Amazon can be a real challenge and at times almost impossible to work with. After pondering all the painful problems they create for sellers  over the past few months, I  have brainstormed ideas and ways to help solve these problems.

If you have been deleted, blocked, removed, and seemingly treated unfairly by Amazon, believe me, I know how you feel. With the rush to e-commerce created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon has enacted extreme measures to try to prevent fraud, bad products, and of course strengthen its own products to gain maximum profit.

With all that said, however, it’s still a must for many supplement brands. Amazon sales for many companies are 100% to 1000% greater than sales on their own brand’s websites. Amazon has the traffic. 50% of all searches now start on Amazon. Love it or hate it, Amazon is a force of nature and essential to many brands.

Removing a blocked ASIN

If you are having issues on Amazon you need to first determine what they did to your ASIN. One way to find out is to try to upload inventory to the product. If you see a message that the ASIN must be removed after trying to do an inventory replenishment, it means they have blocked the product at the ASIN level. If that is the case, and the product is set as FBA, here are a few tips to try to get it back online.

  • Create a new product using the product file uploader ( it’s an excel sheet )
  • Where it asks you for Product ID place your product ASIN as the product ID
  • In the Product ID Type manually enter in ASIN as the type. It’s not an option but it will work.
  • Keep the new product as FBM. You should now have one FBM copy and one FBA copy of the same ASIN.
  • Call Amazon, and tell them that you understand they have product restrictions on the ASIN selling FBA, so ask them to unblock the FBM ASIN. This will many times lead to the FBA one also being unblocked.

When dealing with Amazon keep in mind that with their enormous size and growth coupled with  massive  leverage,  they are prone to cause chaos. No one knows the rules it seems, and each employee will give you a different answer. It’s all about escalation and small steps at this point. If they tell you they will unblock something, even if it’s something you think you don’t need, let them do it. It’s essential that you keep calling, keep asking, and keep making some progress.

Getting Ungated For The Supplements Category

You probably like many, have already done this. Incredibly Amazon is asking many brands to resubmit all the lab documents they initially requested when you set up your account. This has been a big issue for many as the lab they used to manufacture the product has no idea what Amazon is looking for, or worse, they just refuse to help and provide the needed docs.

The main issue here, as you may know already, is that Amazon is asking for things that don’t exist in the real world. They want to see your lab’s name on your product, but no one in their right mind would even do that. You need your brand’s name and address on your product, not the labs.

This is a delicate subject, but one which thankfully I know how to solve. Feel free to contact me for more information on this or if you have any other issues facing your brand on Amazon.