Keep your Amazon seller account health under control. Fix problems with your seller account before Amazon discovers it. Maintain a clean account, deal with unprofessional competitors, and avoid suspensions. How? There are 5 ways to maintain your amazon seller account health.

Product Quality and Operational Review

Begin your health check by checking the quality of your products. Your goods will naturally lead into a comprehensive review of your business operations.

You can start by figuring out the cause for suspending ASIN-level listings in the past. What were the appropriate steps taken to evaluate and solve the problems? What can cause product quality complaints?

Here are 6 areas to look at when checking product quality:

Listings

Check if your listings are accurate. Do you think buyers are misunderstanding what they are buying? Check if you’re using variations correctly, or if there are any misleading content that may steer customers to report “not as advertised” receipts or items.

Documentation

You must have a supply chain documentation which Amazon deem acceptable. To prevent or defend you from any potential authenticity complaints, it would be wise to keep letters from suppliers. Amazon may ask you for invoices, including private label products.

Operations

Are there anyone else touching your Amazon seller account? Make sure they know what they are doing. Give them proper training when managing your account, especially the policies for staff member desks and individual workstations.

Without proper training and knowledge on operational policies, you could be making mistakes that can get you suspended. Most cases could have been avoided with proper SOP.

Customer service

Make sure to be as responsive to your consumers’ messages! Missing a message and replying later than 24 hours means you are missing metrics targets. Also, some buyers are more likely to complain to Amazon if the seller takes too long to respond. If this happens, the chances of a negative buyer experience turning into a performance notification and suspended ASIN is higher.

Product managing and packaging

Make sure that your products are well protected. You don’t damaged goods delivered to your buyers. Consider getting an upgrade if you have high return rates for defective items, or items that were damaged in transit.

Check Source Inventory

How are your suppliers? Are they any good? How’s the quality of the products? Are your suppliers authorized distributors?

Spend crucial time in making sure that you suppliers or manufacturers are authentic. Ask for authenticity letters with a company letterhead. Also, go over the invoices they are providing you. If they fail to pass the Product Quality team’s muster, ask them to change their invoices or look for another supplier.

Performance Metrics and Buyer Feedback

Moving on to detailed analysis of short-term and long-term metrics. These include order defect rates (ODR), chargebacks and A-to-Z claims.

Check every metric for signs of unhappy or disappointed buyers. Do your customers complain about the condition or quality of the products? Do most transactions get cancelled? You should catch problems earlier to limit the damage before your metrics fall short.

If you’re unable to do that, prepare a POA in advance in case Amazon comes to you with a warning or suspension threat. Prepare a solid POA of your action to prevent negative claims, bad feedback, late shipments, or cancelled orders.

Moreover, you should review the reasons why consumers buy your items so you can detect and go deeper into any persistent issues. Evaluating returns can shed light into problems such as product quality, content listing accuracy, inventory, shipping, pricing, and so on.

Go Through Buyer Feedback

How’s your buyer feedback? Are there problems, or are there particular ASINs that are attracting negative feedback? What are proactive ways to address these issues and prevent suspension?

Evaluate and take actions that you can carry out to lessen the chances of getting negative feedback, manual account investigation, and suspensions.

Anti-competitive Behavior

Recently, a lot of seller groups and forums are having complaints about fake product reviews, hijacked listings, and fake product quality complaints. This may continue and expand in 2019, unless Amazon is able to prevent these kinds of abuse. So, what can you do to counter seller sabotage?

For private label owners

There are risks of not trademarking your goods. If you have a registered trademark, you must enforce it via Brand Registry. If you’re unable to do so, you can discuss legal options with a good attorney.

For resellers

You should check your listings under scrutiny and see if any details have changed. Sometimes, you will need to temporarily deactivate your offer until malicious listing changes are rectified. Don’t expect another seller to handle it, it simply doesn’t work that way.

Deal With Fake Reviews

What do you do with fake product reviews? At any moment, you may suddenly get numerous negative reviews that come out of nowhere.

Worse case scenario, you may see a huge number of positive reviews that are engineered by a competitor to make it look like you’re submitting fake review. Product Review Abuse groups are able to tell the difference between a black hat competitor and juicing your own reviews. They suspend sellers for bad behavior, it’s what they do.

You should know how to detect fake reviews. If those reviews are within the past 90 days, then it’s possible. You can also reach out to Marketplace Abuse teams to handle all non-reviews related abuse. Understand what these teams do, how they work, who’s working on them and how to connect with their queues.