Inside Information From Amazon’s Staff In India: Selling Partner Support
Selling Partner Support (SPS) was very hard to get information out of, except that they do follow intense scripts.
They have the ability to update the scripts, but there is an approval process. Seller support claims to treat all sellers alike. From what I learned from the brand registry, they do find sellers from different parts of the world to be harder to deal with.
Chinese sellers are very difficult to deal with. Sellers in India, even though I was speaking with people from India, are very, very difficult. And last but not least, in the top three difficult sellers to work with are the American sellers.
What seller support said, which was the same as what the brand registry people said, is that American sellers tend to be more knowledgeable about Amazon but they also tend to be curt, impolite and abrupt. If you want Amazon staff to work with you, you need to tone it down a bit because they take things very personally.
I tried to get information from seller support regarding why they approve some plans of action and why they reject others. I was certainly informed that they have quotas, although I couldn’t identify what the quotas were, and that their time is very tight. I was told specifically that it is much faster for Amazon seller support people to ask for more information or to turn down your plan of action rather than approve it because to approve it, they have to check certain boxes in their script. Towards the end of the shift, it only makes sense that these staff members are more inclined to simply ask for more information or to reject your plan of action.
I tried to figure out how we could get our plans of action in front of seller support when they are starting their shift rather than towards the end, but I couldn’t get a straight answer. Also, it seems like a very difficult thing to do since seller support, just like there are other teams in India, work multiple shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, while there is a script that they follow and there are canned responses, your plans of action are clearly being reviewed by people, not by robots.
What I learned by traveling to India and speaking with dozens of people that work for Amazon is that your emails are being read by real people, not by bots.
Also, the Amazon people reading your plans of action and your Amazon appeals have the ability to decide whether you did or did not fulfill the script in what they’re looking for. There are both subjective analyses being done as well as objective analyses being done. As a result of speaking with Amazon staff in India, I added some stories to our breaking news. As a result of adding that information, I received a phone call from a person in the United States that worked for Amazon, also in seller support, and what he did was really cool… He confirmed that the information in our book on suspensions and that our methodology for writing plans of action (which I share with sellers all over the world) was dead-on accurate. He also confirmed exactly what the staff in India was saying – script based, but also the ability to decide whether or not what you submit fulfills the boxes they need to check.
If you’ve been suspended on Amazon, contact us for a free consultation: 1-877-9-SELLER.
CJ Rosenbaum, Founding Partner
Amazon Sellers Lawyer
Rosenbaum Famularo, PC
