Amazon enforcement has reached unprecedented levels in 2024. Even 8 and 9-figure sellers are getting suspended, and Amazon's "two strikes and you're out" policy means there's virtually no room for error. If you sell on Amazon, this episode could save your business.

Amazon's tolerance for any form of manipulation is at an all-time low. The cost of non-compliance isn't just a warning anymore - it's permanent removal from the platform. Even if you think you're playing by the rules, the rules have changed, and they're being enforced by AI that doesn't give second chances.

We sit down with Chris McCabe, former Amazon employee with 5.5 years inside the company and 11+ years helping sellers navigate suspensions and enforcement. Known for direct, no-nonsense advice that saves businesses from permanent bans.

Key Topics & Insights:

Review Manipulation Enforcement (The #1 Suspension Risk)

• The enforcement surge: Why Amazon has been cracking down harder than ever since March 2024
• Harsher penalties: Re-offenders are essentially blacklisted - no second chances
• What actually works: The proper way to report competitor abuse (hint: it's not support cases)
• Social media strategy: How LinkedIn and Twitter reports are getting real results

Tactics That Will Get You Suspended (Stop These Immediately)

• Physical mail to customers: Postcards and inserts are dead - Amazon considers this harvesting private data
• QR codes and email collection: Any attempt to move customers off-platform is flagged
• Review requests: Even indirect asks like "if happy, leave review" will trigger suspensions
• Giveaways and rebates: Amazon assumes you're buying reviews, regardless of what you actually ask for
• Influencer services: Many are using compromised influencers that Amazon is actively tracking

AI-Powered Takedow

• Keyword triggers: How certain words in titles and descriptions automatically flag your listings
• Category manipulation: Competitors are weaponizing ASIN contributions to get your products moved to "search Siberia"
• Improper ASIN merges: The difference between legitimate consolidation and review manipulation

The New Reality: No Gray Areas

• Amazon's policies are now black and white - stop looking for loopholes
• Focus on how Amazon interprets policies, not how you think they should be interpreted
• Generic appeal templates and ChatGPT responses are being rejected automatically

Actionable Takeaways

• Audit your current practices: If you're doing any of the "forbidden" tactics mentioned, stop immediately
• Document competitor abuse: Screenshot evidence of review manipulation and report it properly
• Prepare for enforcement waves: Peak seasons (Prime Day, Q4) are followed by major suspension sweeps
• Get help early: Don't waste 5-10 appeals trying to DIY your way out of suspension
  
  

Chapters

(00:00) Intro

(01:40) Overview of Amazon Enforcement and Review Manipulation

(06:12) Reporting Abuse: Best Practices

(11:42) Identifying and Avoiding Review Manipulation Tactics

(23:11) Grow Subscription Revenue with Loop Subscriptions

(24:16) Common Mistakes to Avoid and Additional Considerations

(30:44) Understanding AI Takedowns

(33:39) Improper ASIN Mergers

(36:04) Amazon Policy: No Gray Areas

(38:50) Navigating Appeals Effectively

(45:22) Drive More Revenue with Post Pilot

Transcript

Chris McCabe:

I think Word is finally getting around that you can't just use generic templates to appeal that you can't use chat GPT to appeal. I think Amazon's catching AI use in appeals and they just throw them away.

Brett Curry:

Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. We want to take just a minute and tell you a little bit about my agency OMG Commerce. Now we work with some of your favorite eight and nine figure D two C and omnichannel brands. And our specialty is profitable scale. We love taking great brands and amplifying their growth profitably. We've helped a number of brands go from zero on YouTube to spending as much as a million dollars in 90 days while hitting a CAC or CPA target. We've also helped multiple brands launch on Amazon or just add scale to Amazon. We took Boom Beauty from zero to almost $6 million in sales their first 12 months on Amazon. So if you're not satisfied with your current level of growth, if you're looking to diversify channels, maybe you're a little too dependent on meta and you want to add YouTube or you're not pleased with your Amazon growth, then we need to chat.

So visit us at omgcommerce.com, click the Let's Talk button. We'd love to schedule a complimentary strategy session with you and with that back to the show. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about an absolutely critical topic, Amazon enforcement and how to keep your listings live and available for shoppers to purchase your goods and how to avoid suspensions, how to navigate if you do get suspended. And I probably need to tell you if you're an Amazon seller, but it is gnarly out there, and even the best sellers, even eight and nine figure sellers are not immune to having issues impacting the visibility of their listings. And hey, we got to think about this, like the retail shelf, right? You can't sell anything and Walmart if your products are all yanked off the shelf.

