Quick answer. To get a suspended Amazon seller account back, open Account Health in Seller Central, select Reactivate your account, and submit the appeal Amazon asks for. Amazon says to expect a reply within two days. The appeals that get accounts back identify the root cause of every violation in the notice, list the corrective actions already completed with dates, and attach unedited evidence for every ASIN under review.
Amazon’s help pages use the word deactivation. Sellers say suspension. The path back is the same either way, and it runs through one screen, the Account Health page for the store where you sell. What changes from case to case is what the appeal has to prove, and that is set by the reason in your notice.
What a Suspension Means and What Triggers It
Amazon’s appeal page states that sellers must adhere to its performance metrics and policies, and that failure to do so may lead to temporary deactivation of the account, removal of listings, or limits on the use of the Merchant Fulfilled Network. Those are three different outcomes. A listing removal leaves the account selling. A limit on seller-fulfilled privileges can leave FBA running. A full deactivation stops sales across the store and usually puts disbursements on hold. Read your notice to find which one you have before you write a word.
The Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement sets the legal basis. Amazon may suspend or terminate an account immediately if it determines that you materially breached the agreement and failed to cure within 7 days of a cure notice, that the account may be used for deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity, that your use of the services has harmed or may harm other sellers, customers or Amazon, that your Account Health Rating has fallen below the published deactivation threshold, or that the law requires it. Amazon commits to notify you of the reason and any options to appeal, unless it believes that disclosure would hinder an investigation of deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity.
In practice, suspensions fall into three groups. Each one calls for a different appeal.
Performance failures
Order Defect Rate is the most common performance trigger. Amazon defines ODR as the percentage of orders in a 60-day period with negative feedback (1- and 2-star seller reviews), an A-to-z Guarantee claim, or a credit card chargeback. Amazon requires ODR below 1%, and it applies only to seller-fulfilled orders. An ODR above 1% may result in suspension of your Fulfilled by Merchant selling privileges or deactivation of the affected offers. Not every claim counts. Claims where Amazon finds you were not at fault, claims denied to the buyer, claims the buyer withdrew, and fraud chargebacks do not count toward ODR. Pull the ODR report from Account Health before you appeal, because the order-level detail tells you whether the defects come from one carrier, one product or one fulfillment site.
Policy violations
Intellectual property complaints, inauthentic or counterfeit reports, restricted products, review manipulation and code of conduct breaches land here. Amazon tracks most of them through the Account Health Rating, a score from 0 to 1,000. Green, 200 to 1,000, means the account is not at risk of deactivation under the policies in the score. Yellow, 100 to 199, means it is at risk. Red, 99 or lower, means the account is eligible for deactivation or already deactivated. Each violation costs points based on severity, and Amazon uses four severity levels (critical, high, medium and low). Critical violations can lead to immediate enforcement.
Account integrity issues
The seller code of conduct requires accurate information at all times and allows one Seller Central account per region unless you have a legitimate business need and every account is in good standing. Amazon also states that, regardless of your Account Health Rating, it may deactivate an account immediately if it suspects fraudulent, deceptive, illegal or otherwise harmful activity. Verification failures, related account findings and mismatched business details sit in this group. They are fixed with documents and facts, not with a Plan of Action about operations.
How Amazon Reviews an Appeal
An appeal is read against the specific violation and the specific ASINs in your notice. The reviewer is checking whether the facts in your appeal match Amazon’s records and whether the evidence closes the gap Amazon identified. Amazon’s appeal questionnaire guidance tells you what that reviewer wants, and it is short. Be clear, concise and factual. Explain all issues and their root causes. Include supporting evidence for all products under review. Highlight the parts of documents that matter.
Amazon’s standard for reinstatement is also stated plainly. It may reinstate an account when the seller has addressed the root causes of the violation and put measures in place to prevent it from happening again. The appeal has to show both. A list of intentions without completed actions fails the first test. A list of completed actions without a working process fails the second.
