UPDATE: 7th December 2016

Visited Amazon Head Office

Love Amazon. Love selling. Love Life.

I was loving life! I loved Amazon and had been selling on Amazon for nearly 2 years. These 2 years had been the most difficult years of my life. Fulfillment by Amazon is an amazing service that helped my business grow. I was enjoying the fruits of my labour. Until it all changed in a blink.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Abdurrahman, you can call me Abz. August 2014 I started a business and by December I was selling on Amazon FBA, day by day, slowly but surely, my sales and business grew. This continued over the next year and I was going from strength to strength. I recommended Amazon, especially FBA, to family and friends. I would invite them over and advise them to sell on Amazon. I was Amazon crazy, an Amazon fanatic. That’s all I would ever talk about with my friends. Thanks to Amazon things were looking great!

For those that don’t know, FBA stands for Fulfillment by Amazon. It’s a service that Amazon provides – You send your products to Amazon warehouses and they store the products and ship them once an order is received on the Amazon website.

By mid 2016 my sales reached a point where I was planning to quit my job to focus my efforts on my business.

Panic.

Fast forward to September 2016, everything was going amazing. I had the most sales ever for that week and was over the moon. In the midst of my celebration on the 20th of September 2016, panic struck.

I could no longer log in to my Amazon account. I tried resetting my password numerous times but could not log in.

And it begins.

I contacted Amazon customer services by phone who informed me that my buyer account had a hold placed on it and that’s why I could not access my seller account. The rep explained I needed to provide some billing details which they would forward to an account specialist who would check the information and unlock my account in 24 hours.

24 hours passed, nothing. 48 hours, nothing. Every minute I was losing sales and my eyes were fixed on my email app, waiting for the email from the account specialist.

I found @Amazonhelp on Twitter and asked them for assistance. They said it would take 2-3 business days for a response. I could not believe how long I was going to have to wait. My business was on the line here.

24th September 2016, 72 hours since I had been told an account specialist would respond. Frustrated, I sent an email to jeff@amazon.com inquiring what was going on and why.

Hope?

A whole week later, 28th September 2016, I receive a response from the @Amazonhelp Twitter team:

“Hi,

Your account should be back to full working order. If you are having any other issues, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Regards,

Did I solve your problem?

If yes, please click here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/survey?p=

If no, please click here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/survey?p=

– Kris

Social Media

Amazon.co.uk

Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.”

It’s not over.

Overjoyed I rushed straight to my computer and logged in to my Amazon account (buyer account). Yes it worked! Then I tried to log in to my seller account. Oh wait, hang on a second…

I was greeted with this message:

“This account is not associated with a valid merchant/marketplace..”.

I got back on the phone to customer services who confirmed the hold had been removed. I explained that I could not log in to my seller account despite being told that my “account should be back to full working order”. The rep advised me that only seller performance could unlock the seller part of my account and that I need to email seller performance, explain that the hold has been removed and they should unlock my seller account.

Great, I thought, just an email and a short wait and everything will be finally sorted. Man, was I wrong!

It gets worse.

Days later, my seller account was still inaccessible. I had received no reply to my email.

Since my buyer account was unlocked, I had access to the seller forums, so I thought I would post my experience on there to see if any of the other sellers or moderators could provide some insight.

Within hours of posting, my post was deleted and I found that I had been banned from the forums!

Talk about ridiculous!

Devastation.

13th of October 2016, around 3 weeks since my email to jeff@amazon.com I received a shattering and destroying email response:

“Dear Mr Abdurrahman,

My name is Daniel, and I am a member of the seller-performance escalations team. Jeff Bezos received your e-mail and asked that I research this issue and respond on his behalf.

Having reviewed your account thoroughly and considered all of the information provided, I regret to advise that your account will remain blocked. This decision has been reached because your desired use of Amazon Payments may be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy or User Agreement, which you have accepted when registering with Amazon Payments.

Whilst I appreciate that this is not the outcome you had hoped for, please consider this our final position on the matter. Further correspondence regarding the closure of your account may not be answered.

Thank you for your interest.

Regards,

Daniel

Escalations Specialist

Amazon Payments”

My world ended.

What kind of reason is that? Is it even a reason? I reviewed the email over and over trying to decipher it’s meaning.

“Your desired use of Amazon Payments MAY BE in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy or User Agreement”

You’re kidding right? MAY BE?

I navigated over to those policies and agreements and scrutinised each one to see where I could have gone wrong. I had not violated any terms as far as I could tell and the items I was selling were not listed as prohibited items.

This has got to be a mistake, I thought.

Usually when Amazon has an issue with your account, they suspend you and give you a chance to appeal the suspension. However here they completely banned me with no recourse. And for what? I am still to find out. I have no access whatsoever to my account.

(They unlocked my account temporarily some months later. I was able to log in to the seller side for a few minutes – there are no performance notifications or suspension emails)

So what was I selling? Must have gotten me banned, right?

Screen protectors for phones. Packaged in boxes Trademarked with my own Registered Trademark (I’m also brand registered on Amazon). That’s it.

If anything was wrong with those products (nothing was), I would have been suspended, not banned.

Limbo.

I immediately wrote a letter to the Amazon head office in the UK. It went unanswered.

I tried @AmazonHelp on Twitter again, but they replied referencing Daniel’s email response and said they could provide no further information.

Nothing. No response. Completely shut out.

Needless to say I attempted every way to try and get in touch with someone at Amazon I could talk to and every attempt went unanswered or was ignored. The email did mention further correspondence would not be answered, but I needed answers and I needed them fast. Why is it so difficult to get hold of someone to talk to at Amazon? – A manager or someone with authority that can actually help with information.

I fell into depression. What I had worked so hard for was coming undone hard and fast. Expenses were going out, I had a huge order waiting with a supplier which I could not honor due to uncertainty and also due to funds that Amazon were holding.

(Amazon holds funds for 90 days, and understandably so, I don’t blame them for holding funds. It makes sense – in case a customer wants a refund etc).

I googled the issue desperately looking for an answer but Google returned only a few relevant search results. In those results there was no resolution to this issue.

A warning for anyone who wants to trade on Amazon.

They say don’t put your eggs in one basket. – So don’t rely on Amazon. While it is a great platform (probably the best) you need to work on multiple revenue channels so that if an issue happens on one you can stay afloat. Unfortunately for me, I had invested all my time and money into Amazon – for a number of reasons.

Where do I go from here?

My family and friends have been extremely supportive, they can not believe what has happened. They are trying their best to help me get through this but it’s proving to be an extremely difficult time.

Currently I am developing my own website and will start selling on eBay too.

I’m still fighting. I want my account back. I did nothing wrong – If I broke any of their rules, and I’m sure I did not, it definitely did not deserve an instant account ban.

What would I like Amazon to do?

Review the way they interact with their sellers and make things more clear and understandable in their emails as to what the issue is.

They need a dedicated line where sellers can actually speak to a human and receive correct and detailed information on issues and work with them to resolve them.

Thanks for reading. Share your experience or comments.

If you got this far I would like to say thank you for reading. If you have had a similar experience please do get in touch and leave a comment below!

I hope I can resolve this. Best wishes.

UPDATE: 7th December 2016

Visited Amazon Head Office in Holborn, London.

Waited 5 and a half hours before someone saw us for literally 2 minutes, said they would get someone to speak with us and left. (went with another seller who had the same email).

20 minutes later security tells us that person is not coming back and we will receive an email but we have to leave now.

Next day received the exact same email.