Episode 85: Avoiding Common Amazon Issues with C.J. Rosenbaum The Amazon Sellers Attorney

My guest today is C.J. Rosenbaum. C.J. is a lawyer who specializes in helping Amazon sellers reinstate their accounts with Amazon. Having an issue with Amazon can be a real headache. Unfortunately, issues will come up for any seller at any time. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, there will be complaints that Amazon will have to address. That is where C.J. comes in to help you know your rights and basically give you someone in your corner.

On today’s episode, C.J. tells us about the 3 most common issues Amazon sellers deal with when their accounts are suspended. He also tells us how to fight back.

Here are today’s conversation points:

• How C.J. and I met.
• Why having a lawyer through the Amazon process is a good idea.
• The top 3 issues for Amazon sellers.
• What does Amazon mean by “inauthentic?”
• How to fight an “inauthentic” claim.
• What is intellectual property and how to approach your accuser.
• How to disprove a “used sold as new” claim.
• How arbitration can help Amazon sellers.
• When to use arbitration.

If you find yourself in need of C.J.’s services visit www.amazonsellerslawyer.com. His email is CJ@AmazonSellersLawyer.com or you can call the office at 1-877-9-SELLER.

Remember I will be speaking at Global Sources this year. Global Sources will be during October, and if you have plans to go, you will receive a discount on your ticket by using Ecom Crew’s special discount code (3ec50).

Today’s episode is sponsored by Stamped.io, check out their services if you need help with your reviews in your Shopify store. We use them and have been very pleased with the results.

Resources Mentioned Today:

Amazon

Amazon Sellers’ Lawyer

Global Sources

Stamped.io

If you have any questions or anything you’d like us to discuss on the podcast you can now email us directly at ecomcrew.com!  Just send those emails to support@ecomcrew.com. Also, we would really appreciate if you would leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening!

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to this episode of the EcomCrew podcast. This is going to be a pre recorded episode. I’m going to be doing some travelling over the next couple of months and getting these pre-recorded episodes in. So not sure exactly what episode number this is going to be at, but here it is nonetheless. Just a reminder, the EcomCrew Podcast is sponsored by Stamped.io. Check them out if you ever need reviews for your Shopify store. Today I’m actually going to have a guest on with me which we don’t do all that often here, but when I find a good guest I love being on the podcast, we love doing that.

And the guest today is going to be C.J. from Amazon Sellers’ Lawyer. I met him at Global Sources last year in October, and we just really hit it off. I mean he’s just a really smart guy. Normally I don’t like talking to lawyers and I certainly don’t like talking about Amazon suspensions, but if you are going to be prudent in your business and you do sell on Amazon, these are good things to know. And C.J. is just a cool guy.

I’m from the North East originally and he’s from New York, and we just kind of had this instant camaraderie and it was cool. We talked for like 90 minutes and I actually left, I left China just in a much better place after talking to him. Because one of the things I really worried about more than anything else in my business is Amazon shutting my account down for whatever reason. And as I was talking to C.J., we don’t do anything to deserve this.

It’s not like we are doing any in the crucial sense. But maybe we do something that we don’t know is bad, like at one point we were sending multiple follow up emails for instance, and Amazon came down at a bunch of sellers about that. So sometimes it’s things that you think you are doing good but you could be doing something against their terms of service and still get yourself in trouble. But we certainly don’t tiptoe into the black hat or grey hat waters on purpose. So I’ve rambled on about that enough. Let me bring C.J. in with just a real quick introduction.

C.J. as I mentioned, he is based out of the New York area. C.J.’s firm was founded doing other stuff, but at the time Amazon sellers had nothing else to do. Only one option really for getting their account reinstated which was basically using non-lawyers that didn’t really have the education and experience and resources needed to defend clients against the big old, bad Amazon, right? And the consultants just really didn’t have an obligation to maintain privacy and all the other things that lawyers do. So I think it’s going to be a great talk. And without further ado, C.J. man, welcome to the podcast.

