Dear Amazon，
We are sorry to have your letter to inform us that our seller account on Amazon.com has been suspended because of the complaints of inauthenticity.
Complaint type: Inauthentic
When we purchased items, the supplier did not provide us with invoices, so we cannot provide invoices, sorry.
We have spent a lot of time in thorough investigations on our suppliers, shipping carriers and employees. We found the following root causes, took some corrective actions and made some plans to prevent such problems from happening again.
Roots Causes:
1, We listed the products without brand authorization.
We sold the generic items under branded“Pokemon” items without authorization.
2, Listings and items we sold were not consistent exactly on colors and materials.
The items we sold had some differences with the listings on Amazon. We got the images from supplier. However, The game cards and product packaging boxes that they provided had little difference from the images on colors and materials. The quality control department did not realized the differences and the salesman who was responsible for our Amazon business did not update our products promptly. After receiving your notice, we checked all the details on items and listings carefully and then found that the colors and materials had some minor differences.
3, Suppliers lied to us on brand authorizations and provided us products with high defect rate.
(1)The suppliers lied to us that they had got the brand authorization. However, when we asked them to provide the letter of authorization, they could not do as what they had promised.
(2)The products they provided had serious quality problems. We inspected 50% of the products they offered. However, from the complaints and reviews of our customers we found that this was far from enough. The quality and color of the game card are flawed.
4, New employees listed the unauthorized products personally without careful investigation.
Without enough investigations on brand and suppliers, the employees listed the products on Amazon in a hurry.
During the graduation season, we recruited a large number of newly graduated employees. These newly graduated employees had very specialized knowledge but lack sufficient knowledge of the company's policies and Amazon's policies. In our usual work, we also over-pursued profits and performance, but ignored the most important Amazon policy. These employees try their best to increase sales and improve performance, and we lack sufficient constraints and training, which leads to easy violation of Amazon's rules.We now recognized this and made some corrective improvements. We hope this would never be too late.
5, Unprofessional quality control
We had some negative reviews from our customers on product quality problems. We had to admit that we did not build strict quality control system. We only tested 50% of all the products randomly once we received them from suppliers. We could not find the quality problems before shipping which caused complaints on products quality and inaccurate listing description.
Actions we have taken:
1, We learned Amazon policies carefully.
“Products offered for sale on Amazon must be authentic. The sale of counterfeit products is strictly prohibited. Failure to abide by this policy may result in loss of selling privileges, funds being withheld, and destruction of inventory in our possession”
The above polices were clearly stated on Amazon sellercentral. It was very important for our sellers to know Amazon policies well. If we know Amazon policies well enough before, we would never make such mistakes.
We organized three salons on learning Amazon polices. The topics are:
- Amazon Anti-Counterfeiting Policy Amazon & Amazon Intellectual Property Policy
- Prohibited seller activities and actions
- How to be a great Amazon seller
2, we made compensations and apologized to customers with dissatisfaction
We are truly grateful and understand that Amazon have suspended our selling privilege at this time so that we could stop and spend a lot of time learning Amazon's policies and ideas and to know the reasons for Amazon’s success. This would be very important and helpful once we reinstate the account and have the privilege of selling on Amazon again.
We strongly agree with the concept of Amazon's Customer Comes First. We contacted the customers with dissatisfaction and complaints, made sincere apology, refunded them fully or resent the new replacement. We had tried a lot in minimizing the negative impact on our company and Amazon.
3, we have deleted all the listings in our account .
We checked all listings we sold and deleted all listings in our account. As to the inventories, we destroyed all products with quality problems in our warehouse. We reported the authenticity problem to local Industrial and commercial administrative departments to stop the producing of inauthentic products. We will never sell any products have risks of authenticity and of low quality.
4, we improved managements on suppliers and set strict standards for inbound and outbound inspections.
We stopped cooperation with unqualified suppliers promptly. We signed new contracts with our suppliers and reached agreements on quality control. We learned the lesson from the inauthenticity and set new inspection standards for all the products inbound and outbound of our warehouse. We required suppliers to provide qualified authorizations and meet the new standards with regular supervision and inspection.
5, We improved our quality control department.
- Stricter quality control rules are set for products from manufacturing to shipping.
We used to check 50% of the products from the same batch of products. From November of this year, we improved the standards to 100%. Every piece of product shipping into our warehouse should be strictly checked. Any difference or defects on color, material, size, and packages would never be accepted to ship into our warehouse.
- We increased two employees to our Quality Control Department. We would pay more attention to the quality control of our company. Quality is the lifeblood of a company, especially for a company selling goods on Amazon. The two new employees were set to supervise the quality control process of suppliers. The products from our suppliers should under our supervision from design to delivery.
6, we strengthened employee management
- We strengthened employee management and fired saleswomen and product managers who were responsible for listing the non-compliant products.
- We strengthened our training for our employees. Lectures or salons on learning Amazon policies would be organized weekly.
What we will do to prevent similar problems from happening:
1, Strengthen awareness and management on intellectual property rights such as brands and patents
- We will register our own trademark and increase sales of our own branded products in the future. For non-owned brand products, suppliers are required to provide legal and valid brand authorizations and complete quality management documents.
- We will hire professional teams who are specialized in laws on international intellectual property to help and supervise our daily work.
2, Only cooperate with high quality suppliers
We will continue to establish a more professional supplier management system on product quality, delivery capabilities and other parts related. We will pick out high quality suppliers for long-term cooperation. And we will stop buying goods from suppliers without authorization and qualifications and suppliers with high defect rates.
3, Build Quality Control department
We need to set up QC department who will conduct strict quality control on every product we sell on the aspects of the production of products, shipping procedures and inventory storage. We must ensure that the products received by our customers are of sound quality.
4, Strengthen staff training
We will train our employees regularly on Amazon policies and international laws on intellectual property protection to make sure that we can strictly obey Amazon polices and related laws.
5, Improve our customer service.
We will take the most sincere attitude to treat every customer and try our best to meet the customers’ requirements and improve the customers’ confidence and loyalty to our products & Amazon.
By the way, we attached the invoice as your requirement.
All in a word, we have recognized how stupid mistakes we made before. We thank Amazon for discovering and pointing out our mistakes before things get worse. During this time, we conducted an in-depth investigation of the entire company's business. We have made many corrective actions and made many plans from the company's strategic level to prevent similar problems from happening again.
We cherish the opportunity of selling on Amazon very much. A reinstate of our selling privilege would be highly appreciated! Please consider it carefully and give us another chance. We will definitely strive to be a good Amazon seller in the future.
Best regards,
