Strict crackdown during peak season! A large number of Amazon sellers received warning letters

Amazon sellers who don’t fake orders are waiting for death, but fake orders are seeking death?

With the peak season approaching, Amazon is starting to “make trouble” again.

There are risks in fake orders, so be careful when doing it. Recently, many sellers said they received fake order warning letters. Some sellers who only faked a few orders were also warned by Amazon for manipulating reviews.

Amazon said that after being found to have manipulated reviews, sellers may face consequences such as ASIN being restricted, reviews being removed and unable to receive subsequent reviews, and products being removed from the platform. After manipulating reviews, Amazon also gave sellers the opportunity to appeal. According to feedback from insiders, "hit" sellers need to seize the first three appeal opportunities during the appeal process. In addition, for those sellers who have manipulated reviews twice, the probability of a successful appeal is very small.

Amazon has been taking action to crack down on fake orders!

In terms of policy, Amazon's review policy and variant merging policy have changed recently. Some sellers have received news that according to Amazon's policy update, sellers' variant reviews will not be shared in the future. This policy is being implemented.

In addition, Amazon updated its review algorithm some time ago. Product reviews are displayed based on the age of the listing + recent performance, and are calculated by robots. That is to say, Amazon will focus on the most recent reviews, and the weight of previous old reviews will be infinitely reduced. At the same time, the older the listing, the more popular it is.

At the same time, Amazon has filed lawsuits against a number of order-padding companies in markets such as the United States, Italy, and Spain.

It can be seen that Amazon is "blocking" sellers' way of brushing orders in many ways. Although there are still many sellers adhering to the principle of "brushing orders to ensure performance", under Amazon's iron-fisted crackdown, many sellers dare not "brush orders" anymore!

As it becomes increasingly difficult to make quick money by “brushing orders”, Amazon sellers have no choice but to look for other ways out, such as becoming “price butchers” and deliberately making a traffic-generating product and selling it at a loss to help attract traffic to other products in the store. “It’s cheaper than brushing orders and relatively safer,” said one seller.

A group of Amazon sellers received warning letters during the peak season to crack down on fake orders

Don’t be happy today, be careful of tomorrow’s list. Recently, an Amazon seller said that he received a warning letter for fake orders ↓↓↓

The email content shows that sellers are not allowed to manipulate ratings, feedback or buyer reviews. If Amazon learns that a seller has attempted to manipulate reviews, such as by offering compensation to buyers in exchange for reviews, Amazon will conduct an investigation. If this problem persists, Amazon will deactivate the seller's account.

After understanding, the editor found that this situation is not an isolated case:

I received this email out of the blue, and when I clicked on it I found it was a policy warning about manipulating comments.

I was warned by Amazon for manipulating reviews, and I have only faked about 10 orders so far.

Are there large-scale number sweeps before the peak season? I also had a store that was warned in this way, and it was gone after I checked the submission button.

Don't worry, just don't swipe next time and the warning will disappear in two days.

…

"Both the US and European sites have received warnings about fake orders. Is Amazon starting to settle accounts?" During the peak season every year, Amazon almost always launches a large-scale account blocking wave, and this year will most likely be no exception. Therefore, after receiving the warning letter from Amazon, many sellers trembled in fear, believing that this was a prelude to the platform's large-scale account blocking.

One of the sellers who was scammed said that the number of fake orders he had this year was not large, but he had encountered fake orders by machines. After discovering the problem, he immediately terminated the cooperation. Now, he has not had any fake orders for more than half a year, but he still received a warning letter from Amazon.

As we all know, when sellers are in the process of brushing orders, the most important thing is to control whether the buyer's account is safe and whether the search for brushing orders conforms to Amazon's normal search logic. In terms of ensuring the quality of buyers, an insider once said that many service providers claim that they have their own accounts and real-person reviews, but in fact they are just machine-brushed, and sellers will be cheated if they are not careful. Especially in the current environment where Amazon is strictly investigating brushing orders, sellers are more likely to touch the platform's red line. " Amazon's account status rating has been revised and turned into specific numbers. If the violation is caused by brushing orders, it will be regarded as a serious violation. If the points are deducted too much, it will be difficult to appeal back. "

After receiving the warning letter, how to cancel the warning becomes the key. An appeal service provider said that they have received multiple appeals recently. The warning of manipulating comments is actually very easy to solve. Just prepare an appeal letter and submit it from the backend appeal portal. Abuse of rankings itself is the easiest and fastest problem to solve among account problems. Sellers are advised to deal with it as soon as possible. Account suspension penalties are directly related to warning performance. If the delay is too long, it may rise to account penalties. Moreover, if the warning is not handled in time, it is easy to be sentenced to a second brush. If the store is suspended for a second brush, the chance of a successful appeal will be greatly reduced.

During the appeal process, sellers need to seize the first three appeal opportunities. If they are not sure, do not submit it casually. Otherwise, if they miss the first three opportunities, the success rate of subsequent appeals will be lower.

