[IChooseY0u]

I think people would be surprised what is on the internal seller forums. There is really like a huge amount of issues that Amazon fails to help with. Literally everything from onboarding to protecting sellers from refund scams.

I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

[Closi]

I used to work for a large Amazon Seller (>$100m per year revenue) who got automatically deactivated with no warning and it took them a week to get re-activated.

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.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> 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)

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.

[Closi]

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

> 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.

[8note]

> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

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

[betty_staples]

>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.

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

[binarysolo]

FWIW they got a lot better on this past few years, clearly someone high up finally got the memo.

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...

[kshri24]

> I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

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...

[modeless]

When you look at a forum like that you have to realize that the actual scammers also post convincing complaints (omitting incriminating details). They likely outnumber the legitimate cases. It's all part of gaming the system.

[JasonADrury]

This seems pretty unlikely. Running scams on Amazon requires quite a bit more effort than on Ebay, so the scams tend to be more professional.

Professional scammers are not likely to waste their time complaining on forums.

[binarysolo]

Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible.

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.

[TMWNN]

>We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees

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.

[binarysolo]

Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.

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...

[TMWNN]

>They already take 50%+ of our revenue for all expenses

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.

[binarysolo]

My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%, but our typical unit pricing is <$30 so the FBA fees and base fees/unit sold hit hard.

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.

[TMWNN]

> My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%

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?

[DetroitThrow]

>I suspect big sellers must have dedicated account managers

They do. Large 'first party' vendors have a completely different system, basically. Even large third party vendors have a more direct line to support.

[iLoveOncall]

Even pretty small ones do. My wife has worked at Amazon as an account manager both for 1P and 3P sellers, some of those don't even make $100K a year on Amazon but still have an internal contact.

[busterarm]

Depends on the category. My brother runs an Amazon store that nets more than that but his category is one of the strictest on the site and he gets no support.

[iLoveOncall]

I mean those programs aren't free for 3rd party sellers, so if he doesn't pay I'm not surprised, but it likely doesn't have much to do with the category.

[busterarm]

He would pay. They don't have anything to offer him.

[TMWNN]

What I've heard about having the "Premium" (pay) version of 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.