E336: The Latest Amazon-Related Indictment and What It Means for Sellers

Welcome to E336 of the EcomCrew podcast! After a long time, Dave and I are finally doing a podcast together, and we’re talking about something juicy.

Some big players in Amazon recently had charges filed against them, which exposed some of the illegal practices sellers do to get their listings to rank higher. In a saturated market such as Amazon, some people are bound to resort to black hat tactics.

If there’s any lesson from this indictment, it’s that illegal acts will eventually get exposed, so it’s best to stick to white hat tactics to save you the trouble.

We’re not lawyers and we won’t even attempt to give any legal opinions about this. We’re looking at this news from an Amazon seller’s point of view. In this episode, you’re going to hear us express our frustrations and concerns regarding these practices because any Amazon seller knows that these have been around for quite some time.

Specifically, we talk about

• What sellers should be concerned about regarding the indictment - 4:08
• How they got Amazon accounts suspended - 5:48
• Breakdown of the indictment - 7:28
• Techniques they use to unsuspend their accounts - 8:08
• Using firms to help Amazon sellers get their accounts unsuspended - 11:15
• Suspension problems of some of our EcomCrew Premium members - 13:20
• Ramifications of having your account suspended - 17:30
• Competitor sabotage and how they managed to do it for years - 20:42
• How they hacked pages of competitors to get ahead - 22:18
• Mike’s concern regarding the morality of these practices 23:30
• The difficulty of pressing charges against international sabotagers - 26:24
• Why more people from third-world countries take the risk in these illegal acts - 27:43
• Deleting tracking information to reflect that the inventory was lost - 31:00
• Bribing employees to increase their storage limits - 31:57
• Making a plan of action that is not intended to be followed through to get an account unsuspended - 34:00
• Getting another seller’s supplier invoice and selling it to competitors - 36:58
• Should sellers be worried? - 40:24
• The difficulty of choosing only white hat tactics - 43:25

For more information regarding this topic, check out the article Dave wrote about the indictment.

We’d also love for you to join us on our free webinar on October 14, 2020, at 10 AM (PST). We’re going to be talking about how we successfully imported high-quality products from China and we’re going to share our secrets when it comes to negotiating with suppliers and making sure that our products meet our specifications and quality standards.

If you liked this episode, please leave us a review over on iTunes.