C.J.: Hey, thank you very much, I’m really happy to be on. I really appreciate it.

Mike: Like I said man, it is a pleasure meeting you at Global Sources, and we are both going to be speaking there this year. So we will get a chance to catch up again and commiserate on Amazon horror stories. So yeah man, the main thing I want to talk to you about today is really just helping our listeners stay out of trouble. And then obviously if they do get in trouble who they should be going to, and my pick would be you obviously, and I know it sounds self-serving since have you on the podcast. But I think by the time people get done listening to this they will understand why. So let’s kind of dig right in to let’s say the top three reasons why people end up getting their account suspended by Amazon.

C.J.: Alright, first of all I’m really happy to be on. Also I’m happy to help sellers learn how to help themselves. The top three are inauthentic, intellectual property complaints, and used sold as new. We have the 20,000 foot view and those are three largest categories of sources of suspensions. They are all able to be remedied. We are able to get you reinstated when you are suspended, but those are by far the top three most common reasons for an account being suspended and getting that dreaded email.

Mike: So let’s dig in into those one by one. Let’s talk about inauthentic and exactly what does that mean.

C.J.: Okay, inauthentic is like a butchering of the English language by Amazon. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily selling a fake item. It’s not counterfeit. Inauthentic is Amazon’s language or their code word that says they want to see where you are sourcing your product from. And what they are looking for is an invoice that identifies where you purchased it, that it’s legitimate, that it does not say liquidator on it, and that could be relatively easy to track back to the manufacturer.

If you are doing retail arbitrage, you should have prepared in advance for an inauthentic issue because it’s going to come sooner or later. So you only want to buy from sources that really identify where the product was and what the product is. You are buying a list of products; you want to identify not just women shoes for example, but the model, size, color and the different ways of identifying the product. That’s all inauthentic means.

All inauthentic means is “show us your invoices” and that’s it. And they are very easy suspensions to come back from. But in advance you want to make sure you are getting good invoices and you want to make sure you are maintaining them and scanning them so you can really send them to Amazon at the drop of a dime so you can get reinstated as quickly as possible.

Mike: Okay, and does that mean if you have those things, let’s say like you have the invoices, you are buying from a reputable dealer, Amazon shuts your account down, is that something that you think that someone can kind of self-service themselves, they send the invoice or do you think that they should still step in and hire someone like yourself to help with that process?

C.J.: You know I think sellers can handle it themselves, and I’m happy to go through sort of the three different sections of a plan of action. But some sellers are comfortable giving the shot themselves, others are not. Some sellers are too big to really spend their time. They would rather sort of have a professional handle that for them, but it could be both. You can handle it yourself or you can have us do it for you.

Mike: Okay, and I mean if someone was to handle it themselves, and we’re talking about this before the call and also when we were in China, it’s something I remember specifically, there is a couple of things that you probably shouldn’t ever say to Amazon, right? You don’t want to admit doing something wrong because they are always going to tell you like “How are you going to correct this?” Can you talk about that for just a second?

C.J.: Sure. The consultants that are out there and the train of thought years ago was that you should admit to doing something wrong right off the bat, take responsibility for whether you did something wrong or not. Because the thought was that’s how you get reinstated. I believe that is 100% the wrong way to go. While you have to identify what Amazon refers to and what we refer to as the root cause of the issue. Instead of saying you did something wrong when you did nothing wrong, you can always address to this how you can be better, that you can prevent this issue by doing something different and improving your business rather than admitting to fault when there is none. Sometimes a seller does make a mistake, and if he did make an error and Amazon is aware of it, then it might be prudent just to admit to making a mistake and how you are going to fix it. But if you didn’t do anything wrong, don’t say that you did.

Mike: Right, makes perfect sense. Cool, so let’s move on to the next one here which is IP, intellectual property. This one is obviously going to be something, at least I don’t want to speak for it. But I would think that this is where you certainly want to get some help because unless you are a lawyer yourself, intellectual property is kind of a rabbit hole and can be like untwirling a bowl of spaghetti. So let’s talk about some of the IP issues that come up for suspensions.

