Lesley Hensell, Co-Founder at Riverbend Consulting, joins the eCom Ops Podcast. She will talk about the impact of product quality, Amazon account suspension triggers & reinstatement strategies, and Amazon seller best practices for eCom results.
Key Facts
- Lesley’s LinkedIn
- Lesley is an experienced Amazon Seller
- Riverbend Consulting’s website
- Riverbend Consulting helps clients reduce risk, drive revenue and sleep like babies. They have major manufacturers, private-label brands, top-10 resellers, and mom-and-pop businesses as clients. Riverbend Consulting assembles a second-to-none team and is actively adding new expertise to expand its skill sets and services
- Lesley holds a Master of Business Administration from Texas McCombs School of Business
- Lesley is an experienced Amazon seller and business executive with a demonstrated history of providing real-world practical solutions to improve operational performance and profitability. Before becoming the co-founder of Riverbend Consulting, she worked at Project Retail LLC as a partner.
Key Takeaways
- [ 00:00:30 ] Lesley has been an Amazon seller since 2010, and she co-founded Riverbend Consulting in 2017. Riverbend Consulting’s solutions for Amazon sellers are practical, real-world, and aimed at improving operational performance and profitability
- [ 00:01:18 ] Riverbend Consulting was created to provide “outside help” to Amazon sellers when their accounts face restrictions such as suspension
- [ 00:02:32 ] The biggest reason for account suspension on Amazon is linked accounts. This means you opened a new account, and maybe you had an account that was suspended in the past
- [ 00:03:03 ] Other suspensions include:
- Retail dropshipping
- Code of conduct manipulation
- Review Manipulation
- [ 00:03:31 ] One of the things Amazon has is customer trust. Often, non-violating accounts may face restrictions in Amazon’s bid to eliminate bad actors from the marketplace. A lot of false positives happen because of:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Investigators that are over-worked
- [ 00:06:25 ] For honest Amazon sellers, the number one problem is product quality. To avoid getting suspended on Amazon, focus on your product’s quality
- [ 00:08:41 ] Review manipulation is a complex case that may result in account suspension. In some cases, competitors purchase a lot of positive reviews that come in fast, and this prompts Amazon’s algorithm to think the seller bought these reviews to game the system
- [ 00:10:26 ] To rectify review manipulation/competitor attacks and get your account reinstated, you will have to “throw yourself on their mercy,” proving to them that your brand has a good record over time and creating a solid plan of action to make sure no one at your company does any of the bad things moving forward
- [ 00:12:35 ] However, there are some challenges when you get reinstated. Here are a few:
- Your account is monitored closely for the next 90 to 180 days
- Reduced inventory performance index (IPI) limits
- You lose your best seller rank
- [ 00:13:56 ] To reinstate your account, Amazon requires a good Plan of Action – POA. It should be real and concise. Avoid using POA templates sold by third-party businesses because Amazon uses AI to detect plans of action that are repeats of previous plans submitted.
- [ 00:14:42 ] You have to take responsibility for whatever initiated the restrictions on your account, even if you weren’t at fault
- [ 00:15:18 ] Your POA should have these three parts:
- Describe the root cause: what is the reason the bad thing happened?
- What have you done to address the complaints?
- How will you prevent this from happening in the future?
Lesley’s No.1 eCom Operations hack
“To avoid getting suspended on Amazon, focus on your product’s quality”.
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