Welcome back to Part 2 of this interview with Joshua Price of SuspensionExperts.com to talk about how to write your Amazon appeal letter.

Getting your Amazon account suspended is the elephant in the room that most people either ignore or run scared from. But the truth is, of course, like any good business you have to look at the reality and deal with it. The best way to do that is to work with an expert to help write your Amazon appeal letter.The Size of Your Business Lends Itself to Different ProblemsThere are various different grounds for suspension, which Joshua covers in Part 1 of this interview. The two broad areas to cause your account to get suspended are performance and policy. The performance side is about customer-facing operations, which Amazon monitors with customer metrics and data. The policy side is about Amazon’s rules and regulations, and keeping to them.

Joshua deals mainly with inauthentic suspensions and intellectual property rights and complaints. Those are the most common for larger sellers and they are policy issues. For small sellers, it’s always going to be your Order Defect Rate (ODR) because you just can’t avoid those suspensions if you’re doing lower volumes of orders.Language Leaves CluesAmazon will tell you the reason for the suspension which will help you write your Amazon appeal letter. They may not be entirely clear but they do tell you and it’s in the first line of the notification. It will say something like “we’ve removed your Amazon selling privileges because of…” and for Order Defect Rate it will say “…because your order defect rate is above the 1% target.”

For most performance suspensions, it’s quite plain language in the notification. Amazon will use the terminology that will be reflected in your account health dashboard. E.g. late dispatch, cancellation rate etc. For most sellers, you’ll be familiar with these if you’re familiar with the account health side of Seller Central. In that regard, it’s easy to work out why you have been suspended, and you can log into your account and see.

On the policy side, they tend to use technical language and terminology, which won’t explain for most people what’s actually happened. For example, inauthentic complaints, intellectual property rights, owner complaint and a myriad of other more small and complicated policy issues as well. They’ll often use the language in the policies which is very legal and complicated language.

Order Defect RatesThe first step for any seller is to make sure you’re familiar with the numbers and targets that Amazon is tracking in the Account Health part of Seller Central. You must do your research and know your exact numbers.

The Order Defect Rate (ODR) is the amount of negative and neutral feedback you get, which is the number of people that leave 1, 2 and 3-star reviews about your service. It’s not about the product, it’s about you as a seller. Then Amazon adds the number of A to Z claims in, which is Amazon’s guarantee program for dissatisfied customers. They also add chargeback claims, which is chargebacks from credit card companies, although that’s fairly uncommon.

Amazon adds all those up and divides it by the number of orders you have taken in a 30 and 90 day period, which gives them the ODR percentage. For both 30 and 90 day periods, the target is to be under the 1% order defect rate. Often, January and February are key times for suspension due to order defect rates. This is due to the large influx of orders over Christmas and the higher number of complaints over that period.Diving Deeper into the Cause of the ProblemOnce you understand the pieces of data that Amazon is using to calculate it, we need to look at why those customers have had those complaints. So this means going to the negative feedback section of Seller Central, reading the 1, 2 and 3-star reviews and understanding the common complaints. Usually, there will be a theme because they customers will explain tha...