C.J.: Okay. First and foremost if you are accused of violating anyone’s intellectual property rights, either you should try and address it yourself or hire an attorney. No non lawyers who are — or even lawyers, you have to be admitted in a federal court in order to be involved in intellectual property issue, that’s it. No if, ands or buts. The goal when you are accused of violating someone’s intellectual property rights, and they are also phrased as rights owner complaints, is to reach out to whoever made that complaint. Let them know right away you take their issue very, very seriously, you are looking into it and you will be back in touch.

The ultimate goal is to get that brand to withdraw that complaint. If they withdraw that complaint the suspension sometimes will have the reinstatement of your selling privileges will sometimes happen automatically, or you might have to submit a very brief plan of action. But you want to get that complaint withdrawn. Sometimes that comes in the form of us pointing out to the brand that you really did not violate anybody’s IP rights. Most of the complaints are entirely baseless. So by identifying what copyright, trade address, patents, trademark, what those issues are and pointing out you didn’t violate any of those rights.

Many brands will say there is actually a lawyer standing up; we are going to withdraw the complaint right away. Other times there are negotiations that take place where you might agree to sell out your inventory, and then stop selling that product, and that would be under a written agreement and that’s where you get rid of the complaint. Sometimes they want you to stop selling right away.

There are certain brands you just want to stay away from because right or wrong they refuse to withdraw their complaints. But when it comes to an IP issue, you need to address who made the complaint; you need to go at it in the way of trying to get them to amicably withdraw that complaint. Because that’s the quickest way to reinstatement of your selling privileges even though the complaints are mostly baseless. The goal is to get back to selling, get back to business. So whatever you need to do to get that complaint withdrawn is usually the best route to take.

Mike: Okay, and for the IP complaints, I mean what is the typical route for this? Is it a company like Apple that’s saying, hey, you can’t be selling our products, or is it another company that is basically saying you are violating a trademark or patent or–not a trade mark but a patent in this case is what I’m going for because your product infringes on our technology or something. I mean what are the bases for the majority of the IP claims?

C.J.: The basis is usually they just don’t want you selling, because sellers are obtaining the products through gaps in the distribution chain and then selling it on Amazon for a lower price than what the brands want. I would probably say it’s like an 85/15 or a 90/10 split where the brands themselves that are starting the baseless complaints. The other ten or 15% are sort of brand monitoring companies that will just send out these very broad sweeps claiming all sorts of intellectual property violations that don’t exist.

The way we handle them is really a two pronged approach. The first thing we do is we reach out to the person or the brand or the lawyer that made the complaint and explain to them why there is no basis for their complaint. And it’s a legal opinion letter that shows that you are not violating anything. And the vast majority of brands will then withdraw as soon as they get our correspondence. They look us up, they see what we do and how experienced we are at this and they withdraw their complaint.

The second letter to the brand if they either refuse to withdraw or they are silent, start to explain to them what their liability is for filing and maintaining a baseless complaint. And if they are also selling on Amazon they are putting their own account at risk. So we nicely point out what their liability is if they refuse.

At that point if they haven’t withdrawn their complaint, we then draft for the seller an email to send to noticedispute@Amazon.com to try and convince Amazon to ignore the complaint. And then we refer to our own legal correspondence and point out to Amazon saying these complaints should be ignored because it’s baseless. We are selling genuine products. This is where we source them from, and here is our attorney’s letter to the brand explaining how the complaint is entirely baseless.

And between these two prongs, the vast majority of these suspensions are remedied and the sellers are reinstated because either the brand withdraws their complaint or Amazon agrees with what we write to them that they should ignore the complaint because it’s baseless. And the noticedispute@Amazon.com is becoming more and more and more effective as time goes on.

When that email was originally created, it was kind of useless, there weren’t really doing much, but now they really are. Now they are responding and they look at the legal correspondence that really clearly points out why the complaint is baseless. And even now against Apple we’ve had more success because Apple’s attorneys steadfastly refuse to withdraw even when their complaint is completely baseless.