And while that may not be a reality in the physical world all that much, it absolutely is on Amazon. And so today I've got a returning guest. He's a superstar. He's all over. If you're in the Amazon world, you probably know him. He has e-commerce in his name. Chris. Chris McCabe is joining the show again. We caught up at Prosper Show in Vegas, I guess months ago now, Chris, but you've been traveling the world. I've been speaking at events, and we just now are able to record. But welcome back to the show and thanks for coming on and how's it going?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, no, I always enjoy speaking to you about these types of topics, and we always have good feedback and comments from people that hear it and see it and who are concerned about these things. Things are good. This is a hectic, busy summer. Sometimes summer gets a little quiet, but prime day coming early. Everything I think is different this year. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yes, we just finished Prime Day, but I know you'd mentioned to me sometimes right after Prime Day, there's an increase in suspensions and listing takedowns and things like that. Amazon's maybe a little cautious about doing that during prime day or right before it, but afterwards they're looking at it. And then of course, we're prepping for Q4 basically right now and for the next several months.

And so ai, I mean, Amazon's going to be enforcing things sometimes with ai. And so yeah, we need to understand what are our risk factors? What are the things that could take down our listings? What do we need to be aware of, and then how can we mitigate things if we do get suspended? And so you had shared with me several hot topics that I want to dive into because these are mission critical for all Amazon sellers or brands that are on Amazon. And the first one is review manipulation, and then this is one that we all understand from, hey, our competitors, especially we've got overseas competitors, we we're probably confident that they're doing some shady things as far as reviews go, but it's something that really Amazon's trying to crack down on getting rid of spammy manipulative reviews and ratings. And so walk us through what are the things we need to be aware of? What is Amazon looking for and what could get us into trouble in terms of review manipulation? So

Chris McCabe:

It's kind of classic, good news, bad news. The bad news being, I'll start with the bad news first. Penalties are harsher. Reoffenders are generally speaking, not considered as eligible for reinstatements. So if they've been warned or suspended for review manipulation in the past, they should not be experimenting, dabbling, grabbing a gimmicks, looking at hacks. They found out about at some event somewhere they should be super compliant, extra compliant, extraordinarily compliant because they should consider themselves on their last go. Don't

Brett Curry:

Tow that line, avoid that line. Just be above board. Yeah.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah. There's very little wiggle room left anyway, whether you're a offender or not, and I can get into that in a second. This is still kind of the bad news answer. I mean, the good news in terms of abusive competitors is it's 10 times better now reporting them for abuse if you do it correctly, which is not support cases, not random calls to account health, not waiting for your SAS core manager to report them for you. That might be part of it, but I mean, reporting abuse and seeing action is higher now than anytime I can remember. Wow. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

So maybe we can double click on that because I'm confident. I mean, this is the thing that I hear so much. Of course, at OMG, we help clients grow on Amazon, and so as we have new brands coming to us, they all complain about those Chinese sellers with fake reviews and stuff like that. So what's the proper way to notify Amazon that, hey, these sellers are manipulating reviews,

Chris McCabe:

Take action. And there's more than one way. Historically, it was emailing escalations to senior management or executives at Amazon or their staff, their support, their direct

Brett Curry:

Reports. I just texted Jeff. I just texted like, Hey, Jeff, hope you're not on the yacht, but take a note of this,

Chris McCabe:

Jeff started. That's why Amazon execs can't really ever complain if they get direct emails from people. Jeff himself was the one who began that trend, or isn't that crazy?

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Chris McCabe:

Practice of the, Jeff had Amazon email and Jeff had eight or nine back when I was working at Amazon, and we got the so-called Bezos escalations. Of course, you don't hear about Bezos escalations anymore. Jeff had eight or nine assistance and he had eight or nine email addresses, right? Wow. And most people didn't know those. They mostly knew Jeff B at Amazon or Jeff at Amazon, which of course now has morphed into a generic email queue just like writing the seller performance. But Jeff kind of began the trend of emailing directly to S team execs, or let's just say senior management because there's only three dozen s team executives, and getting them to delegate directly to mid-level management or higher direct reports that they work with to have a senior level senior quality review as opposed to doing abuse reports to seller support cases 90 something percent of the time, that's useless.

No follow-up, no proper review. That's just marking something like it's been worked on, but it hasn't. Yep. Yep. So we don't do email cues. We don't used to do that a lot. There used to be multiple abuse reporting email cues, and they were hit or miss. It was worth doing because sometimes you would hit, maybe other times you would miss and you'd end up escalating it anyway. But if you do it properly, there's been no time that I can recall. I mean, actionable step number one right here is report abuse early and often, but do it the right way. Don't send volumes of attachments or info or don't write three page emails unless it's very fact and data-driven, something that they can use to decide if they're going to enforce or if they're going to ignore it or if they're going to transfer it. But usable value add info. If it's just mushy comments and complaints, and I mean, you can complain a little bit in the first sentence or two, but the rest has to be factual.

Brett Curry:

This is not prose or emotional or this is not an essay. No, this is let's get right to the facts and make it easy for you to

Chris McCabe:

Make a decision. As time has gone on, people have had some success, lesser success, but some success with Twitter posts tagging certain people. LinkedIn has kind of been the dark horse, which is kind of coming up on the rail on the leaders. LinkedIn's been used a lot more in the last 18 months, I would say.

