Amazon Prime Day was Monday and Tuesday of this week, and it became the biggest shopping holiday ever for Amazon. The company announced that it sold more than 10 million products during that 36 hours. However, for some Amazon Sellers, they were not able to be part of the fun. Seeing as they were “unfairly” suspended just days before Prime Day. Cheapskates Liquidators was one of those sellers. This seller has been having issues with Amazon for nearly a year, and have been trying to get reinstated for months. However, they received an email from an Amazon employee by the name of “Paul” who explained that the account would not be reinstated.
Now according to the statement that CNBC received from Amazon regarding this situation, the retailer stated that “the seller in question was found violating multiple Amazon policies, including our anti-counterfeiting policy. They were given multiple opportunities to address the situation but showed a repeated pattern of behavior that was not in our customers’ best interest, so we took actions to protect our customers and stop their illegal activity.” The family that runs the Cheapskates Liquidators account says that Amazon never provided them this explanation. The conversation that the family has had with Amazon was also shared with CNBC (but not published) and shows very little detail about why the account was suspended.
Since the account has been suspended, the Cheapskates Liquidators family is facing a couple of equally bad choices. one is to keep their $200,000 of inventory in Amazon’s fulfillment centers and keep trying to get unsuspended on the retailers site. But that will also rack up fees for storage, which is already amounted to $367.37 in June, which is a tough pill to swallow since they are unable to sell anything. The other choice is to pay around 50 cents per item to have the items shipped back so that they can be sold elsewhere. However that would result in thousands of dollars in total. Finally, if the family doesn’t decide soon, Amazon could destroy the inventory, according to emails from Amazon. So the family is stuck between a rock and a hard place, without any real explanation as to why they are being suspended from the platform. Amazon does have some pretty large teams that work with sellers, but also work to keep counterfeit items off of its website – something that became a big problem a few years ago – so it’s good to see that Amazon is doing its job to protect customers. But it does need to do more to protect its sellers too. Since without the sellers, Amazon is virtually nothing.