#235: How to Solve Your Complex Seller Central Problems

Norman Farrar  0:01  

Hey everyone it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm the Amazon FBA and ecommerce podcast.

Norman Farrar  0:21  

Alright, I got new digs. So I’m just looking out at a beautiful lake in North Carolina. Kelsey is in North Carolina at a hidden location. Anyways, we’ll meet up sometime in the next couple days. Anyway, we got a great show for you today, something that I think every Amazon seller would like to talk about. And that’s how to solve some of your complex Seller Central problems. I already see Simon’s got a question in there for us. I think it’s a question I can’t read exactly. Or it will be one of his normal comments. But anyways, our guest today has experienced, owning and overseeing millions of in sales on Amazon using his own brands, and he also helps brands scale fast with a supportive team surrounding him. I want to introduce the founder and CEO of cellar candy. His name is John Cavendish for the first time on the podcast. But before we do anything, we’d like to have a quick word from our sponsor. I wanted to give a quick shout out and say thank you to global wired advisors for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Global wired advisors is a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please call Chris Shuffling and his team over at globalwiredadvisors.com Okay, where’s the squire?

Kelsey  1:47  

Hey, hey, how’s everyone doing? Welcome to the show. We’re in new locations, kind of fun. And yeah, how’s the beard nation doing? Let us know in the comment sections. I can see we have Simon joining us, Manny, Radd, Jacob and Steven, it’s good to see you guys, where you’re watching from let us know. We’re going to be talking about seller central issues that sellers have. So this is a great opportunity. If you have questions, concerns, issues, let us know how your year has been going. I know there’s been a lot of curveballs for sellers, especially this year. So yeah, let us know in the comment section. And we’ll be doing a little q&a session with everyone as well. And don’t forget to smash those like buttons, give us those thumbs up, we’d really appreciate it. As well as if you’re looking to join our beard nation, you can go over to our free 100% free Facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and E commerce collective. And if you’re looking for a little extra, what I like to call a little more beard, you can join our membership and our membership program on our website that’s lunchwithnorm.com, and just click the membership button you have opportunity to join some small set or small group session q&a is with me and norm as well as guests lessons from Steven black, Amy wese. We just announced it here but we have to go to Java for this month or for January. So that’s going to be a great lesson. And also welcome Alberto Marina. Jessica Rabbit, Near we’ve got a Facebook user and William C. Reilly. Very nice to be here. See you guys. And it’s gonna be good. 

Norman Farrar  3:40  

I never get enough of Simon as well. There we go.

Kelsey  3:43  

And hello, welcome. We’re doing fantastic. How are you? And okay, yeah, we can jump right in.

Norman Farrar  3:51  

Okay, fantastic. So if you do have any comments like Kelsey was saying, especially on this topic, if you’ve had a problem with Seller Central don’t know how to use it just came up with something an issue, just throw it into the comment section and we will get to it. Okay, so other than that, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. Enjoy the episode and welcome. Hey, John. Oh, Dawn.

John Cavendish  4:17  

Great, thanks. I think I have the little beard you were talking about?

Norman Farrar  4:20  

There we go. Yeah, that’s so it’s kind of the in between the Kelsey beard which he tried and could not grow yours and then mine. So there we go. John, since you’re the first, this is a first time episode for you. Can you tell everybody just a little bit about what you do?

John Cavendish  4:38  

Sure. So what I do or what sell candy does our business does is we are both Yeah, we bring peace of mind to become entrepreneurs. So what we do is we help them with all the stuff that drives you crazy about running an Amazon business. So basically anything in the backend of amazon seller central, our you know, our team supports with that. So we trying to give our clients the seller central experience they wish they had.

Norman Farrar  5:03  

So it’s interesting because we had a chance to take a look at your app. Although we’re going to be talking about Seller Central specific problems. In today’s podcast, you do have a very unique app. And this is sort of the second episode in a row that we’ve talked about unique apps. I thought this was very unique, because it really does work with Seller Central problems. Yeah, you have a subscription based, monthly based platform, that if if something comes up, you take care of it. And it’s not just Seller Central problems, but it it kind of just eliminates those types of headaches, which I thought was, I don’t think there’s anybody, I haven’t seen any other app out there that does that, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I

John Cavendish  5:49  

mean, we basically instead of hiring a virtual assistant or something else, you know, our clients work with us. And we’re just a better solution, because we have absolute experts, and everyone’s outcome driven. And you know, we just, that’s what we try and do take away the craziness of working with Amazon.

Norman Farrar  6:03  

And we’ll talk a bit more about seller candy in the episode. But where would you like to start? I know, everybody has problems with Seller Central. So I don’t know about you. But if there was a starting point, you’re the expert. Where would you like to start from?

John Cavendish  6:22  

With Seller Central? What’s our so

Norman Farrar   6:26  

we get the most common problems. How’s that?

John Cavendish  6:30  

Yeah. So for example, with you, what problems do you have? What do you see with your businesses in your agency? Like, what issues do you see regularly?

Norman Farrar   6:37  

Oh, nears on the line, we’re working on a problem forever. It just seems that it could be a very simple problem. So something comes up, and nobody reads the bloody email. So you send you resend, you resend, and you’re typing in just with somebody, please read, it’ll just and you get so frustrated, because you’re not getting the results. And we get that a lot from, you know, just people asking us questions, and it should be so simple, but nobody reads the email. Yeah. How do you get around that?

