Report: It’s Not Hard for Banned Amazon Sellers to Rejoin the Platform

Amazon might need to step up their security measures

Boxes at Amazon facility
Parcels are transported on a conveyor belt in the new Amazon logistics centre.
Ronny Hartmann/picture alliance via Getty Images

Amazon is a massive retailer. Amazon is also a massive marketplace, where other companies can sell their wares. In theory, these two sides of the business should mesh seamlessly. In practice — well, that’s where things get tricky. Can one company monitor a theoretically infinite array of resellers? Can any one company have that kind of oversight capability built in? Those might sound like rhetorical questions, but as Amazon continues to grow, they’re all too real — both for the Amazon retail ecosystem and for the people buying things from it.

Last month, The Verge reported that Amazon banned 600 companies that were using 3,000 accounts to sell products on its platform. The issue, wrote Sean Hollister, was that the companies in question were “knowingly, repeatedly and significantly violating Amazon’s policies, especially the ones around review abuse.” That should make for a much more equitable system now, right?

Before you head into celebration mode, a follow-up to that original report (also by Hollister) reveals the downside to Amazon’s approach to banning companies — namely, that it seems relatively easy for the companies in question to create a new account and get back to selling.

The Verge’s latest report notes the presence of several brands whose names differ by all of one letter from those of banned companies. (TaoTronics, for instance, was now “Taotronic.”) The Verge notified Amazon of their findings on September 17, but the last of these wasn’t removed until September 30.

“We blocked these brands, their product detail pages, and the selling accounts used to perpetrate their policy violations,” Amazon said in a statement. “Unfortunately, these bad actors are motivated and use various tactics to evade detection in their attempts to harm honest customers, selling partners, and Amazon.”

The full report is well worth reading, and the entire scope of this issue seems especially alarming.

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