You can see one of my listings here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHZVVL1H
Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great.
Until last week, out of nowhere, my account has been deactivated.
To reinstate my account, they asked me to submit an authorization letter from the manufacturer or brand owner authorizing me to sell their products. Well, I figured, I am the manufacturer, so I wrote an authorization letter for myself, and even got it notarized for good measure, that I am legally allowed to sell these devices. But to no avail.
I have an option to "Submit new information." But have no new information to submit, and fear if I try submitting anything else, I'll be permanently banned or something.
The funny part is that on most of the products I have listed, I am losing money, just because of the FBA costs and the advertising costs. I lost about $250 last month between two of the variants.
The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies, and do most all my sales through my website, but do get a few orders a week through amazon for the book, and am now afraid the Amazon door is closed forever.
Have you tried just having a single trademarked brand in your title, rather than Airtag and Samsung or changing the wording at all? Something like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Samsung. How about targeting other popular brands like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Apple TV?
Here's another brand that has a combination of the above suggestions: https://www.amazon.com/AhaStyle-Protective-Silicone-Compatib... They use "... for ... compatible with", and they also have a registered brand.
You have been lucky so far, but there is no guarantee that luck will not run out tomorrow. The algorithms making these decisions are not open to review. They are opaque, and there is no way to know when something in your account might be flagged as suspicious.
> but some tips that could help.
I know you are trying to help, so thank you for that. So don't take this personally when I say this. I'm just frustrated with how things have turned out.
It is absurd that we have reached a point where people must rely on unofficial and unverified tips just to possibly avoid losing access to their source of income. It seems incredibly unhealthy for a market this important to be governed in this way.
Is this the one? https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
OP linked the source, but you need a seller account to view https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GZUQ6GBB...
Here is the relevant section copy pasted (which his original listing is pretty close to adhering to, it's really just the second brand mention which I was concerned about):
" When making truthful statements that a product is compatible with a trademarked product. For example, if you offer a cable that is compatible with the Kindle e-reader, you can use the brand name “Kindle” to indicate that compatibility in the text of your detail page. You cannot use a logo to indicate compatibility, only the brand name. Any statement you make about compatibility must be true. If you want to indicate the compatibility of your product with a product of a different brand in the product title, build your product title using the format below, taking account of the Amazon Brand Name Policy. If you do not apply this format to your product title, your listing may be removed as potentially trademark infringing.
Title format for branded compatible products
[Your Product’s Brand Name] + [Product Name] + "for"/''compatible with''/''fits''/''intended for'' + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)
Examples:
Xandu USB charging cable, compatible with AmazonBasics speaker TonTon Sleeve intended for Kindle Fire Title format for generic compatible products
"Generic" + [Product Name] + "for"/”compatible with”/”fits”/”intended for” + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)
Example:
Generic Replacement filter for AmazonBasics Waterfilter A3
Note: When making genuine claims that a product is compatible with a trademarked product, use either of these terms that indicate compatibility as listed above, in the bullet point and product description as well. "
I think they're worth reaching out to (I don't have one that I personally recommend as I've been out of that industry for too long). Because if things haven't changed recently then there's no "penalty" for waiting and the mistake most sellers make is rushing to put through a crappy response and they just make things worse.
I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers
We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company - this was not the exact scenario so please treat with a pinch of salt)
They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.
Holy cow.
What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.
Amazon right now feels to me like a large landlord seeking rent kicking people for no reason because they didn't like that some person spilled some water.
Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.
At Amazon scale they have people firehosing water and complaining about it, people punching holes in the roof causing water leaks, people messing with the pipes causing water leak, it's a lot, so they just wrote "ban water on floor bot" which clears 95% of the scammers and 5% of the innocents who had a small spill. Which sounds innocuous but, again, at scale, 5% of the innocents is a damn lot of people
> Probably gonna share this story online more. I mean I didn't expect the situation to be this extremely bad.
Yes it's bad, although I want to emphasise that I have changed the details significantly here - it was something like this, but this was not the infraction because I don't want the company to be identifiable by anyone. I’m also not sure if my example is an actual policy violation - but it was in a similar vein.
