Hopefully you had a chance to read the first part of this series, People GET PAID to Write Bad Reviews on Your Products. This blog post is the second part of this series that focuses on another sneaky way your Amazon Competitors try to destroy your business so they can steal your “Buy Button” as well as all of your customers. Let’s Begin!:

This issue is especially common during the Christmas buying season, when sellers are raking in money:

A greedy competitor on Amazon not only sees your listing but also notices that you have the famous “Buy Now Button” they want it, at all costs. So what this competitor will do is deplete your stock by buying you out; they will never use their REAL Amazon ship-to address; instead they will buy using a bogus account or have a friend do the dirty work for them.

Once your stock is gone the “Buy Box” is transferred to the competitors account.

Then the seller has your stock and the Buy Button; meanwhile you are just elated to have such a large sale.

Meanwhile the competitor seller has your stock that they can sell as their own, at a higher price than what you had it listed for.

Then, approximately a month later (after the busy season) the competitor will file for a RETURN on most, or all, of the products due to “inaccurate description” or a different issue. In fact, in China there are software programs that automatically buy your stock until it is depleted, then automatically files for the return in 30 days! YES, SERIOUSLY!!! When this scam is timed correctly, the Amazon competitor can utterly collapse your entire company because Amazon allows the buyer has 30 days to return it, then additional time for it to arrive back to Amazon then even more time to deal with the return. So if a “buyer” purchases all of your Black Calvin Klein Tee Sets on November 1st, they can then file for a return on November 30th. From the time they request the return they have 30 days to put it back in transit. Then, according to Amazon’s own Terms section, it can take them 25 days for the item to be acknowledged by Amazon’s return center. … So that means that the purchase from November 1st might not be back in your hands / ready to list again until LATE JANUARY or even February of the following YEAR. Meanwhile you are missing out on the busy season and ending up with the stock you thought you sold 45+ days ago.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Unfortunately, there's not much you can do other than watching for extra large, unusual orders and also watching for strange buying patterns.  For example, if you have 50 of an item and you sell 5 per month on average; if they suddenly start selling 8 times per DAY, this is unusual.  

Equally, if these same buyers are buying a large amount of duplicates BEFORE the first one even arrives, this is unusual.  

And lastly, if you see that the last four orders of this item have all resulted in bad feedback when this item usually gets excellent reviews; this is also suspect.  

The best thing you can do at this point is cancel orders that you suspect are fake and use FREE sites like FakeSpot.com to check into the legitimacy of reviews on your product.  If you have concluded the review is totally fake it is important to report it because once the "buyer" is terminated all of their bogus reviews disappear.

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