The sky is falling, the seller's 10-year-old listing was "hijacked"

Some people describe running Amazon as like going to the West to obtain Buddhist scriptures, where one has to go through 81 difficulties along the way before finally achieving success.

In the process of doing business on Amazon, sellers will always encounter various problems. Compared with the increase in costs, the decline in order volume and the decline in ranking, sellers are more worried about the threat to their accounts and listings.

Seller’s 10-year-old listing was hacked

If a problem occurs with an old listing that has been around for 10 years, the seller must be very upset.

Recently, a seller posted a message on the forum saying that two of his listings that he had run for 10 years were hacked and the brand names were also modified. What happened?

According to the post, the two best-selling links under this seller's store have been "kidnapped" by a brand called "SGarnish". Now, the related parent ASIN and related variants are affected, and the brand name displayed by some variants is not their own brand, but "SGarnish".

If a brand name is suddenly changed, the impact will be very large, especially for old links like this. Many consumers may purchase from this brand. If they see that it is another brand, they will most likely not choose to place an order again.

At present, the seller has opened a case and reported his problem to customer service, but it has not been resolved. So he decided to share his experience with more people through the forum, hoping to get some help.

Below the post, a seller left a message expressing sympathy for the seller and said that Amazon’s customer service system was a disaster. He also had problems with three ASINs, and it was only after several months of phone bombardment that Amazon helped him solve the problem.

As the popularity of this post continued to rise, it finally attracted the attention of the official. An official customer service representative replied: "Thank you for sharing this matter. I have contacted the relevant department to deal with this matter. If there is any latest development, I will inform you through this post." The incident seemed to have been resolved.

In fact, this is not the first time that this seller has encountered such an incident. As early as a year ago, one of the seller's ASINs encountered exactly the same situation. At that time, Amazon helped him solve the problem after he made a big fuss about it on the forum. This is why the seller's first thought of posting on the forum instead of contacting customer service when he encountered the problem again this time.

There are precedents of sellers’ brands being changed

For Amazon brand sellers, the brand is equivalent to a business card. Its importance is self-evident. If it is modified, it may cause serious consequences.

In the first half of this year, some sellers reported that the brand words in their listing titles were suddenly deleted, resulting in a decline in both traffic and order volume.

According to the seller, his trademark and brand have been registered and filed, but his brand name was suddenly removed from the listing title, and his sales volume experienced a "free fall" for a period of time afterwards.

At the time, the seller speculated that Amazon might be testing a new feature but accidentally damaged his listing. In response to this situation, someone suggested that he manually modify the title in the background and try again. He also said that he had encountered a similar situation before and it was restored after manual modification.

But the seller responded that he had tried it, and even after changing the title there was no change from the front end. Now he can only wait for Amazon to come up with a solution.

In addition to the removal of brands, the brand names of many sellers suddenly became other brands, which is the so-called "brand hijacking". Previously, many white-label sellers were the main victims of "brand hijacking".

At that time, many sellers reported that the brand names of all Generic products in their stores had changed to another string of strange characters and they were unable to modify them.

On the product details page, the product information clearly says "Generic", but the Brand displayed at the top is still the name of an unknown brand.

This situation caused many sellers to call Amazon a bug again, and they began to contact the customer service team to report the error, but most of the sellers' problems could not be solved through customer service. For a time, sellers turned their attention to Amazon's customer service system.

Although Amazon's customer service system has always been criticized by sellers, it is relatively friendly to local sellers in the United States, and these local sellers can continue to provide feedback to Amazon through forums and other channels. However, domestic sellers appear much more powerless when encountering problems.

However, recently, Amazon finally listened to the suggestions of sellers and modified some platform policies specifically for domestic sellers.

Amazon makes adjustments for domestic sellers

The inability to open cases on weekends and after 6 p.m. on weekdays has long been one of sellers’ complaints about Amazon.

In case of emergency, sellers can only contact through email, but the waiting time is very long, usually more than ten hours, which greatly delays processing efficiency.

On the other hand, although they are engaged in cross-border e-commerce, a considerable number of Amazon sellers do not have good English skills. When they encounter problems, they can only solve them through Chinese customer service.

Amazon has finally made adjustments to address these pain points of domestic sellers.

According to information officially released by Amazon, starting from November 9, Amazon adjusted the working hours of seller support and now provides Mandarin services on weekends.

Weekend Mandarin support hours: 9am to 5pm Beijing time.

Weekday Mandarin support hours: 7am to 7pm Beijing time.

After the adjustment, sellers can get support from Amazon customer service more quickly whether they encounter emergencies or unexpected situations in daily operations, which reduces waiting time and improves the efficiency of problem solving.

For domestic sellers, although the impact of this adjustment may be relatively limited, it can be seen that Amazon is now indeed beginning to consider issues from the sellers' perspective, which is a good start.

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