Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

One of the softwares I maintain as part of my business is a freight forwarding software which sounds very similar to this space. Am I getting the terminology mixed up here?

Consolidation is one technique that forwarders use to make money.

The concept is the same here, but the movement in my case is courier instead of freight.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

My goal was to get my account unblocked and I failed. I didn't find the right neck to wring and I also made a mistake once by sending a partial list to my account manager.

I'll have the same goal for the coming week.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I tried to add a check that the products imported by my third party app are really making their way into Shopify, but this was a lot more complicated than it sounds. I also couldn't test it because by the time I started working on the solution I had already used up my 1,000 variants allowed by Shopify for the day. I have some code there and will test it out tomorrow.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

Tasks for today:

• MOST IMPORTANT Continuously push account manager for complete 'risky ASIN' list DONE
• Test product upload verification code DONE
• Add deleted ASINs to blacklist script DONE
• Modify site and try to get Google Shopping unblocked DONE
• Try to get correct document for opening other countries DONE

I chased my account manager all day and at the end of the day heard that there is a meeting tomorrow and I will get details after that. I asked if I could join the meeting and was told that no, it is an internal meeting. I reminded them that there are only 10 more days before Amazon has promised to automatically close my account permanently.

My site got removed from Google Shopping after it was approved a week earlier. Two things changed in-between:

1. I changed the theme and as a result the navigation
2. I added 20x more products

So I checked the navigation and got it back to where it was before and I also wrote some more in my 'About' page to explain the business model, and then applied for a manual review.

I tried to get a proper document one way but was told I need another document to get that document. I have some ideas here, but none of them are simple.

For the product upload verification, I thought of a ridiculously simple way to do it that didn't involve the Shopify API at all. So I switched the code and tested it and it worked perfectly. My previous solution was way more complex, in part due to a bizarre feature gap in the Shopify API: you cannot search for a product by SKU.

I modified my blacklist script to also scoop up 'Detail Page Removed' ASINs. And then I had a little thought: "What if my appeals are rejected because I haven't yet deleted those ASINs?" Sometimes the dumbest answer is the correct answer. So I deleted the 150 ASINs in the list and then resubmitted my appeal.

 

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[msufan]

I modified my blacklist script to also scoop up 'Detail Page Removed' ASINs. And then I had a little thought: "What if my appeals are rejected because I haven't yet deleted those ASINs?" Sometimes the dumbest answer is the correct answer. So I deleted the 150 ASINs in the list and then resubmitted my appeal.

This was a great idea.

I'm nervous for you and it's not even my business. Unlock this man's account!!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Looks like The Commandment of Control has bit you in the a$$.

I hope you get this resolved soon, your progress and consistency is admirable.

 

[GoldFibre]

This was a great idea.

It didn't work, so will just have to keep trying things.

Looks like The Commandment of Control has bit you in the a$$.

Yep. This will be a persistent, catastrophic risk until I can diversify the revenue.

 

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[Andy Black]

From your data, what products made you the most profit? Can you add the top 5 to a Shopify store and sell them from there?

 

[GoldFibre]

From your data, what products made you the most profit? Can you add the top 5 to a Shopify store and sell them from there?

This is a good idea.

The dynamic ad was only hitting 5 out of thousands of product pages, so on my to-do list today I was going to make a new dynamic ad and see if it picked up more of my catalog.

But I also know which of my brands and items sell the best on the Amazon marketplace, so I could make some specific ads for those as you suggest. For the brands I might want to make brand specific pages as well.

 

[Andy Black]

This is a good idea.

The dynamic ad was only hitting 5 out of thousands of product pages, so on my to-do list today I was going to make a new dynamic ad and see if it picked up more of my catalog.

But I also know which of my brands and items sell the best on the Amazon marketplace, so I could make some specific ads for those as you suggest. For the brands I might want to make brand specific pages as well.

I understand you're building a machine that makes sales and revenues with thousands or millions of products. That's what that arbitrage company I worked for did too.

Just consider that the data you're gathering could be the more valuable output of your system.

I liken it to a farmer planting crops across thousands of acres and spotting some of the crops growing better because they're in darker soil. It turns out those crops love oil and you stumbled across a few oil wells. Should you start drilling for oil or just keep planting crops in more fields?

 

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[Andy Black]

The dynamic ad was only hitting 5 out of thousands of product pages, so on my to-do list today I was going to make a new dynamic ad and see if it picked up more of my catalog.