Two parts of the review process shape your strategy.
- Requests for more information. If Amazon replies asking for more, the request names the gap. You answer it through View Appeal on the Account Health page, and your next submission should answer that request and nothing else.
- Explanation instead of appeal. If you believe the deactivation was an error, Amazon’s appeal page directs you to the instructions on Account Health for providing an explanation. Use that route only when you have evidence of the error, such as order records that contradict the defect or a system setting that produced a false metric.
What Amazon Asks For by Suspension Type
The reason in your notice decides what the appeal must contain. The table matches common reasons to what Amazon’s policies and support pages say to provide.
| Suspension reason | What Amazon looks for in the appeal | Amazon policy |
|---|---|---|
| Performance metrics (ODR, late shipment, cancellations) | Root causes of the defects, the operational changes made with dates, and the measures that keep the metric under target | Order Defect Rate and the appeal questionnaire guidance |
| Intellectual property complaint | Documentation proving your right to sell, such as authorization letters or invoices from authorized distributors, or a retraction from the rights owner | Intellectual Property Policy |
| Inauthentic or counterfeit report | Invoices from manufacturers or authorized distributors showing the supply chain for the flagged products. Pricing can be removed, but documents cannot be otherwise edited | Anti-Counterfeiting Policy |
| Restricted product | Evidence you addressed the root cause and put measures in place to prevent recurrence | Restricted Products policy |
| Review manipulation | Amazon prohibits any attempt to influence or inflate ratings, feedback or reviews, including incentives and selective solicitation | Seller code of conduct and customer product reviews policies |
| Related or multiple accounts | A legitimate business justification for each account, with supporting documentation, and every account in good standing | Seller code of conduct |
Amazon’s code of conduct gives three examples of a legitimate business justification for a second account. You own multiple brands and maintain separate businesses for each. You manufacture products for two distinct and separate companies. You were recruited for an Amazon program that requires separate accounts. If your case does not fit a reason of that kind, the appeal should explain the link Amazon found and show what you did about it, not argue that the accounts are unrelated without proof.
How to Appeal a Suspended Amazon Account, Step by Step
Amazon publishes the submission steps. The work that decides the outcome happens before step one.
Before you open the appeal form
- Save the full notification and every Performance Notification tied to it. Copy the violation names, the policy cited and the list of ASINs at the bottom of the notice.
- Open Account Health and record each violation shown, its status and whether it affects the Account Health Rating.
- Pull the data behind the violation. For ODR that is the ODR report. For authenticity it is the order history, supplier invoices and inventory records for each ASIN. For IP it is the complaint details, including the rights owner and complaint ID.
- Find the root cause inside your operation. Write down what failed, when it started and why your process did not catch it.
- Complete the fixes that can be completed now, and record the date of each one.
Submitting the appeal
- In Seller Central, go to Account Health.
- At the top of the page, select Reactivate your account.
- Follow the instructions to submit your appeal. Amazon may ask you to complete a questionnaire, acknowledge a violation, complete a quiz or provide supporting documents.
- Select Submit.
- Monitor your email for a decision. If Amazon asks for more information, select View Appeal from Account Health to send it.
For a listing removal rather than an account deactivation, Amazon’s path starts in the same place. Check the Product Policy Compliance tab first, then Manage Inventory for inactive listings, then Performance Notifications for removal details. You then either submit an appeal or edit the listing to comply. Offers removed for high rates of negative feedback, A-to-z claims or chargebacks are reactivated through the instructions under Other policy violations on the Account Health dashboard.
How to Write an Appeal Amazon Will Accept
Following Amazon’s own appeal guidance closely is the largest factor you control. We build every appeal against it line by line.
Be clear, concise and factual
Amazon asks sellers to focus on the facts and events that led to the issue rather than introducing the product, business or customer. It asks you to remove other questions and references to ongoing support cases, and to avoid emotive language. Years on the platform, sales volume and the number of employees who depend on the account do not answer the violation. Leave them out.
