Recently, Amazon introduced a new way of handling alleged policy violations detected within Seller Accounts belonging to third party merchants, who are doing business on their platform. Previously, the seller in question would either receive a performance notification containing a warning or get suspended with an option to appeal. Everything was operated under a ”guilty until proven innocent” approach.
Now, first instances of suspected violations of Amazon Seller Code of Conduct, including dropshipping are enforced with a defect on the Account Health Dashboard. This defect can be either left unaddressed or lifted by acknowledging it.
However, please note that there is a big catch which you should be aware of!
From a legal perspective, once you tick a box acknowledging that you violated Amazon’s policies specifically described by the company in the ”acknowledge a violation” interface through the Account Health Dashboard, you are waiving your rights to challenge any future Amazon enforcement over the matter on the grounds that it was unwarranted. At the same time, you are making a potential legal action (which you may take in the future) over withheld funds or a deactivated selling account meritless.
Amazon is being very clever when having sellers voluntarily sign an affidavit, where they are confirming that they seriously violated their policies.
Now, Amazon will be able to suspend your account anytime, while keeping your funds and destroying your inventory. If you object, they will just point you to your own declaration of guilt and defects committed.
This will mean that you won’t be able to claim innocence and demand Amazon to provide proof of you actually violating their policies, if you take them to the court.
My advice is to be very careful what you agree to and rather allow the violation to drop off after 180 days than to acknowledge, that you violated the policy.
Here you can view a screenshot of such warning containing a tick-off acknowledgement feature:
Cre: Seller-Union.com
Comments