Amazon Account Health in Changing

Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions I'm here once again with Leah McHugh, both of us from ecommerceChris hashing out what we expect people to talk about with us and around us next week in Vegas, throughout the week at the Prosper Show or at MDS Inspire. If you're a member of MDS, you'll see us at the cocktail hour on March 11th.

And if you're gonna the Prosper Show and you arrive early, , we're co-hosting a happy hour with some other brand owners and agency heads service providers on March 9th. So we'll include that information in the show notes. It'll be later in the day on March 9th, because I don't land until the afternoon.

But as usual, once we're boots on the ground or boots in the hotel lobby, we tend to get queries from people about, Hey, I got something to show you. I've got a listing, I've got a alert, I've got a message from Amazon. In fact, in years past, I remember having people walk up to us when we hadn't even [00:01:00] checked in yet.

We were in the lobby pulling our bags around.

They recognize us from past Prosper shows or past podcasts, but the bottom line is I think a lot of brand owners go to these events. With a current need, not a potential future need, not something they're thinking about.

I think it's very hands-on stuff. So if you were pressed to an, I don't know, identify the one or two things you expect to be asked about first this year, what would it be?

Leah: Probably something to do with compliance documentation, , and something to do with a product being restricted that they don't think should be restricted.

Chris: Restricted product false flags would've been my first guess.

Leah: Well, and Amazon's sort of changed some of The compliance documentation submission stuff in the last month or so. So I'm assuming I'll get asked about that. 'cause now they're making labs submit documentation for you. Interestingly, they're making lab [00:02:00] submit CGMPs, which like aren't a lab test?

Chris: No.

Leah: So you have to send your CGMP to a lab to then have them send it to Amazon. I'm not entirely sure why for that particular one. I understand running lab tests direct from a lab, but this is certification that has nothing to do with the lab necessarily that's sending it.

Chris: Yeah, I think part of it is sellers get what appear to be straightforward requests for documentation.

Lab tests, whatever, they submit it. And then a lot of 'em, from what I can tell, are getting this response, if you could call it a response, they get this answer that has all this sort of incomprehensible mush in it. And I'll give you an example, around pricing price matching. I've seen these hey, you compared our price to the wrong item or the wrong quantity. And people appealing that all the time, right?

Because Amazon's always sending these crazy pricing messages out.

And the [00:03:00] responses I see when they appeal it. The responses I see that they show us the next day are just like, I can't even make heads or tails of them. It's almost like the team reviewing it, and I'm sure you're seeing this with compliance work that you do.

The team that sends the message, like they're either copying, pasting from the wrong page or they don't understand the ask, or they don't understand what the brand submitted, but what the brand submitted from what I can see. Makes sense.

Leah: Yeah. That's why I tell everybody not to submit that via an email case or price matching. Because you just get a nonsense response.

Chris: I mean prices. Well, and then how many things have we worked

Leah: on? Also, the team responding to you is not the pricing team.

Chris: Right. And another example, like all the cases we worked last year where they said this product has expired, and it was what? One of 'em was Tupperware, right?

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The definition of the product that doesn't expire. And so I see a lot of people [00:04:00] approaching us with that type of confusion where, another example, wow, I'm full of examples today. Another example are the intellectual property flags and notifications where? Well, it's just I people, it'll say copyright and then you read the text and it has absolutely nothing to do with a copyright violation.

It might be a detail page error or a listing violation or a listing problem, but they're just like, it's the same as the brand owners who get, this is my fourth straight example, if you're keeping count.

It's like the brand owners are getting those. We had complaints about the authenticity of your product.

What are you talking about? I'm a private label brand. I can prove authenticity very easy to you, but why the heck are you asking? And then they attach manufacturer info, trademark info, whatever it might be. And you get this generic response back. I mean, it's always a generic response, but you get a response back, well, you haven't sent us an LOA [00:05:00] from the brand that shows that you're approved to sell this product.

Yeah, we're the brand owner.

Leah: That's been happening for a long time, though.

Chris: It's worse now. You can't tell me that's not worse now, and you can't tell me you don't expect more of these types of messages. I mean, we had met with people in New York, what, three weeks ago now? And people were walking up to us at our meetup and showing us messaging and I mean, I saw at least two or three that made no sense and didn't, it's not that they don't make sense.

I mean a lot of the messages don't make sense. They don't correspond to the issue. And I think each time an appeal goes in, you're likely to get another response that has something to do with yet another topic. And so break out of that. Cycle as early and as quickly as you possibly can and that's what I've been telling people in person at these events is like, don't just call account health.

And they tell you, oh, I can see what happened here. They want blank. And then you submit blank [00:06:00] and you get some other nonsensical response.

