An Amazon merchant has been in touch to say that they were changing bank on Amazon but after updated the details on Amazon on all five EU sites and promptly had their accounts frozen later that evening.
The problem was that the accounts were suspended in the evening including freezing the accounts, deactivating all listings and wiping the new bank details clear – Amazon thought the accounts had been hacked.
As it was after 8pm at night it was impossible to get hold of Seller Support. With Amazon support hours running from 8am to 8pm, one might think it time that a global marketplace considered offering 24/7 emergency assistance. To make matters worse the forgotten password links redirected to a no recognised web address – naturally if an account had been hacked Amazon don’t want the hackers being able to reacquire it a second time.
At 8am the merchant was able to contact Amazon support and get things straightened out, although they were warned that when they updated bank details it could happen again (Fortunately it didn’t!).
There seems to be little advice we can offer to prevent this occupying to other merchants who are changing bank on Amazon, other than to suggest bank details be changed as early in the working day as possible and we’d recommend never doing so on a Friday (or over the weekend) for obvious reasons.
One last point of interest… Amazon only deactivated the merchant fulfilled items and left the FBA items running – they knew they had stock and would fulfil orders so it appears Amazon isn’t totally evil, they just want to protect buyers and sellers, however inconvenient those protections might be.
4 Responses
“so it appears Amazon isn’t totally evil”
I will leave it there
my account went under review for just changing the phone number and I had to resend all the documents
Amazon are excellent at looking after their consumer customers, but in terms of how they treat sellers (also their customers) they can be fairly horrendous. They are far too quick to suspend seller accounts, and provide sellers with poor customer service to resolve account issues , often taking days and sometimes weeks to respond to sellers.