Monitor your account health with new Account Health page features

#1

Maintaining account health is an important part of the selling experience, and we’ve been listening to your feedback about how to better manage your account health. We rolled out the new version of Account Health Rating in August to sellers in our US and Canada stores. Today, we’re excited to announce that we are expanding the programme to the EU, UK and Turkey.

In the coming months, you will start to see new features on your Account Health page.

The first of these is that your Account Health Rating (AHR) will be displayed as a point value based on a scale of 0 to 1,000 in addition to the colour that exists today, enabling you to see how close you are to the various thresholds that move your AHR from green (Healthy) to yellow (At risk) to red (Unhealthy, and at risk of deactivation).

The Account Health page will also display the degree to which any violations affect your account health, allowing you to prioritise addressing those that are most negatively affecting it. Note that the AHR does not change Amazon’s existing policies, but aggregates violations of certain Amazon policies into a single score to show your overall account health status.

As a result of these new features, we have created a new AHR Programme Policy.

To learn more about the AHR, go to Account Health: FAQ.

If you have suggestions about how we might improve the AHR, please share them via the Account Health category in the Seller forums. Our team of Account Health specialists is routinely monitoring these posts for opportunities for improvement, as well as posting answers to your account health questions.

#2

I hope this feature will avoid the frustration of sellers. i dont know it will also give the warning for the violation of drop shipping and seller code of conduct. i think for these famous 2 policies amazon will still deactivate the account without considering any score or sending any warning.

#3

Reading the seller comments on the USA forum a serious violation appears to give you an instant zero

#4

It would be welcome to see Amazon have a better review policy for seller feedback.

As things stand, customers can lie or misrepresent a situation on seller feedback, resulting in a defect against the seller.
This can even happen by accident, I have seen customers leave 1* seller rating, but include a positive comment about their shopping experience.

It seems ancient to have a system where people can maliciously or accidentally cause a sellers account to be at risk, when the seller has done nothing wrong.
Causing a lose-lose situation for third party sellers, Amazon and Amazon customers.

#5

Have important decisions made by LBI’s (living, breathing, individuals)

#6

Hopefully this will make things easier so it’s a welcome step - but there is lots to improve with Amazon Health in general. One of the most frustrating things that happens on a daily basis is that ASINs get flagged due to violations (valid or not) but we’re unable to edit them as someone else is the brand owner and Amazon never applies our changes, even though it’s saying its our responsibility to fix them. I can imagine the system is fairly effective when you’re the only seller listing a particular product, but when it’s being sold by multiple retailers and it turns out there’s something wrong with it… it’s impossible to get anything fixed! Also it would help SO MUCH if when you contact Amazon to try and get support with these kinds of problems, they would actually provide you with some kind of meaningful assistance, rather than a random stock response that never addresses the problem…

#7

I am not sure if you are aware we just had a notification they have updated section 3 of the Amazon Services Europe Business Solutions Agreement. They have updated Section 3 Term and Termination. I wonder whether the new health features are related to the update.

To be honest it would not bother me the slightest if Amazon terminated our account because we have reached a point where we know Amazon has never cared about its sellers.

#8

What is the outcome when this happens, does it always lead to account suspensions or are you given time to work the problem out with Amazon?

#9

I suppose it depends if they also intend to bring AHA (Account Health Assurance) to the UK site where you are protected if your score has been 250 or more for at least 6 months. To qualify for that you need approximately 14 sales per day over a 6 month period and no performance deductions from your AHR score.

#10

Totally agree with this point, we get loads of slaps because Amazons ‘dumb at the moment’ bots are constantly scanning listings, most of which were created years ago before ever we joined them, and discovers that the seller who created them has made some mistakes in correctly naming the BRAND or the MANUFACTURER. The bot sees a difference between the items TITLE and either of those two terms and flags it up as a “SUSPECTED Intellectual Property Violation” whereas any reasonably intelligent human being looking at this would quickly identify the error.

Here’s an example -

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The seller that originally CREATED the listing has obviously mixed up which is the Brand (Leapfrog) and which is the Manufacture (VTech) but unfortunately, the computer says NO!

When trying to edit the attribute to correct this, again the computer says NO! and you get this ridiculous non-sensical error message -

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Contacting Seller support gets no support whatsoever, they just send you a templated reply saying the listing belongs to the BRAND and can only be changed by them - who I think Amazon erroneously assumes is the seller who originally created the listing many, many moons ago and likely no longer even sells on Amazon.

This is such a drain on time caused through no fault of our own and is so, so frustrating.

PLEASE PLEASE Amazon Account Health Specialists if you are reading this (as you have promised in your initial message you will) got this craziness looked at and fixed.

