I have a small business which sells on Amazon. My 22 year old son has his on store as well on Amazon. Amazon contacted me that I will have to shut one of the stores down that i am operating both of them. My son uses his store for his income and I use mine for income for a younger son of mine. I only have one store that i run. Today they informed me that they are shutting me down for having the two stores. I feel like I am being discrimated upon, profiled and defamation of Character.
I asked them to prove to me that I own the two stores. I told them that my 2009 taxes reflect my one and only Amazon store. Waiting on aresponse from them. They say they have eveidence that I operate both of them. Is it against the law for my older son to have his own business? He is my competition and I am his but that is the way it is for us. Do I have a case to fight with Amazon? I asked them to show me the evidence they say they have. I told them I have no probelm what so ever to show I own one store.
Help me on what should I do to figt wrong accusations.
CharlotteW | Former Moderator |
6/30/2009 - 12:11 pm
Welcome to the Business.gov Community.
I would like to help you with this problem but first I have a few questions that I hope once you answer will promote more discussion and someone will have an answer for you.
Is your name listed anywhere on your son's Amazon account? Do you use the same address as the primary business location?
I apologize for not knowing more, but perhaps someone in the legal community or another Amazon customer in this community will be able to help.
Amazon's terms of service for their affilate program are pretty broad and they have recently made major changes in requirements.
I can't comment on the legality but I would guess that they've reserved their rights to do this in the agreement.
It's likely they've matched IP addresses and/or traffic patterns.
My guess is that if you both access accounts through different IPs and assure your not linking to the same products, you can likely open another account and overcome this. There are many algorithms they can use to identify a pattern between you two if there is one. You would need to break that pattern.
This is a perfect example of why not to only rely solely on 3rd party sites selling your products such as ebay, amazon, etc.
You should each have your own website(s) and as part of your overall marketing strategy you could list your products on Amazon, Ebay, Google Base, etc.
I agree, you should not have to rely on one business platoform aka Amazon to sell your products, in situations just because of this. If you loose one of your stores that you are hooped, you have no backup plan. I agree with jbmco its always better to have your own personal business site to have a brand indentity and install a shopping cart-ecommerce solution on your very own site. This way, you will be more visable on search engines, when people search for your products on google or other things. I would use amazon/ebay as an alternate means to sell your products, but the right thing to do is, sell them on as many reputable outlets as you can, this way if one goes down, you have other income generating things on the side.
Whewn dealing with some these gargantous dinosaurs of the internet, Amazon, EBay etc, you might experience a reluctance to change their mind in these issues. They are so big so they can set up their own set of terms, vut everyone that does not fit the bill to 100% and still have thousands of reseller left. New ones are coming in every day.
So, as some have already pointed out, I suggest you start loking into other sources for 3rd party selling as well. You can just call any company that you believe to be interesting, ask them if they are willing to dropship and you're off to a good start. I did this and found it to be better to have a personal business contact with a semi-large company, rather than being one of thousands of resellers for Amazon.
However, if you absolutely want to prove yourself innicent in this particualer case, one crucial thing is to not host both your websites on the same account. That is, you want to have different IP addresses.
It's hard to give further advice without any more detail thou.
Good Luck!
Just because its there policy doesn't make it legal. Get the experts on your side, visit my website for more information:
www.help4mysmallbiz.com
Message Edited by CharlotteW on 07-20-2009 10:29 AM
CharlotteW | Former Moderator | 6/30/2009 - 12:11 pm
woodencrates | Creator | 7/2/2009 - 12:59 pm
jbmco | Creator | 7/7/2009 - 9:43 am
GoodFTA | Contributor | 7/8/2009 - 11:04 pm
Alberon | Creator | 7/10/2009 - 5:30 am
KieranMIT | Creator | 7/17/2009 - 9:53 am
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