Brett Curry:

So reaching out to select team members at Amazon on LinkedIn, is that what you mean? Just

Chris McCabe:

LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Post LinkedIn. You're publicly complaining. But also the great thing about LinkedIn is first of all, there's a lot of high level Amazonians and high level people like us on LinkedIn who are watching this stuff, but you can ask for help describe a problem. You can be factual. You can tag people who are relevant both inside the company and maybe X Amazon like me, but you get a lot of eyeballs on it. You get a lot of people who care about it, maybe people who don't have an exact answer, but people who are resharing it elsewhere where other people might see it that the original post didn't get to. So, and LinkedIn's the only real proper channel for professional posts of anything business related or work related, but also Amazon related. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn too, so people are tagging us about posts I do and about their problems. So it's changed. I mean, as time goes on, people are sharing more things publicly anyway. Maybe this time next year people will be doing YouTube shorts and doing it and tagging people. Got it.

Brett Curry:

So we're going to keep a factual, we're going to keep it fairly brief. No long prose. We're going to consider posting even on Twitter slash x posting on LinkedIn and tagging appropriate people, even former Amazonians like yourself. But what else are we looking at doing? Who do we reach out to? Who do we notify to support to report nefarious review manipulation?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah. The abuse prevention teams at Amazon for obvious reasons, are largely behind the curtain. So essentially you're reaching above them to somebody who's high enough that they probably report to them or report to somebody who reports to them, and their skip level would be somebody who would get eyes on it. But you're generating attention for something that's not just impacting you. That could be happening to other sellers, to other brands. Creating bad seller experiences, creating less faith in the marketplace. I mean, Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, bad customer experiences. Exactly.

Chris McCabe:

Ultimately the biggest risk

Brett Curry:

Here. Yeah.

Chris McCabe:

Ultimately it results in, well, whether it's fake reviews or just listing content that's been misrepresented category abuse, it results in buyers not being able to find things want to pay for. It involves buyers being misled, misinformation, taking them down the wrong path. It's bad buyer experience, which Amazon exists to provide the best buyer experience. And on top of that, legitimate honest sellers get punished when abuse goes unreported or enacted upon. So Amazon has their own interests in protecting everyone's experience, and it's not just their own financial interests because sales would be hurt, their own reputational interest and their own integrity of the marketplace at stake, and also it just makes it harder for them to pitch you services, Hey, pay us 5,000 bucks for an account manager who's going to help you expand your selection and create accessories for your product. Well, you're less likely to do that if you're fighting a two or three front war all day with competitors with bad reviews that don't belong there with listing sabotage, especially coming out of a peak sales period like Prime Day. Well, what happened during Prime Day, I did a lot of posts on LinkedIn about category abuses. People were showing up randomly in the wrong category. People's listings were vanishing

Brett Curry:

Intentionally meaning? Meaning people found that one of their competitors sneaking into or someone sneaking into the wrong category on purpose to try to get sales or

Chris McCabe:

Or competitors pushing you an example into the wrong category.

Brett Curry:

Oh, got

Chris McCabe:

That. The famous example is your products wind up in the adult category, which is like what I call search Siberia.

Brett Curry:

Very hard to find your products, and that's maybe a competitor saying, Hey, I know what to do with my

Chris McCabe:

Competitor.

Brett Curry:

I'm going to put them in the adult category. No one's going to find it. Got it. Right.

Chris McCabe:

Elicit as in contributions sometimes through a vendor central account, sometimes through other means, but there's a variety of ways. This is a well-known, extremely understood problem that crops up every prime day. It's just a little bit disheartening that it happened this prime day too, but it'll come back in Q4, so you have to be on your toes and aware of that. I like how you started this off by saying there are peak enforcement periods like a month and a half before prime day, and then as soon as prime day ends or Q4, like Black Friday, cyber Monday, all of a sudden the enforcement teams pounce with, well, we waited until this period passed. Now we're going to start enforcing all this stuff. That's true. Bad ASIN merges always a hot topic. People are constantly getting busted for merging ASINs inappropriately or reporting their competitors for doing it. They ease off on the pedal with the enforcement right before Prime Day or Q4, and then they dive right back into it because they want to clean catalog. They want to stop these types of practices.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. Totally makes sense. Just to circle back, I want to make sure we close the loop. I don't think we ever fully landed that. So we can post on LinkedIn, we can post on Twitter. A lot of the enforcement team is hidden behind the curtain, so to speak. How do we reach out to them or who do we reach out to, or is that a little more elaborate than a podcast lends itself to,

Chris McCabe:

I mean, there's too many names to count in terms of s team executives or senior management, but that's what you're wanting to reach out to an S team member. Those are emails. Those are direct emails.