Create an ad group per page (dynamic ad target).

You could also upload a keyword per ad group and target each brand/make/product (do this in a separate campaign).

Figure out how to use the Google Ads Editor to do this in bulk. Use Excel or Google Sheets to figure out the columns to upload and then use your programming ability to create CSV files to upload.

This short video that might help:

Andy Black on LinkedIn: #salestip #marketingtip #googleads #googleadstips #andyblackjnr

A client sold 12,000 different beauty products and we were running Google ads for the 2,000 products already on their website. They wanted to load the other…

www.linkedin.com

 

[GoldFibre]

Just consider that the data you're gathering could be the more valuable output of your system.

Yes, I'm also pursuing converting the best products to FBA as well. I get the Amazon traffic data on the 1.5m products in my catalog, so it isn't even about my sales.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

Tasks for today:

• MOST IMPORTANT Continuously push account manager for complete 'risky ASIN' list DONE
• Add 'how it works' page to Shopify store DONE
• Create new dynamic ad campaign to see if it will hit more product pages NOT DONE
• Automatically create collections based on product types NOT DONE

I tried to contact my account manager several times today but it was total radio silence.

I wanted to create some new ads, but my Google Ads account got suspended. The reason: my Google Merchant account got suspended. The reason: none given.

I suspect that I had too many products flagged for various things, but no way to know for sure. Some products like a very innocuous and modest maternity dress were flagged for multiple issues automatically:


I read the descriptions of each of these and I feel like none of them apply, so I clicked 'I disagree with the issue' against each of them, which triggers a manual review. If the manual review overturns it, maybe I will need to write another Puppeteer script to do this for thousands of such violations.

Another prong to my effort to get Google Shopping unblocked is to add more information about my business, so together with Chat GPT I wrote a 'How it works' page and put it on my store.

I wasn't able to get time to code the automated collection creation today.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

Tasks for today:

• MOST IMPORTANT Continuously push account manager for complete 'risky ASIN' list DONE
• Investigate product issues in Google Merchant Center and come up with strategy for resolution DONE

I went through a bunch of the product issues listed in Google Merchant Center and didn't come up with any real pattern for what was wrong. At first I thought the issue was related to words like 'pregnancy', but I also found blouses blocked that didn't seem to have any suggestive word in the title or description.

So I took a variety of products, bookmarked their violation pages and then submitted appeals. After a day or two, I should see which appeals went through and which didn't, and then I will have more information about which violations are real and not.

While looking through this I saw that there were a couple of violations that only applied to a couple of products: prescription drugs and adult products.

The products themselves were definitely not prescription drugs (they were dresses) or adult products (it was a replica of a human pelvis bone). So I submitted appeals on all of these in case it was just these serious violations that got the account restricted.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

Tasks for today:

• MOST IMPORTANT Continuously push account manager for complete 'risky ASIN' list DONE

I chased my account manager but still don't have any tangible response.

I've almost fulfilled all of my orders since the account got shut down, so there isn't much fulfillment work to do anymore.

Most of my appeals on the merchant center got approved, but not all. So I think I will automate the submission of these and run through the catalog once.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

After several days of silence I got a reply from my account manager the unblocking the account will take some time, so I guess I better find something else to do for a while.

The sales above are from country 2, which has buy box eligibility back after a very long time but still needs time to build up the open order tolerance. This means it will get paused over and over again for having too many open orders, but hopefully I can build it up over time and hopefully my country 1 deactivation does not affect it.

Business idea spitballing:

I’m not jumping ship, but had a few ideas I wanted to list out along with my rough CENTS evaluation, with lower-case for partial qualification.