In addition, after the seller receives a warning from Amazon, even if the appeal is successful this time, it does not mean that they can "rest assured". If the seller is caught for fake orders again in the future, the consequences will be more serious, and the seller will generally face consequences such as the link being removed from the shelves or the store being closed.

Where there is demand, there is a market. Driven by profit, there are many chaos in the order-brushing industry. An insider said that there is a serious information leakage in this industry, and some service providers ask for exorbitant prices. When his store was closed for the first time, he received a small red flag at 9 o'clock in the morning and received a call from a complaint service provider at 10 o'clock. The call directly quoted a price of 5,000. When the service provider called again at 12 noon, the appeal price had risen to 10,000. In order not to be manipulated by the service provider, he began to teach himself various appeal skills. Now, even if he is caught for the second time, he can successfully appeal on his own.

The insider also said that appealing is not a particularly difficult thing. The key point is to explain the whole story clearly and admit mistakes sincerely. The reason why many service providers have a higher success rate in appeals is not because of their superb appeal skills, but more because of their internal platform resources and connections. "Appealing is like writing a letter of repentance. The Amazon internal staff who review the appeal content can be called the examiner. The service providers and the examiners collude with each other to divide the fees collected from sellers. During the appeal process, the service providers only need to add specific symbols and marks to the appeal content submitted. When the examiner sees these signals, he will naturally turn on the green light to release it."

Amazon is rectifying review merging, and variant reviews will not be shared

According to Amazon, these three practices are all review abuses: 1. Contacting buyers directly through Amazon's buyer-seller messaging service and offering them compensation (cashback) in exchange for reviews. 2. Arranging for family members, friends, or employees to post false reviews of their own or competitors' products. 3. Inserting inserts, flyers, coupons, brochures, or similar items into products or product packaging to request positive reviews or offer incentives for posting reviews.

Once discovered by Amazon, the ASIN will be restricted, the sales privileges on Amazon will be permanently revoked, funds will be withheld, all product reviews will be removed, and no reviews or ratings will be received in the future. The product will be permanently removed from the shelves, and Amazon will sue and transfer to civil and criminal law enforcement agencies. Regarding restrictions, it is understood that a large number of sellers use small accounts to copy large accounts and place orders at low prices to grab the Best Sellr. As a last resort, Amazon has to take restrictions to plug this loophole.

In addition to limiting the ASIN of sellers, Amazon has been "keeping up with the times" and continuously updating policies to block sellers from placing fake orders.

Recently, some sellers have stated that Amazon has adjusted its review algorithm. In terms of the timeliness, authenticity, and accuracy of product reviews, reviews with longer lengths, long buyer accounts, and recent reviews will have higher weights. In addition, Vine reviews will not be pinned to the top, and 1/2 star reviews will not be pinned to the top. At the same time, international reviews are still sorted by the number of helpfulness.

At the same time, sellers reported that Amazon’s variant merging policy has changed again. For variant listings, first, the weight is calculated based on the parent product; second, the reviews of variant products are displayed separately. This situation is particularly common in new parent-child variant links.

As early as 2019, some sellers received news from Amazon that variation reviews would no longer be shared.

Judging from the notifications received by sellers from Amazon, firstly, according to Amazon’s policy update, sellers’ variant reviews will not be shared in the future. This policy is being implemented and has not yet been fully popularized to all sellers.

That is, if you have two sub-products in a set of variations, one sub-product has 10 reviews and the other sub-product has 5 reviews, according to the previous review sharing principle, each sub-product will display 15 reviews on the front page. After the policy update, the two ASINs will display their respective number of reviews on the front page, that is, one has 10 reviews and the other has 5 reviews.

2. Before the policy was implemented , the prerequisite for variants to share reviews was that the classification of the parent product and all child products remained consistent. If the seller's ASIN classification was inconsistent, Amazon would modify it for the seller to be consistent and then refresh the review to achieve sharing. However, the current policy has been updated to : the current variant review processing principle is no longer unified as required before. Even if this is consistent, the review will not be shared.

According to seller feedback, Amazon's policy of no longer sharing variation reviews is still underway, which means that currently only some sellers know about this policy. As for when Amazon will extend this policy to all sellers, it will take time.

As Amazon continues to crack down on fake orders, the practice of "fake orders" that is publicly written on Amazon's violations has made many sellers stay away, but "smart" sellers are still trying to "survive in the cracks". Getting reviews by "spelling variants" is a common method adopted by sellers. Now that Amazon has set its sights on this issue, the success rate or the effect of this method will only get smaller and smaller in the future. At the moment, it seems that Vine is the only white hat method left for sellers to operate.

In addition to being presentable, some sellers also believe that Vine is the fastest and safest way to get reviews for new links, but the effect of this $200 may be far from what they want.

In October, a large number of sellers reported that the speed of Vine collection and review was several times faster than before. "Nearly 30 Vine were collected within a few days of the launch, but there were many negative reviews. Do these foreigners not even frown when they give negative reviews?" A seller said that Vine is easy to give away, but it does not necessarily sell well. If no one collects Vine, it is likely that it will not sell well.

There are also sellers who, even though they received many positive reviews through the Vine program, failed to bring about good conversions, and naturally did not attract any orders.

