[nikkwong]

Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from the inside, etc. etc. Be happy that your financial loss was limited.

edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590

[njarboe]

I imagine you had good reason not to, but this is a situation for a lawsuit. Did you sue Amazon to get your money?

[nikkwong]

Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.

[binarysolo]

I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.

What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.

I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.

[globular-toast]

Surely that's enough money to go to small claims or something?

[nikkwong]

I live in Seattle, and in WA state that would put it beyond the limit for a small claims case. Idk, I tried to contact lawyers to take the case and they sent letters to Amazon which Amazon never responded to. I was also going through a pretty serious health battle at the time and so couldn't really devote full attention to it. Now that things are a bit better, I feel like it's so far in the past that I don't know if I would have a reasonable claim so I sort of just let it be.

[kelnos]

In general that kind of money is well above the limit for small claims.

[paulpauper]

statute of limitations passed, exceeds the small claims threshold, and unwinnable and more time and money on lawyers