
Amazon.com just closed my seller account. No warning, no details. - akavlie
http://aaron.kavlie.net/2011/12/web/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-account-no-warning-no-details/
======
solson
I've seen this and yes there are false positives. It is unfortunate they have
no reasonable appeal process. Amazon will ban you with no recourse if two
selling accounts appear to login from the same network/same computer. It does
not need to be a banned account. At least that's what appeared to happen in
one case I've seen. Maybe it is cookies too, who knows.

Two internet merchants in the same family. Both have separate businesses,
separate tax IDs, separate locations, etc. One family member is older and
needs a lot of help with IT stuff. The younger family member comes over on the
weekend to help with network/computer problems and happens to login and check
their orders. Amazon sends an email to both of them demanding that one of the
accounts be immediately closed or they will both be terminated. Again, they
tried everything to get a human being to listen. No help from Amazon. The
older family member closed his account and lost 50% of his revenues because he
felt responsible for the entire situation. The younger seller 's account
remained open. It was extremely heavy handed.

I have close relationships with both of these people and I am 100% sure
neither of them are involved in any fraud.

~~~
DEinspanjer
Heaven help Amazon if merchants ever had the idea to do an entrepreneurial
workshop and had dozens of accounts all logging in from the same area as part
of the conference.

~~~
solson
I don't know exactly what sets the flag off, but it is something like IP
address, cookies, hardware, or some combination.

I also got the impression from the way they described the multiple phone calls
to Amazon CS that the decision was made by an algorithm or some bunkered third
party security firm that CS could not contact.

I'll have to check with these folks and see if they are willing to do a blog
post about it. The one that is still selling is justifiably afraid of what
could happen to that business.

------
akavlie
UPDATE: Amazon just reinstated my account (with an equally impersonal email).
I updated the post to reflect this.

A partial victory, but it's still not really satisfying. Had I not taken the
effort to blog about this, and gotten lucky by hitting the top spot on Hacker
News, I don't think Amazon would have reinstated my account.

~~~
larrys
No question about that.

After all they did say:

"Further correspondence regarding the closure of your selling account may not
be answered. The closure of this account is a permanent action. Any subsequent
accounts that are opened will be closed as well."

I would still consider doing the PR angle with this ending as the story hook.
You went to all the effort of doing a blog post and you got everyone talking
about it here. It would be unfortunate if this wasn't able to result in some
reasonable systemic change to the Amazon practice.

~~~
akavlie
I have no experience doing a PR blitz as you've suggested in your other
comment; it would be tough to fill in all the details you didn't spell out.
Might be worth it, but it sounds like a lot of work.

------
algoshift
It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large
internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal,
Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as
"violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being.
The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with
justification for the behavior.

One argument is that they have to deal with so much fraud that they have no
choice but to be somewhat pragmatic and, yes, totalitarian about it. The
counter argument to this is that if your company is so big that you have to
hurt honest customers because you can't afford to do it right, well, maybe you
are too big. I've red about cases where an individual's only source of income
was summarily cutoff overnight with no recourse whatsoever. That's plain
wrong.

~~~
jrockway
What's the economic incentive to provide better support? You don't make Amazon
much money, but an appeals process would cost them money. So why would they do
it?

~~~
rhizome
The economic incentive is increased business. Amazon may not need the
business, which is up to them, but "service" is pretty much the only
difference between Home Depot and Lowe's, as far as I have been able to tell,
to provide one example.

~~~
michael_dorfman
And that might be a compelling argument if there was a competitor to Amazon
who offered the same value proposition plus better service as a
differentiator.

In this case, I don't think there's really anywhere obvious for the traffic to
go, so the "increased business" is fairly minimal.

~~~
jaylevitt
We didn't think there was anywhere for the traffic to go either. -- AOL,
1989-2001

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm an Amazon seller. I sell a small ebook. I think my wife sells a few things
too.

So you guys are saying if she logs on to her account from my computer suddenly
neither one of us can sell on Amazon _ever again?_

Does this seem a little draconian to anybody besides me? Random rules -- no
doubt put in place for good reasons to prevent fraud -- haphazardly applied to
people and resulting in a lifetime ban from being a seller?