Leah: Yeah. Well, the trouble with going down that path is that sometimes what they think you should be doing actually makes it worse. And actually makes it harder to resolve.

That's sort of the interesting thing, at least in the compliance side of things. Sometimes it's actually easier for me to fix something that's been correctly identified by Amazon.

Chris: Yeah.

Leah: Than convincing Amazon that they've incorrectly identified something. you think it would be the other way around?

Like this product is clearly not what you're saying. Do you think that would be the easier thing to appeal, but oftentimes it's actually more difficult to appeal because it doesn't fit within their little decision tree in their internal tools.

Chris: Well, your example I think is easy to fix because you can make an argument and prove to them, Hey, you've miscategorized this item.

And a lot of times they seem to agree when they review it properly.

Leah: No, you have to get it pushed higher up in order to get it reviewed properly when it's not. But I'm saying is I [00:07:00] often don't have to escalate things when it is I correctly identified to get it resolved. Whereas when it's incorrectly identified, which you think would be easier because there is no appeal, then you're just like, you got this wrong.

but usually I have to escalate those in order to get them actually reviewed by somebody because the low, I just don't think the lower level team has the knowledge or the authority. A lot of the times to remove a restriction that was placed incorrectly.

Chris: Yeah. And because escalations are probably most of what we do now and most of how things get resolved now you do end up having people that aren't trained in certain compliance areas get these escalations delegated to them so they can review it at a high level in terms of they report to somebody who is at a high level at Amazon, but they don't have high level training within that, within their core area of expertise. So they might not understand compliance.

Leah: Compliance is the same as performance. Usually who it's delegated [00:08:00] to is not somebody on that team.

And oftentimes they have limited access to that team. They just have slightly more access to that team than somebody on the lower level teams.

Chris: Yeah. Or something legal in nature. I've seen people making legal type decisions on things that had nothing to do with legal issues.

Leah: Yeah. That's also been happening for years.

Chris: Yeah, it's been happening for years. But there have been some changes, or there will be soon some changes in the escalation ranks and who's handling what based on just some executive reshuffle, but also I've noticed. Account health leadership is changing and that means there might not be as much.

Well, first of all, we've already seen a decline in the calls from the so-called leadership team members or escalation team members, and that's gonna be one of the topics I talk about next week in Vegas, because that's a big deal. they didn't do a great job with those calls.

But [00:09:00] sometimes on some of those calls, I mean, the ones I was on, at least, you at least finally got an answer and you got to break away from these generic answers.

Leah: Sure, you got an answer not in writing. And they would call whenever the hell they felt like it usually. And then if you missed the call, too bad. Yep.

Chris: Sometimes they called a second time.

Leah: Emails. Yeah, but sometimes they'll call a second time, five minutes later.

Chris: I don't think those tend to be escalation or leadership team people that call five minutes later.

Leah: No, I've had that too.

Chris: I think the problem is that they call a second time without telling you when the hell it's gonna be.

Leah: Well, they never tell you of what it's gonna be unless you're well into it and then it's like a regular thing that you're doing. Then they will sometimes give you a time, whether they actually call at that time is a different story.

Chris: They often don't or didn't.

Leah: But I mean, we work with people all over the world. Amazon's team for this is in Seattle, and they just seem to assume that everybody's on Seattle time.

Chris: Yeah, I spoke with an account health rep last week who admitted, he said, yes, there is a process [00:10:00] for if you meet certain criteria, maybe get a leadership team call.

I mean, they're clearly reducing the number of these that they do. And I think I understand now why those drifted away, is because a couple of the executives running or in charge of account health have left or are in the process of leaving. And there's a reshuffle within account health, teams and representatives, the people managing those teams too.

So not only are there escalation changes, there's changes within account health and there's just, I think, gonna be changes in how listing appeals are reviewed and. Escalations are delegated, generally speaking.

Leah: So to be honest, actually haven't had a lot of escalations going to account health leadership lately.

They've been going to other teams. Rather than being delegated to them. So I haven't really been dealing with that team all that much of late.

Chris: Maybe they're winding it down soon. I don't know. Maybe the account health team will be like 2026 and then by 2027 [00:11:00] it'll look totally different.

Or maybe by Q4 it'll be totally different. I don't know long way to go before accelerate to figure out these, read these tea leaves. Um,

Leah: now it's something that may or may not actually happen.

Chris: Yeah. Well I'm like the career. Yeah. I mean, I'm just right now focused

Leah: on what, I don't even remember what the one last year was.

The one before. It was the escalation button.

Chris: Support escalation.

Leah: I was that last year support escalation? I don't even

Chris: remember. No, that was 2024. Um, so almost two years ago. But

Leah: yeah,

Chris: in, in Amazon's defense, they could just say, look, our seller assistant slash ai tools and plans became more developed because technology went ahead leaps and bounds.

