You can see one of my listings here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHZVVL1H
Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great.
Until last week, out of nowhere, my account has been deactivated.
To reinstate my account, they asked me to submit an authorization letter from the manufacturer or brand owner authorizing me to sell their products. Well, I figured, I am the manufacturer, so I wrote an authorization letter for myself, and even got it notarized for good measure, that I am legally allowed to sell these devices. But to no avail.
I have an option to "Submit new information." But have no new information to submit, and fear if I try submitting anything else, I'll be permanently banned or something.
The funny part is that on most of the products I have listed, I am losing money, just because of the FBA costs and the advertising costs. I lost about $250 last month between two of the variants.
The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies, and do most all my sales through my website, but do get a few orders a week through amazon for the book, and am now afraid the Amazon door is closed forever.
Have you tried just having a single trademarked brand in your title, rather than Airtag and Samsung or changing the wording at all? Something like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Samsung. How about targeting other popular brands like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Apple TV?
Here's another brand that has a combination of the above suggestions: https://www.amazon.com/AhaStyle-Protective-Silicone-Compatib... They use "... for ... compatible with", and they also have a registered brand.
You have been lucky so far, but there is no guarantee that luck will not run out tomorrow. The algorithms making these decisions are not open to review. They are opaque, and there is no way to know when something in your account might be flagged as suspicious.
> but some tips that could help.
I know you are trying to help, so thank you for that. So don't take this personally when I say this. I'm just frustrated with how things have turned out.
It is absurd that we have reached a point where people must rely on unofficial and unverified tips just to possibly avoid losing access to their source of income. It seems incredibly unhealthy for a market this important to be governed in this way.
I think they're worth reaching out to (I don't have one that I personally recommend as I've been out of that industry for too long). Because if things haven't changed recently then there's no "penalty" for waiting and the mistake most sellers make is rushing to put through a crappy response and they just make things worse.
I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers
We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company - this was not the exact scenario so please treat with a pinch of salt)
They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.
Holy cow.
What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.
Amazon right now feels to me like a large landlord seeking rent kicking people for no reason because they didn't like that some person spilled some water.
Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.
We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.
Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...
No clue how it is elsewhere but in Amazon India, the largest seller is Amazon itself which sells under a different name. That's their model. They were under scrutiny by the Indian Government [1] [2] [3] last time I checked. Keeps registering subsidiaries under different names.
So you are basically competing with Amazon itself, which also acts as a seller in their own store.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/amazoncoms-retail-p...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/tech/amazon-flipkart-india-an...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Professional scammers are not likely to waste their time complaining on forums.
Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.
You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.
That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.
They do. Large 'first party' vendors have a completely different system, basically. Even large third party vendors have a more direct line to support.
Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :)
First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead of "for... Samsung TV remote".
I've been doing Amazon for 13 years and have a team + a few brands I own in the ecosystem -- just some basic tips:
1. Get brand registry (or find a maker buddy and put it under their brand) for listing control. Generic is not the way to go for listing control -- you need brand registry. Then you can edit away under your own brand.
2. You shouldn't be losing any money doing this. If you're doing 3D printer stuff you should expect your cost to be like 5-10%, Amazon takes 40-50% between all fees, ads around 10%, and the rest is labor/margin... and if your numbers aren't there you need to figure out what's wrong.
I have lots more thoughts but I realize this can become an essay haha. Feel free to ping me if you need some help, loved your books. :)
===
Edit: I don't think you're at risk of getting banned, but you might need an escalation to a higher level support (a captive or escalations specialist within Amazon).
Edit 2: I had some extra downtime to look at it, my approach to resolving the issue would be: a. You should first try to clearly indicate you're a product accessory and not a Samsung-branded product; review sellercentral best practices for SKU naming but it's gonna be something along the lines of "compatible with Samsung TV remotes" b. If you get stuck here for too long, I would first remove all reference to Samsung for now from the listing and make it a more generic accessory, acknowledge the brand confusion, reinstate your store, then create a case to add Samsung back into your listing (and be sure to have this case handy if you get future problems so you can reference back and show you're doing this the right way). c. Phone support works a lot better in recent days than email/chat support. But since you're deactivated I'm not sure if you get access to this.
