Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, and welcome to another live episode of Marketplace Masters. Brought to you by MerchantSpring, the leading analytics platform for Amazon agencies and vendors. Marketplace Masters strive to go deeper into the challenges that agencies face to lift e-commerce performance and provide practical actions and insights.
Paul Sonneveld
And that includes thinking about, Amazon Seller Health. Which we'll get on to shortly. I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld. And we're going to be talking about Amazon Seller Health today and how to respond successfully to some of those very scary performance notifications on the Amazon Health Dashboard. Now, to help us do this, I've invited Valerie Bleus to join us and share her valuable experience and expertise on these specific perspectives. Valerie is an accomplished e-commerce and marketing enthusiast. Let me just edit the stream here. And
Valerie Bleus
Hi there.
Paul Sonneveld
Hey, Valerie. How are you? Hey, let me just finish, your intro here. So Valerie is an accomplished e-commerce and marketing enthusiast who left the corporate world in 2019 and has quickly become a sought-after expert for Amazon and Walmart entrepreneurs seeking to enhance their e-commerce and marketing strategies. She offers, consulting services and launched Brand Side marketing, to cater really to the needs of entrepreneurs.
Now, Valerie has worked with a number of businesses and agencies helping them optimize their e-commerce strategies and build their brands across a wide range of industries. Her adaptability and expertise make her a super valuable guest for our conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Valerie.
Valerie Bleus
Thank you Paul and thank you for that stellar introduction. Wow.
Paul Sonneveld
It was, yeah, no, it's a great one. Well, I'm just talking about your background and expertise, so, it was easy to do. So thank you so much for being on the show. You know, I love the fact that you put your hand up to talk about Amazon Seller Health because it's something that's really dear to my heart, probably for all the wrong reasons, but doesn't get talked about, a lot at all.
And I'm certainly a strong believer that unless your Seller Health is in a good state, all the other things become so much harder, you know, in fact, part of the reason we started MerchantSpring was, you know, we got into real trouble around not having a good grasp of the Seller Health across our entire client base when we're still running an agency. Which was a big catalyst for us to actually build more of a system to manage health across multiple sellers simultaneously, across multiple platforms. Had to learn the hard way, including some client suspensions along the way, so very, very scary.
And might not add for many sellers, I think also very stressful times because when these things happen, it's like getting sued in court, right? All of a sudden, you've got this thing that's hanging over you and your business might be at risk. So, that's just me justifying why we're doing this topic on the show today. I think it's very, super important.
So let's kick off with just a couple of questions really. Talk to us a little bit about maybe for those that are more focused on other aspects of marketplace performance. Let's just start with the really basics here. You know, What is this concept of Seller Health, and why is it even important?
Valerie Bleus
So, Seller Health, like you said, is something that's rarely talked about and it is super important to obviously maintain it because it affects so much including your potential mental health, right? If something happens and your account gets deactivated or something like that, it really just affects so much, even your ability to just be, in the buy box.
And I have some notes here and I'll just go through a couple of things, but, you know, some of the three top performance metrics you generally want to stay on top of, that's your Order Defect Rate, just you want to make sure that that's below 1%. You know, Cancel Rate, your ability to actually fulfill the orders because as we know, Amazon is Uber, customer-centric, right? So they always want to make sure that they're doing the absolute best for their customers. And the last thing is the Late Dispatch Rate. So you just want to make sure that that's below 4% as well because Amazon wants to know that you are indeed a reliable seller and that you are going to actually, mail out the packages in a timely manner.
So those are important things to just really be mindful of. But in thinking of this show, and when you and I first discussed it, I was thinking of more the extreme circumstances, right? Where, there are some things that you're not necessarily aware of paying attention to, and then before you know it, you're dealing with some kind of a suspension.
Paul Sonneveld
So, Valerie, Can I just follow up on just to clarify those three performance metrics that we spoke about? One of them was Order Defect Rate. So I think the other one's you know, conceptually make more sense, particularly if you're using, FBM, obviously. Order Defect Rate, what does that mean? What is an order defect in Amazon's eyes? How would they classify that?
Valerie Bleus
So, Order Defect Rate is essentially if the product arrives to the customer in a manner that's not acceptable. The Order Defect Rate also means just really providing stellar customer service in general. Or, if Amazon sees that a particular product has a high return rate that is a ding against you, and that does affect your performance metrics. So essentially, you're selling something that' snot a good product. So that's basically what that means.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Thank you. Now there might be people listening to our podcast or watching this on the man going, oh, you know, it's been such a long time since I've even looked at this, or I didn't even know where to go with Amazon's. You know, Amazon has gone through a couple of iterations with our interface.