John Cavendish  7:12  

Yeah. So the reason that that happens is because in the backend of Amazon in Seller Support in the Philippines, mostly, or in Costa Rica, when they get a message, Amazon’s trying to standardize everything as much as possible. So they’re trying to keep it so that the people are cogs in the system rather than problem solvers. Because if they’re problem solvers, then they’re not replaceable, and replay replicatable. So they have to follow what their system through, which is called workflow. So they’re basically following a Wiki on the back end the same as you’re following the Wiki on the front end. So they, whenever they get to the end, they have to copy and paste that into the responses. So that’s how you end up with these stupid templates every time because they’re allowed to go above and beyond to figure out what the real problem is.

Norman Farrar  7:51  

All right, you got a hack for us. Yeah.

John Cavendish  7:54  

So I mean, the hack is not to talk to sellers and support too much. So whatever it is, there’s different processes. So say something like something simple, like updating a listing, something that should be super simple, we want to update the listing, we want to change the content, but it’s locked, Amazon is not reflecting the changes. What lots of people do would be to raise a case, and then just chase that case over and over again, and then a week and a half later, maybe it gets updated. But the best way to do it is to basically start by downloading the category listing report. So you raise a good hack is always if you want to do a listing update, go to Amazon, raise a case for them to enable your category listing report, which is basically the flat file on the back end of your listings, right. So once you got that, and go through it, delete everything you don’t want. So all the ones you don’t want to update, find the one you want update, and then update the everything in that update or the title or the bullets or whatever you want to update, re upload that through the feed file system, and then may work. But now you can call because now you’ve got a batch upload number for that feed file. So they can’t tell you to go away anymore. They can’t tell you that they don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, you’ve got a traceable number. So you call them up, you say Put me through to the captive team, you get put through to the captive team. And then you just push them until they do the update. So that kind of takes it from a frustrating many, many weeks to you’re getting it done the same day.

Norman Farrar  9:19  

That’s a great point. And one thing I do want to point out the catalog listing report, you did go through it, but it is something you have to request. It’s not something that’s just on the Reports menu. You have to go in and actually requested it usually stays open for what seven days. Yeah, seven days. Yeah. So that’s a great one. Now the other thing like I sell soap and a lot of the times what will happen is I get the stupid suppression suspensions that I got to work through the one the big one last year I think a year and a half ago was pesticides. Has nothing to do with pesticides, but I had to go

John Cavendish   9:56  

antibacterial Yeah,

Norman Farrar  9:58  

yeah, man You know what I mentioned it in the, the listing, right? So I learned my lesson. And so I had that I had claims because I had the word psoriasis in it, or I had something about brown. So you have to be very careful what you put in your listing. So that got nailed. What was the other one? Oh, I had hemp oil, believe it or not, I had hemp oil. And I got suspended for that. I mean, I’ve had more suspensions on my listings over the last year to two years. And they’ve all been stupid suspensions that should never have happened. I get them back. But it comes at a price it cost me sales.

John Cavendish  10:41  

Yes, so you’re so does this is your postal question. But is is your business based in Canada or the US?

Norman Farrar  10:50  

Um, it’s, I registered it in Canada. And I most of my sales are out of the US.

John Cavendish  10:57  

Yeah, so that that throws a spanner in the works a bit. Because if you are a US based company, what we’d say is do the pesticide test, because that way you can eliminate mostly like, but in your case, you know, what you have to do is pretty much the similar process to what we went through before, which is to get the category listing report, sanitize it by removing anything, but ideally, removing almost everything. Apart from this is a bar of soap. Re uploading it calling up again, getting amnesty refresh, and once you’ve got it back, then you can start adding back content. It’s fine. When you’ve got a few listings doing it, we can be ready, you can do it really quick. But we had a Canadian client who had 5000 listings select, and then it’s just a war of attrition against Amazon, doing them as quickly as possible and working through the whole catalog. Yeah,

Norman Farrar  11:44  

it has been extremely tough. And that’s exactly what we’re doing is just redoing it from scratch. That’s actually what Vandana is doing right now. I hope she is anyways. But so what about any other common problems that you’re seeing this year that that, that 2021 is just been a killer for.

John Cavendish  12:04  

So we have quite a few resellers that we work with as well, as well as private label sellers. And there’s a lot of IP claims suspected IP claims. So this year, Amazon introduced a new bot. And every time they introduce new bot, everything gets flagged as always. And this bot highlighted second third party listings that mentioned copyrighted brand names. So if somebody created extra listing for Nike shoes, and they’d use the word Nike or something like that, it would then flag the listing, and they’d get 50 to 100 help account health warnings appear on their account immediately. So obviously, that makes everyone panic. So that was a that was a big thing this year of a lot of resellers getting huge amounts of account warnings and account health warnings.

Norman Farrar  12:49  

Right? I see that nearly said something about being risky. What are we talking about near? Can you be more specific on that? Maybe you said something further on, I’m just seeing the last comment that you made.

Kelsey  13:03  

So I’ll Oh, when he answers, I’ll throw the comment back up. All right, very good.

