Nightmare! A "big earthquake" occurred on the French website, and all inventory items were banned from sale overnight?

Overnight, all inventory products were banned from sale. Can you believe it? This happened to sellers on Amazon France! Just like the previous "FBA suspension of non-essential products from entering the warehouse", Amazon's action this time was also without warning!

A seller posted this morning: I came here today and found that all the products in stock in France are no longer available for sale. I haven’t received any official news! Other sites are about to resume warehousing, but France has stopped selling them. What’s going on?

This situation is not an isolated case, many sellers have encountered the same thing:

I woke up at 7am and saw that all the products in the backend were not available for sale. I lost all my sleepiness...

Most of the popular ones are no longer available, and the remaining ones are sold only once every few days...

Too miserable, FBA only has a few links, and a few have been removed today. What should I do if all are removed? How can I survive...

Why is the French site banned from selling on a large scale? A seller asked the customer service, and the customer service said that the warehouse was closed due to the epidemic, but the real situation is...

According to AFP, a French court ordered on April 14 that Amazon must limit its business to only processing orders for daily necessities before an assessment is made on the risks related to the new coronavirus in Amazon France's warehouses!

According to the Nanterre court's ruling, the court found that Amazon "manifestly disregarded its safety and precautionary obligations in protecting the health of its employees."

The court ordered Amazon to limit its business to only processing orders for food, hygiene and medical products. If it is found to have violated the order, Amazon will pay a late fine of 1 million euros per day!

The court ordered an assessment of Amazon’s employee health protection measures and the risks associated with the new coronavirus in its warehouses. Only after the assessment is passed can Amazon resume the delivery of non-essential goods!

The restrictions will be implemented "after 24 hours" for a period of one month, and the court may decide to extend them depending on the situation of the new coronavirus. Amazon must do a risk assessment with company employee representatives!

Last month, Mediapart shared recordings of Amazon executives saying they were not doing enough to protect warehouse workers - making it particularly difficult to respect social distancing, for example.

Previously, the largest SUD union in Amazon also filed a complaint with the court! The union pointed out that it was very unsafe for more than 100 employees to work in a closed warehouse together, and demanded that business activities in the warehouse be completely stopped!

Since the outbreak, at least one Amazon employee in France has died!

Amazon executives found the French court’s ban on Amazon very difficult to accept, saying in a statement:

“We disagree with the decision made today by the Nanterre Court and we are currently assessing the impact this has on our French logistics base. We will also continue to work with all stakeholders and provide the necessary clarifications, as we have been doing since the beginning of this unprecedented crisis.

Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees. In France, we have distributed more than 127,000 packages of disinfectant wipes, more than 27,000 litres of hydroalcoholic gel and more than 1.5 million masks across our sites over the past four weeks. We have also implemented temperature control and social distancing measures, and have tripled our maintenance team in France to intensify cleaning of an additional 200 areas per site.”

But this statement obviously means little!

Apparently, the French site’s massive removal of sellers’ existing inventory was due to a dispute between Amazon and the French government, but in the end, it was the sellers who paid the bill! Not only that, during the epidemic, my brother-in-law’s net worth did not drop but increased!

It is understood that after the outbreak, people staying at home rely on Amazon more than ever before. On Tuesday local time in the United States, Amazon's stock price climbed 5.3%, hitting a record high, closing at US$2,283 per share.

As Amazon's stock price hit a new high, its CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth increased by nearly 5% ($6.4 billion) to $138.5 billion. Bezos currently holds 11.2% of Amazon's shares and is already the richest person in the world. Since the beginning of 2020, Bezos' net worth has increased by nearly $24 billion.

In contrast, after entering 2020, only a few Chinese sellers were able to take advantage of the opportunity to explode, while the orders of most of them plummeted, and some were even on the verge of bankruptcy! In addition, they also encountered various unexpected policies from Amazon, which undoubtedly made the situation worse!

So, under the epidemic, it is my brother-in-law who is taking off, and it is the sellers who are suffering...

I still hope that the overseas epidemic can be brought under control sooner, and that Amazon can be nicer to the sellers on the platform and its own employees!

Source: FBA Information