The following situation I have seen multiple times now:
- Inauthentic customer complaint received, Amazon’s demanding invoices or they’ll deactivate the ASIN in 7 days
- Invoices submitted are routinely rejected even though they meet all the requirements, and the supplier is the brand owner
- ASIN deactivated after 7 days
- (sometimes) 26 days after the original policy warning was generated this email is received:
This has been happening more frequently lately. I believe that bad actors are using buyer accounts now to cause sellers problems by buying something, then making a complaint to Amazon CS or leaving reviews/feedback loaded with keywords and sometimes I’ll receive multiple complaints from the same order ID in voice of the customer.
Sometimes the inauthentic complaint sticks, sometimes it’s automatically removed after Amazon’s bots figure out that the complaints were lodged by a scammer. Either way they’re successful at shutting someone out of an ASIN for at least a few weeks.
In the past few months, I had a couple products where around 5000 units were sold on each one, and they were each shut down by a single complaint, and then automatically reinstated. I had another one with 3000 units sold and around 5 complaints, that one stuck. And I had another one with 3000 units sold and 2 complaints, and that one the invoice was accepted for.
It’s crazy how someone just needs to file a few complaints (or pay people to file them) and can shut someone down even though there’s clearly NOT a problem given the number of problem-free orders.