Brett Curry:

Got it, got it, got it, got it. Yeah.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah. I'd love to rattle them off right now, but that would take a while

Brett Curry:

And that might not be the best

Chris McCabe:

Approach. You have some good clicks on the podcast for that.

Brett Curry:

That's true though. Yeah. Want all the to Amazon st.

Chris McCabe:

You can't send the same thing to 15 people. That's what sellers, that's their number one mistake,

Chris McCabe:

Customized

Chris McCabe:

Content. Depending on your audience, depending on where it goes, you're probably contacting the people who do different things at the company that have different types of staff supporting them. So you don't just say, well, they're high level, so we're going to send the same thing to these 15 people. That's not going to produce a good result. And they're also going to see annotations on your account that show you've sent the same exact thing to other people, so they can just say, oh, great. I don't have to do anything here. Somebody else got the same email,

Brett Curry:

They'll take care of it. Yeah.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah. So that's a major mistake people do. Got it. But in terms of, I know you want to circle back on the review manipulation mistakes.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think what's interesting here too, so as we look at the review manipulation mistakes, one, these are things for us to avoid, but two, these are things that we could be looking at for our competitors to be able to mention or potential, so kind of dual angle here, what should we avoid and what should we be looking at that our competitors might be doing?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, and if you see anything I'm about to say, if you capture screenshot, collect evidence, live links, whatever it is, of any of the things we're about to talk about, that's abuse reporting. That's exactly what I was just talking about, and no better time than the present to report these things. They take it very seriously. I cannot recall any other prior period. I've been doing this for 11 years, by the way. I can't remember any other period where 11 years and former Amazonian,

Brett Curry:

Which we failed to mention at the beginning of the podcast, but you

Chris McCabe:

And a half, yeah, five and a half years at Amazon, six years before that, so 17 out of the last eight, I did take a year off. Understandable. 17 out of the last 18 years, but I don't remember any period that's been this long of one particular suspension type, continually enforced week in, week out for these many months. Prosper is when I last saw you in person. I would say this started in March, and I mean there's been a little bit of an ebb and flow. Not every single week is as heavy as the week before to the week after, but we've been consistently getting suspended. Sellers or the threat of suspension, as you've probably heard, many sellers are in the account health assurance program, so they make you appeal. It's the same process. They make you appeal, but to keep your privileges active, they don't suspend you upfront. But this topic's been hot since March. I mean, that's four months. That's a long time for one suspension type. Usually it's like four weeks of the peak. It's kind of the bell curve.

Brett Curry:

People kind of clean their act up for the most part, and then in the Amazon eases off a little bit.

Chris McCabe:

Most suspension types follow the traditional bell curve where there's a little tail in the beginning where they're sort of ramping it up. There's the big bump in the middle, and then as word gets out, people get suspended, reinstated, some get suspended, not reinstated. Then it kind of tails off over the course of a few weeks. Not this time, not this year. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Well, I mean, this has got to be the biggest issue though. I know this is something that all the soldiers talk about or complaint about this, but even as a shopper, I'm like, I want to be able to trust the reviews, and if I start to get the hint that these reviews have been manipulated, now what am I trusting? I'm not trusting the whole experience, and so totally makes sense. So yeah, what are some of the things we're looking for here or trying to avoid,

Chris McCabe:

And unfortunately, several people are still doing most of the things I'm about to say. Now I realize a lot of the tricks and techniques are in a cycle. They get trendy and then they go away. Remember, years ago, rebates were a big hot thing, and then those completely went away once a bunch of people got suspended, a couple of people are trying to weave rebates back into it now. Inserts hot topic, then it goes cold for a while. Maybe there's thing you were

Brett Curry:

At the tail end of that bell curve, and so it's like, Hey, we can maybe fly into the radar, but

Chris McCabe:

I would argue that it's no longer trendy or cyclical anymore. I think now you cannot recycle these old tactics, which sending postcards like physical mail to people is just dead. No one should be doing this. I've seen, I don't know how many messages I've been on calls with Amazon enforcement teams calls sometimes of my own calls with other sellers on the call. They are not interested in any mail going to buyers. The messaging's been extremely clear, and all the suspension notifications don't use residential addresses. Don't send physical mail for anything that's not essential to the order. They don't want people harvesting emails through QR codes on inserts. I've had a lot of arguments with people about, well, what if the QR code takes you somewhere where they don't ask for a review or where they don't give any product away? First of all, tons of sellers are still giving product away, and all you have to do is scan the QR code. It takes you straight to a page where there's giveaways and I'm kind of amazed and shocked. I'm still having conversations about, well, what if I give product away, but I don't ask for a review? That question has not been relevant for way over a year.

