Amazon Inform Act Stupidity

We received the account health banner to confirm our information for one of our accounts back on 4/22. Great, no problem. But for some unbeknownst reason to me, Amazon decided it was necessary to verify our business address (the same one we’ve been using for years and have verified previously). Ok, fine. The estimated postcard delivery showed 5/7. WTF? Amazon is going to take 2 weeks to send me a postcard but is only giving me 10 days to verify? Am I missing something here? Fast forward to this morning and I get this email - [Action Required] Your Amazon seller account has been temporarily suspended due to non-compliance with the INFORM Consumers Act. Seriously? I’m shocked. Well, not really. And they say at the bottom of the email - Your account may be permanently deactivated if we do not receive or are unable to verify your information. Hope they can wait 4 more days for their postcard to hopefully arrive.

Thankfully, this is our account that doesn’t have too much going on, so it won’t be a huge blow to go a few days without sales. BUT they’re also wanting to verify our address on our 2nd account too; the account health banner showed up 5/1, and they’re estimating postcard delivery on 5/11. Maybe in time?

They’ve overnighted these postcards to us before; not sure why this can’t be done when it’s do or die here.

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Well, that’s BS.

We verified our address when we dealt with this the first time a year ago, but we were not asked to this time.

Sending the post card after suspending your account is a very Amazon thing to do, and pretty infuriating. I’m sorry.

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Interesting. Do you use the same address for both accounts?

I have 2 accounts and both verifications happened yesterday without issue. With that said, everything to do with both accounts is totally separate, (including address), other than the main contact / account manager which is me.

Hope you get that postcard today or tomorrow!

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@Tormentor @maintak @ASV_Vites

Do you use the Buyer-side of your Seller account to order to your business address?

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I wonder what triggered them to re-postcard-verify your address. I don’t believe anyone else here has experienced that.

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I’ve never, ever gone into the buyer side of either account for anything.

Do any and all Amazon buying from personal Prime account, including for biz purposes which gets charged to company CC and expensed.

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:grimacing: Well that blows that theory, then…

@Tormentor my thought was that if the account uses the business address for business with Amazon, then that might preempt Amazon needing to verify it again each year.


Ok, new theories

  1. @Tormentor and @Maintak, are you FBA, FBM, hybrid? I think @ASV_Vites is all FBA.

  2. Are your product return addresses the same as your business addresses?

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Kind of, same street address, different suite numbers.

One of my accounts was a buying account for years before I started selling and I do use that account to place orders but not to my business address.

Yes and yes.

It really doesn’t bother me that they want to verify the address again, the problem here is them using snail mail to send something when its as urgent as this is. More times than not in the past these postcards have been overnighted via UPS. For the one supposedly arriving on the 7th its status is only “dispatched”, hasn’t even made it to “in transit”

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In my own experience, the “postcard” arrives more quickly (in a big ol’ envelope lol) than projected :crossed_fingers:


:thinking: But yeah, I’m just also trying to brainstorm for the community why on earth full business address verification might be on the INFORM re-up menu.

  1. NOT due to using/not using the Buyer side to make Amazon purchases to the business address
  2. NOT due to using FBA or not
  3. NOT due to different business address from return address
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If I had to guess, I would think this might be why this is happening. Potentially triggering some stupid bot.

And that’s fine but Amazon should not have shut you down due to their inability to time a piece of paper to your addresses.

Wishing you luck with this.

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^^^ hey @Tried_Tested if it makes you feel better???

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I guess misery is supposed to love company but both of these situations are sickening.

I know TT’s brand. Everything has completely sold out and he’s holding containers of inventory destined for Amazon that needs to be paid for, now with zero income from Amazon to pay for it.

Even if this gets fixed, he’s looking at months to get back on his feet with how Amazon punishes volume sellers who go OOS.

I lost an item that was doing $1800 a day because of this in 2020. Never could get it going again after we couldn’t restock it for ~ 70 days. Ended up throwing out a lot of inventory once we got it back. Was a good learning lesson to ensure something like that never happened again.

Amazon has a whole Rolodex of punishments for their “partners”. They and their bots love sifting through it and dolling out the whippings.

Great place to set up shop. :smirk:

I love Amazon in the fact that they gave us an opportunity to set up shop, get decent data, and prove our concepts.

My shoes are falling off in the way we are running away from that ■■■■ hole now to better opportunities.

Again, never would have happened if Amazon didn’t exist for me so thanks Amazon for aiding us and taking a few years off my life from the stress.

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No.

It’s utterly stupid.

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And it’s not your fault, it’s not @Tormentor 's fault.

Neither of you have done anything wrong.

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true…i did mine earlier this week without even getting out of bed…all I had to do was confirm the info they had on file was correct (it was), and I was done with it.

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Never.

We do both.

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Update: Got the letter for the first account on the 6th and got the letter for my other account yesterday (1 day before they would have deactivated my account). Both letters were sent via First Class Mail with a return address in Seattle, about 20 minutes away from me. So they literally waited until day 8 to send the letters out both times. At least both accounts are up and running. :man_shrugging:

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