Mike: Right, and I’ve heard they are sticklers with this type of thing and opinion [overlapping [00:13:11]

C.J.: Nice lawyer, they got a nice lawyer here in New York, but his marching orders are what they are. But even on those complaints now where before we didn’t have much success, now we are. But that’s the mechanism that we use and no one bats 1,000 in this business. But we are very successful at getting the complaints withdrawn and getting the sellers reinstated.

Mike: Okay, it sounds like if I’m hearing this correctly that the majority of these types of IP complaints are probably happening to your retail arbitrage type clients where they are buying an existing manufacturer’s goods that are either a well know brand or another manufacturer that you can buy at a retail store and then reselling those items on Amazon. Versus someone like myself that’s developing their own products from the factories in China and putting our own labels on them and selling them on Amazon.

C.J.: You are right. The vast majority are either RA or people who are buying from legitimate distributors. They are suffering the same consequences as the RA people.

Mike: Right.

C.J.: What happens is I’ll give you a brand, Luxottica. They own like 90% of the brands that make eyeglasses. And they routinely manufacture a lot more eyeglass frames than they can sell through the channels that they want. The distributors then sell to people who retail them on Amazon, okay. But every once in awhile Luxottica will do a sweep and accuse people of violating IP rights when they are really not. They are genuine glasses purchased through the distribution chain, and they are suffering the same issues.

With private label — there is a portion of private label sellers that get accused of violating IP rights. But if you are a private label, you developed your own trademark, your own logo and your own products, those are very easy to defeat the IP claims because they are baseless. It’s very rare that a private label is violating anything at all. I mean it’s your product. We can show that you developed it, sourced it, prototypes and then ordered it. So even there I mean while the vast majority of IP complaints across the board are baseless, when it comes to private label sellers, I mean it’s like super baseless.

Mike: You are right, okay, that’s good to know. So the third category that we talked about here was used sold as new. This is one that is going to be fun because I have been in the middle of one of these myself. So I’m looking for a chat with you about it, but is this just as obvious as it seems on the surface? You are just selling a product that you are saying it’s new, but it was in fact used or is there more to it than that?

C.J.: No, most of the complaints on Amazon are baseless, okay. Here is the key to use sold as new. Packaging, packaging, packaging, and packaging, okay? Most sellers are not selling used products, they are simply not. But the packaging may be like last year’s version of the packaging, or the coloration may be different because it sat on the shelf on a warehouse for a long period of time. The packaging changes sometimes. Brands do it as a plan where they consistently change the packaging so that people further down the distribution chain are not delivering the same thing that’s in the store.

So if you want to avoid used sold as new, sellers have to consistently stay up to date on what the latest packaging is like. Going to the brick and mortar stores and see what your product looks like when someone is actually going into a store and the customer gets to see. Because a lot of buyers what they are doing is they will go to a brick and mortar store, they will see a product they want to buy, then they will see how much cheaper it is on Amazon, and they’ll order it.

The product then arrives in the packaging as slightly different. It could be as different as just the font has changed. So you really want to stay on top of what the consumers expect, okay? Also used sold as new packaging if it gets damaged between either merchant fulfilled to the customer or even through FBA. The people that work in Amazon’s warehouses are just like anybody else. There are some really, really fantastic people and there are some people who are like not the best, and they are not packaging the products right, and they are showing up damaged.

They show up damaged; the consumer makes a complaint and say it looks used because the packaging wasn’t right. Another way of avoiding used sold as new is to opt out of Amazon putting returns back into your inventory. Because again the guys in the warehouse, the women in the warehouse don’t really have the time to do a really good analysis about whether it’s been opened and resealed, or it’s been damaged shipping back and forth.