I have no problem with Amazon running a clean shop. In fact, I wish they'd do
more to make it that way. What I have a problem with is systems of rules that
are put up without any feedback mechanism in place. So instead of some real,
live person listening to complaints and eventually coming to an understanding
that this is totally whacked, thousands get dumped in the trash can until
somebody finally manages to make a public relations case out of it? Completely
unsatisfactory.

This is just poor systems design, Amazon. This is exactly the same systems
problem many are having with PayPal, and for exactly the same reason. Be as
strict as you like, but always include the possibility that _you might be
wrong_. Because if you have no self-correction mechanisms, people aren't going
to like you much. I know I just started thinking very carefully about my
relationship with Amazon. I'm sure a lot of other folks did too.

~~~
larrys
Assuming the story is correct (and based on how others have vouched for the OP
here I have every reason to believe that it is) the crime that Amazon has
appeared to commit here (I like to reduce things down this way) is that
according to the story there is no reasonable appeal process.

We regularly get fraud orders and we follow a certain procedure to yank those
but you can call us or email us and you will get a response.

We are actually very interested in knowing whether we've made a mistake so we
can refine the process further. (As PG said he wants to know the future
success of companies YC rejected for the same reason.)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Just guessing what type of stuff you do, and also guessing how the
organization at Amazon is set up, many times the guys at some level really do
want to know where things went haywire. The problem is that they farm out this
support work with scripted callers and such limited options for a real
conversation that you've effectively shot yourself in the foot (if not shot
your entire leg off)

At some high level of abstraction, 50-thousand-feet or so, the message is
"support work is overhead which does not directly effect the structure of
operations. Their job is to run the business machine that we've created. So
we'll cost this as any other overhead, find the cheapest, best way of
providing it, and do the correct thing."

But the problem is that anytime anybody talks to the customers, there is all
sorts of information exchanging that's not in some policy book. This nuanced
and in some cases subtly-patterned information is extremely difficult to
manage in a traditional fashion. In this case, the message from Amazon is
clear: we do not trust you, we will not tell you why, and we will never do
business with you again. While that's a great message for Sammy Spambot and
his legion of Makov-chain-generated ebooks, it really sucks for all those
false-positives real human beings sitting in their living rooms trying to make
buck during a tough recession.

So yes, I can understand very well that people in every business want systems
that self-correct, and put in places ways for that to happen. The problem is
that for all their good intentions, the end result for most of them is a
structure that's rigid and communicates important customer opinion data
poorly. But it's created that way usually for what seems like very good
reasons. We have met the enemy and he is us.

~~~
larrys
How true. In a small organization the distance from the source of discontent
to someone with a brain is short. So even if the person who answers the phone
is stupid the caller senses that, complains and gets someone higher up who
might give them what they want just because otherwise they can't finish lunch.

Additionally the distance from between aggravation to a person who can do
something (or it becomes their problem) is also very short. Large
organizations can put something in place because the person who has to fend
off the anger (front line) is far removed from the person at 50k feet who
thought up the policy.

There is also a lack of empathy. In a previous business I owned I did all the
jobs (ran equipment, worked sales, counter work the whole thing). So I had
empathy for the people doing those jobs. I knew what it was like to stand and
deal with an angry customer. But the people that I hired had never done any of
those jobs in many cases (they had only managed). As a result they didn't have
empathy and made all sorts of jobsian "just do it" policies and rules.

Some things people do though make you laugh and there is no "information ...
in some policy book" for every situation. We had a charge policy with a
minimum floor charge of $10. One day I found out that someone came in and owed
us $.25 on some invoice. So the counter person rang up a $10 charge and gave
them $9.75 in change.

------
aaronf
As a seller on Amazon, do not expect the same level of service and efficiency
you receive as a buyer. I had a client selling on Amazon that had all kinds of
surprises. On one occasion, they took down listings because the product was
selling too well - it took days to resolve, and the launch's momentum was
killed.