To be honest, the surprising thing wasn’t the ban on a policy violation (because they had violated a policy), it was how automated the internals of Amazon were and how slow it was to overturn.
its a very common fraud vector: redirect customers off of amazon, then fraud them there, and when the customer comes back to amazon to complain and get a refund, amazon has no idea what they are talking about, but amazon is still on the hook for making it right.
i recently left this area. id describe the business logic of the various policies as written in blood as responses to sophisticated attackers, but also, spaghetti written by pretty short lived PMs. its of course, hard for account managers to do anything, because there's also a history of account managers having colluded with bad actor sellers
fortunately, tons of the investment has been into fixing problems like "overly harsh" "opaque" etc, and just about all the tools needed to refactor the seller policies are in place now. that and tools besides a top level account banhammer
I expect what should have happened and what will happen in the future is that the one listing or feed gets removed, with a warning/issue to fix it, and the account only gets banned after repeated infractions. most things should be making a phone call to the seller already, if amazon trusts them. for something like that, amazon might also think the account was hacked
that said, all the above is only my opinions, not amazon's, and im not there anymore:P
We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.
Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...
No clue how it is elsewhere but in Amazon India, the largest seller is Amazon itself which sells under a different name. That's their model. They were under scrutiny by the Indian Government [1] [2] [3] last time I checked. Keeps registering subsidiaries under different names.
So you are basically competing with Amazon itself, which also acts as a seller in their own store.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/amazoncoms-retail-p...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/tech/amazon-flipkart-india-an...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Professional scammers are not likely to waste their time complaining on forums.
Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.
You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.
That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.
We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
As mentioned my revenue is far smaller, so I need larger margins. My total marketplace fees plus shipping spend in 2025 was 26% of revenue. My net margin was 28%, but the metric I focus on is margin on COGS; that was 60% in 2025 and 54% lifetime.
Hearing your account and that of another seller with close to seven figures revenue makes me think I should aim for smaller margins. Not as small as yours, but maybe 10% smaller.
>We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
My Walmart revenue equaled Amazon's in 2025.
I've thought about opening my own website. On the one hand my multichannel software already supports such, so it would be from that perspective just another marketplace. On the other hand, besides the additional cost and hassle, I keep coming back to how difficult it is to match the Amazons and Walmarts of the world in terms of customer reach.
We make ~30% before labor and net 10-20% after everything so it works OK. Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Our Walmart store is pretty sad, cross product lines we sell between 1-10% of our rev on Amazon :( ... but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit.
45% for me in 2025.
>but our typical unit pricing is <$30
$59 ASP in 2025 ($63 average revenue per sale).
>Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Yes, that's the impression I've gotten of the marketplace megasellers, of 10% margins being the norm. Not quite the old dotcom joke of losing money on every sale but making it up on volume, but you know what I mean.
>but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit
That's interesting; I would have thought that Amazon would have more sellers across price points. Walmart has more Chinese sellers with gibberish brand names than before thanks to a noticeable loosening of application criteria, but still fewer than Amazon. Are competitors at your price point not present on Amazon but are present on Walmart? Or they are present on both, but for whatever reason (advertising, FBA/FBM differential) your listings get relatively more visibility on Amazon?
They do. Large 'first party' vendors have a completely different system, basically. Even large third party vendors have a more direct line to support.
Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :)
First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead of "for... Samsung TV remote".
I've been doing Amazon for 13 years and have a team + a few brands I own in the ecosystem -- just some basic tips:
1. Get brand registry (or find a maker buddy and put it under their brand) for listing control. Generic is not the way to go for listing control -- you need brand registry. Then you can edit away under your own brand.
2. You shouldn't be losing any money doing this. If you're doing 3D printer stuff you should expect your cost to be like 5-10%, Amazon takes 40-50% between all fees, ads around 10%, and the rest is labor/margin... and if your numbers aren't there you need to figure out what's wrong.
I have lots more thoughts but I realize this can become an essay haha. Feel free to ping me if you need some help, loved your books. :)
===
Edit: I don't think you're at risk of getting banned, but you might need an escalation to a higher level support (a captive or escalations specialist within Amazon).
Edit 2: I had some extra downtime to look at it, my approach to resolving the issue would be: a. You should first try to clearly indicate you're a product accessory and not a Samsung-branded product; review sellercentral best practices for SKU naming but it's gonna be something along the lines of "compatible with Samsung TV remotes" b. If you get stuck here for too long, I would first remove all reference to Samsung for now from the listing and make it a more generic accessory, acknowledge the brand confusion, reinstate your store, then create a case to add Samsung back into your listing (and be sure to have this case handy if you get future problems so you can reference back and show you're doing this the right way). c. Phone support works a lot better in recent days than email/chat support. But since you're deactivated I'm not sure if you get access to this.
This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com
Emphasize your own brands and model number, and make the other brands more clearly a description, in the Amazon item title?
