Dana Rodriguez, paralegal at Rosenbaum Famularo, PC, law firm behind AmazonSellersLawyer.com, talks about a deactivated Amazon seller account due to IP complaints that is now reinstated with our help.
https://vimeo.com/372475767
Getting IP Suspensions Reinstated on Amazon
Recently, we had a client reach out to us whose account was temporarily deactivated for three intellectual property complaints that he never addressed. He had 24 hours to submit a plan of action (POA) to try and explain what he had done to fix the complaints as well as how to prevent them from being asserted on his account in the future.
A plan of action is nothing more than an exercise in persuasive writing. It is composed of three sections: the root cause, immediate remedy, and systemic changes to your business.
Root Cause:
– The root cause is the portion of your appeal where a seller states the reason for suspension; this is the problem that Amazon wants you to address. As Amazon will not always provide specific information regarding the reason for the suspension, a seller will have to do a deep dive of their account to figure out the exact cause. They should examine their performance notifications, feedback, and the email from Amazon itself.
Simply put, Amazon really wants the seller to find the issue at hand, take ownership and elaborate on the issue.
Immediate Remedy:
– The immediate remedy is what the seller has immediately done to rectify the situation; it directly addresses the issues outlined in the root cause. A seller needs to identify what they already did to remedy the Amazon complaint. Amazon wants to see that sellers are going to do whatever it takes to keep consumers happy. For example, if there is a problem with the item sold, send the customer a new one free of charge or refund their money. Even with really bad customers, make them happy. It is better to lose money on one customer than to lose an entire day, week or, even worse, weeks of sales.
Systemic Changes to Your Business:
– This section outlines the long term changes being made to prevent the issue from recurring in the future. In this section, sellers need to show Amazon that they have improved their business practices and have taken measures to ensure that they will remain compliant in the future. In order to prevent being suspended a second time for the same issue, a seller should be sure to implement the changes they say they will. If you tell Amazon that there is a problem but don’t correctly implement the measures, or just send them a quick message denying the accusations, you will most likely get a notification stating that ‘you may not sell on Amazon and that they reserve the right to not respond to any future emails.’ This is something that all Amazon sellers want to avoid.
When it came to helping this deactivated Amazon seller account get back online, our team worked together to investigate the issue. Our team worked collaboratively with the seller to help draft a persuasive plan of action and appeal because nobody knows a business better than its own seller.
After we received the notice, we started working on the appeal immediately. We submitted the appeal and his account was reinstated; the suspension banner was removed and his listings were active once again.