Valerie Bleus
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
As a seller, how would I know if I have an issue here, how does Amazon tell me?
Valerie Bleus
So, once you log into the platform, you'll see a message there. If it's extremely urgent or if your ordered defect rate is high, you'll actually get an email as well. You'll get a performance notification. And in extreme circumstances, they'll even call you. They will call you to notify you that your Order Defect Rate as an example, is way above what's acceptable for Amazon. And we'll encourage you to correct it and actually question you to find out what you're going to do to actually correct it.
Paul Sonneveld
That's, I think that's the first time, the first example I've ever heard of where Amazon calls you, it's really hard to call them.
Valerie Bleus
Well, it's really hard to call them right? But they’ll call you
Paul Sonneveld
Don't call us. We'll call you.
Valerie Bleus
And obviously, that's in more extreme circumstances.
Paul Sonneveld
Sure. Absolutely. So you mentioned high-risk categories before. Let's go into deep here. You know, what are some of these high-risk categories, and the types of performance notifications that usually go along with them?
Valerie Bleus
So high-risk categories in my most recent experiences are topicals and consumables. And some of the things that notifications that you can expect to receive, you can get, like a product safety concern. That example is if someone, if you're selling some kind of a consumable or something like that and someone had a bad reaction to it, you have to be able to explain that, why that happened. So there's that. There's also like making prohibited claims. I had a company that made shampoos and conditioners and everything, and one of the claims that they made even in their product description was, say goodbye to dandruff forever. So, typically things like that.
Another thing is, actually this is typically if you're a reseller, a product authenticity complaint. So that just generally means that as a reseller, Amazon wants to ensure that you know that your products are authentic and that you're selling authentic products and you're vetting your, the manufacturers and wherever you're getting the products from that you're vetting them properly in order to make sure that you're selling the actual products to consumers and not counterfeit products. So those are some of the more alarming ones that you may receive.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So I do know when and I feel like I'm old as I'm saying this is a few years ago, the ones that kept coming up for us were these A to Z claims, right? I think they're part of the Order Defect structure. Are they still really top of mind for Amazon, or is that something that's sort of we're seeing less and less of? What was your read on the A to Z claims piece?
Valerie Bleus
The A to Z claims piece is a lot more, it's a bit hairier than I typically get into. I have a great team behind me and I have one person in particular that's super skilled on A to Z claims. I don't see them as often. I feel like a couple of years ago it was just all, you would see A to Z claims, A to Z claims constantly. I feel like they're popping up a bit less, but I will certainly get back to you, on that. I'll get her, I'll gauge her opinion and see how she feels about it and if she feels like we're getting like she's seeing more of it or as much of it, I should say.
Paul Sonneveld
Sure. Sure. Thank you. You mentioned those high-risk categories. So, let's say Amazon says, Hey Paul, you've got some issues here. They've got an issue with the product or an Order Defect Rate and we now deem your account to be at risk. How long do I have and what do I do? Until my business disappears.
Valerie Bleus
That's a good question. So it depends on the number of notifications received. It also depends on the type of notification. So, for any notification performance notification that you receive from Amazon, you want to be sure to address it right away.
Sometimes it's just, you know, a warning, hey, we've noticed X, Y, and Z. Make sure that you are on top of these specific things. Other times, you have to supply what's called a POA, a Plan of Action essentially. And in that Plan of Action, you want to detail to Amazon basically the issue, and you want to structure it in a certain way. You want to make sure that you respond to every single performance notification and even call them if you're unsure of how severe it is. But typically, they will tell you, you know, if you don't respond in a certain time, your account could be at risk.
There are more recent notifications now in the US where US sellers have to be in compliance with some new law, and they have to submit, you know, varying documents that they're being asked for. To re-resubmit their identification, resubmit business documents and various things of that nature. And it didn't seem very I guess foreboding to me. But in talking to an Amazon rep just today actually, he's like, no. Basically, if these documents aren't received in two days, your account will probably be deactivated. And it was completely shocking because it didn't seem like an extremely urgent matter that needed to be attended to.
