Imagine this: you’re a seller on Amazon Marketplace making around $500k a year and have five employees. You run the business out of your house, but store your inventory in a rented warehouse space.
Everything is going well the first few years, but then you start to grow. $500k a year turns into a couple million and you now employee multiple small teams instead of one. Your inventory is larger, but your warehouse structure isn’t necessarily better. You start to accrue a few bad reviews saying your product arrived broken or even late.
Next thing you know Amazon is sending you an email saying your practices go against their Seller Performance Ratings policies and that you may no longer sell on their site. And just like that, the number one channel for sales for your business has been taken away. Bankruptcy is inevitable.
Sound familiar? Unfortunately, this is a tale all too familiar to some Amazon marketplace sellers and one the rest fear happening. Situations like this send sellers scrambling for help. They try to get through to whoever can help them rectify the problem at Amazon, but instead should be looking inward. You can be angry at Amazon’s Seller Performance Ratings all day long, but the problem starts with your own practices. Like that big warehouse you left a mess. That’s a good place to start.