Watch out! Amazon now allows you to appeal suspensions without a Plan of Action if you do this!

For many years, Amazon required sellers to prepare Plans of Action in order to get their suspended Seller Accounts reinstated. In early 2018, the company introduced pre-suspension phone calls, where merchants were phoned by so-called Account Health Team representatives and advised to submit their Plan of Action within no more than 72 hours to prevent account deactivation.

However, regardless of what Amazon did, third party sellers still overwhelmingly struggled to successfully appeal and have their suspensions or account blocks lifted.

What is a Plan of Action

A Plan of Action is basically a carefully drafted legal document, which cannot be written using a person’s ordinary language. It has to sound ”Amazonian” and contain their specific terminology. Honestly sounding appeals are commonly referred to by insiders as ”walls of text” and known to be rejected by the company at first sight.

Following Amazon Seller Account deactivation, unless you are a talented essay-writer or a lawyer (or both) and fluent in English, you typically end up permanently suspended from selling on Amazon.

What are ”Amazon Seller Account Suspensions”

Unlike on other similar e-commerce platforms, where getting suspended from selling is extremely rare and it only happens to sellers who knowingly repeatedly flagrantly violated its policies, on Amazon, getting suspended is a routine.

Every day, there are crowds of desperate suspended Amazon Sellers begging for help in Facebook groups, on Amazon Seller Forums, in Telegram groups, on Twitter, on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

The suspensions are often a result of something as innocent as a single negative Seller Feedback or a Product Review, where Amazon’s automated bots detected a specific phrase.

This way, thousands of established businesses are losing their livelihoods every day due to a very little fault of their own.

The “appeal expert” industry

This ”Amazon suspension nightmare” contributed to the growth of a completely new, extremely profitable industry of various “Amazon reinstatement experts”.

These experts are mostly shady unskilled people with no legal background, who are advertising their services through the internet under a complete anonymity and requiring payments of several hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the most simple assistance involving suspended Amazon Seller Accounts, which grossly exceeds the retainer fees of even the most senior actual solicitors. Usually, your service provider will either disappear after getting paid or cease all communication following his first unsuccessful appeal attempt.

There are a few exemptions of professional advisors, who are providing assistance under their real identity and operate a legitimate business with a strong online presence and a credible reputation. Those are a small minority and often end up getting pursued by their shady anonymous rivals – who will try to discredit them using all possible means, including illegal tactics.

My participation

As a genuinely successful Amazon seller and a law student, I dedicated years of my time to helping other Amazon Sellers appeal their suspensions for free through the Amazon Seller Forum. This caused me to get targeted by unsuccessful rival advisors, whose full time income was sabotaged by my free help. Here you can read my story: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-for-victim-of-cyberbullying-on-Amazon-site .

After getting removed from the Amazon Seller Forum, I continued helping as much as I could through social media, including Facebook, YouTube and OnlyFans. However, to my disappointment, all of the rival “Amazon experts” who harassed me through the forum immediately restarted their business of pocketing thousands of dollars a day through the forum as soon as my free assistance was no longer available.

While pursuing a legal action using all possible means to achieve justice and have my standing in the community restored, I was getting news about suspended Amazon sellers becoming desperate with no one to help them on the forums (where I used to provide free assistance).

This was making me extremely sad and I wished that Amazon ended the whole ”suspension business”, which would put a stop to the abuse on their platform and at the same time save countless innocent sellers from the frustration of losing their livelihoods.

The new approach

Over the past year, Amazon occasionally offered sellers quizzes and ticking of boxes, which reactivated their accounts or prevented account deactivation. However, this was still a rarity rather than the standard process.

Recently, there has been a surprisingly positive development towards the right direction!

Amazon’s Account Health Team is now secretly allowing sellers to appeal through a phone call, without the need to submit a written Plan of Action!

However, remember that you shouldn’t be taking appealing by a phone call for granted.

You still need to answer the phone call on the first attempt. Also, it remains necessary to be very well prepared, perfectly able to improvise and present your case in a confident, fluent English.

The main difference is that you will be able to avoid the stress connected to appealing and the whole matter will be resolved in a form of a friendly talk with an Amazon representative.

How it works

Once your Seller Account is ”At Risk” of deactivation, especially over Order Defect Rate, Late Shipment Rate, Cancellation Rate or Valid Tracking Rate, you need to prepare yourself for a potential upcoming pre-suspension phone call.