For this reason, many sellers have no choice but to rely on advertising or price manipulation.

When it comes to "price wars", most sellers have a lot to say. Compared with his peers' "hatred" of price wars, a seller on Amazon took the initiative to "strategically lose money". It is understood that the product that was originally sold on the platform for $59 last year was directly reduced to $39 this year. In this way, even if the product is not promoted, each piece will lose at least $3. In the eyes of outsiders, this single product has lost money and the seller has lost a lot. However, the seller's real idea is that this product can attract other products in the store. It is not only cheaper than fake orders, but also can be a price killer and kill his peers.

Are all Amazon sellers unable to escape from fake orders?

Recently, an industry insider summarized the bumpy journey of Amazon sellers from entry to career change: they entered Amazon with a bright future, researched the market, determined categories, found factories and placed orders, and then prepared copywriting, pictures, etc. After the products were put on the shelves, they began to look for service providers to brush reviews, but the conversion rate was very poor, so they conducted data analysis seriously, and after a series of fierce operations, the conversion rate was still very poor. They used data analysis and "brushing orders" again, but the conversion rate was still very poor, and they also received "brushing orders" warnings from the platform. Under multiple blows, the initial enthusiasm was gone, and instead they were not only afraid of having their accounts blocked every day, but also deeply doubted their own abilities, and finally cleared out their goods and left!

This has won high praise from many industry insiders. A careful observation revealed that Amazon sellers believe that among the many unavoidable steps in doing business on Amazon, "brushing orders" is one of them.

It is understood that there are three main ways of brushing orders in the market . The first is to find a service provider to brush orders. However, since the service providers are mixed and there are behaviors such as machine brushing, the risk is relatively high. The second is to brush orders with one's own account. This method is relatively safer, but the amount of orders that can be brushed is relatively small. The third is to brush orders with internet celebrities, who mainly conduct ground-based promotion.

Are all Amazon sellers unable to escape fake orders? There are many voices that agree.

One of the sellers believes that there will be orders if you fake orders, and there will be no orders if you don’t. Although sellers can open a through train to attract traffic, the user reviews attracted by this method may not achieve the expected effect, so any product needs to be combined with fake orders, otherwise no one will buy the product. "On an e-commerce platform, when consumers buy a product, they will definitely look at the previous reviews before deciding whether to place an order. No consumer will go to a new store without any reviews to consume. Fake orders during the new product period are equivalent to collecting data and decorating the store. Only after the store is decorated can it attract consumption and have subsequent development. Even though Amazon has been strictly investigating fake orders, fake orders are addictive and it is difficult for sellers to quit."

There are also many voices of disapproval. In the view of sellers who insist on white hat operations, although not brushing orders may mean higher advertising costs and a longer promotion cycle for new products, an advertising war is better than a battle of brushing orders. The act of "brushing orders" is equivalent to queue jumping. Some people can queue up properly but do not, which disrupts the market and drives others to start queue jumping. This is very unfair to sellers who still insist on not brushing orders. Moreover, not brushing orders does not mean that new products cannot be promoted. On the contrary, not brushing orders means that sellers can go further on the Amazon platform. "I used to be very good at brushing orders, but now I don't do it. In half a year, the sales volume of products has increased from 0 to 100. It is much more interesting to work hard on products and operations than brushing orders, and the overall profit is much higher," said one of the sellers who does not brush orders.

Last year, Amazon banned a number of sellers, but in real life, there are still a large number of people who do fake orders. As a huge profit gathering place, Amazon platform is plagued by various disputes around the word "fake orders" every day. Among them, maliciously giving good or bad reviews to competitors is a problem that cannot be stopped despite repeated bans.

Most Amazon sellers are almost "terrified of bad reviews" and hate spoofs. Therefore, some malicious people have discovered the role of reviews, such as maliciously posting good reviews to damage other people's links, or using malicious bad reviews to engage in unfair competition. "Malicious bad reviews are Amazon's biggest shortcoming. This defect is now being mastered by service providers and black hat sellers, seriously disrupting the market order, and the impact is worse than fake reviews." According to feedback from many Amazon sellers, it is too difficult to effectively report after a product is maliciously posted with bad reviews by competitors.

In response, Amazon said that it is currently reporting to relevant departments the low timeliness of the tool used by sellers to report malicious reviews. If a seller's listing is maliciously reviewed, they can promptly click 'report abuse' in the lower left corner of the review or send an email to [email protected] to report it. In addition, if the seller has a dedicated account manager, they can also contact the account manager to file a complaint through internal channels.

Amazon has launched rounds of rectifications against these fake order chaos, such as continuing to crack down on fake order companies. Recently, Amazon has filed lawsuits against several fake order companies in Italy, Spain and the United States. In the United States alone, more than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against fake reviews.

"Amazon will continue to invest significant resources to combat fake reviews. In the future, we will continue to improve detection technology, invent new technologies, and use machine learning to detect bad actors and bring them to justice," Amazon said.

Under Amazon's all-round pursuit and blockade, it is becoming increasingly difficult for sellers to fake orders.

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