1. [CENTs] Meal-plan business SaaS (home-delivered meal plans are extremely popular where I live but I’m not sure what software these businesses use — I messaged my friend who owns one of these businesses to find out)
2. [CeNTS] Event coordination and photo collection SaaS (idea taken from an X post where someone successfully did this and later sold the business)
3. [ceNt] Parking spot leasing (my community is changing the parking system to install license plate cameras, which will reduce a massive illegal parking problem by people who own more cars than spots and increase demand for legitimate spots. I don’t have the cash for this but maybe I could run it like a fund and get investors to put up the capital and I take the management fee.)
4. [CEnts] Local drop-shipping support service (implement the consolidation mode I have for my Amazon business but market the service to other dropshippers, including those with independent stores)
5. [CENTS] AI product landing page generator or single product store SaaS (some cheap service that reduces the time investment to market test products - provide easy integrations with Google, Meta, TikTok, etc., provide some in-built experiment runner that will tell you to move forward with a product or not. This completely fulfills CENTS but is also by far the most work of all these ideas.)
6. [eNTS] Local price comparison website with affiliate marketing (this doesn’t really exist and this could leverage my existing product database, but not sure how to cross-reference SKUs across stores)
7. [CeNTS] ‘Request a cheer up’ service/app (users request a cheer up explaining what is getting them down, and other users post personalized videos to them. Several different monetization options. Maybe the best cheer up gets a bounty with a pay-out or a tip)
8. [Ents] Foreign language humorous YouTube channel (I have a unique skill in that I’m fluent in an exotic language and could post humorous videos that could get a lot of traction from the ethnicity-language mismatch)
9. [eNTS] AI-powered LinkenIn influence builder. (Automatically post on certain topics and build your follower base passively. Ensure your posts use the correct tone and dont have the ChatGPT giveaway words like ‘thrilled’)
10. [eNTS] Gimmick AI flirting app (idea from X, screenshot the message from the person you are flirting with and get back something to send back in the tone of your choice)

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders.

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I got a few more country 2 orders last night and then my account got paused for too many open orders (15).

I'm traveling and didn't have time to make any progress on the system. I only handled a few customer service issues.

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

Well my country 1 account is still deactivated, but country 2 is actually doing pretty well now that buy box eligibility is back. The account just doesn't have the built-up order volume to let me sell more and so it keeps getting paused. Maybe profit would be around 1k USD for the week if it was mature.

With Shopify I'm still building up the store but with my Google Merchant and Google Ads accounts blocked, I'm not able to drive any traffic.

Organic impressions are slowly building up as my product pages get indexed:


I've got similar goals again for the coming week:

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders.

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked NOT DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

I looked through my Google Merchant Center account and thought about how to make a puppeteer script to submit all the issues. And then I thought that I may have another option, which is to remove the Google & YouTube sales channel from the Shopify products that are disapproved by Google.

Although thousands of 'products' are disapproved, these are variants in Shopify, so they shouldn't be too hard to remove manually once. I downloaded a CSV of the products and then with the help of some Excel, I made a quick way to turn off the sales channel in Shopify.

Afterwards I updated my Shopify product update script to skip the sales channel if the product had problems with Google. I also found a bug with the pricing that I fixed, as well as an issue with inventory that I need to test a bit before I will know how to fix it.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders.

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked NOT DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

Today's Tasks​

• Remove all pricing error violations from GMC WIP
• Carefully re-read all of the 'misrepresentation' documentation on Google DONE
• Improve all compliance-related Shopify store content NOT DONE
• Resubmit GMC appeal NOT DONE

I only can submit an appeal once per week, so I want to do as much as possible to get my store compliant before submitting.

I worked on getting rid of the pricing errors. The strategy was to set the product as in-stock when I have a price and out of stock with the average price of the in-stock variants when I don't have a price. I had to learn more about inventory management in the Shopify API to get it working. Then I ran my updater script over my entire Shopify inventory.

Google takes a while to reflect the updates when you edit many products at a time, so I will submit the appeal tomorrow.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders.

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked NOT DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

Today's Tasks​

• Remove all pricing error violations from GMC DONE
• Carefully re-read all of the 'misrepresentation' documentation on Google DONE
• Improve all compliance-related Shopify store content DONE
• Resubmit GMC appeal DONE

Shopify Store​

In the morning I looked at the outcome of my Shopify product update script and saw that some products still had zero as their price. I also saw that many prices were way too low. So there were some bugs and edge cases in the pricing code and after I fixed them I ran it again and all the pricing issues disappeared from GMC.

Before resubmitting my appeal I went and read every single word of the misrepresentation documentation. Then I went through all of the various links on my site and reviewed the content. I did find that on the Contact page there was some placeholder text from my new theme, so I replaced that. Otherwise everything looked pretty good.

After all this I resubmitted my GMC appeal and within 30 minutes my appeal was rejected:


Since it was rejected so quickly I am suspicious that this was actually done through a manual check.

I'm not sure what to do now, so maybe I can pay an expert to try to address this.

On the other hand, maybe there are some simple improvements I can make:

• Add address and contact information to the footer of every page
• Add company registration number and authority
• Add phone number (currently I removed my personal number because I already get way too many calls)

I have two weeks to think about this before my next chance to appeal.