(Background on a simple filter: On eBay, it seemed like someone told counterfeit sellers that all they had to do was to copy&paste the string "For" in front of the brand name and model number, and then they could sell counterfeits. And sometimes black out the counterfeited brand name in the photos. So an item title might be of the format "For <brand> <model>", and mean it's definitely a counterfeit or knockoff of "<brand> <model>".)Have you tried escalating via [email protected]? It used to be a meme, but people still report getting actual human eyes on their case that way when the automated Seller Central loop fails.
And yes, more info is pointless, see https://www.revk.uk/2025/11/more-useless-amazon.html
Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.
I started giving more business to Walmart. Free shipping promos are just that, same dollar threshold as AMZN but items often arrive in a day or two (sometimes same day). They arrive by the date stated. Free shipping is the default selection. Experience with third party sellers has been good. They do shill Walmart+ (their cheaper Prime equivalent) but it's not obnoxious and no dark patterns. They do have the Chinese products but for some reason they do not pollute the search anywhere near as bad as Amazon. It's easy to filter out third party products with one click. I know stuff I'm getting is not counterfeit - they seem to have much better control over supply chain than AMZN. Many products are drop shipped direct from the manufacturer.
Unfortunately the Chinese flea market junk is Amazon's bread and butter so they have intentionally made it difficult to exclude it.
The downside is Walmart's site is a bit rough around the edges but lately Amazon is doing a great job of destroying their own site in multiple ways - like removing the ability to print real invoices, removing the ability to effectively filter third-party sellers in search, etc.
I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.
Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.
It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."
>Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.
Walmart charges less in two ways:
* No monthly membership fee.
* Seemingly random fee discounts, up to and including 0%. More than once I've sold an item early in a day, then sold it again later that day with a different fee percentage.
>Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund?
When Walmart refunds a customer, it takes from the seller's reserves exactly what was paid for the sale in the first place. No more, no less. It is Amazon that charges sellers a "refund processing fee".
While Walmart definitely has its issues, there are also many virtues vis-a-vis Amazon. It is worthwhile selling on both. My 2025 Amazon and Walmart sales are equal.
Edit: you say it too:
> I hated dealing with Amazon
Yet the comments in this subthread all talk only about costs - they say the costs are the same so why switch to Walmart? Aren't the reasons already given?
They may have a filter for people who exceed a certain number of flags?
edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590
How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :< I hope you are doing okay right now man.
I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)
One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.
What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.
I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.
when in Rome ...
Every time I hear a story like this (and there's one like every month) I wonder how we ended up here. The internet was meant to be this place where anyone could set up a website, run a business, and reach customers directly. Instead it has turned into a collection of walled gardens, where your existence and livelihood depend on the whims of an opaque algorithm.
Luckily in my country Amazon does not have the level of market control it has in the US and some other places. People still walk or drive to local shops and when they order something for delivery they usually do so from their websites.
But reading many of these HN threads gives the impression that in the US and elsewhere Amazon controls a huge share of the market. If it functions as such a powerful exchange for both merchants and buyers, should there not be regulation to prevent injustices like this?
But when the only punishment for crime is fine, then crime becomes legal (and even preferred if doing the crime actually makes more than the fine)
Amazon also does malicious compliance. Yes they are following the law but they are trying to stoop as evil foolishly low as possible while still following the law and sometimes they don't even follow the law but get out of free jail card by paying some fines and oh did I mention, lobbying?
I completely agree with your message. We might need a better alternative to Amazon but one of the reasons why I sort of prefer Amazon sometimes is that you can get a 5% discount on all products if you have a decent credit card and pay bills on time on all products in my country, there are special cards just for amazon and also some cards which pay 5% on all online payments.
On small businesses this is not really possible.
Theoretically if one keeps money in a short term market fund or somewhere safe and uses this or other apps, they can probably safe upto 5% on all expenses, (uses credit cards and then pays the bills on time)
Combine this with the bloody fact that Amazon's tos's requires you to sell the cheapest on amazon, there just ends up being no competition.
So rather than investing time and effort into investigating, we just built faceless tools to punish anything that looks even remotely suspicious, and ignore any appeals, and if a few (or a lot) of folks just trying to make an honest living get caught up, then oh well.
Even if you try selling direct, your payment processor takes on this role, with varying degrees of trigger-sensitivity.
I agree but I hate payment processors sometimes as well and they feel very rent seeking in nature (akin to amazon) to me as well, I definitely wonder if stablecoins with good on/offramps or proper VISA support might actually help the end citizen but I am a bit worried because Stablecoin's on crypto and most crypto's really scummy so I also don't want to give things like this way too much attention.
Time will tell perhaps
edit: typing is hard