So while you will lose a little bit of money by pulling, telling them not put returns back into inventory. It’s better to lose a little bit of money than to lose your account for even a day or a week. Also sellers might want to opt out of the commingled inventory system. Because if it’s commingled that means someone else’s product who may not have the same quality controls that you do may go to the customer that bought from you. And you are the one that’s going to get nailed if the packaging is old or the packaging is damaged. So I will just tell sellers just across the board, take a little bit of hit, opt out of commingled inventory, opt out of returns going back into inventory, it will protect your account in the long haul.

Mike: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. We opted out of commingled inventory in the first month or two of selling on Amazon. And even for our own private label stuff, I mean most of the stuff that we sell now, almost 90% of what we sell now on Amazon is our own private label stuff. But if you have commingled inventory turned off, and you are putting on Amazon barcodes and everything, if there is ever a case where a seller starts selling on your listing claiming to be your product, you can buy their product, file an A to Z claim and get them kicked off. But if you are doing commingled inventory, there is no way to prove like who sent what in. And they can put you in a pretty bad situation.

And then the other thing is returns. I mean you’ve just mentioned as well which is something that we turned off on our account about a year ago just after talking to another seller. But even after we had that off, I mean we actually had, luckily they didn’t suspend our entire account, but Amazon closed our literally our bestselling listing with a used sold as new complaints. And it’s just so frustrating because like, this is literally our best selling item. We were selling 4,500 of them a month. It’s got like over 1,000 five star reviews, and they just like arbitrarily shut down our account because some schmuck checked the box and said that was used sold as new.

And Amazon just has a zero tolerance policy for this and doesn’t use any logic whatsoever, and our listing was shut down for quite a while until when they did an investigation. Like they agreed okay, well your stuff is new but it could have been — the email could have been just as well like we’re shutting your account down because this is well, I mean is there any advice of what to do  when these types of things happen?

C.J.: Yes, right away, you get a used sold as new, and a lot listen — a lot of them are consumers trying to get a free product, okay?

Mike: Yup.

C.J.: And here is my advice, a lot of people may not like it, give it to them, okay? Let that buyer get over on you. Let them rip you off a little bit. Who cares? Your goal is the long term profitability of your business. So someone makes a complaint, tell them you can keep it for free, I’m going to refund your money and here is one more, here is three more. You want to prevent them from making a complaint. And when they kind of get over on you, you know it, they know it. Hopefully they avoid making any further complaints.

Also you just need to really stay on top of your products. What sellers lose in terms of the aggravation that Amazon causes, and some of the hoop shaft to jump through, you are still gaining a tremendous opportunity. I mean any one of us is all of a sudden in a global market and it’s a huge opportunity. Are there bumps in the road? Of course there are, but Amazon still presents in my opinion and I do battle with them all the time, probably the greatest opportunity in the history of commerce. I mean where else could really anybody with like a cell phone and a credit card get into business and compete with the big boys?

Mike: Yeah, that’s what’s amazing.

C.J.: You have to be careful. You have to do some things that in normal retail you wouldn’t have to do. Stay on top of your packaging, maintain your invoices, respond to every single complaint. If you get a cease and desist letter back to sort of the intellectual property issue, the rights owner issue, if you get a cease and desist email where it’s not an IA complaint yet, write back to them right away.

Say I received your email. I know this is important. We are going to look into it carefully today, and I will be back in touch with you. Because the people making those complaints, their goal is to protect the brand. So silence is like the worst thing because if there is silence they are going to make a complaint to knock you off. But if you get it, you respond, you email them, you make a phone call, introduce yourself, then you have a chance to look into it to avoid that issue ever becoming a complaint.

Mike: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So one of the things I want to talk about here just to kind of to — we only have a few more minutes left, and the thing that I was, I don’t know — I guess the big takeaway for me when I left China is we were talking about arbitration. And I didn’t even know that this existed. So I want to talk about this for a minute because let me just kind of set this up for a second. I mean as I mentioned off the top, one of the things I just worry about every day in my business, I worried about more a year or two ago is Amazon just shutting my account down for something that was completely out of my control, I did nothing wrong.