Norman Farrar  13:08  

Okay, so just one sec, here, I am in a different location. And actually, I was telling you guys, just before the podcast that I’ve had to jerry rigged something I’m my computer is literally on a bond a bunch of boxes. So every time I touch anything, you know, I’m just thinking everything’s gonna topple over. So I this is called a bush fix with your team. I know with our team, we have this risk evaluation process. And we go through some of the more minor processes on if this happens, then do this because it’s bound to happen. One of the things that happened this year was the claims, we had issues because we talked about psoriasis and Zema. We talked Oh, I forget one of the some of the other things, but because I even mentioned it, all of a sudden things were being suspended. So as we were fixing the one, we were creating a process, which goes back to our last podcast, but a process on how we fixed it. So just letting people know that anybody who’s listening, one of the first things that you you were talking about was going in downloading your catalog listing and redoing it and uploading it and then talking to the captive team because you have that case number. So that would be something that we would put into a note into our SOP or into our we have a notebook in teamwork. And so if something like that were to happen, people could go into our policies or our Risk Evaluation Center, check on it and then go forward. Is that something that you do as well?

John Cavendish  14:47  

For sure. So as we as we do things, we produce SOPs, and they will get filed. And then we also have experts in different in different things. So we have an appeals expert on our team who has amazing appeals. We have a feed expert who test if something doesn’t work. So like nears question about making sure the flat files right, you know we have somebody to check who’s awesome at whose ultimate fee files and basically did it at Amazon before they came to us.

Norman Farrar  15:15  

Right. And I guess one of the most important? Well, I don’t think this would would have anything to do with it I actually, I was just talking about updating the listing, you want to make sure that you have a

John Cavendish 15:26  

partial update, wouldn’t it be? Yeah, yeah, partial update,

Norman Farrar  15:30  

that would be the main thing. So you just don’t override everything? I think that wouldn’t be correct. Anyways, what about plans of action? Can you give us any tips or action points on putting together a plan of action when, when they’re needed needed when they’re not?

John Cavendish  15:47  

So plan of action is pretty much just needed when Amazon asks for one, or when you need to get a listing back. It’s been suspended. I mean, the main, our main ethos with plans of action is don’t argue with Amazon. Okay, no, too many people that come to us when they’ve had a few issues. It’s because the reason they’ve got stuck in a rabbit hole is they’ve argued with Amazon about it wasn’t their fault, or they didn’t do anything wrong. And with, with Amazon, I think it’s always best to just accept we did it no matter what it was, even if we didn’t do anything, it won’t happen again, this is what we’ve done instead. And this is the reason why it won’t happen again. So Amazon just wants to see we’ve identified the problem. This was the issue. This is what we’ve done to solve it. One of the best ones, which I’ve, which I heard of a few months ago, when from one of our clients, I think it Amazon found some other inventory that wasn’t there as and then added it to their inventory. So they found some lost in the warehouse, they added it because they’d sold this product in the past. And then Amazon then it sold obviously, it was FBA. And then like this, you sold as new. So as inventory they’d never bought, but then got added to their account got sold, and it got they got flagged. So we had to do a plan of action to say that, sorry, we didn’t send any inventory, but we won’t do it again. And we will solve this problem by not reselling inventory that we didn’t buy in the first place. It was just like a stupid Amazon error. But that’s the sort of thing you just have to go alright, you know, we didn’t do anything but this is we just need to move on with our business. The whole goal is to keep selling, keep our account in good standing and keep trading.

Norman Farrar  17:22  

What are the three different degrees of Amazon slapping on the wrist? I guess that’s what I would call it. Like I’m thinking of the least amount is a warning, right? So you get a warning an email. Well, how do we how does it evolve from the warning?

John Cavendish  17:40  

That’s good question. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it as classifications quite like that. So I mean, after a warning, then you start getting account performance notifications and your account may may move into at risk. And then that’s when we’re very aggressive and following up with Amazon is figuring out why it’s at risk, what the issue is and how we can stop it. It’s pretty rare to have an account suspended unless you’re doing something that Amazon is really not happy about.

Norman Farrar  18:09  

Right? Yeah, I guess the ban is the worst.

John Cavendish 18:13  

Yeah, Ban is definitely the worst. That’s definitely the worst.

Norman Farrar  18:15  

And when you’re talking about the ban, going into that, then you’ve got to do something significantly. upsetting to Amazon, right?

John Cavendish  18:26  

Yes, most of the time, unless you’re just very unlucky. And you know, unlucky as in, you’re selling a product, like for example, if you were selling masks during the COVID time, and then Amazon suddenly changed their regulations, even if you were selling them before. COVID. That’s that caused some real issues for some people.

Norman Farrar 18:44  

Yeah, if Yeah, if you want to hear a real horror story about that, Kevin King came on, and he lost about a million dollars selling PPE during COVID. And he did everything right even had an Amazon. One of the people at Amazon higher up working with him, and the algorithm kept shutting it down. He lost a million bucks. So yeah, it is horrible. But guess what he’s still selling on Amazon. So he still believes in Amazon, even though that happened. But I guess with the account ban, I mean, there are people that get banned for they have two accounts, and the two accounts are still selling the same product. We warn people all the time about that. But they don’t realize that that is a real taboo. You cannot sell the same product and two accounts are on the same two. There, they will shut you down. There’s so many things. Let’s talk about that. What will Amazon shut you down for?

