Amazon angers mom-and-pop sellers with ‘arbitrary’ suspensions
Bloomberg News
Andy Ayers was walking to his car in a Big Lots parking lot — shopping cart brimming with cereal, dog treats and Always brand feminine hygiene products he planned to resell for a markup on Amazon.com Inc. — when he got a phone alert that his account had been suspended.
“I thought, ‘Oh Crap. Perfect timing,”’ says Mr. Ayers, 32, of Athens, Ga.
An Amazon shopper had complained that one of Mr. Ayers’s products wasn’t authentic. Mr. Ayers disputed the claim and provided receipts to back it up. But about two weeks had passed by the time his account was reinstated, and the downtime cost him sales.
“I wasn’t doing anything shady,” says Mr. Ayers, who estimates he’ll sell $500,000 worth of goods on Amazon this year. “It seems there are a lot of Amazon sellers who aren’t doing anything wrong and are getting punished. There’s an arbitrary nature to it.”
He has plenty of company. Attendees at an annual gathering of online merchants in Seattle on Friday said merchants are “living in fear” that they’ll be kicked off the site.
Most Amazon customers probably don’t realize that almost half of all items sold on the site come from third-party merchants. That means a set of kitchen knives could have been plucked from a Walmart bargain rack in Nebraska by a mom-and-pop business looking to profit from a little retail arbitrage.
Amazon relies on more than 2 million merchants like Mr. Ayers to keep its website and warehouses stocked with an assortment of goods no brick-and-mortar store could ever match. But the company’s relentless focus on customer service means that when Amazon receives a complaint it’s the shopper — not the merchant — who typically gets the benefit of the doubt.
“We treat sellers like customers,” said Erik Fairleigh, a company spokesman. “The perfect seller experience is seamless selfservice that allows the seller to independently run their business. If a seller needs to contact us, we have Seller Support associates available hours a day worldwide, including support for urgent issues with a response in an hour or less.”
But Mr. Ayers and other sellers maintain Amazon is too quick to suspend its business partners and too slow to review their appeals, cutting off their primary revenue source, leavingthemsaddledwithinventory. That ties up thousands of dollars in Amazon accounts until the issues get resolved, they say. As a result, many are reducing their reliance on Amazonbyplacingsomeoftheirmerchandise on other sites, including eBay Inc.,oneofAmazon’schiefrivals.
“Any complaint from any buyer or manufacturer can result in a seller suspension, and their livelihood stops,” says C.J. Rosenbaum, a New York attorney who says he’s helped hundreds of sellers navigate the suspension appeal process in the past several months. “Mom-and-pop businesses can’t make the mortgage and big businesses can’t make payroll.”
Sellers say the suspension process is guilty-until-proven-innocent, forcing them to prove complaints are unwarranted or pledging to make improvements to get selling privileges reinstated. They also say that the email appeal process wastes time and energy, and they often field the same request, often vague and unspecific.
Amazon is clear in its seller policies that its rules can change at any time, taking effect immediately. Sellers are informed about changes via e-mail and other notifications sent on the platforms they use to manage their accounts.