Since 2024, various changes on the Amazon platform have continued to escalate. First there was the new Amazon coupon policy, and then there were various illegal scanning incidents. This made sellers like frightened birds, always worrying whether their stores would become the next target of the sweep.

As the North American Spring Promotion Campaign kicked off, March 21 was a "Black Thursday" for a large number of Amazon sellers, as many sellers said their stores were blocked for no reason, and the appeal conditions were the most stringent Amazon review mechanism in history!

Amazon launches large-scale ID scanning

On the afternoon of March 20, the Amazon seller group was in an uproar. One seller said that his account was suddenly blocked for unknown reasons, and he received an email notification from Amazon: fraudulent video verification.

If you have received a similar email notification, you may have also encountered this type of "fraudulent" video verification.

However, the account information used by this seller was not his own, but someone else's.

During the video review, the legal representative of the store information and the seller’s operations staff responded to the Amazon reviewers’ questions.

Unfortunately, the video authentication failed because the legal representative did not actually participate in the daily operations and failed to effectively cooperate with the operational staff who answered the questions.

Afterwards, she received a more stringent information review notice. The content of the notice is as follows:

It is difficult for Amazon to provide any one of the five items it requires. Now Amazon also requires sellers to provide all the information. What is wrong with you, Amazon?!

In addition, several sellers received red flag warnings of being deactivated. Amazon did not specify the reason in the email, but only stated that these seller accounts had engaged in unfair behavior or abused Amazon's functions, and were therefore deactivated by Amazon!

Regarding the unfair behavior examples mentioned in the email, Zhaodanmao has compiled the following situations based on the feedback from sellers:

It is understood that the scale of this sweep was very large, and most of them occurred around 3 pm. Not only newly registered accounts were affected, but also some normal accounts with long-term operation and good reputation; this sudden blow caught many sellers off guard.

However, several sellers reported that many of the accounts that were swept had never conducted any illegal operations and were operating in a completely compliant manner.

Vacuum cleaner category with 10 brands

On March 21, multiple brands in the "Stick Vacuums & Electric Brooms" category on Amazon's US site could not be displayed.

A seller revealed that there are more than ten brands affected, including HO*****, DE****, Be****, BUPO*****, TA*****, WL*****, HA*****, PO*****, VO*****, JA*****, and Lu*****.

Moreover, some sellers claimed that when a brand fails, Amazon also seizes the funds.

According to the seller, the account that was scanned did not receive any performance notification in the background.

Some sellers compared this incident to the "joint punishment" incident in 2021. At that time, some sellers were blocked on a certain site for infringement, double-brushing, private contact with sellers, fraud, etc., which resulted in other sites being implicated.

But some sellers hold different views on this, believing that these brands are engaging in gray operations.

A seller revealed: "I used to run vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers. Most of these blocked accounts were acquaintances. The product quality was average, and they engaged in some shady operations, such as illegally merging variants, merging international reviews, manipulating reviews, and placing fake orders outside the site. They basically did everything. I can only say that they were not wronged to be blocked."

Some sellers also said that their products were taken off the shelves mainly because the discount on the crossed-out price was too large!

Amazon did not give a specific reason, but the increasingly frequent scanning of accounts shows that Amazon is becoming more and more strict in reviewing account compliance!

However, due to the unclear reasons for the account suspension, most sellers currently still do not know the specific reasons why their accounts were deactivated, and have no way of filing an appeal; some sellers have chosen to continue to wait and see.

At present, Amazon has not made any official response to this; scanning numbers before big sales has become the norm. For the normal operation of the store, sellers need to always pay attention to the platform's rules and policies to ensure that they operate in compliance and avoid losses due to illegal operations.