The amount of work to comply to INFORM is more than the time allotted to comply to it.
Letâs be honest, thatâs because amazon dragged its feet on this hoping it would go away.
Iâve no banner for weeks and all the little green checkmarks for weeks. This morning June 28th (the day after INFORM went into effect), I received a timely email from [email protected] which begins;
Hello The Sawle Mill,
Thank you for providing information about your business. We have successfully completed verifying all the information about your business that is required by the US INFORM Consumers Act. We appreciate your efforts in supporting this verification process.
If you change this information in the future, the US INFORM Consumers Act requires us to verify this new information. Depending on what piece of information you change, we may also need to reverify additional business information.
Otherwise, each year, we will ask you to certify that this information has not changed.
Thank you for choosing to sell in Amazonâs store, and we look forward to our continued partnership.
I cheerfully accept the confirmation, but surely the AI could have hit the send button a few weeks earlier?
The email didnât exist weeks earlier and it was the after thought AI bot that caught it and decided to send it out as if it was a pre thought out message.
To be fair:
https://test.sellersasksellers.com/t/update-on-account-verification-new-recorded-message/1214/41
We first received this message 13Jun23, the day after clearing the last hurdle, before receiving it again yesterday, 27Jun23.
As @lake and many another of the old hands have pointed out for years, Amazon has simply gotten too big for its breeches britches.
Our initial selling (2004) and larger account was cleared within hours.
This much smaller account (also opened in 2004) took days. still waiting for our post card.
The two accounts are totally separate - different business names, different address.
Why one cleared immediately but the other is awaiting address verification is beyond me but most of this stuff is these days. We have used the same address for
8 years - prior to that we were on the other end of the building, so same street just different number address, same town, same phone #.
Hmm.
I wonder if thereâs a hidden object lesson in your experiences, re: Amazon prioritizing higher-volume sellers?
It wouldnât at all surprise me to learn that such is indeed the case⌠
Same here. We have two different businesses. The one I work for was cleared in hours, no address verification. Very simple, to the point I felt extremely bad for everyone experiencing issues with the verification.
Our second business had to do address verification. Same location, different ste numbers. The only thing we could think of, is that maybe the postal service doesnât have record of the ste number, just the street address, for that business. IDK, just thought it was weird because both businesses have been on Amazon for over 10 years.
both accounts were opened in 2004. When the first received the email requiring verification for the larger account I wasnât concerned as everything âmatchedâ. Business name on bank accounts, all documents were business documents, same business name on credit card statement, and the âbusinessâ owns the building, so I figured easy and done. Which it was. Maybe because of the longevity? No clue. I was concerned about the âsmallerâ account even though both opened around the same time. Both bank account and address verification were required for this smaler account but nowhere near what so many were going through. Strange and interesting.
Amazon pushed for this law.
Push for it or not, they dropped the ball and were clearly not ready. Amazonâs fault.
Walmart gave everyone 1 week.
I cannot even confirm if they received everything they want.
INFORM is definitely going to be a problem.
Part of my theory is that Amazon has, in the past, been so lax on proper verification that they cannot rely on anything short of an all-out 100% total re-verfication, unlike other sites that properly vetted sellers from the start. You can tell from some of the forum posts on Amazon of a seller in an unauthorized country who got a Payoneer account in Jordan so that they could get an LLC in Wyoming, or something similar, that there are plenty of sellers on Amazon who will not be able to get past these rules; just asking them âis this your addressâ is not going to sort things out.
That said, the people who tell the programmers what to program seem incapable of figuring out what really needs to be done (or likely, the people telling them what to do).
Itâs a good example of how doing things right in the first place usually saves time in the long run.
I agree, but that sounds like an Amazon issue