Urgent: Amazon Selling Account Under Review (Part 3)

Read Part 1 and Part 2

When I got off the phone with the Health Support team, we immediately hired Ed and his team. We knew we could probably handle this ourselves, but we also knew there was a lot at stake. Just one day of suspension would cost more than hiring a pro – and a wrong turn could easily mean weeks of suspension on the cusp of Q4. Even as relatively experienced sellers, we knew DIY was a poor gamble today. This was a great opportunity to learn from the experience of others.

With Ed’s team engaged, I cleared my day to answer any questions that arose and to continue my own research. We already had a good idea of the problems that led to this situation. Now together we needed to come up with a plan of action to solve those problems and keep them from happening again.

By early evening Ed’s team had a POA ready for us, but the work wasn’t done. I’m a strong believer in making any POA our own. I didn’t want it to read like it was written by someone else, or like I was just telling Amazon what I thought they wanted to hear. Now that we had a framework from a pro, we still needed to do the finish work ourselves.

We were confident that this plan gave us an idea of what Amazon’s expectations were, but we weren’t confident that we could or even should implement every piece of it as it stood. The next step was to examine our processes, identify our internal failures, and use the ideas in this POA to lay out the root cause and the solutions we were implementing.

I decided to use the information I had received in a followup email from the Account Health Support rep as an outline for my final POA:

Send a plan of action within 72 hours that explains:
— Greater detail on the root cause(s) of the policy violation
— Greater detail on the actions you have taken to resolve issues
— Greater detail on the steps you have taken to prevent the policy violation going forward
— Greater detail on how your account has complied with our policy
— Greater detail on evidence or examples that demonstrate that your account has complied with our policy

I formatted my POA using 5 bullet points based on the subjects above, and organized the ideas and solutions under them, rewriting each one in my own words but making sure to retain significant terms and language that I knew were important to Amazon – for example, words and phrases that appear in the 14 Leadership Principles.

I revised the pieces that we felt would be an unnecessary burden on our processes, not eliminating them but changing them to be more appropriate and practical to our situation.

We discussed the situation with our team and especially with the members most closely connected to the situation to make sure they understood the issue and knew what needed to stop or change.

We prayed, slept on it, revised it, and prayed some more. Then we sent the plan on Saturday evening about 40 hours after receiving the initial notice, and settled down to wait.

Incredibly, we received our answer in just 25 minutes.

Cont’d