So we, we shelved the original plan to throw. Support escalations people.

Leah: We got rid of the original plan to have better qualified people helping you and decided to replace it with ai. That kind of doesn't work.

Chris: Thanks. [00:12:00] Yeah. Everyone wants to talk about AI all the time, so obviously that'll be a big thing at Prosper too.

Leah: Yep.

Chris: I'm expect a lot of ai, it was last year, the way it will be next year, but for us it's, I'm gonna have to start asking people more often, like. Okay. I read your appeal. Was this chat GPT?

Leah: Oh,

Chris: I email. I read your email. I can tell I read your email. Well, to confirm it, I'm asking because I have suspicions, but they're summarizing stuff in emails to us using chat, GPT or other ai, and I understand that.

Um, and they're writing some appeals that go in Amazon that seem like they're cookie cutter, one size fits all exercises. And I understand that to a degree. But it went from the basic appeal used chat GPT to, let's use it for everything.

Leah: We have had some people send us a summary of a situation, which they clearly use chat GPT for, and it's like, wow, this is very long and doesn't say anything.

Chris: Repetitive.

Leah: It's just [00:13:00] gibberish. Like it's

Chris: just, yeah, I know. I know other members of team have commented on that also.

Leah: They're always very long when it's

Chris: Yeah. And the emails that we're supposed to be sending back to people, it's like, here's seven paragraphs and no one's gonna read.

Leah: Yeah. You're like, oh, okay. And none of them say anything.

Chris: But I mean, gonna lead with that. I think this year with some of these conversations, instead of saying where did your appeals go, or how many did you do? I'm gonna say also, did you rely too heavily on AI to put these appeals together? Because obviously Amazon can tell, and you're not supposed to be discouraging them from reading your appeals, but people are, I think.

Doing a worse job at discouraging or a better job at discouraging them, depending on your perspective.

Leah: I mean, eventually we'll just get to seller's AI talking to Amazon's ai and they can just go round.

Chris: Yeah.

Leah: And round and round and round and round.

Chris: Well, I mean, that's great if it works. If your AI can talk to their ai, that's my point

Leah: a lot.

But it'll, it'll be entertaining.

Chris: I [00:14:00] mean, you know, let's leave a note on this episode for Comeback in 2030 and let's see how the AI AI is going. See age. Yeah, that's four years away from, I'd say three, four years away from ai. Your inputs are great. Their inputs are great. It actually improves and doesn't lessen the solution to have the first couple of goes, use ai the first couple attempts because I just assuming that it works that way now.

Is kind of like assuming that the first day the internet was used, that online shopping would be perfected within two or three years. It's kind of not the way the internet evolved.

Leah: But also no one was thinking to use it for that then.

Chris: Oh, people were trying to sell at the

Leah: be. Amazon was

Chris: one of the first named

Leah: major ones.

Chris: People named Jeff. Were envisioning a future [00:15:00] where DVDs, for those of you not

Leah: not

Chris: familiar what a DVD is. That's

Leah: actually my favorite Jeff Bezos quote was that one of the main questions people asked when they started Amazon was, what's the internet?

Chris: Yeah. So I mean, kind of people are still with AI wandering around, but the idea that you can instantly adopt and instantly communicate perfectly with these tools, it, it ignores the fact that you have to propel that communication using the tool.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So, um, those are the main things I'm expecting to talk about. The, the ex escalation changes, the executive reshuffle. Within account health, because obviously people are much more familiar with calling account health reps now. Um, and then also just the misunderstandings and the, why did you send me this response?

Uh, because misreading one of Amazon's incorrect responses, I think can really damage your ability [00:16:00] to understand what's going on. And then you're more likely to write an appeal that has nothing to do with anything just because they told you to write an appeal based on something.

Leah: And just on the flip side, because it isn't all on Amazon side.

Uh, a lot of times sellers send something completely different than what Amazon has asked before. Yes,

Chris: yes. Which, which is one thing that we are always talking about, but Amazon's getting worse at doing that too. So it's like bad enough when one side's doing it, when both sides are doing it, you're just guaranteeing that you're talking past each other and it just, it, it lengthens the amount of time it takes to solve this stuff, you know?

And this is, this can be tricky stuff when both sides don't really know what's going on or,

Leah: yep.

Chris: Account health

Leah: is so we'll be looking forward to talking about that at Prosper.

Chris: We'll keep the information in the notes on, uh, our March 9th, I don't know, early arrival drink.

And if you're an MDS, you're going to the cocktail hour. [00:17:00] That's on March 11th, so you already know where to go for that. Questions on any of this or if you're planning to go to Prosper Show, reach out to us and let us know. Or look for us wandering the exhibition hall. See you there.