A reader pointed us to a thread where quite a few sellers reported Amazon deactivated their accounts this week because they were wrongly linked to another selling account that had violated its policies.
"Amazon seems to have "bug" or a BOT gone wild that is suspending dozens of seller acct for being linked to a banned acct," the EcommerceBytes reader said. "Every hour or more and more sellers are posting that their acct was also suspended. Forum mods have been silent, and none of the sellers have gotten a response from Amazon."
The original poster in the forum thread said the notification read in part:
"Why is this happening?
"Your Amazon seller account has been deactivated in accordance with section 3 of Amazon's Business Solutions Agreement. We found that your current selling account is related to a different selling account which violated our policies and is not allowed to sell on our site. As a result, you may no longer use the current selling account to sell on Amazon.com."
What's unusual about this thread is that numerous sellers reported the incident happening to them within the last few days.
Some sellers thought it might be a technical glitch.
One person theorized it could be a method devised by competitors, writing: " I believe competition has found a new and sure way to take out their competitions accounts. Even with just an address whether it be return or from address... a name can be dug up and or company name and so they make a new account with most of your info. They then burn this new account to the ground and in turn you go down with it."
Another seller thought it might be an old international account that suddenly conflicted with a unified account (one account for selling on multiple international marketplaces). Someone else said they had moved last year, and wondered if the new owners had begun selling on Amazon, causing the address to raise red flags.
Sellers who were impacted said Amazon didn't identify the accounts they were supposedly associated with and were frustrated because they were unable to prove they were not linked to another account.
The original poster created the
thread on the Amazon boards at 4:16 pm on June 4th, and as of Friday evening, there were no answers from Amazon support staff.