Tell HN: Amazon has deactivated my seller account
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.
26 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadAmazon 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 suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers
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.
Emphasize your own brands and model number, and make the other brands more clearly a description, in the Amazon item title?
(Background on a simple filter: On eBay, it seemed like someone told counterfeit sellers that all they had to do was to copy&paste the string "For" in front of the brand name and model number, and then they could sell counterfeits. And sometimes black out the counterfeited brand name in the photos. So an item title might be of the format "For <brand> <model>", and mean it's definitely a counterfeit or knockoff of "<brand> <model>".)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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590
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 ...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. :)
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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.
edit: typing is hard
And yes, more info is pointless, see https://www.revk.uk/2025/11/more-useless-amazon.html