I don't know. Countless suspensions have been for people. It doesn't matter if you asked for a review or not anymore. That's completely not relevant if you're giving product away.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, no giving products away. No,

Chris McCabe:

No giveaways,

Brett Curry:

No physical mail

Chris McCabe:

Period. Amazon assumes you're going to harvest good reviews from giving product away, so I still see people doing the, if you're not happy, contact us directly. Here's our email. Here's our phone. If you're happy with the product, please leave us a review. People are still doing that on inserts. I thought that was dead two years ago. Still happening. Still

Brett Curry:

Happening. Now, I'm assuming one exception could be, I'm assuming on the postcard thing is if you're using Buy with Prime, right? We got a few sellers that also sell D two C, so on my Shopify store, if I'm doing Buy with Prime, I get all that information, right? Amazon's fine with me having all that information. It happened on my site, but Amazon's fulfilling it and doing the merchant fee with that. I'm assuming we get all the data so we could mail to those customers, correct. They're our customers.

Chris McCabe:

That's a different deal. What they don't like is that you're using private info data about buyers for your own purposes and a lot of pure Amazon

Brett Curry:

Buyer,

Chris McCabe:

And then like email harvesting QR code here, enter your email. We'll send you a, we'll subscribe you to our newsletter. That's what a lot of people do. We'll send you a product, we'll send you information about new products. Somewhere in that funnel, you're eventually giving them something, maybe later asking for a review. Somebody told me the other day, they're only asking for a review way down the road after they send three or four emails that have nothing to do with anything. Your competitors can see all of this. The reason why none of these marketing tricks that are ancient already anyway, the reason they don't work anymore is because your competitors are getting that information. All they have to do is buy from you. So unless you're somehow lifting out and picking out those particular people, which I know you can't do no way to do it. Yep. All they're going to do is take screenshots of it and report it to Amazon, because I can't tell you how many sellers have told us Amazon can't see our funnel. Amazon can't see this. It's like Amazon can see anything your competitors can see and take pictures of.

Brett Curry:

Yep.

Chris McCabe:

That's why this stuff doesn't work.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Chris McCabe:

Yep.

Brett Curry:

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Chris McCabe:

People are, I mean, some of this is they're hiring a third party service and they don't vet them for compliance. People are hiring marketing agencies or services who handle their messaging with buyers like customer service for them, and there's been things even appearing in buyer seller messaging, not even an email right there in the messaging that says, if we help you with a refund or we help improve your experience, can you change your review

Brett Curry:

From

Chris McCabe:

A three to a five? You can't do that. You can't ask people to change. Can't

Brett Curry:

Make that request.

Chris McCabe:

Nope. You can refund people all you want. You do not ask them to change their feedback, their review, their rating.

Brett Curry:

Some people might do that on their own, but you can't make that request.

Chris McCabe:

People are still making that mistake. Now, I understand some of them are newer and they don't understand that that's been banned for a long time. Whether you're new or old, doesn't matter to Amazon. They're supposed to treat everyone the same when it comes to policy enforcement, and then again, I kind of mentioned this a minute ago, but do not re-offend. Don't be guilty of one of these things, and then you're guilty of another type of review manipulation, and you think, well, we weren't doing the postcards this time. We were doing illicit language on inserts. I mean, that's, you're playing with so much fire there

Brett Curry:

That you have to repeat offender, just like the court system, right?

Chris McCabe:

Okay. I didn't rob, but I sold drugs. It's

Brett Curry:

Fine.

Chris McCabe:

Well, that's the court system is typically three strikes and you're out. This is two strikes.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Got it. Got it. It is court of Bezos

Chris McCabe:

Much less common now, chassis, I guess. I mean in 20 17, 20 18, yeah. There were people who got busted two three times, wrote a plan of action, got reinstated. They almost never ask for a plan of action anymore. I'm sure most sellers know that because they don't want to read them anymore.

Brett Curry:

They don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Not reading

Chris McCabe:

That they want troublemakers off the site. If they mark you as a troublemaker, it probably means that they think whatever you're selling, someone else can sell it in your place. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's very true. Who don't give them administrative headaches and problems. Yeah, that's how they view it. That's how they view

Brett Curry:

It, and if you think you're too big to mess with, no you're not. I mean, unless you're Nike or something, but obviously know there's issues there, but

Chris McCabe:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

You're

Chris McCabe:

Not too big. You're not too big. You mentioned eight, nine figure sellers. The second you said that a minute ago, I thought of some nine figure sellers we've worked with on these issues and we were able to help them. Amazon kind of told them right before reinstating them, we're giving you an extra shot out of the kindness of our hearts, but you probably shouldn't be. Reading between the lines was We probably shouldn't be doing this. We will give you one more shot, but this is an exceptional case. It's not just because you're a nine figure seller. It's because we've decided that you presented us a strong enough appeal and you sound sincere and we're just tired of talking about this,

Brett Curry:

But they take another strike. No way. They're getting that back in way,

Chris McCabe:

And there are nine figure sellers that have lost their accounts. I mean,

Brett Curry:

It's crazy. It's crazy. Interesting. Cool. What else should we be avoiding on the review manipulation side and or be watching for?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, no, just be careful with hiring a group that says, we have a bunch of influencers who are going to buy your product and promote it and talk about it. Some influencers have been trying too many products, leaving too many five star reviews and the influencer themselves themself is probably a problem, and if you're just paying a service who has a group of them and works with a bunch of them over and over, you might not even know that that particular influencer has been a problem,

And Amazon in the past, Amazon would just delete all the reviews that that influencer left, but they're doing more now. Now they're harshly punishing the people that hired the service that used the influencer, so be very careful and vet those services and talk to them about their influencers or talk to them about their methodology and tactics, because a lot of times Amazon suspends the seller account and they're not even that interested in you as the seller. They're trying to get the guy or the woman behind the screen who's helping you because they know that that service is working with a lot of sellers and they want you to name names. They wanted, where did you find these people? What's their methodology? And I saw some sellers appeal saying, oh, this was our methodology. We hired the service, and Amazon declined the appeal and wrote back and said, no, no, no, no. We know what your methodology was already. We want to know what they do. We want to hear what you paid them to do because

Brett Curry:

We can going after the service providers and the

Chris McCabe:

Influencers,

Brett Curry:

Interesting

Chris McCabe:

Why they've been prompting all these sellers to name names and they see the same service named over and over and over, and they start circling them. Okay, so these people the problem. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Yep, yep. It's finding the drug dealers, right? It's like,

Chris McCabe:

Okay,

Brett Curry:

I can find that, but I want to find the drug lords here and then go after that.

Chris McCabe:

I mean, maybe the last word on this be just document everything. They more or less guide you into terminating the service, so have it in writing, have a contract, terminate them with a dated signed letter and keep track of that stuff because it ends up being attached to your appeal. So

Brett Curry:

Interesting. It's

Chris McCabe:

A much harsher landscape. This is not two years ago where you just apologize, say, I'm sorry, take responsibility. That's ancient history with this.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It's like the teacher that's fed up with the students. These folks names are like, I've had enough two strikes, and you're dead. You're dead to me, so totally makes sense. Anything else on the review side or should we transition to ai?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, I think we should go to the AI takedowns. The last part about the reviews is just Amazon has their own selfish needs and reasons for wanting this to go away. People have bashed them for not having reliable reviews on the site, so it makes them look good to say they're finally

Brett Curry:

Taking action, which is actually good. Yeah,

Chris McCabe:

It makes them look good to say they're punishing wrongdoers, so

Brett Curry:

Don't play

Chris McCabe:

Into their hands.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So AI takedowns, what are those and what do we need to know about them to avoid them?

Chris McCabe:

Some people are just getting Amazon bots to take their listings down because they've got improper wording in a title like you're using trademark keywords or if it's a consumable product, they're using disease claims, health claims, unsupported claims. Those are just, those people are trying to rank by inserting certain keywords or certain terms without thinking about how they might be triggering Amazon's AI to take their listings down until they can prove that they have products that have those qualities or just might be they're being triggered. They're triggering restricted product bots, so some of that's just low hanging fruit. Keep an eye on compliance. Don't just be going for sales and throwing whatever words you can think of in there. Then there are AI type problems where you are either improperly classified by Amazon in terms of what category you belong in, or you suddenly wake up and you're in a totally different category. I was talking to somebody recently who they moved from the home category to the media category, and they didn't belong in there at all. Well, somebody had made some illicit ASIN contributions and triggered what maybe in the old days would've been a manual review by a person. It's more likely to be an AI review now by Amazon, and Amazon started asking

Brett Curry:

Them for, explain that, what is it? What is an elicit ASIN

Chris McCabe:

In there? I'm putting in terms which make it look like you're selling a certain type of product, which you're not. Got it. Amazon starts asking you for, I mean, there are people who were selling Tupperware or books or other types of products who were suddenly being asked for things typical of consumable products like compliance documentation and testing from ISO certified labs, and that was all because an abusive attack. Somebody tried to make it look like your product belonged in a different category. Got it. There are all kinds of ASIN contributions. You should have the strongest level of contributions on your own ASINs, of course, people make illicit contributions and try to update product pages with certain types of information.

I mean, there's a lot of different ways they do it. There are a lot of illicit tactics out there. Sometimes it's social engineering where they get somebody at Amazon to do something that shouldn't happen, but you have to kind of have the right tools and software in place to catch this so that you're not completely oblivious when people are tampering with your detail pages, but also you have to understand what's happening to you instead of just calling account health or calling support and complaining and saying, this is all wrong. Amazon screwed up. A lot of people spend time blaming Amazon for something that a competitor did.

Brett Curry:

Got it. Got it. Yeah, and when you start an interaction in complain mode, you're potentially less likely to get help. What about improper ASIN merges? I know that's something you mentioned to me before. That's something that some of our clients, we help merge ASINs. There's some valid reasons to do it, but what is an impro ASIN merger? Maybe contrast that with what a proper AON merger is and why you would do it, but why should we avoid the improper?

