Amazon’s Terms of Service for Sellers: Paragraph 16: How Related Account Suspensions Occur
What this section is saying is that the seller is always responsible for their password to their account.
You are only allowed to give out your password if a third party is authorized, and you are solely responsible for any action taken under your account. So pretty much, Amazon won’t be taking the blame if someone gains access to your account – if it’s accidental or intentional.
It’s always important that you don’t give this information out, even to employees. You could run into issues. I know Dana recently had a case she was working on where this specific scenario occurred to one of her clients. It was a related account suspension. What happened was our client have access to a third-party service, who was their business manager. Unfortunately, the business manager ended up signing onto their account with their password but was also doing the same thing with other clients. So everybody was flagged for related accounts. Although we had to appeal to Amazon for this, and it did take a few tries for Amazon to respond, them saying that you are allowed to give it out to a third party that’s authorized… It’s a little confusing because if the third party accidentally signs on from the same IP address as another client, then they’re flagged for related accounts. That’s a really hard suspension to come back from. We do have trouble winning those. We also have some success, but when it’s issues like this, sometimes it takes a while for Amazon just to understand specifically what happened.
This paragraph is definitely important for sellers to know how Amazon treats security issues because as part of the arbitration team, I’ve seen several sellers who are unfortunately victims of hacked accounts. We’ve seen how Amazon treats these situations.
So once again, Amazon is excusing itself from any liability. This is interesting because even though Amazon is limiting their liability, we once again on a positive note, see that in situations where an account is hacked, that Amazon will act responsibly.
Now, what do I mean by that? We filed several arbitrations against Amazon specifically for this reason, that they allowed a seller’s account to get hacked, and that when a seller tried to act pursuant to the contract and change their password because they knew their account was hacked, Amazon was unable to resolve the issue for our client. When we file these arbitrations, we find that although the contract limits Amazon’s liability, Amazon is willing to amicably resolve the issue. I don’t think we’ve ever had a hacking case that actually went to a hearing. Anytime a seller has come to our firm stating that their account has been hacked, we’ve been nearly 100% successful in getting those sellers back to business.
If you’ve been suspended on Amazon or have questions about the new TOS, call us for a free consultation: 1-877-9-SELLER.
Make sure you watch all of our videos regarding the loopholes Amazon created in the new TOS.