How to defend Black Hat Sellers in Amazon?
After many years of effort, many sellers in Amazon have earned there spot and rewards in amazon marketplace with amazing sales, reviews and amazon titles. But nowadays there is a problem in amazon with the increase in black hat sellers. Overnight they flood with negative reviews and pull the rating down. On the other hand, new sellers rating shoot up in a few days. This is all well planned and executed by exploiting the loophole. Amazon’s Product Review Abuse is not working hard enough to avoid these issues.
One of the popular tricks played by scam sellers is hijacking the listing in the name “similar item”. At first, they find the private label products with a slight change, later they take control of the product detail page in amazon with the help of Vendor Central. However, the scam sellers don’t have any source of the products but they will manage to change images, title and other details of the product. This type of Vendor Central abuse is going on in amazon for many years, however, in recent years it is just increasing.
Review abuse is another popular dirty tricks used by competitors to destroy genuine sellers. They create multiple accounts and start flooding fake reviews, less rating, and upvote the verified negative reviews. Amazon posts a question below review “Was this review helpful to you?”, the fake account starts upvoting negative feedback and those reviews will stay at the top. Many buyers see those reviews and decide not to buy the product. This will increase attention to other sellers and that’s how they start selling items overnight. In many cases, these fake review companies will have access to amazon data, and identify the soft target and destroy that overnight.
What is Amazon doing about Black Hat Sellers?
Amazon is working really hard to counter these problems. On the one side making too many regulations will eventually trouble the true sellers. Other side, lots of fake items and reviews will flood the market place. Amazon recently launched Project Zero to fight fake and counterfeit items. Internally Amazon also made many changes by allowing some tools only top employees and suspecting few employees on bribe charges and data leak. Still, amazon lacks tougher action against fake product sellers, banning seller account is not enough.
Recently Amazon is using a machine learning algorithm to counter the manipulation. Nowadays it is difficult to get offers from vendor central. Getting an offer from amazon is not easy unless you have something unique and difficult to counterfeit. Many managers in amazon have risked their job in past to help Black Hat seller, now currently they are under investigation. The internal policy has changed a lot, along with tight rules has cut insiders help to those Black Hat sellers. No one wants to risk their job at Amazon! When you are reporting abuse in Amazon, don’t just write speculation. Also, don’t simply raise an issue at Seller Support, more often you end-up getting an automated reply. Contact managers or higher executives with strong evidence might able to get you some solid support.
Finally, as an amazon seller, one must stop hiring the Black Hat services for themself. Give it time, slowly things will grow. Concentrate on identifying the better product to sell or create one. Always keep an eye on your listed products, ratings, reviews, new sellers and competitors. When all the things in the Amazon seller account are good, it is just a matter of time you see one of the similar product with their own private label. Don’t sit helplessly when you see something fishy, report and take action proactively. Have a defence plan, get the list of support you can get to defend Black Hat sellers, this will happen overnight, remember. Honest sellers cannot relay 100% on Amazon support yet, so it always better have a backup plan.