Chris McCabe:

Oh, no. There's plenty of reasons to merge ASINs. This is mostly for people who want to harvest reviews to boost. I mean, maybe you've got a bunch of unsold inventory for a particular ASIN and you've got another ASIN out there with better reviews and you're trying to boost the visibility by putting them together. Maybe you sold out of one asin, which has all the reviews and the ASIN with very few reviews. You've got a bunch of unsold product, right? You're trying to take advantage of all the reviews on the other ace. Got it. By pretending like it's the same product when it's not asin, separation is a lot more common now where Amazon sees what you're doing and they go in there and they re separate them. Does Amazon improperly separate asin? Sometimes? Of course they do, but a lot of the separations are valid because sellers are trying to merge them for their own sales rank. It's a form of

Brett Curry:

Review manipulation. In some cases. It's a form of

Chris McCabe:

Most commonly review manipulation. I mean, the other merges are, of course, people are taking over zombie listings, some other listing out there that has a bunch of reviews where it's kind of floating free and disembodied from whatever it was, and people go in there and get Amazonians or using other tricks, merge their product with that listing because that listing has all the reviews. That's why you have a lot of buyers complaining. I went to the older reviews and they're all about shoes, and your product is a salad spinner. Why are the product types different? Well, because two listings that did not belong together at all were merged together, so people are still, I mean, I think these are just hacks and gimmicks and they belong to a mastermind. They go to an event. I understand where these ideas come from, marketers and services and agencies and lots of people out there are always trying to come up with the next fad.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's the fun thing to talk about that gets people coming back to a mastermind. It makes your service appear more valuable if you're an agency, but yeah, these hacks, tricks manipulations. It just isn't going to work. And one of the other things you mentioned, you alluded to it earlier, but you talked to me about offline is no real gray areas anymore, right? It's very black and white with Amazon right now. Do you want to unpack that a little bit?

Chris McCabe:

Well, certainly with the review manipulation, there are no gray areas, and if you look at the policy, which hopefully you can put in the show notes here, totally pretty black and white. There isn't a lot of people try to talk themselves into that. There is a gray area, but my main word of advice there is don't talk yourself into how you think Amazon's policy should be interpreted. Focus all your energy on how does Amazon interpret this policy?

Brett Curry:

Yes, yes. How are they interpreting it? How are they enforcing it? That's all that matters. Understand that and plan accordingly,

Chris McCabe:

And if you aren't sure, you can talk to me because we do this stuff all the time. You can talk to some people at Amazon. Now, granted, some people at Amazon don't know. Well, obviously don't ask support. Don't ask account help. Don't ask any lower tier staff if you have an account manager who can run some stuff down for you. If you go to events like Amazon Accelerate in Seattle, you can probably bump into or meet up with some people who work for Amazon who can explain some of these things to you at seller cafe, but don't make assumptions. I still see a lot of people assuming that their interpretation is gold or they're just looking for more wiggle room. Well, isn't it kind of different if you offer them a warranty? That's a big one with the inserts, right? Well, what if the insert just talks about warranties?

I don't know down the road. Do you ask them to leave a review because that's not about the warranty anymore. That's why say there aren't any real gray areas and when you're suspended for this stuff, which is kind of a little bit late to learn it, but if you're suspended and you start talking to those teams yourself, you start realizing very quickly, oh, okay, we can't do that stuff anymore. Oh, okay, whatever I heard at this event or in the mastermind or post it on YouTube, I used to be in the dark myself to an extent. Where are these ideas coming from? I don't understand why so many people are making these mistakes. That's the two or three years ago version of me. Now that I've been to some of these events where I've seen people on stage talking about this stuff or I see it on YouTube or Instagram or wherever. Now I know that it's just sellers who are looking to boost sales or sales rank or boost their visibility are consuming this stuff and not questioning it. I mean, now I kind of understand.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Totally makes sense. Awesome. Any final rapid fire tips before we talk about how people can work with you? Because obviously you're the one we recommend if they're wanting to prevent issues, but certainly if there are issues and how to get reinstated, you are the guy and your team is the team, but any other rapid fire tips before we talk about how people can work with you?

Chris McCabe:

I have so many with appeals. I think word is finally getting around that you can't just use generic templates to appeal that you can't use chat GPT to appeal. I think Amazon's catching AI use in appeals and they just throw them away. You can't appeal over and over and over and expect them to read an infinite number of appeals and you have to show them that you take it seriously because they think you don't care about your suspension or your brand or your business if you send in appeals that your VA did for you or whatever. I'm not saying every business owner or CEO is the best communicator or writer, but it's not just about communication. It's about having a strategy.