And used sold as new is a great example of this because this just happened a few months to us, ago to us. And we legitimately obviously are not selling anything used as new. I mean we’re selling all brand new product, and we are the manufacturer of this product. So I know there is nothing used out there being sold as new. But again one person trying to get a free return doesn’t want to pay return shipping can get your whole account shut down.

And this is something that worry me greatly because either you can email Amazon and say I didn’t sell something used as new, and they come back and basically say, so bad, too bad, sadly we don’t agree with you. Your account is shut down; there is nothing more you can do about it. And that was like the thing that worried me the most is just you get to the end of rainbow of trying to get your account reinstated, and they say no and there is nothing else you can do.

But it turns out there is another thing you can do which is arbitration. And it turns out that that is a part of your seller agreement. So let’s just talk about that for a minute, and some of the things you have done at arbitration, and that there actually is I guess another way out of this mess that maybe a lot of sellers don’t know about.

C.J.: Well, first I want to apologize to some really poor sellers that have been subjected to my dad who will regularly — now he promised me he stopped. He’ll buy three or four pair of pants at a time, and pick the one that fits best and return the others, not realizing he’s screwing up sellers’ metrics. I think he stopped, I hope he stopped. But here is the story, Amazon suspends you, and you are trying to get Amazon to amicably reinstate your account through the first level which is seller support, product quality, right?

The second level is the policy teams. The third level is the Bezos escalation team. And if you get shot down at all three levels and Amazon just refuses to amicably reinstate your selling privileges, you have the right to take them to arbitration. It’s the one part of the business services agreement which is your contract with Amazon that I think is really great. You gave up your right to go to court, but you got the opportunity to take them to arbitration which is much faster, much cheaper and there is no appeal process.

So what you do if you get shut down, and you just can’t get reinstated, you file for arbitration through the American Arbitration Association. It’s not very expensive. It’s certainly not cheap, but it doesn’t cost the same as litigation. It takes three to four months generally. And instead of Amazon having the final word, the arbitrator does. And Amazon to their credit, they have great lawyers who we work with every single week on these arbitrations. Whatever the arbitrator orders, they do.

So if the arbitrator orders the reinstatement of your selling privileges, they reinstate you. If the arbitrator orders them to pay money, they cut the check. So it’s a really great process where if you’ve struck out, you don’t need to say okay, that’s it. You don’t necessarily need to go to a second or a third or a fourth account which I’m not personally against. I think sometimes it’s a very good business idea to have multiple accounts. You know it’s against policy, but you really can take the decision making out of Amazon’s hands and bring it to an arbitrator who will be more inclined to do what’s right or what’s fair for sellers.

Mike: Really cool. And one of the things you said there that’s also key for me in our conversation we had a couple of months ago in China is there are can be an exchange of money to you from Amazon. Talk about that for just a second.

C.J.: Sure. If you go to arbitration, you are going to generally seek reinstatement and monetary damages. Sometimes the monetary damages are that Amazon hasn’t released your money till the 90 days comes and goes, and they just refuse to release the money. And it’s become more of a seizure. We can also seek, although it’s against the agreement, we can seek lost profits. And the arbitrators may or may not give it to you even though it is against the contract because the contract is so terribly one sided, and Amazon complies.

Arbitrator says, reinstate them, and issue them a check for X thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, Amazon complies with it. Also by filing for arbitration, you are getting Amazon’s lawyers involved, and Amazon’s lawyers then deal with people at Amazon. So often sellers get the feeling that no one is actually looking at their case. Once Amazon’s attorneys are involved, someone looks at your case. It’s Amazon’s outside counsel, and they deal with people within Amazon. But that often leads to resolutions even without going through the entire arbitration process.

So it’s not the best scenario to have to go to arbitration, but it is available to every single seller. If Amazon refuses to reinstate you, if they refuse to release your money, you can take them to arbitration. Take those decisions out of Amazon’s hands.

Mike: And what’s the time frame, like worst case scenario from like the day that you get suspended, go through the three levels of Amazon internal communications you mentioned to like getting the case in front of an arbitrator and having a decision?