Explain every issue and its root cause
Amazon notes that some deactivations come from a combination of issues. It asks you to find the root causes, giving unverifiable suppliers, inventory management problems and quality control gaps as examples, and to describe the specific actions you took, including dates of changes and documentation. A root cause names a failure inside your business. “The supplier shipped bad units” is a description of the event. “We sent units to FBA without inspecting them against the listing” is the root cause, because it names the step that was missing.
Separate what is done from what is ongoing
We write corrective actions in the past tense with a date for each. We write preventive measures as a running process with an owner and a frequency. A reviewer reading “we will review suppliers” learns nothing. A reviewer reading “on March 4 we removed the two suppliers who could not provide manufacturer invoices, and our purchasing lead now checks each new supplier against the manufacturer’s authorized distributor list before the first order” can verify the first part and evaluate the second.
Support every ASIN under review
Amazon asks for supporting evidence for all products listed at the bottom of the original notification and reminds sellers to check the timeframe requested. Some products require invoices from the last 365 days. An appeal that covers eight of ten ASINs is incomplete, and incomplete appeals come back.
Highlight what matters in your documents
Amazon suggests circling or highlighting the most important parts of supporting documents, such as ASINs, supplier names or supplier terms. Match each invoice line to the ASIN it supports. If the invoice uses a supplier SKU or a product description instead of the ASIN, give the reviewer a short mapping so the connection is not left to guesswork.
Documents and Evidence That Carry Weight
The evidence must match the violation. Sending everything you have slows the review and can introduce documents that raise new questions.
- Supplier invoices. For authenticity and IP cases, Amazon’s support guidance points to invoices from manufacturers or authorized distributors that show the supply chain for the flagged products. Amazon allows you to remove pricing. Any other edit, or a misleading document, violates the Anti-Counterfeiting Policy and leads to enforcement against the account.
- Letters of authorization. Amazon’s Anti-Counterfeiting policy states that appeals typically require invoices or letters of authorization to show your right to sell the products. If the products are confirmed genuine, Amazon removes the enforcement claims from the account.
- Rights owner retractions. When an IP complaint was filed in error or the dispute was settled, a retraction sent by the rights owner to Amazon resolves the complaint at its source.
- Order and fulfillment records. For ODR and other performance cases, the order IDs, carrier tracking, handling time settings and customer messages tie each defect to a cause.
- Business records. For verification and multiple account cases, the documents Amazon names in the notice, plus records that show the business relationship behind any linked account.
Amazon’s Anti-Counterfeiting policy also states that Amazon does not pay sellers until it is confident customers received the authentic products they ordered, and that it may withhold payments if an account was used to sell inauthentic goods. That is why authenticity evidence affects both reinstatement and the release of funds.
Mistakes That Keep Accounts Suspended
Most rejected appeals fail on avoidable errors. These are the ones we see turn a short case into a long one.
- Editing documents. Changing quantities, dates, product names or supplier details on an invoice is a violation in its own right. Remove pricing if you need to. Change nothing else.
- Blaming customers, competitors or Amazon. Amazon asks for facts and root causes. Commentary about unfair buyers or rival sellers shows the reviewer that the cause inside your operation has not been found.
- Partial evidence. Supporting only some of the ASINs listed leaves the appeal incomplete.
- Resubmitting the same appeal. Sending the same text again with small wording changes does not answer the gap Amazon named. Read the response, fix the gap, then resubmit.
- Opening another account. The code of conduct states that if any of your accounts are not in good standing, Amazon may deactivate all of your selling accounts until all are in good standing. A new account opened to keep selling during a suspension is the fastest way to lose both.
- Ignoring repeat violations. Amazon states that the point value of a violation increases each time the same policy is violated, so repeats degrade the rating faster. Reaching the maximum number of repeat violations for a single policy in 180 days can put the account at immediate risk of deactivation, and for higher severity violations that maximum can be as low as two.