And lo and behold, you call today. And it actually is quite urgent. So anytime you receive an Amazon notification, you want to make sure that you address it and that you call them. Another little thing that a lot of people don't know is that you can actually review your POA with an Amazon rep when you call. I don't know if you knew that.
Paul Sonneveld
Wow! That’s I never knew that. I thought you'd put it together and you kind of throw it over the fence and hope and pray for the best. And then do a few iterations and hopefully it'll be accepted at some point. So, tell me more about this POA dialogue with Amazon.
Valerie Bleus
So, there's a basic structure of a Plan of Action, and that's for the most serious of performance notifications to an actual deactivation. So the first thing is you want to start with the root cause. And the root cause in this section essentially is what I call throwing yourself on the mercy of the Amazon court. You just have to admit that you violated one of their policies, right? So typically, you'll have like a few bullet points, but typically you want to start it off with I'm submitting this POA because I inadvertently didn't follow Amazon's policies regarding X, Y, and Z, and I like to put a link of the policy there.
The reason that I do that is so they know that I took it seriously and I went through and looked at the policy violation. So, there's more to it, but I'm just giving a broad overview. The second thing, the second section is immediate actions taken right? So in that section, you want to indicate to Amazon, what did you do as soon as you got this notification?
Typically, I'll start it off with, I immediately called Amazon Seller Central to get more clarification on the performance notification. In an attempt to remedy this, the situation and fully understand the violation. And then lastly, you can basically call it, like, steps, you know, moving forward implementation steps. And in that section, you want to talk about things that you're implementing in your business so that you don't get this notification again. So, in my experience, and I've dealt with, I mean the most dreadful performance notifications you can even imagine all the way up to deactivation, and I have successfully gotten even the most difficult deactivations reactivated.
Paul Sonneveld
I'd love to hear an example. In your mind, what was the one you thought, I'm not sure how we're going to recover from this one. What stands out?
Valerie Bleus
So, one of the most difficult deactivations to remedy is drop shipping. It's really drop shipping. A few years ago, everyone was on the drop-shipping Amazon train. And then Amazon brought down the hammer and a ton of stores were being deactivated and we're talking about just across the board and people initially thought especially, you know, novice sellers, well, you know, you can just go ahead and open up another account.
Well, you can't do that. So because Amazon also has a policy that you can only have one seller account per household. So, I had a situation where an account was deactivated due to drop shipping, and on top of it, this person went and tried to open up four different accounts using varying various relatives, children and ex-husband. I mean, it was a disaster. It was a complete and utter disaster, and I successfully got that account reactivated.
Paul Sonneveld
Wow, that's the worst.
Valerie Bleus
That's the absolute worst. That's one of the worst notifications you can actually get. That and associated accounts deactivation. Those are extremely difficult. But even with that if you follow the POA, exactly how I mentioned it. You call Amazon, you submit it to them. They will literally talk you through every section and give you pointers on how to improve your Plan of Action. So, I learned that the hard way I had to learn it because there weren't really any resources or really credible resources out there to gain some kind of support.
I would look into “attorneys”, who could help with these things. And with this particular deactivation, the first attorney that I had contacted, “attorney” because they're not really attorneys, he threw his hands up and said up. I'm sorry. This is beyond the scope of my expertise here. And I was able to, I was actually able to get the account reactivated, so, you know, it just took a lot of trial and error. A couple of mental breakdowns and shingles outbreaks and health issues. Yeah. But, you know, I got through it.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it's interesting. We were talking about it as sort of a business topic right now, and it's, there's not a lot of emotion in it, but I do recall when this happened to one of our clients, you know, the many years ago, like, I was sick in the stomach because I knew that if I can't fix this, then their Amazon channel is gone.
Valerie Bleus
Oh, yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
The amount of kind of emotional kind of heaviness that came with it. I personally I found it pretty challenging. And it's good. I'm really actually glad to hear that. You can actually call someone. I think sometimes in this process sort of talking about that, it just feels like you are powerless. You're throwing these Plan of Actions sort of, you're submitting them and at times suddenly I felt, is there even a human being on the other side or is there some sort of
Valerie Bleus
Right.
Paul Sonneveld
Really a version of Chat GPT that's checking my thing, looking for things and just spitting it back. Yeah. Cause you know, there was very little feedback. But you know, what a great update that you can actually now call Amazon. Now, I don't know whether you're aware, whether it's that's just a US option at the moment or whether we've seen that in other countries as well, but certainly, that's a great step in the right direction.
