Amazon is one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world that provides consumer to consumer as well as business to consumer sales services online.

Today, amazon.com is a place where thousands of online transactions worth billions of dollars take place everyday.For many years, this website has become a heaven for online sellers to meet with their buyers and sell their products. However, Amazon doesn’t always accommodate its sellers, because apparently not all of them can follow its guidelines. Thousands of seller accounts have been banned from this website for various reasons, but basically the main reason is because these sellers have violated the Amazon’s selling guidelines.

Here are some of the most common reasons Amazon bans sellers:

Negative Feedback

When you sell something on Amazon and the transaction is completed, the buyer will be able to post a feedback. If your buyer is satisfied with the product and the whole transaction process, he will give you a positive feedback, in the contrary if the buyer is not satisfied you will get a negative feedback. Feedbacks from your buyers will affect your seller ratings, which will also affect your position in Amazon search results.

When you have a slightly low overall rating, perhaps somewhere around 4.3 or lower, the worst thing that can happen is you will appear lower in search results. However if you have an extremely low rating, it will raise a flag indicating that there’s something wrong with the way you do business, because that means you have too many unhappy buyers. It doesn’t just affect your credibility as a seller but also Amazon’s credibility as your host.

Counterfeit Goods

Counterfeit goods are everywhere these days, including in online marketplaces. These products have inflicted billions of dollars of financial loss to so many businesses. This illegal practice is obviously not tolerated by Amazon, so any seller who got caught selling counterfeit goods will be banned permanently and immediately.

Too Many Chargebacks

This case is pretty much similar with sellers who have too many negative feedbacks. Too many chargebacks is also an indication of negative buyers experience, which means there are too many buyers are disappointed with the product they received from you.

Fake Customer Reviews

This is a quite common practice in various online marketplaces by unethical sellers to improve their ratings. Usually they create fake accounts or pay other people to post these fake reviews. This is clearly a very unethical practice and most online marketplaces including Amazon have found ways to detect these fake reviews. Therefore, doing so will only get you banned from the site.

Selling Prohibited Items

In its early days, there were so little regulations about what can and cannot be sold on Amazon. That’s why years ago you can find so many unusual and even illegal items being sold on this site like ivory products for example, in the late 90s someone even offered his kidney for auction on this site.

As the website grew, there are now a lot of restrictions and there is a list of prohibited and restricted items that cannot be sold on the site.

Resources:

http://time.com/4002890/amazon-work-culture/

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/can-you-still-make-a-living-selling-on-amazon-and-ebay/