It’s a common problem for Amazon FBA sellers, particularly those who source via retail arbitrage or online arbitrage:
- You’re restricted from selling a brand on Amazon.
- You apply to sell the brand.
- You gain approval to sell the brand (YAY!).
- You buy inventory from that brand to send to the FBA warehouse.
- You may even sell some units of that brand’s inventory.
- And then bam…you become restricted AGAIN from selling that brand.
It’s a frustrating situation, to say the least, and one that leads to a lot of questions. What happened? Will I be able to sell the inventory I’ve already sent in to FBA? Am I going to lose money because of this? What should I do now?
In the rest of this blog post I want to walk you through this situation and show you how you can increase your chances of being re-approved to sell a brand if you become re-restricted. (Please forgive all the “re”s – it’s an odd situation, and it calls for odd terminology.)
Why the restrictions?
One thing we need to understand about this situation is why Amazon has these restrictions in the first place. Typically these brands are restricted for several reasons:
- The brand wants to protect itself from counterfeits. In some cases, a brand will allow sellers to become unrestricted if they have 6 months of experience at selling on Amazon, as a way to show that they’re not selling counterfeit items.
- The brand wants to protect its brand reputation. Brands are very concerned that their customers are getting top-rate performance from the sellers they deal with, so the brands will have their items restricted to make sure only sellers with experience and good seller metrics are allowed to sell their brand. Brands can choose a certain threshold for various seller metrics, and only sellers who meet their requirements will get approval to sell the brand.
Why do sellers become re-restricted?
If brands have these requirements for gaining approval to sell on Amazon, why is it that some sellers find themselves re-restricted after they’ve already gained approval and been selling that brand? There are a couple of reasons this may happen.
Your seller metrics may have lowered. If your seller metrics fall below the brand’s requirements for selling their items, you may lose your approval to sell the brand. There’s no way for sure to see behind the curtain to know exactly which metrics are affected and what you need to do to improve your metrics and regain approval – but you can look at your overall metrics and see if you have areas that need improvement. Perhaps you need to improve your feedback score. Perhaps you need to do a better job of responding to customer messages in a timely manner. Perhaps you’ve received an excessive number of returns on a particular ASIN.
The brand may have raised their minimum standards. On the flip side, the problem might not be that your metrics have changed, but that the requirements have changed. If a brand decides to tighten their requirements, your metrics may no longer meet their standards, and you could lose your approval. This change might be permanent, or it might be temporary. For instance, some brands might tighten their requirements only for the Q4 selling season, and then come January they’ll go back to their previous standards.
How can sellers get re-approved for a re-restricted brand?
So back to our original problem. You’ve sent in to FBA some inventory that becomes restricted to you as a seller, even though you previously had been approved to sell it. Now your inventory is showing as inactive status, and you can’t sell it. What do you do?
Improve your seller metrics. Make sure you use the Amazon Seller app on your phone to immediately answer emails from customers.- Work to improve your feedback score. First, make sure you’re providing great customer service and sending in quality inventory to Amazon. But also, you can use a service like Feedback Genius (from Seller Labs) to send an email to customers asking for honest feedback about you as a seller for their purchase.
- Reduce your return rate. You need to work hard to find out why items are being returned and what you need to do to reduce that rate of return. Do you need to improve the product page? Is there something wrong in the product description? Is there a problem with the item itself? Are you sending in items as new that aren’t truly in new condition? Do what it takes to make sure customers won’t need to return items they buy from you.
- Gain more selling experience. Sometimes all you can do is wait and gain more time as an FBA seller. Sometimes it just takes time for your selling account to become older and have more metrics before you can get re-approved.
It takes some effort to keep tabs on these restrictions and reapply for approval in the future, but it’s worthwhile to take the time to reopen applications and see if the situation has changed for you as a seller. It’s frustrating when these re-restrictions happen, and yes, it does sometimes involve making choices about whether to wait it out or remove the inventory to store at your house or sell on another platform.
The key is to focus on what you CAN do in this situation. If you can’t automatically get approval, you can still focus on improving your metrics or growing in patience as you wait for longevity in your account. If you focus only on what you can’t do, you will miss out on so many other opportunities to grow your Amazon FBA business and make profits.
Have you ever found yourself in this situation before? Did you ever try to get re-approved to sell the brand? How did things go for you? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below.
*This post was updated for 2023
Brand restrictions can be super confusing, but when it comes to selling on Amazon, easily the most misunderstood aspect is sales rank. What is a good sales rank? What is a bad sales rank? What does a sales rank of zero mean? What do I do with sales rank for sub-categories?
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Have a similar situation.
Was selling a pancake mix this year, and sold dozens of them. About a month ago, the few I still had left in FBA went stranded. Reason was “request approval”.
Tried to do that (didn’t have to from that brand originally when I first listed these), and was denied because I’m gated out of “dietary supplements”. A pancake mix is a dietary supplement? It’s still listed in the correct category of “Grocery & Gourmet Food›Pantry Staples›Cooking & Baking›Baking Mixes›Pancakes & Waffles”. It’s not listed in a dietary supplement category.
Wonder if you have any suggestions on how to overcome this? I doubt I’ll get ungated in dietary, and I’m only doing RA anyway, not wholesale, so no invoices of quantities will become available.
I’m sure a solution/suggestions might provide some insight for others.
I would open a ticket with Amazon to have them investigate why this item is labeled that way.
Check for ungating courses – prefer the ones where you get the wholesale supplier contact, so you can form the order (and get the invoice) manually.