C.J.: It’s hard to say because sometimes it’s worth riding it out, weeks, weeks and weeks with Amazon to try and get them to amicably reinstate. Other sellers will have less patience. So you know like for anybody that hires us, we get your plan of action out to you no later than the second business day. Usually it’s the same day, but certainly no later than the second day. We can’t control how quickly Amazon responds to that plan of action. They are supposed to respond within 48 hours and they usually do but not always.

Sometimes you get caught up in a cycle where they say your account is under review, your account is under review, your account is under review to which the seller has to decide when they want to then take the next step and file for arbitration or go to a policy team or go to a Bezos team, or then file for arbitration. Once you file for arbitration, you are looking at generally three to four months from the day that you hire us at least until the day you get a decision. But again each seller will make their own decision based upon their business needs as to when they want to take each step.

Mike: I’m not sure there is enough as a reflex for somebody to get through three to four months. Oh man, that would be brutal. Cool well, we’ll definitely wrap up there. I think we’ve got right to the 30 minute mark which has been awesome. It’s been awesome having you on the podcast. Now where can people find you in the off chance that something happens to their Amazon account, how can they get a hold of you?

C.J.: Okay, the website is Amazonsellerslawyer.com. Sellers is plural, lawyer is singular. My email is right at the top, cj@amzonsellerslawyer.com. They can call 1-877-9-SELLER. I try and talk to every single seller that reaches out to us either via email; there is a chat box on the website or a phone call. I do my best to return every call or email the same day or worst, the second day. Nights, weekends, I really do my best to speak with everyone. Many times when we get contacted I can sort of help a seller to help themselves, or sometimes they either need to hire us or they just prefer to hire us. But the website is the best way or email. Many sellers also have my cell phone, but we try and get back to everybody as quickly as possible.

Mike: Awesome.

C.J.: Which kind of affects my wife and kids a bit, but they got to eat also.

Mike: True. It’s a 24/7 world, and if you got a six or seven figure or eight figure business on the line, people want to hear back quickly.

C.J.: Yeah, also I got to tell you we understand that if you are suspended, you are frantic and you are stressed. We also understand that nobody at Amazon will talk to you and sellers need someone to talk to, we are human. So I understand you need to talk, need to express yourself and explain why the accusations are baseless, or what’s been going on with your account, or how successful you’ve been, and now there was just a bump in the road.

So I understand the need to express yourself and to explain what’s going on in your account. So we do. We talk to every client. 95% of them it’s me you are going to get on the phone, so feel free. If you have questions, email, chat and I will get back to you as quickly as possible, if not pick up the call right when you call in.

Mike: It sounds like you are a part bartender and part therapist.

C.J.: Yes.

Mike: Understandable.

C.J.: You know I have worked; actually I was a bartender. I’ve been working since I’m like in New York you need working papers, and you had to be either like 12 or 14. I did it under my sister’s name.

Mike: Nice.

C.J.: So I’ve had — being a lawyer I love it, but I recognize it’s not hard labor. But I’ve worked hard my whole life, and I get the stress that we try to get back to everybody as quickly as possible.

Mike: Excellent, well again CJ thank you so much for being on the episode today. Have a great rest of the day, and I look forward to catching up with you at Global Sources.

C.J.: Yeah, great, great event especially for advanced sellers. Fantastic event, and yeah everyone listening, have a great weekend.

Mike: Yup and just a reminder to everyone, Global Sources is October 17th through 19th in Hong Kong, one of my favorite places in the world to be. And if you use the code 3-E-C-5-0 that’s 3-E-C-5-0, that will get you 50 bucks off your ticket, and you will also get an opportunity to meet C.J. and myself out there. So I look forward to seeing you guys out there. And until next week everybody, happy selling.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/EcomCrew for weekly live recordings of the EcomCrew Podcast every Monday. And please do us a favor and leave an honest review on iTunes; it will really help us out. Again, thanks for listening and until next week, happy selling!