Please, do me (and yourself) a huge favor: stop adding VAs to your Amazon Seller
By Chris McCabe · July 24, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Please, do me (and yourself) a huge favor: stop adding VAs to your Amazon Seller Central account and Brand Registry left and right, if you have no idea what they'll break while they're in there.
You'll be left to fix it, too. They won't be able to do much to help in most cases.
And, also, please stop hiring those services period if you do little to no due diligence or compliance vetting. You get what you pay for, right?
I don't know how many brands have contacted me about how many services they hired who got their accounts suspended, brand registry revoked, listing violations piled up or other acts of internal sabotage.
Yes, we understand how attractive cheap labor can be for a "running lean" business in ecommerce. No, we don't think it's worth the risk...
What are we seeing?
1 -- VA's have their own seller accounts blocked, and often not reinstated. Often, that means sign-in slip ups connecting your account to theirs, triggering misunderstandings, or worse, full suspensions due to related accounts.
2 -- A lack of vetting of service providers, or the VA's themselves, for illicit or bad behavior, or even simply ignorance of Amazon listing rules.
3 -- Many service providers offer incentives to their VAs based on brand growth or ASIN-level sales, which leads to several practices considered outside the lines of Amazon policies.
Think ASIN variation creation, bad ASIN merges, even review manipulation schemes, all based on a promise that they have "Done this with other people" and nothing bad went down.
4 --Whatever you do, please don't tell an erroneously hired VA "You got me suspended, now it's your job to get me reinstated." The worst appeals for reinstatement we see are done by VAs, or more accurately, bad AI.
5 -- Lastly, please don't let your VAs buy from competitors and leave them bad reviews. I'm not sure why brands think that won't be caught.
Happy to talk through any of the above points, if there's confusion on how those behaviors lead to trouble. Remember, Amazon loves to use "dispute only" appeals paths now, where you have to prove they were wrong to flag you, or else.
That's awfully hard to do if you're unaware of the actions by your VAs, or if they ran fast and loose with compliance or policy guidelines.