My funds have been withheld by Amazon today and everything has gone into reserve, after disbursing daily for nearly 3 years. Account is healthy and not suspended or under review, sales are continuing, bank, card and tax info is all verified. No A-Z or outstanding orders. I have no idea why they have withheld the funds and they refuse to provide me with an explanation. This is the same response I get every time:
The factors, data, and transactions we use to calculate the funds reserved from a specific settlement are part of Amazon’s risk management systems. We do not publish data on or expose the rules by which we calculate reserves for a particular settlement. The amount that we have reserved will always appear in your unavailable balance, and we will always release reserved funds to you as soon as any risk arising from these orders has passed.
Has anyone ever experienced similar or know a way to release the funds or when they might release them?
I have not had any notifications to state why this has happened, my account health is 672 and healthy. I have 3 [Received Intellectual Property Complaints], 1 of them is 6 months old so will drop soon, the other is 3 months old and the most recent is 1 month old so none of them I feel would’ve caused this. There is nothing else in my account to state that my funds have been put on hold.
I have now just received this. I don’t and have never owned any other accounts so obviously cant provide the information they request so will email them and see what happens. I am not holding my breath though.
thank you for joining the forum. I am sorry to hear that Amazon has placed a sudden reserve on your funds.
As you may be already aware, Amazon is currently vigorously enforcing the new legislation that requires all e-commerce platforms to validate account information of their sellers before allowing them to disburse money. If there is a suspicion of a breach of money laundering legislation, then the seller has to provide evidence demonstrating that they are established for tax purposes in the country where their business is registered.
In your case, it appears like you are related to an account, which has been enforced over unpaid VAT to Amazon. Since the company wants to retrieve the owed sum as soon as possible, they will restrict any other linked account. This is a similar scenario as it is the case with related accounts suspensions.
The communication which you received indicates, that Amazon detected that your account shares some information with another storefront, which failed the tax establishment review.
It could be anything - e-mail address, phone number, bank account, credit card, inventory, SKU patterns, IP address usage patterns…
The link could have been created without your knowledge - maybe an employee logged into your account using his own computer or device, which was also used to access another account. Or someone else’s credit card was entered only to pay for an order in the buyer side of your account. It could also be related to any prep-centre, shared address service or a software which you are utilizing.
In order to appeal a situation like this, you will firstly need to find the exact cause of the link.
How would I go about finding the exact cause of this link? This sounds near impossible and like finding a needle in a haystack. Seller support wont help me or provide this information.
I receive hundreds of orders daily so if someone else’s credit card was entered only to pay for an order in the buyer side of my account how would I even know this.
As already mentioned, Amazon links selling accounts by e-mail address, phone number, bank account, credit card, inventory, SKU patterns, IP address usage patterns.
This means that if let’s say your account is 10 years old, then if at any point in the past it had a different e-mail address, phone number, bank account, credit card or user details entered that correspond with an enforced account, then this would constitute the link.
It could be either one of your family members or (former) employees, or someone who logged into their selling account using the same device / computer as what you use to access Amazon.
In most cases, it’s former employees, virtual assistants, business partners, account managers, prep centers… Was there at any point anyone apart from you who had access to your Seller Central, your computer or their details were entered into the account?