John Cavendish  19:41  

Yeah, so as you’re saying same products into accounts, that really sucks. Yeah. related accounts recently has been a big thing. Lots of people getting flagged wrongly for having related accounts and getting shut down in certain marketplaces. So Amazon won’t necessarily shut down your entire account but they’ll ban you in Canada or the US or One of the European markets. Recently, I’ve, I’ve seen quite a few people getting banned for dropshipping. Not the full account. But initially, they get their FBM privileges suspended, which is the first time I’ve seen this. In the last month, I’ve talked to two separate people who’ve had their FBM privileges suspended for dropshipping. So they can only sell FBA. That’s a new one to me, man you want to me as well, on from that, like the stupid the silliest one is one of our clients went on holiday once and then didn’t put their account on the way. And you got banned for just not responding to customer messages for a week and a half.

Norman Farrar  20:40  

Oh, boy band. Well,

John Cavendish   20:43  

they got suspended. Sorry, yeah, banned, but their account was suspended. And it was a hell of a job getting it back.

Norman Farrar  20:48  

Okay. Well, before we go into the next question, I just wanted to let everybody know that we do have a we’ll have Kelsey today that we’ll have Kelsey is an audit audit by John and his company. And we’re also putting in a month worth of the Cinterion League and one of our calendars. So if you’ve seen Tim and Tim Jordan and myself, we have a calendar, we have an image that comes out every Friday or Thursday, I think it is. And we’ve decided to put out a calendar this year. Well, there’s a bunch of them that have just arrived. And I’m happy to send one out. So it’s a complete bundle, you’ll get the audit, you’ll get the calendar, which is where 1000s of dollars. You’ll get a Centurion league membership for a month. So all you need to do is hashtag will have Kelsey tag two people, and you will get a second entry. So again, I’d like to go back and just talk about I don’t think we hit enough of the common mistakes that people make, that you see people make in their accounts. You want to talk about that for a bit.

John Cavendish  21:55  

Sure. Yeah. So that’s actually part of the audit. So what we do in an audit is we look for the mistakes people make in their account. So things like suddenly people have the wrong FBA settings, like things like having inventory placement service turned on having not having export settings turned on, right, all these little things, which just like profit drains and drip money at the bottom of your business. Other things we see regularly, just listing issues like when you don’t have if you don’t have monitoring software setup on your listings, then sometimes things change Amazon messes with things and you just don’t notice because you’ve got a lot of listings. And there’s a lot of breaks between storefronts and listings we see often. So on the listings, you know where the brand name is, it’s not linked to a storefront or it’s linked the wrong storefront or a guy yesterday, this morning I talked to because it’s now like 18 hours later, he his storefront was linking to lubricant for some reason. So that was a funny one. But really not a good one for your brand. This mistakes in like storefronts not being set up, right, not being linked, right. Not having PPC setup, right? Sometimes, and having campaigns that just been running in the background for a long time, not turned off. So that’s that’s the biggest loss, probably a list of some of the biggest stuff you see in accounts regularly. Right we go through them

Norman Farrar   23:18  

is some of the things that we’ve we’ve noticed as well. Let’s just kind of go through the listing. And these are minor, but you can have some suppression if you have the logo or if you have a board or if you don’t have the white background on your on your photos. I mean, that’s everybody knows that. And every a lot of people, you know, I’ll hear it when Oh, my count is suppressed. Why is it suppressed? And then you take a look at the the the image and it was just due to an image that was a problem. Once you put in the proper image. Everything’s cool. And you’re up and running. The other problem that we’re seeing is a lot of time this was big. We saw accounts that were suspended. What, three, four months ago? Because they had capital letters in their bullets. Did you see that?

John Cavendish  24:11  

I didn’t see that. There was tons. Wow. So it looks there’s a lot I mean, almost all listings I see have writing apples capitalized bullets.

Norman Farrar  24:20  

Yeah. So we were telling people as soon as we like all of a sudden it happened. Like overnight, we got four or five messages. And then we heard more people. It wasn’t a suppression. It was a suspension. So it was due to the of the caps. And if you take a look on Amazon right now maybe was an algorithm adjustment. Tons of people still have those caps out there. But we’ve changed everything right now to non caps. And the other thing that came through was the HTML, there was an HTML issue that you could really just have a page break or bold in the description which, at least if you did that it looks better than just keeping your product description all Just plain text plate format that looks ugly. And then adding a brand name, we talked about that for a second. But having using a brand name other than your own, in your listing is a taboo claims have definitely been an issue this year. And it’s, I think those are probably the main ones outside of that if I take a look at going down the listing, even in, even in your images, but also in your bullets, satisfaction guarantee, 100%, guaranteed free the word free. Like let’s say it’s free of whatever free of para bond free or whatever, you know, it’s instead of that you put non Parab on or Yeah, something like that. Anyways, we had to change all our listings, because we had the word free in it, and this goes back two or three years ago, but it’s still a lot of people are using the word free 100% Guaranteed satisfaction, we have a full list if you go to lunch with norm. And it’s a full list of probably 100 200 words, that is on a restricted list that you’re not supposed to be using or those rules. And the other thing you can do is to go check your guidelines and see exactly like they give you a breakdown of what you can do what you can’t do. It’s not everything that they’re asking, but it’ll give you a much better idea of what you can and can’t do. And if you stick within those guidelines, then you’re good. And a quick rule of thumb is if it doesn’t feel quite right, if it doesn’t pass the gut check, then why are you doing it? So, you know, a, it was the whole rebate thing, right? Like going to these free rebate groups are very cheap rebate groups. We’ve been warning about that for a long time. And guess what? It, you know, hit the fan just a couple of months ago. So I don’t know if you have anything more to add to that. John.

