My Secret Weapon

I feel like I have a secret weapon because 3 times in a row, I’ve succeeded in resolving complicated issues with the help of this secret weapon. The first issue–when all products of one of the accounts I’m managing lost the buy box overnight and it went on for a full week. A lot of Amazon sellers were affected with this issue so it wasn’t account or brand-specific.

The second instance, from the same account, it was taking longer than expected to get approval to sell Disney branded products despite showing all relevant documents numerous times. We were desperate to get the approval because of the new products that were scheduled to be launched in Q4.

And the third instance, also from the same account–we made a mistake of creating a listing under the wrong brand. As we already know, once a brand name is linked to a EAN/UPC barcode, changing the brand is close to impossible. Almost always, Amazon doesn’t allow it. You can argue that I can just change the barcode and relist the product but that is not an option because changing the barcode would cause headaches to the operations department.

In all these instances, I went through a lot of back and forth with Seller Support, Account Health Specialist and even the Brand Registry team. But none of them managed to fix any of these issues.

So what is my secret weapon? Sending an email to the Managing Director of Amazon UK.

I came across his email in Seller Forums when looking for answers for the first issue. One of Amazon moderators suggested to email the MD directly to get a faster resolution. And I did just that and did it again for the other 2 issues.

I sent an email to the MD and after 2-3 days, everything was resolved. No back and forth, no questions asked.

The 3rd issue was actually resolved today after sending an email to the MD yesterday. I spent a week communicating with Seller Support to get this issue fixed but got nothing. But with one email to the MD and the issue got resolved in less than 24 hours. How impressive is that?

I don’t intend to email the MD every time an issue comes up, I still go through the proper channels. It’s only when I hit a dead-end that I consider emailing the MD. I hope I haven’t maxed out this email privileges because with Amazon you’ll never know what kind of issue you will face next.

Got questions? Drop a comment or send me an email.