Amazon sellers operate under immense pressure. Shrinking margins from a variety of costs (think accelerating fees, ad cost increases, automated buyer refunds by Amazon and more) and of course fierce price competition boost a brand’s need for more sales. At the same time, you cannot risk problems with Account Health that could hurt your rating or get you deactivated. 

For example, the obsessive need to accrue positive product reviews results in a high-stakes environment where every advantage counts. In the current climate, many brands rely on either outdated advice or they assume incorrectly that a claim on someone’s site that they are “Amazon Terms of Service Compliant” – which usually means that in their opinion, they believe a permissible "gray area" is allowable, when it is not. Of course, services look for loopholes.

The other side is this: we see recommended practices, sometimes recommended by agencies, internal Amazon representatives, SAS Core account managers and various unproven “consultants” or lawyers that become direct paths to full account suspensions. You see this in Seller forums posts, LinkedIn calls for help, and in private WhatsApp or other groups citing “Amazon nightmares” and pleading for assistance. 

Those often trace back to how Amazon’s enforcement landscape turned unforgivingly black and white in the age of “zero tolerance enforcement” during this past year.  This is reinforced in almost every call I’ve had with internal Amazon teams, where they repeat their mantra that playing by the rules is mandatory, not a suggestion.  

Some counter-intuitive mistakes sellers make right now may kill off their Amazon brand, so the time to assess risk and prevent TOS violations and other mistakes is now, too.

The Irrelevance of Your "Good Intentions"

The Common Advice: Sellers are sometimes told by their Amazon SAS core account managers or Account Health representatives that their intentions matter when appealing a suspension. They are led to believe that if they didn't mean to violate a policy, it will be taken into consideration. Or maybe they offer it as a last-ditch attempt to help you cover for a mistake that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. 

Either way, teams that make the final suspension decisions won’t be moved by it. They may have cared in the distant past if you actually meant to violate a policy deliberately or not, but those are the old days– and they are long gone.  Like everyone else in business, Amazon knows the road to ecommerce marketplace Hell is paved with your good intentions.  

Whether or not you break rules out of ignorance or to cheat, you’ll pay the price for it once it catches up to you. If you misrepresented your products to sell more of them, or made eye-grabbing product claims, then you profited while others suffered, their view.  If you bought from a competitor and left them a bad review or feedback to “warn buyers” away from their bad quality items, you won’t get anywhere giving that reasoning to Amazon.  They’ll see an attack.

Once Amazon takes you down, you’ll need to “come clean” on how you took shots at someone else.  Selling a story, or putting together a weakly constructed POA, won’t cut it with the performance and policy teams I used to work on.  POAs are out – and avoiding errors and correcting mistakes BEFORE you’re reprimanded or suspended is in. It’s clear cut.

Personally, while working on these during my Amazon tenure, I did allow for second chances to sellers I reinstated, and it was despite the story they tried to peddle, not due to it. Nowadays, Amazon knows your brand or your particular product can be replaced (most of the time.) 

For policy enforcement investigators, what matters is not why you did something, but the hard evidence of what you did. Your motives, malicious or not, are not a huge factor in their analysis.

The worst example involves the trap of the "No-Strings-Attached" Free Product.

The Misconception: "You can offer a free gift as long as you don't ask for a review."

This is one of the most persistent and dangerous myths in the Amazon seller community, and I think I know why – the obsession with asking buyers to leave reviews yet staying compliant with policy hasn’t kept up with trends on the account suspension side of things. That, and the fact that anyone pushing services involving boosting sales rank or product reviews have absolutely zero experience with suspension appeals and account reinstatement teams. 

The hard truth is that giving away a product is a violation regardless of whether a review is explicitly requested. Amazon's policy enforcement teams are not looking for a direct "ask" and leaving you alone if they never find it.  They analyze data and identify spikes in positive reviews, before investigating causes, then suspend you for giving away products to generate them.

Amazon views the act of giving a product away as an inherent inducement for a positive review. The seller's specific language or stated intent is irrelevant to the teams making the enforcement decision.

A suspension is awful anytime, and becomes all the worse if Amazon tells you that you can only reverse it if you prove you never broke any rules to begin with.  Taking a leap to set up a short term revenue score, only to apologize later if you’re caught isn’t a strategy. It’s asking for an Amazon death sentence. 

More on this particular trend (and account killer) in my next article on appeals mistakes, coming soon!