Valerie Bleus
Well, I know with the UK, trying to get some kind of seller support is a, is a bit more difficult. In my experience, the communication tends to be more via chat, but in the US you can call, submit your POA and they will review it and give you pointers to improve it. Now they don't have the ability to reinstate the account. That's actually a different department. But they'll give you an idea of an indication rather of what you can improve to improve your chances of getting your account successfully reactivated.
Paul Sonneveld
Right, right. Okay. Follow-up question then. So when your account does get reactivated, I mean, what happens? Does Amazon put you on probation? You know, what are you sort of, Hey, everything is back to normal. What does that process look like? The reinstatement process?
Valerie Bleus
So, it depends on the original deactivation. So, for example, if you were, and obviously we're talking more to your audience, right? You know, agencies and everything like that. So they're not really experiencing drop shipping violations like we were experiencing a couple of years ago. But typically, once your account is reinstated, they may take away certain privileges. The one thing that stands out immediately is like from a drop shipping perspective, you may not be able to do FBM any longer. You will be forced to do FBA. Amazon wants to now ship your products for you.
But typically, you just have to make sure that you're keeping an eye on your metrics. If you get deactivated for like an Order Defect Rate issue. You always want to make sure that you're in compliance with their rates. So, because if you even start to inch close to that again, you'll quickly get deactivated. You won't get another phone call or anything like that. You'll just go straight to deactivation. So, you certainly want to try not to have the same performance notification more than once. You definitely want to try to avoid that at all costs.
Paul Sonneveld
Try to avoid being a serial if you’re the vendor. Yeah. Makes sense. Exactly.
Valerie Bleus
Exactly.
Paul Sonneveld
Now, of course, in an ideal world, this whole conversation stays completely theoretical because we're managing our Amazon accounts in such a way that this is never really an issue, which just gets us on the topic of how can we be proactive about this. What strategies can we put in place and I'm talking from an Amazon seller's point of view or from an agency's point of view, to ensure we don't end up in a situation where our health is downgraded or we need to write a plan of action. What can we do?
Valerie Bleus
So, from an agency perspective, one of the things that I do anytime I'm bringing on a client is, I created my own document to fully audit the account. I want to take a look at every single part of the business as it relates to performance account health. The other thing that I do is I go back and I actually read through the performance notifications. So the reason I read through the performance notifications, is a, to get an idea of the types of issues that have been happening if they're recurring, How they were able to manage it and how they responded to it. And then, really put myself in a position to prepare.
So, for example, I had a nutraceutical brand that I managed a couple of years ago. I noticed that one of the note notifications that they would get was about a particular product that they just kept having issues with and what I came to realize was that anytime Amazon took the product down, they would re-list it under a different name. So, you know, I was able to number one, really convey to them how horrible that was. What a terrible idea, you know, obviously it was. And really just to prepare. You know, to respond to that kind of notification again. I think the product was, you know, it had a propensity to like give people stomach issues or something, something like that.
So, we created a response for that so that if we got a notification like that, we could quickly respond to it. Another thing too is to be able to ask the client for specific documents to have on hand. You know, should you receive a specific type of notification? So those are the main things that you want to do. I'll also look at customer feedback sometimes, if the feedback is negative to get an idea of what they're complaining about just to anticipate something that could happen.
That's from an agency perspective, obviously, sometimes you're getting an account and you're not sure what to expect. Because the Amazon process it's very difficult. It's very difficult, especially when you've really grown your store. There are just so many different issues that you have to deal with that you may not be able to fully anticipate. So, basically that really, you know, going through, having a very good auditing process and just really keeping an eye on the performance notifications.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Just to follow up, I want to drill down a little bit more on the agency perspective. I know there's a lot of agencies tuning into that. So if you're in a situation where you are managing 50 to a hundred seller accounts and, hey, you're not using MerchantSpring, so you don't have a good view of Seller Health across all of them. Shameless plug there. Software aside, what would you recommend in terms of SOPs and processes from an agency's perspective? Maybe from a Head of Operations or Head of Client Accounts to ensure that you stay on top of this? Are these daily checks, weekly checks? What would you put in place if you were part of a medium-sized agency?
