New Amazon ‘Seller Challenge’ Gives 3 Lifelines to Sellers

If selling on Amazon could be compared to the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” game, sellers now have three “lifelines” thanks to a new feature rolling out called Amazon Seller Challenge for members of Account Health Assurance (AHA).

Some sellers noticed Seller Challenge as early as 2 weeks ago as Amazon has been quietly rolling out the feature that gives sellers opportunities to challenge enforcement decisions. But Amazon gives sellers only three opportunities to use a Seller Challenge every 180 days.

Ecommerce Consultant Keith Sterling wrote about the feature the week of October 6th, saying he believed it could be a huge win for brands and sellers dealing with listing enforcement issues. Here’s an excerpt of his explanation from his post on LinkedIn:

• You get 3 “Seller Challenges” every 180 days.
• If your challenge succeeds, Amazon reverses the enforcement instantly.
• If it doesn’t succeed, the “challenge slot” resets after six months.
• This sits alongside (not instead of) the protections you already have under AHA against account deactivation.

Former Amazon employee and ecommerce consultant Chris McCabe wrote about the new feature today, but he reserved judgment, writing in his post on LinkedIn, ” let’s not break out the champagne until we see how it actually works.”

McCabe said when Amazon tried other remedies such as such as “escalated support,” they fell short because sellers need to know why appeals are rejected; need consistent guidance; and need “meaningful transparency about how decisions are made, why they are made, nor how to truly resolve a problem permanently to move on.”

He said if Amazon Seller Challenge does not explain why an appeal was denied, sellers will just have a “quicker route to the same dead end.” However, he wrote, “If they do switch it up and offer real denial reasons, we’ll applaud it.”