I worked inside Amazon Seller Performance and merchant risk investigations for y
By Chris McCabe · November 13, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I worked inside Amazon Seller Performance and merchant risk investigations for years in Seattle, taking down Amazon accounts while also evaluating reinstatement appeals for their fitness and acceptance. I saw the nature of the work from all sides.
Then, I launched ecommerceChris a bit after leaving Amazon, to help sellers "think like Amazon" or at least have some understanding around why appeal denial decisions were made. How do accounts get suspended in the first place?
Most sellers I met didn't seem to know given all the opaque messaging.
I worked long hours on extremely long days in Q4, from late October or early November, right through mid-December or later. Like right now!
Here is an uncomfortable internal reality every brand needs to understand during their peak holiday sales:
Account investigators rarely appear to get reprimanded for improperly denying an appeal. If they do, it's clearly not in a meaningful way to change how they work. Or, they've already assumed they'll be let go.
It may mean everything to you, but they see dozens or hundreds of them a day, and most of the time you have to believe they're just numb to it all.
A routine, baseless denial may stem from numbness to the pain you have.
Also, who wants to get into trouble by reinstating you, only to see you go right back to breaking the rules? It's much safer to deny you, and act like they're being careful.
If you go down the tubes, that's on them. You could have stayed deactivated if they hadn't let you back on.
Since their incentives are to deny, it's built right into the system, Amazon knows that will mean more appeals, of course. A lot more emails, more escalations, more LinkedIn posts and more of everything time consuming.
Strategy-wise, you have to grasp THEIR incentives in this world:
Staff is normally measured on strict IPH—Investigations Per Hour.
During Q4, queues swell with thousands of desperate sellers fighting to get their top-earning ASINs back online.
Denying an appeal takes roughly 60 to 90 seconds, on a good day. They spot one generic paragraph, hit one button, and you're done for the day.
Truly examining a thorough appeal, and checking back-end annotations, reviewing all invoices, and taking personal ownership of a reinstatement decision takes real time and real risk.
Not everyone is built to do that quickly, and most of them cannot be trained to do it that way, at all.
Their default setting isn’t "let’s help this seller navigate the appeals process." Their default setting is rejection until we see real punishment for "auto-denial" styled work. Denials are the norm.
Don't retreat to emotional fluff, excuses, or template language just because you can't think of anything else. Don't hand an overworked reviewer the exact excuse they needed to reject you and move on.
In Q4, you get maybe 30 seconds of an investigator's attention, make your opening sentence impossible to dismiss.