Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from the inside, etc. etc. Be happy that your financial loss was limited.
edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.
Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.
I feel like if you've made a good-faith effort to start the arbitration process they require you to do, and they ignore you, that is grounds for a lawsuit. And I doubt a judge would look favorably upon Amazon in that case.
Good luck for the lawsuit. I read your story and I read some other horror stories in here as well.
How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :< I hope you are doing okay right now man.
I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)
One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.
The TOS is worded in such a way that it's almost impossible for them to lose. The best legal minds who are paid 7 figures write these things to be impenetrable. Arbitration is slow, time consuming, likely to not lead to desired outcome. Retain a lawyer just means more money and time down drain, and these companies laugh at legal threats, knowing it it ever got that far they would still win either getting the case dismissed or attrition.
That was basically my sentiment and the sentiment of a few lawyers I consulted for it. I lost so much money in the entire process overall it hurts to think about.
I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.
What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.
I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.
I live in Seattle, and in WA state that would put it beyond the limit for a small claims case. Idk, I tried to contact lawyers to take the case and they sent letters to Amazon which Amazon never responded to. I was also going through a pretty serious health battle at the time and so couldn't really devote full attention to it. Now that things are a bit better, I feel like it's so far in the past that I don't know if I would have a reasonable claim so I sort of just let it be.
edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590