[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