Here's the key to getting these issues resolved: 1) Always use phone support,
not email support. Email support will almost always paste the easiest reply -
it may as well be automated. Phone support gets you a a real human being on
the phone who will actually listen and understand what's going on. 2) Keep
escalating. If they deny your appeal, appeal again. There is absolutely no
consistency in how they handle these situations. One person may say there's
nothing that can be done, the next will push a button and instantly make the
problem go away. And the more you annoy them, the more it's worth their while
to actually look at and resolve your problem.

Good luck.

------
kjurka
I received a warning from Amazon about illegally having two seller accounts
and they threatened closure. I believe they picked up on the fact that my
girlfriend had a seller account and used my computer to update it. We ended up
closing her account down rather than trying to explain to Amazon that they
might possibly be wrong.

So depending on where you've managed your account from, you might be
associated with all sorts of unsavory characters.

~~~
kokey
I guess the moral of the story is that with Amazon, never manage your account
from a shared anything.

------
xer0
When a farmer drives his harvester through a field, most ears of corn get
profitably harvested. [Work with me, I'm a city boy.] A few ears get trampled
and destroyed. The farmer doesn't grieve for the trampled ears, and he does
little to nothing to reduce trampled ears, because overall his harvesting
method is the most monetarily efficient one available to him. He's happy, and
doesn't give the trampled ears a single thought.

Amazon, Google et al. have discovered that millions of ears of corn will line
up to be harvested. Virtually none leaves voluntarily.

Welcome to the produce section.

------
alttag
I've been an Amazon customer for many years, several of those as a paying
Prime member, and I've been generally happy ... until this past fall.

I don't know what's going on, but in the past three months I've had several
issues and complaints requiring customer service intervention. The most recent
of which was when I signed up for Amazon Student with time remaining on my
paid (full price) Prime membership.

My Prime was cancelled without warning (more likely, simply overwritten by
Student), which downgraded my privileges on their site (no more Prime video,
for example). The service rep was unable to simply cancel student and
reinstate my Prime membership for the remainder of the paid term. I ended up
with in-store credit for a buck or so more than the difference.

Anyway, a company that had previously provided me exceptional service (for
example resolving issues with a fraudulent 3rd-party seller) has really let me
down this past little bit. With the negative reviews for the Kindle Fire and
now this incident, I (hyperbolically) wonder whether this is the beginning of
the decline of Amazon (not as a corporate behemoth, but as a 'good' company
that cares for its customers)?

------
larrys
"The only idea that came up was to plead your case to jeff@amazon.com (Jeff
Bezos’s email address), with plenty of detail including the reason my account
might have been banned."

I would write to PR at amazon amazon-pr@amazon.com.

If that gets no response I would fax to that department.

If still no response fedex copies of the above two attempts to Bezos or some
high up VP. At some point someone will take notice.

If not it will make a good story during the holiday season. I've had good luck
with holiday and event specific interest by the media. Timing is everything.

If it were me, after trying the above, I would package the story and send it
all over actually.

Edit: When you send to the media make sure to package with choice HN comments
to, um, make their job easier.

------
georgemcbay
What makes this story extra silly is the fact that so many non-Amazon APIs
have banned (either temporarily or in some cases permanently) the entire block
of AWS IPs because of a few bad actors who have abused APIs from AWS
instances.

You'd think Amazon of all companies would be hip to the dangers of assuming
that everyone behind a certain IP block is the same person, but I guess not.

------
edw519
The scariest part of all of this is that they can tell which physical computer
you log in from.

Sounds like a business opportunity: a proxy not only for your IP address, but
for your browser / cookies / history / operating system. I look forward to the
day when all billion of us appear to be arriving from the same place.

~~~
feralchimp
Expecting unique client machine/network profiles for each seller account seems
fundamentally incompatible with a web-based access model. Then again, maybe
it's merely incompatible with a Good web-based access model.

Modest proposal: Distribute smart cards and readers to sellers, and use
mutual-auth TLS for everything. Or offer this as an option to anyone willing
to pay $xxx for their initial sign-up fee.

~~~
r00fus
> Distribute smart cards and readers to sellers

Jeebus, this makes too much sense.

If Blizzard can hand out OTP generators for it's users, surely Amazon or
retailers can do the same for it's _sellers_.

Hell, look to Google and their Authenticator app or SMS-based 2-step login
(out of band auth channel would be better).

------
tuananh
Failed to provide details why they closed your account is kind of
unacceptable. The least they could do is telling you why the account was
banned.