John Cavendish  27:09  

Anything I’d add when you’re sharing about flagging for claims like compliance this year, Amazon has been super, you know, a lot more hard on compliance. So like child safety certificates, supplements, certificates, just you know, make sure you get everything certificate certificate certified, that needs it and make sure you can back it up when it snaps to your sets. Because Amazon is asking more and more often for compliance sets for everything.

Norman Farrar   27:32  

Yeah, they’ve put in a compliance tool. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. It’s still in beta. And it’s still not that great. But if you do have a, if you know the country of origin, and you’re bringing it in, it’ll tell you, you know, the certificates or the certification you should be asking for. And that’s a big one that we saw that fob and I were doing some work. And this person just wanted to bring in some product and they had to get the order in right away. Or they wouldn’t meet the deadline. And they didn’t ask for any certification. Well, it came here and it didn’t have any. And so they had to go back and it was gonna be a ton of money that the supplier didn’t have it. And for them to go out and get it done. It was going to cost a lot. Anyways, it turned out that they didn’t do anything with the product. They couldn’t sell it. Yeah, they but this is where it takes an extra question when you’re looking at a supplier and asking them if the proper certification is there that you need, or making sure that the certificate you check if the certification if there’s any certification requirements, like toys, for example. You know, that is a few extra steps you got to do with toys. But anyways, and that’s different on every brand. I you know, you can go through like with what I do with my soap, you know, you have to check in Canada and might be a different certification that’s needed to sell then going over to Europe or to Japan. But anyway, that’s one that I know that Amazon is trying to work with. It’s and I believe everybody has access to it. Now it’s just a compliance tool. If you’re brand registered, okay, so let me see. First, I think I want to just cut over to a word from our sponsor, and we’ll come right back.

John Cavendish   29:26  

Alright, just give me a quick second and

Norman Farrar   29:28  

then first I just want Kelsey to push the right button.

Kelsey  29:32  

You really like to just

Norman Farrar  29:35  

push that by now. Just like when you smack Thank you solarize for sponsoring this episode of lunch with dorm solarize is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. Everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business is just one click away. For more information, contact demon his team over at solarized calm and remember solarize is with one Our Oh, okay, there we go like

John Cavendish  30:05  

the 101 are.

Norman Farrar  30:08  

All right, Kelce? Do we have questions coming in? I’m thinking that there’d be a lot for this topic,

Kelsey  30:14  

too. Yeah, we can start diving into them. So anything when Seller Support says for months that they are working on the issue with their team, is it best to wait on them for months or start a new case and start over?

John Cavendish  30:34  

I think somebody froze.

Kelsey  30:42  

Yeah. So John, I think you’re froze a little bit. We’ll just give you a second.

Norman Farrar  30:50  

John, if you can just click your camera button, stop the video, then bring it back on. And other than that, yeah. Okay, I’m going to the fetal position for you guys.

Kelsey  31:07  

Don’t worry. So John, it looks like maybe your walkway is just cutting in and out. But normally, you have any irate comes?

John Cavendish 31:16  

I think so it’ll probably be strange.

Norman Farrar   31:24  

Alright, so let’s take a look at that question. Cows, can you read it out to me?

Kelsey  31:28  

So when Seller Support says for months that they are working on the issue with their team? Is it best to wait on them for months or start a new case and start over?

Norman Farrar   31:38  

Oh, 100%, I would say for me, and I know NIRS on here like to hear what he would say. But I would start a new case. If they’re not getting anywhere. I get fed up with it. If it’s going nowhere, but I’d also want to make sure that I have everything down, like every little piece of information to help back up what I’m writing in the case. And now near if you’re here, because we are having problems with John, maybe you can actually hear me now. Oh, yeah, I can hear you now.

John Cavendish  32:11  

Sorry. I just I don’t know what’s going on there. Yeah, so I agree with you. Depending on the case. You know, you’ve got to be pushing, pushing, pushing Amazon all these cases and calling up and escalating the case. And then let’s open another case, see what happens. They may merge them together. They’ll probably merge them together. And if they do, then, you know, we know that’s not an issue, not the not the solution. Unless they it helps. But if it’s been taking months, and it’s a big thing, then yeah, we just escalate and escalate either to Jeff, or to Twitter. You know, Twitter escalation at the moment is one of the best ways to escalate outside of Jeff. So going on to Twitter, reaching out to support getting them to send you a specific signup form, submission form, and then you can raise it that way.

Norman Farrar  32:59  

Yeah, it’s interesting. I wasn’t sure if at Jeff was still working, but it is people are still responding. Friday.

John Cavendish  33:07  

Yeah, we got two clients that success for that. Work on.

Norman Farrar  33:11  

Yeah. Okay. So let me see. What did near have to say there. Kelsey says something about Brad can’t really read it. Yeah.

Kelsey  33:18  

So nears saying meanwhile, allow me to help. Don’t use brand names. This can cause problems and holding the money.

Norman Farrar  33:26  

Okay, did Simon come back with something sarcastic? Or what was

Kelsey  33:30  

just another question? Oh. Alright, so the next question from Simon, does my vendor account still Trump’s seller account and get more solid results?

John Cavendish  33:43  

That’s a question for assignment, isn’t it? How’s your How is your vendor countering Simon?

