New punishment for fake orders? A large number of Amazon sellers have been restricted

Amazon recently broke big news from sellers. Many sellers have recently received a penalty letter stating that the sellers were suspected of fake orders and were subject to risk control, which restricted the traffic and display of the sellers’ products!

The content of this punishment is quite fresh. It is not the common first and second brush warning emails. The means of punishment are also different from the usual removal from shelves and closure of stores. It chooses to limit the display of sellers' products and reduce the frequency of consumers seeing suspected brushing products.

In last year's order-padding ban, there were some similar cases where traffic was restricted but products were not removed from shelves. Judging from the content and punishment, it seems to be a punishment targeting less suspicious accounts.

This is actually not a good signal, because the emergence of this penalty means that Amazon is doing something with a big impact - lowering the threshold for determining accounts that engage in false ordering.

Everyone knows that Amazon has a complete system and blacklist for judging whether a buyer's account is involved in fake orders. The pollution mechanism is used to screen out suspicious fake order accounts and stores on a large scale. The advantage of this mechanism is that it is easy to uproot the fake order chain. The disadvantage is that it is difficult to catch the "thread". Amazon's previous treatment of fake orders was warning or direct removal, which is a relatively serious violation. Therefore, Amazon will carefully judge and deal with accounts that are completely white hat operations.

From last year's small-scale test of limiting the flow of suspected fake orders to the recent large number of sellers receiving flow-limiting penalties, Amazon has developed a relatively mild punishment method for fake orders. Correspondingly, many accounts suspected of fake orders that may not have been warned or removed in the past will now be punished by flow restrictions, which means that more sellers will be punished for fake orders.

Judging from the feedback from sellers affected last year, the penalty situation is quite complicated.

According to the information collected so far, this kind of flow restriction penalty will generally clearly tell you the duration of the restriction in the email, such as 30 days, 15 days, etc. Amazon will make a judgment based on the extent of the account suspected of false orders.

If during this period, the suspected account (whether it is a seller account or a buyer account) has further suspicious operations, Amazon will enforce the previous penalties for fake orders, such as warnings and rejection of second-order orders.

However, in actual cases, not all sellers can restore normal traffic and orders after the restriction period. Even if there is no further punishment, there is still a large proportion of sellers whose traffic has not returned to the level before the punishment after the restriction period. Even if they contact customer service, they are powerless. This forced traffic reduction seriously affects product sales, causing product rankings to plummet, and cannot be restored even if the restriction is lifted.

Therefore, the sellers who were caught in this wave, in addition to not taking actions that may be judged as fake orders, must also prepare recovery measures after the restriction period expires. They should promptly use internal and external promotional efforts to improve product rankings as much as possible and restore traffic levels before the restriction period as quickly as possible.