- Letting other people break the rules for you. The code of conduct lists allowing others to act on your behalf in a way that violates Amazon’s policies as an unfair activity. Agencies, repricers and review services you hire are your responsibility.
First-Time Versus Repeat Suspensions
A first suspension for a correctable operational failure is the most recoverable case. The appeal identifies one cause, shows the fix and shows the control. A metric failure with a clear cause and a fix already in place is usually straightforward to document.
A repeat case is read differently. If the account was reinstated before for the same policy, the earlier appeal promised a preventive measure that did not hold. The new appeal has to explain why the earlier control failed and what replaced it. Restating the original Plan of Action is the most common reason a repeat appeal fails. Amazon’s repeat violation rules also mean the threshold for enforcement is lower the second time, especially for higher severity policies.
Severity matters as much as history. Amazon describes critical violations as the most serious and states they can lead to immediate account enforcement. For suspected fraud, deceptive activity or the sale of counterfeit or stolen goods, the Business Solutions Agreement allows Amazon to permanently withhold payments, while offering an avenue to appeal the withholding decision. Successfully completing that appeal is required to be eligible for further disbursements. These cases need complete documentation from the first submission.
What happens to your funds and inventory during a suspension
The Business Solutions Agreement allows Amazon to withhold payments for as long as it determines related risks to Amazon or third parties persist. Where Amazon determines an account was used for deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity, it may withhold payments permanently, subject to an appeal of that decision. The Anti-Counterfeiting policy adds that inauthentic products in fulfillment centers may be disposed of at the seller’s expense. If FBA inventory is at stake, review the removal options in Seller Central and the dates in your notice before you decide how to handle stock.
US, EU and UK Differences
The appeal mechanics in Seller Central are the same across stores. The Account Health Rating is displayed separately for each store in which you sell, so a deactivation in one store does not always mean the same status in another. Check Account Health for every marketplace you operate in.
The legal notice rules differ. In the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, the platform to business regulation, requires an online marketplace to give a statement of reasons on a durable medium before or at the time it restricts or suspends a business user. For termination of the whole service, the statement must come at least 30 days before termination takes effect, with exceptions for legal obligations and for repeated infringement of the terms. The statement must name the specific facts or circumstances and the applicable ground. The business user must have the opportunity to clarify the facts through the provider’s internal complaint-handling system, and if the decision is revoked, the provider must reinstate the user without undue delay.
The United Kingdom kept the same rules after leaving the EU. The UK version of Regulation 2019/1150, published on legislation.gov.uk, still requires a statement of reasons at least 30 days before termination of the whole service, subject to the same kind of exceptions. For sellers in Amazon’s European stores, that means the notice itself should state the facts relied on. If it does not, ask Account Health Support for the specific facts before you write the appeal.
In the United States, the Business Solutions Agreement is the governing document. It commits Amazon to notify you of the reason and any options to appeal, with the investigation exception noted above, and it allows termination for convenience with 30 days’ advance notice.
Where to Get Help From Amazon
Professional sellers can contact Account Health Support through the Contact us or Call me now button on the Account Health page. You enter a phone number and a specialist calls back. Amazon says specialists can help you understand your metrics, address performance defects, listing deactivations and policy violations, and submit requested information to reinstate a deactivated account. The team is available 7 days a week, and the Contact us button is also available in the Amazon Seller app.
Amazon’s support FAQ also covers two situations sellers run into. If you cannot submit an appeal or the buttons are greyed out, try a different browser or clear your cache, try the Amazon Seller app, then contact Account Health Support. If you believe an Amazon system error caused the violation, such as incorrect handling times generating false late shipment defects, say so specifically and provide evidence of the error. If you do not understand why a violation was triggered, ask the specialist to explain the policy in detail. Write down what the specialist tells you, because it is often the clearest statement you will get of what the reviewer needs.