Norman Farrar  33:49  

I know, I don’t know if this is just a personal thing. But when we have some people signing up for consulting service. We just like if they have a vendor account, it’s not even something that we’ll consider working with. I don’t like vendor. Personally, I think you get much more control with just a single like a seller central account. Simon, you know what, maybe during one of our talks in the membership site, we can talk a bit more about that. I’d like to learn a lot more about how you’re doing it or working with them because I’ve dealt with a lot of brands. And after they go on to Seller Central. They just have so much exposure and so much freedom. Maybe you have both. So be interesting. Our next talk, let’s talk about that. And then we’ll come back and we’ll report Okay, cows next question.

Kelsey  34:45  

Right. From a boo. When I upload my flat file, Amazon returns error to change the title to what’s already on Amazon. So we basically cannot change the title even with the full updated flat file. Do you have any pointers

Norman Farrar  35:03  

on, you know, on something like that? We’ve seen it. And they are just like a lot of times that’ll happen for brand name, for example. And they’ll just force putting the brand name in front of you’re not using the brand name. I haven’t any, the only thing I’ve been able to do is just redo the flat file, try to bring it up. And then you can report it to the team and see if there’s a problem. I don’t know anything outside of that. Other than opening up a case. Again, if John is here, not sure if you can hear us. Oh, can you hear

John Cavendish  35:40  

me? Oh, yeah. Can you see me? Can you Can y’all see me? Can? I can’t see you. But I can see myself perfectly. What about like that? Oh, there we go now, sorry. I could see myself the entire time. Sorry about that. Go for it, John. Yeah. So what I would say is we kind of do what what I said earlier, which is once you’ve uploaded the flat file, and you’ve got the batch upload number, then you can call Amazon and quote that and say, I’ve got a flat file, it doesn’t sit says it should be working, then why it’s not working, can you tell me why it’s not working. And then they should refresh the listing. And hopefully, the update will go through. You can also have this issue if it was originally created in vendor, and then you bear the worst, because vendor had control of the listing initially, and then you kind of get it back. But it’s still you can still push it through. It’s just a real pain.

Norman Farrar   36:25  

Okay, so, again, a lot of people here are there, there’s probably a third, a third, a third beginner, intermediate advanced. When you’re when you’re talking about the captive team. How do you get a hold of the captive team?

John Cavendish  36:42  

That’s a good question. So the the captive team to get hold of them, you just request a call back. So it’s better to go into your accounts, go to your brand page, request a call back, they call you. And then from there, just ask to be put through to the captive team. Okay, and then just keep keep asking. And if you don’t get the right person, hang up and start again, basically. All right. Good. All right. Next.

Kelsey   37:05  

Okay. So I think someone just clarifying this question. Okay. It’s the spinner account, still Trump seller account and get more solid results. He says he means for changes of titles, etc.

Norman Farrar  37:20  

Oh, that’s tough. You just said in vendor, they control that, right?

John Cavendish  37:27  

So vendor has the most control. And if you’re selling in both vendor and seller vendor is going to have control. If there’s no one selling in vendor anymore, then you can get control back. It’s just a pain. Yeah, you can

Norman Farrar  37:37  

suggest the tight Simon. So you can make I think you mentioned that John, you can make a suggestion to make the change whether they do it or not, is a whole different story.

Kelsey  37:50  

Okay, and then we have this question from someone as well, I have a major selling Seller Account problem, tried to open us account to merge with my UK accounts, didn’t get verified, tried again. And again, months later, still no accounts support, not very supportive. There anything he can do.

John Cavendish  38:11  

There’s a few different escalation email addresses that you could use. I’ve got a list of them somewhere, there’s a list of them somewhere online as well. So there’s, you could try the management Managing Director, UK escalation address, because they should hope hopefully help you open in the US. You could use the UK seller verification email address, you can use the US syllabification email address. And just reach out from your master account email and say, basically, I’m having this issue. It’s not working, what have I done wrong? And usually, it’s usually when it doesn’t get verified just because there’s a problem of the documentation. So whether the address doesn’t match, there’s something wrong. They there’s something isn’t quite right. So just double check all the documentation I’m sure you have already. But looking for anything that could be a mismatch between what’s in Amazon and what’s on the documentation.

Norman Farrar  39:05  

Yeah, it could be the slightest thing,

John Cavendish  39:07  

like a PT instead of apartment, or something stupid like that.

Kelsey   39:13  

All right. And just a reminder, don’t forget to smash those like buttons, give us those thumbs up. We really appreciate it. And if you do have any questions, go ahead and put them in the comment sections. We’ll be here just for a few more minutes. We’re gonna jump into the wheel Kelsey real soon. So that’s also our giveaway. We’re doing a free account audit with John. And we’re giving away a month of this charity League, which is 10 enormes private mentorship program from private label Legion. So a free month and a private label Legion calendar as well. So you’re going to get all of that in today’s giveaway. So that’s hashtag we’ll have Kelsey just put that into the comment section. And that’s that. So jumping into our last couple questions If you have a brand and only seller, how do you lose the buy box?

Kelsey  40:09  

I guess I can chime in. If you if you have your brand and you’re the only seller, you could lose your Buy Box many reasons. Sometimes when you raise a case of Amazon, they’ll say your metrics aren’t good enough. Which means that you know, might be a new selling that product or it’s a new product, and they don’t have enough seller history. And then for some reason, you’re not getting the buy box. It could be that you’ve changed price recently, and you’ve set the price too low and then tried to increase it too quickly. And you get a pricing error, like pricing suspension could be a return rate goes too high. And again, you lose metrics, and Amazon still takes the buy box away. In general, it’s usually an error. And usually you can get in to refresh the listing. If you lose the buy box, and you’re the only seller and you’re the brand owner. It’s just very annoying, because Amazon send you back a template saying you must not have met our metrics for getting the buy box must their standard kind of template. And it’s like well, yeah, and then you get into the argument with them. about it.

