Stopping .mx and .ca charges

Selling on Amazon
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Based on the many posts on NSFE and my personal experience, many people are getting hit with unwanted listings on .ca and .mx, resulting in charges to charge cards.
I finally got a non-boilerplate response to a case, and wanted to share it for any who need it now or in the future. Apparently, there is a page that says “Welcome to the New Improved…”; I’m guessing that when it was “improved”, like so many Amazon “improvements”, that it mucked things up. I’d never seen the page before, and am unable to find it without using the link provided.

Response from Amazon:
Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,

I’m happy to help you with your request to remove the connection between your source and target store.

To remove connection and to stop synchronization, follow these steps:

Note: You must individually remove connections for each target store, one at a time.

  1. Go to the Build International Listings (BIL) tool.

  2. From the list, navigate to the left-hand side of the page and select the target store you want to disconnect.

  3. After selecting the target store, navigate to the right-hand side of the page and click “Remove Connection” link at the bottom of the “Connection settings” widget.

  4. From the pop-up window, choose to keep or delete your offers in the target store after the connection has been removed.

  • If you choose to keep offers in the target store, they will remain in the store but their prices will not be synchronized with offers in the source store. You must maintain these offers manually.

  • If you choose to delete offers from the target store, only offers connected with the source store will be deleted. All other offers will remain. It can take up to four hours before the offers are deleted from the target store. You cannot undo this action.

  1. Click “Remove Connection” to confirm your choice and remove the connection.

  2. Repeat “Steps 1-5” if there are additional target stores that require removal of Build International Listings connections.

To learn more, go to “Remove a connection using Build International Listings”:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/G202121660?referral=A99FB6FN65NYY_ARWW92I7BXB9V

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The charges sellers were seeing should have been the $40 professional fee split among the various marketplaces. Unless sellers are getting other, additional charges this is nothing to worry about.

I also recently disconnected my various marketplaces, but not enough time has passed to see if this condenses my payments to just the $US payment from the .com payment method.

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The total amount comes out to about $40 (depending on exchange rates fluctuations), but the fact that .mx and .ca charges get charged to your credit card, rather than deducted from your account, can be frustrating to those wanting to avoid charges and/or have efficient bookkeeping.

There’s also one case on the NSFE where the listing that was copied (without permission) to .mx received a violation for making claims not allowed in Mexico; no telling how that may end up affecting his account.

Regardless, it’s just another example of how annoying Amazon can be by “rewarding” us by mucking around with our accounts.

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Exactly! What kind of coding cluster means that a basic UI redesign enables options?! That makes zero sense, outside of the code being completely fubar.

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To be clear, I am strongly in favor of de-synching the different accounts if they are not being used, and most strongly for this exact reason. This is why I de-synched my accounts. I just wanted to be clear that this should not actually be costing sellers any additional money.

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This happened to me a few months ago.

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7

I appear to have it far worse.

Despite having disabled .ca and .mx from the start, Amazon has chosen to replicate out-of-date copies of listings to multiple country “marketplaces”, for no apparent reason, and without any prompting from me. They have “brand names” that are not correct, and they have out-of-date numbers of reviews, showing that the data replication is not at all timely, if this is the source of the issue/problem:

Below, I list country, # of reviews, and brand name match for a single ASIN.

All except USA are listed as “currently unavailable”, but these clearly are open invitations to hijackers to make offers, and to sell counterfeit product.

Inquiries as a brand owner to at least get the brand name right result in demands that I show Amazon a trademark registration for each country, something I will not do, as that will require me to set up an account in each country (and a bank account!) simply to remove a rouge listing.

USA, 580, Correct Brand Name

Japan, 531, Random other company is “brand”
Egypt, 562, Former brand hijacker
Mexico, 562, Former brand hijacker
Australia, 562, Former brand hijacker
Singapore, 509, Former brand hijacker (suppressed listing)
Poland, 562, Former brand hijacker
Spain, 508, Former brand hijacker (suppressed listing)
Saudi Arabia, 562, Former brand hijacker
Italy, 555, Mangled Version of our brand name
France, 554, Mangled Version of our brand name
Germany, 562, Correct Brand Name
United Arab Emirates, 508, Former brand hijacker (suppressed listing)
UK, 508, Former brand hijacker (suppressed listing)
Turkey, 562, Correct Brand Name

The Browse Tree entries are also a mess, the product is misplaced more often than not.

How to get these bogus listings created by Amazon itself removed?

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My monthly CA charges are bank debits, the bank is charging me small foreign transaction fees on top of the charges.
CA isn’t worth the trouble for me, I zeroed out the quantities of what I had listed there.
I need to try shutting it down completely but am hesitant to make any changes this quarter, can’t risk a new can of worms during the holiday season.

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9

Have you put CA and MX on vacation?

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Vacation mode for sure, and de-synch the marketplaces if not already done. When you de-synch the marketplaces, it gives you the option of also removing all SKUs from the non-source marketplace (which you can set to the US if not already default) in bulk. If you don’t want to use the .ca marketplace, I suggest taking this route to avoid the potential violations resulting from old listings lingering in your account.

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It’s things like this that will, one day, cost Amazon a major loss in a court.

Not having control over the system, and having no explanation over why something did something will be Amazon’s downfall

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Trademark law is complicated, but as far as I know a US trademark is valid only in the US.

Without a trademark registration in those countries you’re not a brand owner in those countries, which is why Amazon is balking at responding to your inquiries. (And be careful about repeatedly submitting these inquiries, as far as Amazon is concerned you’re acting as a fake rights owner in those countries as you do not have a trademark but are claiming that you are a rights owner).

If you are ever planning on taking your brand global this is a subject worth some research/consulting with an IP attorney on. If your brand becomes popular enough in the US and you do not register it globally, it is possible that someone else registers it first in another country, and if the opposition period passes without action from you, they’re now the brand owner in that country. At this point if you attempt to sell your products there, YOUR products would be considered counterfeit.

Of course, it’d be crazy if every country was totally different, so most of the civilized world has agreed to standardize trademark applications (importantly, this includes China):

You do need to pay all registration fees to every country you want to register in. This means if you register 120 countries, you pay 120 sets of fees (which can be substantial).

Without knowledge of other countries’ trademark laws (and meeting the requirements to legally claim that you’re a brand owner there), I would tread very carefully here, as if Amazon determines you’ve provided false or misleading information to them, even on another country’s Amazon platform, you could be facing a US suspension that’s nearly impossible to resolve.

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