Amazon’s Account Health Rating policy also notes that when an account starts to degrade and becomes eligible for deactivation, Amazon may call you to offer personalized support. Keep the emergency contact phone number under Notification Preferences current so that call reaches you.
How to Prevent the Next Suspension
Reinstatement restores selling privileges. It does not reset the record of repeat violations within the 180-day window. The controls promised in the appeal need to run every week.
- Check Account Health on a schedule. Review the Account Health Rating and every open violation at least weekly for each store, and address the highest severity items first, as Amazon’s policy recommends.
- Keep ODR well under 1%. Work A-to-z claims and chargebacks as they arrive, request removal of feedback that meets Amazon’s removal criteria through Feedback Manager, and watch the order-level report for a single cause behind several defects.
- Source with paper. Buy from manufacturers or authorized distributors who issue invoices with your business name, the product description and quantities. File invoices by ASIN so you can answer a request for the last 365 days in one pass.
- Audit listings against restrictions. Check new products against Amazon’s restricted products and category approval requirements before you list them.
- Keep review requests neutral. Request feedback and reviews only in a neutral manner. Never offer incentives, ask only satisfied customers, or ask a buyer to change a review.
- Keep account information accurate. Update business details, bank information and contacts when they change, and document the business reason for any second account before you open it.
When to Bring in a Reinstatement Team
If your first appeal was rejected, if the notice covers several violation types, or if funds are being held, the appeal has to be built around the exact policy cited and every ASIN listed. Our Amazon suspension and reinstatement service writes the appeal and Plan of Action for you. If the suspension started with intellectual property complaints, our rights owner complaint service works on the complaints themselves. To keep a reinstated account healthy, see our Amazon account health maintenance service.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take Amazon to respond to a suspension appeal?
Amazon says to expect a reply to an account deactivation appeal within two days. If Amazon requests more information, the review continues after you submit it through View Appeal.
Can I get my Amazon seller account back after a suspension?
Many sellers do. Amazon may reinstate an account when the seller has addressed the root causes and put measures in place to prevent recurrence. The outcome depends on the violation, its severity, your history and the evidence you can provide.
What is the difference between a suspension and a deactivation on Amazon?
Sellers use the words interchangeably. Amazon’s help pages mostly use deactivation, and the appeal path is the same, the Account Health page.
Can I open a new Amazon account if mine is suspended?
Amazon allows a second account only for a legitimate business need and only when all accounts are in good standing. If any account is not in good standing, Amazon may deactivate all of them.
What documents does Amazon accept in an appeal?
It depends on the violation. For authenticity and IP issues, Amazon points to invoices from manufacturers or authorized distributors and letters of authorization. Pricing can be removed from invoices, but no other edits are allowed.
Get Your Account Back
A suspension notice tells you what Amazon wants to see. Submit your case for a free assessment of your notice, or book a consultation before you send your appeal.
Related guides cover Amazon Business Verification Suspension and Blocked ASIN on Amazon.
See also Suspended for Online Arbitrage or Dropshipping With Funds Held.
Get Help With Your Amazon Case
Our Amazon suspension team can take the case from here. You can also see all our marketplace suspension services.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central, Appeal an account deactivation or listing removal
- Amazon Seller Central, Complete an appeal questionnaire to reinstate selling privileges
- Amazon Seller Central, Account Health Rating program policy
- Amazon Seller Central, Order Defect Rate
- Amazon Seller Central, Selling policies and seller code of conduct
- Amazon Seller Central, Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement
- Amazon Seller Central, Intellectual Property Policy
- Amazon Seller Central, Amazon Anti-Counterfeiting policy
- Amazon Seller Central, Additional information and resources about the Restricted Products policy
- Amazon Seller Central, Customer product reviews policies
- Amazon Seller Central, Account health support FAQ
- EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 on fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services
- legislation.gov.uk, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, Article 4 (UK version)