~~~
_delirium
They did more or less say why: that their algorithms determined he was a dupe
account of another banned seller. Presumably they don't want to give more
details so people who really _are_ making illicit duplicate accounts can't use
the data to tune their avoidance strategies. But if there are false-positives,
that's definitely super-frustrating.

~~~
ridave
This happened to me as well:

My brother's college roommate is banned --> brother gets banned as a result of
a false-positive dupe account --> when brother gets home and logs into amazon
I get banned.

I was on the phone for hours trying to fix this, nothing ever happened.

Google and eBay get a bit of flack for poor customer service availability and
seller relations and they have improved as of late. Hopefully amazon can
change for the better too.

~~~
protomyth
Must be fun and confusing for people checking their accounts from a coffee
shop or from home if the dhcp from their ISP assigns them a "bad" ip.

~~~
ceol
That's what I was thinking reading these replies. Amazon must be checking if
you log in from the same IP as another seller, but how is that reliable in
determining if it's a dupe? Why even allow users to log in from different
computers if the only way they check for duplicate seller accounts is if
someone else logs in from the same machine?

It seems like the author logged in to his seller account from a public
wireless network (coffee shop, office) where another, previously-banned seller
account had logged in from at one time, and Amazon assumed both accounts were
from the same guy. Maybe they sold the same type of products.

I'm sure they get a lot of sellers who get their account closed and just try
to make a new one, but I'd rather have Amazon not catch the sellers who are
dumb enough to create an account from the same IP than catch them and get
legitimate sellers banned in the process.

~~~
akavlie
All of my weekend listing was done from home. Don't remember accessing my
seller account anywhere else recently.

~~~
protomyth
Does your ISP give you a static IP or is it dynamic?

~~~
akavlie
Not completely sure, Cox (my provider) says in the small print:

"Static IP addresses may be required or dynamic IP addresses may be assigned
without a static IP request, depending on location."

<http://ww2.cox.com/business/arizona/data/pricing.cox>

I don't take notice of my IP address much, so I can't say if they assigned a
static IP address in my case. If they're filtering on IP addresses, I imagine
that they get a lot of false positives.

~~~
protomyth
If they are filtering on IP and you're not paying for a static IP address,
then Cox's DHCP server could have given you a new IP address that matched
someone else who had been banned. Not out of the ballpark of possibilities
when IP is used for selection / banning.

------
kaitari
Terrible. I've been thinking about selling a few items on Amazon but now I'm
wary. Thanks for sharing your story, I hope you can somehow get your situation
resolved.

------
Drakeman
I've acquired a growing distrust of Amazon's seller accounts in the past year.
For a while, I was making my rent on used books I'd acquired over the years.
However, I found Amazon was more likely to side on the buyer side, even when
there was a preponderance of evidence that I had done nothing wrong. So,
Amazon closing a person's account and giving no reason is right up their
alley.

------
RyanMcGreal
Tim Bray said it back in 2003: don't be a sharecropper.

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

------
OoTheNigerian
" There was a listing on Amazon.com for the X220 with a couple of other used
listings, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot. I listed it Sunday
night for $725."

I am not sure if the author means there was a listing for 'the X220' or 'a
similar X220'. Whatever the case, it is really appalling that big internet
companies refuse to treat their users like how they wish to be treated.

However, I have had only very excellent experiences with Amazon customer care.
Maybe they value customers more than suppliers?

~~~
akavlie
Unlike eBay or craigslist, items on Amazon are listed under fixed, pre-
existing products, with variations (in condition, included accessories, etc.)
noted in its comments field. On a baseline seller account, it's not even
possible to create a listing for a new item that doesn't already exist on
Amazon.com.

So I found an X220 listing with different specs, and noted the specs of mine
in the comments. The other two used listings had done the same.

------
benvanderbeek
"Amazon.com staff — seriously, just look at this from the customer’s point of
view, and try to tell me this is a customer friendly process."

