Amazon account reinstatement and appeals

When the deactivation notice arrives, the first instinct is to write an appeal within the hour. It is also the most common way to lose the case. Amazon rejects appeals that do not answer the exact reason in the notice, and every rejected appeal makes the next one harder.

The appeal is not the first step

The deactivation notice names the policy that was violated. Sometimes it says so plainly. More often it has to be identified from Amazon's wording and from what is showing on the Account Health page.

Three things have to be settled before any text is submitted: what you are actually being accused of, what evidence already exists in the account, and what can be proved with documents. An appeal sent before that is not a start. It is a round spent.

We work inside your account. That is why we ask for Seller Central access before we say anything about the case. Without it we cannot read the notifications, the case log or the real state of the account, and any opinion we gave you would be a guess.

What the Account Health Rating actually shows

Amazon shows an Account Health Rating on the Account Health page, for every store you sell in. It is a colour coded score between 0 and 1,000 that reflects how close the account is to deactivation when selling policies are not met.

Points are lost when a new violation appears and recovered when one is resolved. The score updates close to real time.

For us it is the starting point, not the conclusion. It shows every active violation in the account, not only the one that triggered the deactivation. That is often where you can see why an earlier appeal was rejected.

The policies that can trigger a deactivation

Amazon publishes the list of policies included in the Account Health Rating. There are fourteen:

We work on all of them. Each one needs a different kind of evidence. A counterfeit complaint is answered with supply chain documents. A condition complaint is answered with proof of how you store and ship. A detail page violation is answered with the catalogue change history.

The plan of action is written on your case

We do not use templates. The plan is built on what is actually in the account: what happened, what evidence exists, and what has changed so that it does not happen again.

A plan copied off the internet is recognisable in the first few lines. Amazon receives an enormous volume of appeals, and generic wording has one predictable outcome, rejection. Worse, a rejected appeal spends a round and leaves you less room on the next one.

How long it takes

Seven to fourteen days from case intake to a decision.

The range depends on the type of violation and, to a large extent, on how quickly we receive documents from you. The analysis and the drafting take a few days. Getting paperwork from your supplier or your accountant is on your side, and it is usually what decides whether a case lands closer to seven days or to fourteen.

We do not promise reinstatement in 24 hours.

Identity verification and rejected documents

This is a separate category and it deserves to be treated as one, because it is not a policy violation. The account is not deactivated for something you did. It is deactivated because Amazon could not verify who you are.

What we do: we ask you for the documents in the format Amazon requires, we upload them to the account, and we open cases where cases are needed.

Most rejections come from form, not substance. A partially scanned document. An address that does not match the commercial register. An expired certificate. A name spelled differently from the identity document. Small things that hold an account for weeks, because nobody checks them before upload.

Deactivations that no appeal can fix

Part of what takes listings and accounts down in Europe has nothing to do with how you sell. It is compliance.

Without a VAT number in a given country you cannot activate FBA there. Without a valid EPR registration listings are deactivated, and in Germany Amazon states that it has a legal obligation to verify EPR compliance and to deactivate non compliant listings.

No plan of action resolves either of these. A registration does. If your notice points at one of them, we will say so in the first conversation and send you to the right process instead of selling you an appeal that cannot work. That process is on our page about EU VAT and compliance for selling on Amazon in Europe.

This is where sellers coming into Europe from outside lose the most time. The appeal gets written, submitted and rejected, sometimes twice, before anyone reads the notice closely enough to see that the block is a missing registration and not a behaviour.

A deactivated account and a blocked listing are not the same thing

They get confused often, including by people who have been selling for years.

A deactivated account means you are not selling at all, on any marketplace covered by the decision. A blocked, suppressed or inactive listing means that one product is off the site while the rest of the account runs normally.

Two different processes, with different documents, different teams at Amazon and different timelines. We treat them as two separate services, because that is what they are.

When we take a case and when we do not

We take the case if you can provide the documents Amazon asks for, and if the product is not restricted from online sale in the European Union. If the product itself is not allowed to be sold online in the EU, no appeal changes that, and we will tell you in the first conversation.

We also take cases where the thing you are accused of actually happened. An honest appeal that acknowledges the problem and shows real corrective action has better odds than one that denies it. Amazon holds the data. Denial shows.

We do not publish success rates. Every case has a different account history, different evidence and a different policy behind it. A percentage on a marketing page tells you nothing about your own case. We would rather look at the account and tell you in writing whether it is one we can carry.

What we do not do

We do not provide legal representation and we do not handle arbitration. If the dispute has left Seller Central and moved to court or to arbitration, you need a lawyer, not us.

We do not sell preventive Account Health monitoring as a standalone service. We come in when something breaks.

Frequently asked questions

How long does reinstatement take?
Seven to fourteen days from the moment we take the case to a decision from Amazon. The range depends on the type of violation and on how quickly you can supply the documents.
What do you need in order to start?
The deactivation notice you received and access to Seller Central. Without access to the account we cannot read the notifications or the case history, and anything we told you would be a guess.
Will you take the case if I actually did what Amazon says?
Yes. An appeal that acknowledges the problem and shows real corrective action has better odds than one that denies it. Amazon holds the data.
Do you write a standard plan of action?
No. The plan is built on the specific problems in your account. Generic wording is recognisable and it gets rejected.
My account works, but one listing is blocked. Is this the same service?
No. A deactivated account and a blocked listing are two different processes, with different documents and different timelines. Tell us which one you are dealing with and we will point you to the right one.

Send us the notice you received from Amazon. We will tell you in writing which policy was violated, which documents are needed, and whether it is a case we can take. The initial review is free.

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