This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com
Emphasize your own brands and model number, and make the other brands more clearly a description, in the Amazon item title?
FooCorp TagTeam S (sleeve mount holder to attach Apple AirTag to Samsung TV remote)
And yes, more info is pointless, see https://www.revk.uk/2025/11/more-useless-amazon.html
Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.
I started giving more business to Walmart. Free shipping promos are just that, same dollar threshold as AMZN but items often arrive in a day or two (sometimes same day). They arrive by the date stated. Free shipping is the default selection. Experience with third party sellers has been good. They do shill Walmart+ (their cheaper Prime equivalent) but it's not obnoxious and no dark patterns. They do have the Chinese products but for some reason they do not pollute the search anywhere near as bad as Amazon. It's easy to filter out third party products with one click. I know stuff I'm getting is not counterfeit - they seem to have much better control over supply chain than AMZN. Many products are drop shipped direct from the manufacturer.
Unfortunately the Chinese flea market junk is Amazon's bread and butter so they have intentionally made it difficult to exclude it.
The downside is Walmart's site is a bit rough around the edges but lately Amazon is doing a great job of destroying their own site in multiple ways - like removing the ability to print real invoices, removing the ability to effectively filter third-party sellers in search, etc.
I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.
Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.
It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."
They may have a filter for people who exceed a certain number of flags?
edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.
What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.
I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.
when in Rome ...
Every time I hear a story like this (and there's one like every month) I wonder how we ended up here. The internet was meant to be this place where anyone could set up a website, run a business, and reach customers directly. Instead it has turned into a collection of walled gardens, where your existence and livelihood depend on the whims of an opaque algorithm.
Luckily in my country Amazon does not have the level of market control it has in the US and some other places. People still walk or drive to local shops and when they order something for delivery they usually do so from their websites.
But reading many of these HN threads gives the impression that in the US and elsewhere Amazon controls a huge share of the market. If it functions as such a powerful exchange for both merchants and buyers, should there not be regulation to prevent injustices like this?
But when the only punishment for crime is fine, then crime becomes legal (and even preferred if doing the crime actually makes more than the fine)
Amazon also does malicious compliance. Yes they are following the law but they are trying to stoop as evil foolishly low as possible while still following the law and sometimes they don't even follow the law but get out of free jail card by paying some fines and oh did I mention, lobbying?
I completely agree with your message. We might need a better alternative to Amazon but one of the reasons why I sort of prefer Amazon sometimes is that you can get a 5% discount on all products if you have a decent credit card and pay bills on time on all products in my country, there are special cards just for amazon and also some cards which pay 5% on all online payments.
On small businesses this is not really possible.
Theoretically if one keeps money in a short term market fund or somewhere safe and uses this or other apps, they can probably safe upto 5% on all expenses, (uses credit cards and then pays the bills on time)
Combine this with the bloody fact that Amazon's tos's requires you to sell the cheapest on amazon, there just ends up being no competition.
So rather than investing time and effort into investigating, we just built faceless tools to punish anything that looks even remotely suspicious, and ignore any appeals, and if a few (or a lot) of folks just trying to make an honest living get caught up, then oh well.
Even if you try selling direct, your payment processor takes on this role, with varying degrees of trigger-sensitivity.
I agree but I hate payment processors sometimes as well and they feel very rent seeking in nature (akin to amazon) to me as well, I definitely wonder if stablecoins with good on/offramps or proper VISA support might actually help the end citizen but I am a bit worried because Stablecoin's on crypto and most crypto's really scummy so I also don't want to give things like this way too much attention.
Time will tell perhaps
edit: typing is hard