#11

And here’s another thing - We dont even SELL this item anymore, It’s just been left in our inventory for the historical record, and we are being lambasted for it around 3 YEARS after we last sold one!

ANOTHER REQUEST to Amazon. ----- Please can we have an ARCHIVED section for our INVENTORY to keep ASIN’s for historical reasons and enable us to pull those ASIN’s out of there should we ever want to sell the item again (maybe when we restock them or are able to source them again at a profitable price), but at the same time firewalls them from your Bots to prevent them from accusing us of offences we are simply not and never were guilty of.

#12

Well if their updated Section 3 clause (d) is anything to go by… it pretty much could be game over…

"We are making the following change to the Amazon Services eBusiness Solutions Agreement. This change will go into effect on February 15, 2023 .

Section 3 of the General Terms will be updated to add new clause (d), which allows Amazon to suspend or terminate your account or this Agreement immediately if your Account Health Rating falls below our published thresholds for deactivation."

This is quite worrying considering the malice of customers who deliberately leave negative feedback to back up their false “return for free or outside policy” reasons or those that just leave feedback for the wrong seller who never bother to respond to messages.
And Amazons stance of “Amazon does not remove customer feedback even if it is unwarranted or the issue has been resolved”… is beyond belief !!
How can Amazon use this feedback as a weapon against it’s sellers (but not itself) when it ignores unwarranted abuse by customers?

As already covered by a few here, the “Suspected” Intellectual Property violations that we keep getting for listings we are forced to use, as the EAN number is assigned to that ASIN, and then we are told to fix it for Amazon as if it’s our fault their catalogue is broken beyond repair, to then be told we can’t fix it because we are not the brand owner so the violation stands.
It is madness beyond belief that we get lambasted and threatened by Amazon for THEIR errors and broken catalogue.
We try our best to fix it and get the merry go round with SS until after a few weeks you get the ONE SS employee who actually knows what they are doing.
It looks like this new Section 3 clause (d) will possibly take away that few weeks merry go round as they now threaten to immediately terminate your account if you breach their thresholds.
I think small sellers who get just 1 or 2 negatives will be toast, as they dont have the sales to absorb the threshold for 90 days.
It seems that Amazon are gearing up to get rid of SME’s to just deal with big business.

#13

It seems crazy that a neutral feedback lowers your feedback percentage down as much as a negative i.e 9 positives and 1 neutral gives 90%, this is especially bad on a platform where so few buyers actually leave feedback unless it’s for a moan. All the other platforms I have used a neutral has no affect on your positive feedback percentage.

#14

yes i think they are trying to drive more sellers to fba where your account health is safer

#15

This is great, however when as and SFP the couriers fail to collect which affects your SFP dashboard stats, were are the ones that have to raise a case, reply multiple times to the standard responses, all while we are losing sales due to the removal of Premium shipping eligibility which was out of our control.

#16

Amazon should also fix the ridiculous situation when a customer leaves a feedback for an obvious wrong purchase and Amazon refuse to investigate or remove such a customer mistake.
Example:-Feedback -“The item should have 3 poles but one was missing. I returned the item on Saturday 27th November but still had no feedback from the supplier.”
The order was for a plastic drinking glass.

#17

Not necessarily
They will introduce varying risk levels and a counterfeit claim for example is a critical incident - fbm or fba

Interestingly though, when you score drops below the required figure, you will be suspended however, once it rises again, you will be automatically reinstated
Only time will tell on that one

#18

the proof of the pudding is in the eating

#19

yes silly comments should be investigated i agree

#20

Yep… I was trying to sort out a right mess yesterday. Its a LED Lenser adaptor for GoPro accessories, which I’m sure they designed in conjunction with GoPro so is all completely legitimate, however Amazon has flagged it as a trademark violation. To further complicate matters, the original seller put the name of their own shop down as the brand name, and I get this same red error come up straight away whenever I try to edit the listing, meaning I can’t save anything - even if I don’t touch the brand name. I managed to speak to a support associate on chat who at least attempted to resolve the problem, but after about an hour of going round in circles of them saying I need to remove the reference to GoPro, and me saying it makes no difference what I try to do as I can’t save anything, eventually they just disconnected the chat and sent me an email that says “here is the conclusion of our investigation: remove the references to GoPro from the listing.” The stupid thing is that even if it would let me make changes, Amazon probably won’t apply them anyway, but all these kinds of silly problems just stay in the account health dashboard for ages as no one knows how to get rid of them. And if Amazon’s dedicated support team can’t work out how to fix them, what hope do sellers have?