Stephen,
I always appreciate your posts; so thank you! I have a question: How do you know (for sure) that re-restrictions have to do with seller metrics? For example, I was restricted for Nerf products, and then I got approved. I was about to purchase some Nerf products on clearance, but Scoutify 2 indicated that I was restricted, and it turned out to be true (for all Nerf products). I have been doing Amazon FBA exclusively (no dings for MF, etc.) for 4 years, and my feedback score has always been 100%. Why would Nerf (or Amazon) restrict me again? Did Nerf suddenly change? I know you don’t have all the facts, but I would appreciate your input. TIA.
It could be many possible situations. Maybe the the brand decided to only let sellers who have 5+ years of selling experience sell that item but you only have 4 years. Maybe the brand decided that only sellers with a wholesale relationship with the brand are allowed to sell that brand on Amazon. Hope this helps in your understanding.
Have a similar thing happening now. Got approved in Frozen with my invoice, sent my product into FC, FC checks it all in, then strands it saying I now need Frozen Movie approval and photos of the product I do not have in my posession. After weeks customer service had a FC worker go to the product on the pallet and take photos, emailed them to me. And now the Approval people say the photos are not clear enough. 6 weeks later, multiple re-attempts at applications explaining the drama and my product is still stranded…. any tips would be appreciated….
I had the same thing happen – I was selling a Frozen product, and got gated out all of a sudden! I didn’t have pictures as I send the inventory directly from supplier to FBA. So I ended up creating a removal request to send a sample to my home. I took the pictures just with my phone and provided them to the ticket I’d opened, and was ungated shortly after. Your mileage may vary but it worked for me.
Stephen,
I always love your posts. I recently got into a situation where my product had no problem with listing or selling on Amz. However, not long ago, I was informed that my products were stranded and that the products fell into a luxury beauty category. Amz doesn’t even let anyone except for one seller, who I think is the manufacture, to sell. Now, we are stuck with more than 100 units that we paid for shipping + prep fees and removal order fee to come up soon. Any suggestions on where we can resell them? also, do you have any experience with situation like this? Now it makes it scary to resell products where the manufacturer can one day decide to monopoly the whole category and kick us out of the market after purchasing their products. Thank you.
Sincerely,
I’m sorry that this happened to you. It really stinks. If I were you, I wold try to sell these items on eBay to see if I can still make a profit, or at least get some of the capital back in order to use that money on other inventory items you are approved to sell.
Great info. As always. I wondered if I could get your opinion on something,if you don’t mind. I was going over some of Amazon’s rules and procedures etc. and found out that Amazon uses someone else’s inventory to fill my order if its closer to that address. I am extremely finicky and picky about my prepping. I always go above and beyond to make sure all of my inventory is and will remain completely safe and unbroken until it arrives to it’s destination. Not everyone is like this, if you get my drift. I feel like this could cause a problem with my performance metrics if the customer became unhappy with something that arrived broken etc. This doesn’t seem fair. Anyone have an opinion on this.
This is called stickerless commingled inventory and not all sellers have this activated. More on stickerless commingled inventory in point #3 on the following post: https://www.fulltimefba.com/the-riskiest-strategies-for-amazon-fba-and-why-we-dont-teach-them/.
Now, there is a rumor that even if a seller is not signed up for stickerless commingled, that Amazon will still sometimes ship someone else’s inventory item even though you get the sale. This is not proven, but just a rumor. If this is the case, then Amazon keeps track of this and knows that the item was someone else’s and won’t ding your account if something goes wrong (like a used sold as new).
Other times, Amazon loses your inventory, and then finds it later assuming it’s yours when it might be someone else’s. Again, Amazon keeps track of this and knows that the item might have been someone else’s and won’t ding your account if something goes wrong.
Overall, if you grade your items well, you’ll be ok in the long run.
Want to share a funny, although frustating Amazon story.
I went through the applicaton process for Moroccanoil and got approved. Of course, I bought product and when I tried to send them in, they said I needed to edit the listing. I was told to jump through a bunch of hoops (which I did) including, editing the listing, deleting the listing, relisting the product, etc. After going back and forth with seller customer service to fix this “technical issue” I got a response saying that I was not approved to sell Moroccanoil.
This was via the same case that I was oriignall approved through.
Face palm
This isn’t great. All of these YouTube experts giving general advice about a very complex issue. Amazon discourages people doing retail arbitrage. Businesses that have relationships with manufacturers paying 50% retail; don’t want you going to a wholesaler and getting products for 30% or less. Even if you do get ungated, invoice from a reputable wholesaler, etc. You then buy more and more and make a good profit for a few months. Then someone comes along and calls themselves a “brand owner”. May not even be the manufacturer; but knows how to keep only certain people on listings (for a FEE). Kicks everybody else off claiming counterfit or inauthentic items. Now you get restricted and Amazon tells you to ask the new unscrupulous “Brand owner “if you are allowed to sell the same authentic items you were just selling.. The new brand owner just wants the name of your supplier so that they can keep you restricted; buy the products themselves, and make the money. Amazon/Amazon FBA isn’t an easy money making game. The new policies on Amazon have many veteran sellers treading very carefully. What used to be a 6 figure business can turn into a 2 figure business very quickly. Huge losses, lots of inventory stuck at the office or at FBA. You guys need to come up with real solutions and not spew dreams on youTube!. You guys get is ad revenue from Google, congrats. The people watching this are at risk and will bear the heavy financial losses or lose their Amazon accounts if foolish enough to take your advice.
Sounds like you have a lot of opinions on this topic. You’re right, it’s hard to give advice on YouTube about complex problems, definitely agree. We’re doing the best we can on such a big platform to help as many people as possible, and then we try to work individually with people to solve their specific problems.
For the record, our website has never used ads, so we get no ad revenue for this blog. We’ve also never turned on monetization for our YouTube channel, so we don’t get ad revenue that way either. That business model of using Google ads and hoping for clicks and views just isn’t for us. Guess we’re missing out on a lot of the money we could be making from Google.