I don't believe Amazon views any seller, let alone someone selling used items
occasionally, as a customer. The buyer is their customer. 3rd party sellers
are mostly interchangeable. If you are a professional seller with enough
volume however, you have a direct human account rep who can at least provide
more insight into processes such as this.

------
revscat
I find it sad that one of the questions I asked myself before clicking the
link was "Did he do business with Wikileaks?"

------
rshm
My experience with them. First they close your account, than they keep your
money for six months (you agreed to such terms). Few months down the road,
Amazon will start selling the product you were selling themselves.

------
wladimir
Companies like this are turning the world further into a Kafkaesque nightmare
every day. In this case there isn't even a labyrinth of bureaucracy to
navigate as last resort, it is a permanent action and they're unable to even
tell you why.

The only thing that works is getting a lot of attention behind you in the
media on a site like this, it appears. I don't like this at all. It also
reminds me very much of that recent Paypal "fraud detection" mess-up.

------
tedyoung
I've experienced this as well: my seller account was closed with no appeal
possible, Then, later, my parent's (completely separate and valid) seller
account was also closed, again with no appeal possible. This wasn't a business
for either of us (we were each selling used books), so we simply left Amazon
and sold through eBay/Half.com and never had any problems.

------
akavlie
Just posted another update, with a snapshot of Google Analytics visitor count
by service provider. Amazon.com Inc. ranks at #2 with 350 visits.

------
paulhauggis
This does not surprise me.

I've been selling on Amazon for the past 5 years and they have only gotten
worse. As an example, September-mid-November had bugs and glitches that caused
sellers to lose sales (customers literally couldn't check out).

Amazon (like always) denied there was even a problem. Another thing that I
don't like is their feedback system. Customers can leave feedback for any
reason, but if it doesn't fall into a stock set of reasons, a seller can't
ever get it removed.

During the Amazon glitch-fest, an item I cancelled wasn't removed from my
listings. A customer ordered it and I had to cancel their order. They then
left negative feedback. Amazon wouldn't remove it. If I get enough negatives,
my account could get banned.

Customers will also almost always win in any dispute, which makes it very easy
for scammers. You also can't block customers from buying.

I also love the fact that amazon charges you to collect sales tax (in addition
to having to buy a $40/month account, you need to pay 3%).

The only reason I stay is because by far, they have the most amount of traffic
and I get sales as a result.

Luckily, I have other sources of income.

~~~
jbail
Amazon charges you to collect sales tax, but Amazon doesn't actually add sales
tax to purchases, right? How does this work exactly?

~~~
_delirium
Starting next year, they'll collect sales tax on your behalf for a 2.9%
surcharge: [http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/11/03/amazoncom-play-
ta...](http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/11/03/amazoncom-play-tax-
collector-client-merchants)

~~~
ryanhuff
I thought Amazon was arguing that it was too complex for them to collect sales
tax for all of the states? Wasnt that their whole argument in their right with
three state of California?

~~~
fpgeek
They've made the "too complex" argument in the past, but I believe their real
bottom line is they don't want to be at a disadvantage vs their online
competitors.

------
billpatrianakos
I get how frustrating this is but when you provide this kind of service to the
general public like Amazon has you're taking a huge risk. They have to be
extra cautious about the slightest hint of abuse and because of that these
things happen. If you really want aweso,e customer service you're better off
with a regular merchant account and payment gateway. Contrary to popular
belief, just about anyone can get one. I feel for the author but I just can't
get behind the boycott the author calls for.

------
ebbv
Having worked for a listing service and particularly working on keeping it
secure and safe for members, I have little sympathy for the author.

Frankly, I just don't believe him. It's possible he tripped a false positive,
but in my experience -- and I have to believe the people working at Amazon had
more resources at their disposal than I did -- it's much, much more likely
that he's lying.

~~~
jbail
If the author is lying, what does he have to gain?

I don't know akavlie personally, but he's been on HN for a long time. I think
he's a rational person based on his discourse here.

~~~
ebbv
Obviously he's trying to garner public pressure against Amazon to get his
account reinstated.

I'm not saying he's not a rational person. Rational people lie all the time.

