A bug appeared in Amazon backend! Sellers cannot unblock their stores

Amazon has been hit by many accidents recently. In addition to the unpleasant incidents such as products being removed from the shelves due to misjudgment of pesticides, many sellers had their entire stores closed last week.

Either it shows that the account password is wrong and I can’t log in even after changing the password, or it shows that there is abnormal activity and I can’t log in. At the same time, I can’t find my store and products at the front desk.

The account suspension incident this time was caused by account dealers taking advantage of the credit card refusal period to sell accounts that did not pay monthly rent to sellers. After reaching the maximum refusal period of 180 days, Amazon will ban these accounts. Teacher Alice also talked about this incident in our Knowledge Planet two days ago.

In addition to learning from their mistakes, all sellers are actively appealing and trying to restore their own stores. However, the backend fails at this critical moment. Many students have told me that when they appeal, the system will fall into an infinite loop and cannot complete the appeal process.

Report a bug

When the seller sent an email to contact seller support, he received a reply saying "the complaint channel was used incorrectly."

Amazon replied to tell the seller that the appeal channel currently used is incorrect, and the seller should click the "Appeal" button in the performance panel to initiate an appeal.

However, many sellers cannot even log into their accounts, let alone click the button. Even a small number of sellers whose accounts were blocked not due to monthly rent issues followed this step when they appealed, clicked the "Appeal" button, and received the same prompt again.

I did a search and found that this issue was also reported by foreign media.

▲The frozen Amazon sellers encountered email failures

In some cases reported by foreign media, the sellers had even reached the stage of submitting improvement plans, but the response they received from Amazon was the above prompt that the seller’s complaint path was wrong.

In theory, the above two operations are correct. Clicking the appeal button to initiate an appeal and submitting an action plan are both necessary steps in the appeal process. The student who made the mistake also said that the operation was the same as the previous appeal, but it was reported wrong this time . No matter how to change or change the appeal method, you will be prompted with the message that the appeal method is wrong.

Amazon's official spokesperson responded to this incident, but his attitude was very firm, "This is not a technical error!"

Simply translated, it means "We have no technical errors. If a seller who has been banned for violating the policy tries to appeal by sending an email to an Amazon email address instead of following the prescribed steps in the background, this reminder message will appear."

Obviously, the Amazon spokesperson did not answer why some sellers received this reminder even after submitting their applications according to the steps in the background. It seems that there may indeed be some complaint bugs in the background.

The official spokesperson also confirmed that backend complaints are a compliant channel, and this complaint bug is believed to be fixed in a short time.

However, this incident did give us some small trends that may affect the changes in how our sellers contact the seller support team in the future. I will analyze them for you below.

We sellers have summarized a rule that whenever Amazon wants to modify or update a policy, some bugs of varying sizes will occur in the module to be updated.

Amazon is indeed making some changes to the contact mechanism for seller support recently. Judging from the spokesperson's words, the content of the changes is that in the future, if there is no official approval, sellers may not be able to contact the designated seller support team on their own.

During the operation process, we sellers will inevitably encounter problems such as product removal and store closure. In these situations, we need to contact the performance team, flash sale team, etc. ourselves.

I remember very clearly that a seller trainee sent crazy emails to harass the flash sale team because of a problem with the Black Friday flash sale (which was originally impossible to modify). In the end, the flash sale team manually modified it for him.

Such unscrupulous actions of contacting the team on your own may be blocked by the reminder of "incorrect complaint channel" in the future. This trend is in line with Amazon's style. For example, the performance team is becoming less and less responsive. In the future, it is very likely that they will only handle complaints entered from the background and will not accept any email complaints.

This is definitely not good news for sellers. Not being able to contact the team on our own will cause considerable inconvenience to our operations. I hope Amazon will develop a user-friendly and fast appeal function before implementing the method of blocking incorrect appeal channels.

Finally, I have collected a list of contact information for each Amazon team and customer service. You can still send them emails to harass them as much as you want. If you have any questions, please ask the customer service team immediately. Please scan the QR code below to contact me.

PS. If you want to join the seller discussion group, you can also private message me to let me add you to the group