Brett Curry:

You want this to feel human and to have the right strategy, but yeah, you want them to believe that your earnest and you are going to make a change. You're not going to be a repeat offender, that type of thing.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah. I quiz people all the time when they say, well, if this doesn't work, we're going to try escalating it, and then if the escalation fails, then we'll call you back and I say, okay, so when you use the word escalation, that means something very specific in the Amazon appeal space. What do you mean by escalation? Nine times out of 10, it's their kind of muddled hazy idea of basically using the word escalation on a phone call with account health or putting the word escalation in a Dear Jeff email, really outdated, not useful, and that worries and scares me because you only get so many cracks at escalations and similar to what we said a few minutes ago, if somebody opens an email from you that you send straight to them or their team and it says, escalating blank reinstatement of our account, and they go in your account annotations and they see that you've done prior escalations, probably not that well, then they'll say, well, this has already been escalated,

Brett Curry:

So I don been escalated and got rejected, so why would I do any

Chris McCabe:

Different? I got rejected, so either A, why do I need to read this at all? Or B, they're biased against reinstating you because they can see how many people rejected you previously. So

Chris McCabe:

No

Chris McCabe:

Has see appeals, no, shoot first ask questions later. I don't blame people for thinking two or three moves ahead and thinking about let's start filling in some notes or a potential escalation if today's appeal fails. I don't begrudge you that, but that's at least a strategy.

Chris McCabe:

Be

Chris McCabe:

Willing to change your customize or modify that escalation. Don't just say, we wrote this three days ago and now we have new information, but we're going to send the same thing in as an escalation. That's not how this works. Totally

Brett Curry:

Makes sense. Totally makes sense. Awesome. So Chris, when should someone reach out to you and what services do you provide and then how can someone reach out to you?

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, I mean our, first of all, how do people reach us? Support at eCommerce? chris.com is a good place to email us summary info include messaging from Amazon. You don't have to send us the phone book, just the suspension notification. Maybe your most recent appeal and background or summary info is usually what people do. Reach out to us early in the process, do not appeal five or 10 times and then show us a bunch of failed appeals and then show us a bunch of generic canned messages from Amazon rejecting you. I assume those people are doing it because they don't want to pay the cost associated with hiring us, but think in advance about the time lost and the money lost. If you appeal that many times, that means you've, I mean, I assume you're not sending in five appeals in five hours. It's probably five appeals in five days.

Well, how much do you lose in five days? How much do you lose in five weeks? People are still coming to us in week six after they've lost six figures, and all I can say is I don't understand that thinking come to us a lot sooner. Even if you don't hire us right off the first phone call, we can evaluate and we can at least level with you. We're known for being direct and blunt on this stuff. We can at least level with you, waste time with sales pitches. We level with you on what you think, think your current status is before we even talk about what we would do to fix it. So reach out to us early and yeah, it helps to make a higher or not higher decision early in the process too, but it depends on the particulars of course.

Brett Curry:

Got it. Got it. Awesome. So e-commerce chris.com, email support@ecommercechris.com. Also sounds like you're on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, so people should follow you on LinkedIn also X as well, I assume.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, LinkedIn. I'm on there every day and all the usual social channels at amz. And Chris, C-H-R-I-S is social, so Instagram awesome.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, check it out. We'll link to that in the show notes and then Twitter also will link to that.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah, I sent Twitter earlier policies. I meant X, sorry.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's all the same. Sort of think that people will call it Twitter forever. Twitter slash x. I dunno. I finally got in the habit of sort of saying X first, but I didn't like it in the beginning, that's for sure.

Chris McCabe:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

It's tough, so it's tough, man. It's tough. Well, Chris, thanks again for coming on. Thanks for helping people keep their products live and their accounts in good standing with Amazon so we can keep making money there, keep our products on the shelf. That is the first step in the name of the game of trying to dominate on Amazon, and so I'll link to everything. Also, if you share that links to the policy, I'll put that in the show notes as well, the review manipulation policy. And so with that, Chris, thanks, man, A ton of fun as always, and look forward to seeing you at the next Amazon event. We run into each other at

Chris McCabe:

Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Yep.

Chris McCabe:

Thank you

Brett Curry:

Again. Awesome, and as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you if you found this show helpful. If you know someone who is in Amazon purgatory or Amazon, hell send 'em this episode. Let 'em know about e-commerce, Chris. If anyone can help, they can. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. Today's episode is sponsored by post pilot. It's the secret weapon behind some of your favorite e-commerce brands, and they're using it to print money on the regular, so if you're already crushing it with Klaviyo with meta, then imagine taking that same segmentation and automation and sending it straight to your customers mailboxes. That's right. We're talking physical mail, personalized postcards that drive serious trackable revenue, and right now, post pod's giving E-Commerce Evolution Podcast listeners 1000 free postcard credits just to test it out. But this is for new users only. Just go to post pilot.com and tell them that we sent you to claim your credits break through that digital noise and beat rising ad costs. That's direct mail done right post pilot.com.

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