Our 6 years old UK/EU seller account got deactivated by Amazon. It’s been 9 days that all listings are inactive, and 3.5 months that funds are held by Amazon with no payout. Cases opened and escalated via “account health team”, “account verification team”, JeffB team, Dharmes team and “ManagerDirectorUK”. The latest generated an automated case in our case log, but was then deleted after 48 hours. Otherwise, ZERO response from any of them, despite weeks of patiently waiting.

The root cause of this issue seems to be embedded in our “country of establishment” (COE) identification, as the only meaningful notification which we have received from Amazon seems to be requesting further information regarding a mismatch of our account’s COE data.

Here is what we know:

• Amazon seems to have conflicting data regarding our COE in their systems.
• It is unclear where this conflict was identified by their bots, as on our end, all information in seller central seems to be updated, accurate, and successfully verified by Amazon.
• We seem to be only one out of MANY other sellers that have been caught by this bot sweep. Here is a nearly 300 posts thread of sellers discussing the issue after receiving the exact same notifications as we did: https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/forums/t/disbursements-withheld/580745/276

Here is what we think caused this at the first place:

• A couple of months ago, after selling in the UK/EU region for 6 years, we used the “transfer account” feature to change the legal entity of our business. We champed it from the UK to Hong Kong.
• Since we never before used “Amazon’s VAT services” and needed new VAT numbers for the fresh entity, we have applied for VAT in the 6 countries that have been available. We noticed that the UK option is not available for us. Therefore we contacted support, and they explained that our COE is set to UK (despite the fact we already successfully transferred and verified the account to the new entity). It took them a while, but they have finally fixed the issue in the backend, and we could apply for using Amazon’s VAT services for the UK region. Our application for VAT in all 7 countries is currently handled and ongoing by Avalara, through Amazon’s VAT services.
• Our belief is that something is either still not fully updated in Amazon’s backend systems, or that a bot was simply trigged as a result of past information mismatch.

We have obviously responded to amazon’s notice with all of the requested information and explanations, then escalated and pushed through all the above mentioned channels, but with ZERO response, even not a rejection or request for further info, after WEEKS of waiting.

This situation is bringing our small home business to its knees, considering our cashflow is frozen for nearly 4 months, and all of our sales stopped for over a week.

If anyone can help us, please contact me!