Norman Farrar  41:07  

Yeah, yeah, I’ve also seen, but they deny usually, but if you’re selling on Walmart, and you’re doing something different and chewy and you’re giving a better price, all of a sudden, you’ll miss that. You’ll miss the buy box. And they’re not supposed to be doing that. But it just seems that once you match it, then everything’s cool. The other thing Kevin King gave us a really great tip. When he was on the last podcast he was talking about when you go in and you’re launching a product, make sure that there’s a min max price. So that min price could be a buck, that Max price could be $13. And if you set it in between there, and you can go up and down at ease. So anyways, if you’re interested in that it was the last time Kevin was on it was last month. And he was talking about, you know, ways to get around that. That’s awesome, too. Yeah, it was a nugget. We got to come up with another word for nugget. John. I hate it.

John Cavendish  42:09  

And we want you I would

Norman Farrar 42:13  

like it. Everybody uses nugget. It’s golden nuggets.

John Cavendish  42:17  

Like a be a themed wood.

Norman Farrar  42:19  

Right could be like a habit. They’re careful. Yeah, please. Okay, so, you know, Kelsey, I don’t know if there’s any other questions, if there are there any more.

Kelsey  42:36  

I think we covered them all. Okay. But yeah.

Norman Farrar  42:40  

Because I wanted to talk a little bit about your app, and why it’s different. So seller, candy, you you sent me over a link, I took a look at it. And I just thought this was an option. I don’t know, it’s an option for everybody. I’m looking at Simon, that might be and I know, I know, Simon. So I know his products might be something that would be cool for him to take a look at. Because it just eliminates these headaches. It comes at a price. You know, it’s not a free service. But do you want to just talk a little bit about it? Again, guys, I don’t have an affiliate. I don’t do it. Like if I drive traffic over there. I get nothing. So you know, I don’t get a deal. I’d jod you don’t give me a deal on that the app. So it’s, it’s just something I saw that would be I recommend to you guys.

John Cavendish   43:29  

Oh, thanks. No, that’s awesome. Thank you for your feedback. That’s, that’s amazing. Thank you. Okay, you’re welcome. Yeah, so what we do at cellar candy is we provide expert outcome driven assistance. So we don’t do PPC, we don’t do strategy, we don’t do consulting, what we do is we take all of the stuff you don’t want to do in the backend of Amazon, or the shoveling. And then we do it for you. Basically, we have a platform, which is like a management platform to communicate with our assistants. And all you have to do about what it is, what’s the outcome, and then you can basically think of it as done. It’s like Seller Support, but we’re never going to send you back a template or anything really annoying and frustrating. We’re just going to get you to the results so that you can feel confident that you can get on with the other stuff in your Amazon business.

Norman Farrar  44:16  

So can you give us a bit of talk a bit about price point, what are we looking at?

John Cavendish   44:21  

Sure. So our price point runs from 5.497 up to 997 a month, depending on what package you’re on, or we’re gonna agency we scale indefinitely. Basically, 497 is one market. 697 is two markets and 997 is three markets, one market being us and then one region being 697. And then Europe and the US being then seven. And you get a different number of tasks simultaneously. So I didn’t explain that we work on the unlimited task system. So what that means is you pay us the subset fee per month. If you’ve got say out 697 plan, you get three simultaneous tasks. So you can submit as many tasks to our portal as you want. As we as you, we finish one, we close it, we open another one, close that one, open another one. So that’s a way of us balancing your workload. So it doesn’t cost you a fortune. It doesn’t change every month. And you’ve been able to submit as many things as you want. And we have a prioritization system. So if something’s like, I got a suspension, this is costing me money. I just click Can’t you just click high priority, and our team gets on it immediately.

Norman Farrar  45:29  

All right, very good. Okay, so how do people get ahold of you or your company?

John Cavendish  45:35  

Sure. I mean, you can check out our websites, Sella. candy.com. Spelt like in my name, and my email if you want to drop me an email, it’s just John at Sela candy.com. Okay, wish me a merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. Oh,

Norman Farrar  45:48  

yeah. So you’ve never seen we’ll have Kelsey. I don’t think?

John Cavendish  45:52  

No, I haven’t. Alright, so counting out the wheel, if any Tony Robbins.

Norman Farrar  45:59  

Giving you I just want to make sure you have time to hit the button. Okay.

Kelsey   46:03  

Oh, yeah, we got John, please enjoy this. This is a work of art. My older brother ready, okay. Now, I realize it’s a bit aggressive. That’s part of the so yeah, here’s the wheel of Kelsey. Thank you everyone who entered today’s giveaway. If you are the winner, if this is your first time, you can email me Kate at lunch with Norm comm. You have 48 hours to reach out to me. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the ability to find you. So definitely. Let me know before that runs out. So I’ll shuffle these up. And here we go. Alright, so let’s see the winner of today. Is Toyota from YouTube. All right, fantastic. Congratulations. I love the applause. Thank you, John. And, yes, if you’re the winner, Toyota, thank you for entering please email me Kay at lunch with Norm calm. And yeah, we’ll get you all sorted with your little giveaway bag.