Amazon Account​

My contacts at Amazon have been ignoring my calls and messages for several days, and before that only replied once every few days.

Finally one guy answered my call and gave me a lot more context into what is going on behind the scenes.

When I signed up for my account through them it was meant to be part of the 'dropshipper' program. This program has different vetting and compliance rules and should not get deactivated as easily as a normal account. However, the account manager forgot to put this flag on my account and so from the beginning I have been subject to the stricter rules.

They are now trying to retroactively apply the flag on the account, but the feedback from the internal team is that they can't do that and I should make a new account from scratch. My account manager is pushing back and trying to find a way for me to keep my account and get the special flag on it.

So even though I don't have any estimated time for resolution, I would consider this to be good news - the risks I have been exposed to have been higher than necessary, so however this works out I should be able to operate with less risk moving forward. It also looks like my account won't be permanently deactivated and I should get my business back.

I still have the short term concerns that:

1. I have 45k USD in cash locked up in the account while it is deactivated
2. I owe my suppliers the majority of that money, including a 25k credit card bill due in two days
3. I'm not making any other money right now to cover the expenses

Later in the afternoon I visited the warehouse and we sorted out some lingering problem orders. I also got a view on what my next invoice will look like. It should be less than I anticipated, so I do have profit left over, once I get that money out of the account.

The warehouse manager told me on the side that he thinks I have enough volume to make my own consol and save good money. He might be right, but in order to do that I still need the handling at both ends. This is another area where I'm saving time and money. Like in TMFL, I don't want to end up managing people for a job. I want to minimize my own time investment, especially while this is still part time for me. Right now I think the best option is to keep squeezing my supplier for lower rates as my volume goes up.

 

[Andy Black]

How many products have you got in your Shopify store and Google Merchant Center? Maybe restrict it to a handful and get approved? Maybe uploading too many too fast is making it hard on yourself to stay compliant, and maybe worries Google (staff and algorithms)?

 

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[solyom]

I have 45k USD in cash locked up in the account while it is deactivated

Was it your choice to keep so much money on the Amazon account?

Or was it part of Amazon's policy to park your money for decades - to secure themselves for cases of disputes?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

This thread is giving me severe anxiety. I'm so sorry this is happening to you.

 

[GoldFibre]

How many products have you got in your Shopify store and Google Merchant Center? Maybe restrict it to a handful and get approved? Maybe uploading too many too fast is making it hard on yourself to stay compliant, and maybe worries Google (staff and algorithms)?

Now there are about 50k products synced to GMC and I stopped adding any more while this issue is going on. All product violations are gone. The only violation not gone now is account-level 'misrepresentation' which is supposed to mean I'm not clear enough about what my business is, my policies, contact info, etc.

Was it your choice to keep so much money on the Amazon account?

Or was it part of Amazon's policy to park your money for decades - to secure themselves for cases of disputes?

They pay out every two weeks and keep some reserve in case of refunds from returns and other exceptions. But when your account is deactivated they don't pay out anything at all. Once it is reactivated I can have it paid out immediately.

This thread is giving me severe anxiety. I'm so sorry this is happening to you.

Don't get anxiety! I'm not anxious at all. I can deal with whatever happens.

 

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[StrikingViper69]

Customer support on these platforms is awful. Heaven forbid they tell you what the problem is.

 

[GoldFibre]

Customer support on these platforms is awful. Heaven forbid they tell you what the problem is.

Customer support is great on these platforms. Unfortunately, I'm not their customer.

 

[StrikingViper69]

Customer support is great on these platforms. Unfortunately, I'm not their customer.

true

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked NOT DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

Today I was busy at my full time job until late at night so only did my transactional work for the day confirming orders and so on.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked NOT DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

One contact at Amazon reached out to let me know that I have a new account manager who will be helping me resolve my account health issues. This is my fourth account manager since I began.

I spoke to him on the phone and he let me know a bit more about the process and the internal problems they face in trying to resolve issues.

I sent him my POA and he is supposed to come back to me soon with the next steps.

While preparing the documents today I realized I made a mistake on some of my orders going to Country 2. I had recently started doing these by API but never had a need to fill in the declared value properly before. But since these are cross-border shipments, that information needs to be accurate for customs purposes. I fixed that now and hopefully the earlier shipments don't get stopped because of it.