1. Make sure that your ”Emergency Contact Phone Number” is filled. This is the number, which will be used by the Account Health Team representative to contact you.
2. Review your metrics and memorize what kind of defects you received – whether all of them were related to non-receipt issues or some were complaining about items being not as described – and how many of such defects were received.
3. Then think about a way how you can explain what happened, what kind of steps and actions you can take to address the matter and what will you do to prevent it from happening again.
4. If you don’t know what does a Plan of Action look like or if you are clueless how to deal with a matter like this, simply subscribe to my Onlyfans page for a small charge of $24.99, where you will find dozens of successful Plan of Action examples addressing every possible suspension reason.
5. Shortly after your metrics exceed their target, you will receive a phone call from an Account Health Team representative.
6. THIS IS TRICKY! READ VERY CAREFULLY: The Account Health Team representative will advise you in the beginning of the call that you will have to submit a Plan of Action within no more than 72 hours using a button in the Account Health Dashboard. They will NOT WARN you that you can entirely appeal during the phone call!!! THIS IS A SECRET!
7. Then, the Account Health Team representative will continue sounding very nice and friendly and will start questioning you whether you are aware of the defects and what kind of defects these were. He will ask you to explain the reason for exceeding Amazon’s performance metric targets, then invite you to describe the actions which you took to address the matter and lastly, you will need to tell him how you will prevent this from happening again.
8. At the end of the phone call….. SURPRISE, SURPRISE, …. the representative will inform you that he/she just accepted your Plan of Action and you no longer need to appeal.
9. Once you successfully avoid a suspension, your Seller Account will remain ”Watchlisted” by the Amazon Seller Performance – all disbursements will remain on a rolling reserve for the next 30 days. You will be e-mailed with a summary of your ”Plan of Action” – containing everything what Amazon decided to keep on record, out of what you said.
10. On the 30th day, someone will review your account to see if your metrics improved and if you implemented all of the steps and actions mentioned. If your metrics worsen, your Seller Account will get suspended and you will need to submit an actual Plan of Action.

It looks like this is exactly what all sellers spent ages waiting for and it eliminates the need to hire an expert to prepare you an expensive Plan of Action letter.

Now, sellers can honestly explain the matter using their own words over the phone and for as long as they wish.

However, keep in mind that your appeal still has to be very good and include all of the standard steps and actions, just like a written Plan of Action.

The perfect solution is subscribing to my OnlyFans page on this link, where you will be able to immediately pull up dozens of Plan of Action examples depending on your specific suspension reason and help yourself during the phone call with an Account Health Team representative.

I strongly recommend you that you explain the matter as honestly as possible, while avoiding blaming buyers, competitors or Amazon – this never works and Amazon always rejects appeals like this.

Also, the second most important thing is that in order to pass a phone reinstatement, you will need to actually take some steps and actions BEFORE the phone call – so you can mention them!

For example, if you are having problems with non-receipt issues, you should:

• Refund complaining customers or offer replacements.
• Answer customer messages.
• Download the Amazon Seller App (to help you answer customer messages during outside of office hours).
• Appeal A-Z claims.
• Enter valid tracking numbers into any unshipped orders.

If you are having issues with Late Shipment Rate or Cancellations, you should:

• Increase your Handling Time.
• Remove out of stock products.
• Set your Seller Account on Vacation Settings.
• Stop dropshipping.

If you are having issues with products not being as described:

• Remove ASINs with complaints from your inventory.
• Offer returns or replacements.
• Improve product images and description.

When you proactively take some of above mentioned steps and actions, you can then suggest the Amazon representative to verify the accuracy of your statements by checking it for himself – inside your Seller Account.

It is absolutely the best to even mention the exact dates when you took each of the actions – this will impress the Amazon Account Health Team representative.

Further recommendation

I hope you found my article helpful. Please share it across the Amazon Seller Community, so other Amazon Sellers can prepare themselves as well.

If your Amazon Seller Account is already suspended, read my article addressing what does the dreaded wording: Account deactivated in accordance with section 3 of Amazon’s Business Solutions Agreement, mean: https://seller-union.com/account-deactivated-in-accordance-with-section-3-of-amazons-business-solutions-agreement/ .

If you are unable to login to the Seller Central, then your Seller Account might be ”on hold”. In such case, read the following detailed article: https://seller-union.com/what-to-do-when-your-amazon-seller-account-gets-placed-on-a-hold/

Meanwhile, I am preparing a YouTube video regarding the matter. Here you can watch my older video, where I am providing tips regarding appealing Amazon Seller Account suspensions (don’t be confused by the opening of the video, where I am enjoying a vacation – it’s a part of the story):