and then they find the answer and they copy and paste it. And Amazon's been trying to automate this for as long as possible by having humans follow the decision tree so eventually they can use AI. I think this was before the whole generative AI thing came in and they're like, oh, we can probably do it a different way. So that's always been the problem. They have to close the ticket within eight minutes. The KPI is to not have it reopened and they just have to slam it in and close it. And that's not, we at Seller Candy try and be the opposite of that. We try and be the, we think about it and we go, oh, what do they actually want? How can we help you get to the outcome? You want to get to the outcome, not the answer. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's actually something which is been also kind of the nemesis of the customer support for Amazon, that they have this KPI that if you don't reply enough cases fast enough, they actually penalize you as an employee. So I feel sometimes they just close cases not because they don't want to help you, it's just they have to make up with how many cases they have to do on an hourly basis. And that's contradictory because it shouldn't be based on how many times successfully they actually have an Amazon seller. But anyway, we know the reality. Now, what are things you're seeing in terms of issues that have been raising more lately? Like, I know we talk about suspension, but are you seeing lately more issues with, for example, which you briefly touched now, leasing suspensions, issues with you know, fighting things with a brand registry or things that have to do more with, you know, maybe inventory issues. Like what are some of the cases that if you have a look at your whole kind of ecosystem of seller candidates, like these things keep coming up, like I keep having this issue. Speaker 2: Hmm. I mean, I think it's the same stuff. To be honest, I think, you know, we've been doing the same stuff the last five years, pretty much. It's just getting harder and harder. So where it used to be that we would Not do any listing updates. Now we do a lot of listing updates because Amazon freezes everything, you know, and then we have to push it through with flat files and feed files and raise cases. Apart from that, like I said, I think volume sometimes has gone down a little bit of the cases people raise, but the complexity and actually getting stuff done has definitely gone up. So people are getting stuck more on what should have been things that they could solve themselves or that we could have solved within A small amount of time is now taking us a very, very long time. I think AI eventually will be a great thing once Amazon implements it, but you've got to be super careful, haven't you, where the human line ends and about changing prices or setting removal orders. Who do you trust to do stuff like that that can make good inventory? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think some of the things as well I'm also seeing more, I'm keen to hear your take on this, is on the other picture with AI, I've seen more and more people when they're having an issue with documentation or things like that. Now with AI you can make up a lot of things. You can make an invoice on the spot, you can make an authorization later on the spot. I've seen more, like there's more kind of dodgy things going on from seller side. Like they are falsifying things that usually wasn't possible to do before. So are you seeing that also being a bigger issue later with AI? Because, I mean, with AI these days you can manufacture anything that you want, any reality. So how do you think also AI could be a negative thing for Amazon sellers in the fact that the bad people, the bad players can get away now with so many more things because they can make up anything with AI, you know? Speaker 2: I haven't personally seen it, but I mean, the problem is that not everyone is, not everyone is the smartest person out there and you might accidentally follow it. AI generates this and they might think, oh perfect, AI generated something. I'm going to submit it. They don't realize they're committing fraud, you know, like legitimate fraud that Amazon will sue you for or suspend you for. So, you know, the average IQ in the world is 98 or 100. You've got to, you've got to, you've got to mitigate for that. But at the same time, you know, most people are honest. Most people work hard. Most people want to do the right thing. Occasionally people make mistakes. And then you've got like, and if you want to be sketchy, there are thousands of those sellers out there and all over the world. Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess the reason why I wanted to bring that to the table is because we all know that there is a lot of black sellers doing these techniques and attacking, like, you know, and doing this really dodgy business, you know, putting claims on other people's businesses, saying this is counterfeit. And I'm seeing, at least from my side, that's why I was What's keen to hear you take is like, I see this kind of a trend lately where now with AI is easier for these bad players to take over competitors side because now with AI we can manufacture anybody. So that's why the question. Now on other topics, I wanted to pick your brain when it comes to support. I was keen to also hear from you, how do you see the whole situation going with, for example, And you know, patents, the trademarks and all of that, like I see lately, people is trying to protect and say more than ever into those things, because of you know, how tough the business is getting. So a lot of our clients now, most of them have patents, most of them have trademarks, most of them are really investing significantly in intellectual property to make sure that they can have some kind of assets that will make sure you know, a Chinese seller might not take them down. I am from a Sutter County perspective or even from you personally, are you seeing this being a bigger kind of I would say area where you guys are focusing right now in terms of protecting your clients, doing IP claims and things like that or you see the same kind of volume as you see in the past? Speaker 2: I mean we always have IP claims and we always have introductions from IP partners. We have lots of partners in the space and they send people to us when they have stuff that they don't want to deal with on the back end of dealing with the Amazon part of it. In terms of my volume personally, I can ask the team actually. I don't know about that one. I will ask. The good thing is our team is operating 24 hours a day, 10,000 tickets a month, 20,000 tickets a month. So I need to get deep into the trenches and ask, to be honest. That's a good question. I will ask how we're going with IP stuff. We've always had a lot of trademarks. Obviously, everyone does a trademark, but in terms of patents, that's very interesting. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's something I was asking to ask you because I know for a fact that with everything happening, copycats and tariffs and everything, the only thing you have to protect is the actual idea that you bring into market. So I see people being even harsh in terms of using brand rates to take all the competitors and copycating their ideas and everything. So asking to know if that's something you're seeing a higher volume than usual. Now, another thing I was keen to hear from you is how is the situation going on with reviews? Like, I saw Amazon getting tougher on this. They are pretty much now removing the fact that you can reach out to customers. They are getting very tough on how fast to suspend GPS for reviews. Like, what is your take? Like, what are you seeing with the whole review situation happening with your support cases? Speaker 2: So, you know, there's a few of those suppliers out there that just do review removal. And charge based on success. I know some of them got into some hot water a couple of years ago because they were, you know, they raised a huge volume without managing against TOS. So, I mean, Amazon's always said that they will remove reviews which are non-compliant with their terms of service. And we still do that for our clients. So if you want help with that, we can help with that. But as you said, the success rate is just so low, which is why we do that as a side service just to help our clients. Other people charge on success per review because you need like, if you don't have a thousand negative reviews, they won't even take you on as a client. Because the success rate is so low. Yeah. It's frustrating, isn't it? Because you see the negative reviews. It's nothing to do with the product. It could be delivery. It could be another product that's nothing to do with your client's product. And then Amazon won't do anything about it. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. So we say for those people are being attacked with negative reviews and everything, like it sounds, it really sounds that the only hope is just keep fighting with Amazon, right? It's like there's no... Speaker 2: Well, attack is a little bit different. Because at least you can usually, we can look at a trend and we can track everything. It's, yeah, standard negative reviews is difficult, but attacks, you know, we should be able to track an attack and help turn that around. Speaker 1: Cool. And in terms of, I would say, now that we're talking about reviews, are you seeing more issues lately with people around strategies with inserts? Is that still an issue? People are getting suspended by that. What is your opinion on that? Speaker 2: We haven't seen any of our clients get any warnings or suspensions because of inserts. I think it depends what it says in the insert. There's a lot of Chinese inserts like five star, give us five star or reach out if you're not happy and we'll send you another free one, you know. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. No, because the reason why I ask you this, I already talked to people and people say, no, these days you cannot even put accurate code that says claim this on our website, things like that. Is that something you see people not having any issues? It's fine. Speaker 2: None of our clients I've seen have had any issues. I mean, I've always advised people to keep it in line with like what a professional brand would do. You know, they're not suspending Sony. Yeah. Speaker 1: Sony wouldn't say, buy this program, we send you a $50 gift card. Speaker 2: They'll say register for one year extended warranty or they'll say here are the videos to put this thing together. Speaker 1: Mm hmm. You know, I think, and then from their videos or whatever. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, yeah. To start coming to a closure, what other things do you think, John, is something that has been coming through your desk that you see? Maybe this is happening more than usual or overall, like, or maybe prediction. Is there some last kind of gold nugget as the colleague you want to share with us? Speaker 2: Prediction, AI apocalypse incoming. By the time you watch this, we will be robots, me and Vincenzo. It's been a crap first half of the year for ecommerce sellers, hasn't it? If you're selling on Amazon now, you've been having a relatively okay half of the year. Nobody that I know has said, wow, first half of 2025, I've made millions. Some people have made millions of dollars, but I'm suddenly a millionaire. It's not going crazy. As with any business downturn, there will be an end. Whether it's three months, six months, a year, two years and the ones that survive are the ones that hang on. So keep marketing, keep spending money on marketing, keep profitable and just keep going. Like we all aim to be here and thriving in two years time. Speaker 1: That's actually a good advice because we're actually, you're talking about this before going You know, live. And I say, like, I've been also doing this for, you know, close to seven years now, a long time. And I'm telling you, like, it's always like this. I've been going to the ups and downs. And when you are down, It's difficult, like, you know, you're really, you might not see the light at the end of the tunnel here and there, but it's what you just mentioned. Keep pushing, stay consistent, believe in your project, of course, and your product or whatever you're doing. And I think, to be honest with you, towards the end of the year, end of next year, you're going to see a very nice uptrend. Like, I feel right now we're reaching almost the bottom of, kind of semi the bottom. So I think it's just right in the way towards the end of the year, stay afloat, don't do any crazy decisions. And I feel for those brands that actually keep hustling and survive, they're going to have a good also situation because a lot of brands are not going to make it unfortunately. And that what is going to create in the market is a huge void in a lot of the categories where The ones that say they're going to have to fulfill the demand that's going to come on board again, you know, so yeah. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 1: But anyway, John, how people can reach out to you and work with Seller County? Because I'm sure everything we talked today is something that people are struggling on a daily basis. So tell me more about that. Speaker 2: Yeah. So what we do with it, before we take on a client, every new client, is we jump on a call and we see You know, are we a good fit? And is there money that we can save you in your account immediately? Because the real goal is that you join us and then immediately we've paid for more than our initial fee just by finding money in your account. So if you want to do that, and if you're interested in us, like looking deep into your account, like recently we found $7,800 of like unclaimed misdeliveries in one account. We found another suspended listing that I think was costing like $15,000 in sales, which they also hadn't got back up. You just need to book a call on our website. So you go to sellercandy.com, click book a call, and then you'll talk to Kelly, who's on our team. He'll dive deep with you, find any missing revenue, lost money, anything like that. And if you have a specific issue, he can also answer you if we can do it, how we can do it, and how long it will take, basically. We're always there to support. Speaker 1: Thank you. I'll make sure to put everything down in the description for people to find you. All right, another pleasure. Yeah, hopefully I'll see you soon in Vietnam. Let's see if I escape again there this year. Yeah, pleasure, John. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. You too. Speaker 2: Thanks, Vincenzo. Speaker 1: Take care. Speaker 2: See ya. Bye-bye. 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.