Valerie Bleus
Great question. So one thing I would do is I would group the kind of business. So for example, I would kind of group, like, topicals, consumables and everything like that because you can somewhat anticipate the kinds of notifications that you're going to receive. And then I would just create essentially a library with different types of responses for various performance notifications. Because they tend to be similar. That's really one of the main things that you can do, especially when you are running so many different business models and different kinds of companies.
But there will be some kind of similarities where you can have different libraries for different risk categories and really just keep collecting information and keeping it and referring back to it. Taking good notes. I do that myself. I have POAs from 2019 that are very effective. I'll actually leave notes on the POA. For example, I had one Account Rep that I called and had her review the POA and she said to me, this is hands down the best Plan of Action I've ever reviewed.
So, of course, I put a big note on that and I use that as basically like the prototype for the rest of my POAs. You want to make sure that they don't all sound the same as well. You do have to reword it. But yeah, that's basically it. You know, kind of group your the categories and high-risk categories together.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's really some really good insights and advice there. To me, I would really kind of summarize it, what I took away from that. We’re always saying is, if an agency, ask yourself the question, Not just a process for monitoring but also capturing your learnings so that you institutionalize some of the process. Because I think one of the things as an agency you do have the benefit of is you probably go through well, hopefully not, but most likely a couple of POA plans a month potentially. If you're a larger agency. So there is value in the cumulative process there and insights.
Valerie Bleus
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
I was going to ask in terms of obviously for those smaller agencies that do not have the resource and all of that, and they really want to tap into the expertise, tell me a little bit more about, I'm trying not to do too much sort of sales and business development here, but I'd love to just understand in your own words, how do you work with agencies? If someone really needs a bit of expertise on this specific area, may not have it in-house, how do you work and collaborate with other agencies?
Valerie Bleus
So basically, I'll come in as a consultant, gauge some of the issues that they're facing and then, come up with my own plan and recommendations to help assuage varying concerns that they're having. That's mainly the approach that I take. And then, you know, we kind of take it from there.
And depending on what the need is, you know, obviously the approach will be different, but that's kind of just a broad statement of how I'll come in and work with agencies. In my experience, agencies have a lot of issues managing performance notifications. So, that's where I've found there to be a greater need.
And I love it and I say that I love it now that I've gotten over the hump and I know how to manage it, because it really feels gratifying when you're able to help someone who felt hopeless. There's only been one instance where I really couldn't help. I actually had to get a real attorney involved and not a “YouTube attorney”, who says that they can get your account reinstated like an actual real attorney.
Paul Sonneveld
Right.
Valerie Bleus
And then the main thing I do is help them put processes in place and audits in place to keep these things from, from actually happening.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Makes sense. How do others get in touch with you?
Valerie Bleus
Oh, I love this part. So you can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, directly, Valerie Bleus. Got my name there, Brand Side Marketing. You can follow my page on LinkedIn. And also what I'm doing, you know, thank you for being here, Paul. This has been awesome. I love talking about all things Amazon. If anyone who reaches out to me, I am going to give them a copy of my audit report that they can use in the agency, as well as a couple of examples of Plan of Actions that they can use.
Paul Sonneveld
That is awesome. Thank you so much for being generous for that. Yeah, fantastic. I think that'd be really, I'm sure there's a lot of people listening in now going, well, yeah, actually, particularly if this doesn't happen that much, you're trying to sort of just get through it and move on. But maybe now is the time, maybe this has prompted something to say, look, we need to build a little bit of capability in this space, to be more on top of that.
Valerie Bleus
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
The risks are large for you and your clients. So, yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Valerie. I'm looking at the clock, unfortunately, going to have to wrap it up, so let's do that. Thank you for coming on the show today. I really love the expertise around Seller Health that you've brought to the table today. I love your generosity in that. Thank you for sharing the audit document as well and all the practical tips too.
Valerie Bleus
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
So, I really, really appreciate it. And, I look forward to welcome you back on the show in the near future.
Valerie Bleus
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for the invite.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you so much. Take care.
Valerie Bleus
Bye.
Paul Sonneveld
Alright, everyone, that is it for today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Today we talked about Amazon Seller Health. Shameless plug here, if you are managing lots of stores, lots of channels, not just Amazon, but maybe eBay, Walmart, all of that, and you want to see all your Amazon, and other Account Health in one place and even be notified if there's issues, feel free to check out MerchantSpring at merchantspring.io. That's it for today's episode. Look forward to seeing you at our next one. Take care. Bye.