Norman Farrar  47:29  

Just please remember, because it’s YouTube, we can’t reach out to you, you have to reach out to us. So Kay at lunch with norm. And yeah, that’s a great bundle. I’m sure you’re gonna like that, that audit with John. And then, you know, feel free to join the Centurion league for that month, anytime, and we’ll get you out our calendar. Okay, so that’s it for now. John, we will be talking to you later. We’ll have to get you back on to talk to about more updates next year. But until then, we’ll see you later.

John Cavendish  47:58  

Cool. Thanks for having me know,

Norman Farrar  48:00  

you’re very Yeah, and you too. Okay, everybody. So I hope you liked the topic today. We’re going to try to dig in more to that we’re going to be talking a lot more about this every time something comes up with Seller Central. And we see these updates that maybe to the algorithm, we will be posting them in the in the group. So if you haven’t joined the group do that. It’s just the lunch with Norm the Amazon FBA collective. And yeah, we’ve got a really great active group in there right now. It’s fully like totally engaged. I think Kelsey was saying the engagements like 75% or more. Anyways comes where are you?

Kelsey  48:41  

Alright, yeah, everyone enjoyed today’s episode. If you are interested in joining the Facebook group, it’s lunch with Norm, Amazon, FBA and E commerce collective. And again, like we said, If you want a little more of that luscious beard, you can go over to our website once norm.com. And that’s, you can just find membership, and click on that tab and it’ll take you to our tears that you can find what’s suitable for you. If you’re looking to buy a monthly cup of coffee for us, there’s that or if you want something a little more extra, you can check out our Platinum tier where you can get to two or three q&a sessions with me in norm a month. Guest lesson monthly SOPs, discounts, deals, all that fun stuff and a great community. I really love our our group that we have there. We feel like a little family. So definitely check it out. And yeah, also, if you guys have any questions or topic or guest suggestions, we’re looking at guests for the new year. Let me know at K at lunch with Lauren calm, and we want the very best for you. So yeah, reach out. We’re open. We want to see what you guys want to listen to for our podcast in the new year. So yeah, let’s Let us know. And I think that’s it for me.

Norman Farrar   50:03  

All right, and I’m just looking at Simon Yes. Merry Christmas to all the weirdos and a happy new year. Okay. Join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But

Kelsey  50:20  

our sponsor a quick word from our sponsor

Norman Farrar  50:26  

Z CO for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Are you looking to take your ecommerce business from local to global, you can with the help of z and their brand new app. That’s right, you can track live shipments with push notifications. Get detailed lead times for each stage of your shipment, and store all compliance and VAT reclaim documents in the palm of your hand. All while listening to lunch with Norm. Ready to expand your E commerce empire. And take your Amazon FBA business global. Use the link in the description to learn more about Z’s new app that’s now available on desktop and mobile. That’s z.co z e.co. It’s your fault. Yeah,

Kelsey  51:14  

yeah, you blame me for this one.

Norman Farrar  51:18  

All right. Now can I finish when you so you’re really interrupted, sorry, Z, sorry, Z. But luckily for Kelsey, anyways, join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for being part of a community. Like I said, the engagement in that community is just awesome. I it’s, I’ve never seen anything like it. And just keep that engagement coming. We love it. We want to engage as much as possible. And we really couldn’t do this without you join us on Friday. We are going to be doing a broadcast on Friday. So happy to if you got time to join us. And on that note, we will see you later.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode: 235

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces John Cavendish – Sellercandy’s founder

Subtitle: “How to Solve Your Complex Seller Central Problems”

Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJJbuyc2F4

Back on Lunch with Norm…Learn most common Seller Central problems Amazon sellers have had this year, and learn how you can streamline the process. With years of experience as an Amazon seller John Cavendish the Founder of Seller Candy started his Full-Service Amazon agency, becoming a premier Amazon Channel Management provider for brands to scale fast.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 0:00 Intro/Housekeeping
• 4:12 Welcome John Cavendish
• 6:09 Most Common Problems With Seller Central
• 9:39 How to Avoid Suspension in Your Listing Report?
• 11:56 Other Amazon Common Problems in 2021
• 13:33 Amazon Risk Evaluation Process
• 15:36 Plans Of Action for Amazon Listing Suspension
• 17:22 The Three Different Degrees of Amazon Suspension Warning
• 19:37 Reasons Why Amazon Shut You Down
• 21:43 Common Mistakes that People Make in their Amazon Accounts
• 23:18 Common Amazon Listing Mistakes
• 27:32 Amazon Marketing Compliance Tool

Follow our Podcast

• Lunch With Norm…Website
• Lunch With Norm…Facebook Group
• Lunch With Norm…Youtube
• Lunch With Norm…Instagram
• Lunch With Norm…Twitter
• Lunch With Norm…Apple Podcast

Follow our Host

• https://normanfarrar.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/lunchwithnorm
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/normanfarrar?originalSubdomain=ca
• https://twitter.com/normfarrarjr?lang=en
• https://www.tiktok.com/@normanfarrar/ 
• https://www.pinterest.ca/officialnormanfarrar/ 

Join the Conversation

Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section.  

Join our PLN

Join our discussion network here!:

• Lunch With Norm…Facebook

Check Out More Lunch With Norm…. Programming

• lunchwithnorm.com/ 

Need a Presenter?

• normanfarrar.com