First human reads your appeal.

Happy Friday,

Nobody says this part out loud, so here it is.

The appeal is not the review. The appeal is the first review.

An automated system reads your listings, your pricing behaviour, your documents and your history. It flags. It suppresses. Sometimes it deactivates. And the first human being to look at any of it is whoever opens the appeal you had to go and write.

The people who do reinstatement for a living have been saying this all year. Take their specifics as testimony rather than evidence — they see more deactivation notices in a month than the rest of us see in a decade, and they also sell reinstatement, and nobody outside Amazon has a denominator.

Except that is not quite true any more. Somebody does have one, and it is not who you would expect.

The order of operations is the story. Decision first. Person second. And the person only turns up because you went and got them.

Under the EU Digital Services Act, Amazon has to file a statement of reasons every time it moderates something in its European store. Not a summary at year end. Each decision, filed with the European Commission, in near real time.

And one of the mandatory fields is whether the decision was fully automated.

Those filings sit in a public database. No login, no lawyer. Anyone with a browser can search and download it.

As of this week it holds roughly 3.3 billion statements of reasons from the last 180 days, across 359 reporting platforms, of which about 42% were fully automated — that figure is every platform pooled together, not Amazon's alone, and the database will happily tell you Amazon's if you ask it.

A European seller gets a filed public record saying a machine did it. You get a notification.

Same company. Same models. Same policies, more or less. The difference is which continent the buyer was standing in when the machine made its mind up.

The honest part, twice. That database covers listings and content in the EU store. It is not a register of US account deactivations and does not become one because it would be convenient. And automated enforcement is not a scandal by itself — nine million seller accounts cannot be policed by people, the counterfeit problem is real, and every slower alternative hurts honest sellers too.

The complaint was never that a machine decides. It is that the machine decides, the record of that is a regulatory obligation on one continent and a courtesy on the other, and the entire burden of finding a human falls on the person who just lost their income.

Which brings us to the quiet version, and it is worse. Amazon publishes changes through Seller Central notifications, Changes to Program Policies, Account Health and Performance Notifications, on no fixed schedule. A recertification request with a hard date lands in a tab. The failure mode is not that you refused. It is that nobody opened it.

You cannot appeal a notification you never read.

THIS WEEK IN AMAZON DOING AMAZON THINGS

Vinted banned thousands of sellers by automated fraud detection, per the BBC — one of them after relisting £3 sandals at £2. Same format, different platform, and there it made the news.

The Senate is looking at the marketplace. The Small Business Committee is investigating Amazon over alleged Chinese influence. No evidence has been released and Amazon has not confirmed the scope. Every previous marketplace probe ended in tighter rules for mid-sized third-party accounts.

India repriced. Amazon India moved cancellation fees to a percentage of order value, up to 10%, with closing fees rising from September 7.

Owner: whoever holds account admin.

Your policy and performance emails almost certainly go to one inbox. That inbox almost certainly belongs to one person. That person takes holidays.

Start by finding out where they actually land. Open the last policy or performance email Amazon sent you and note two things: the sender address, and which mailbox it arrived in. Most people are mildly surprised by the answer.

Then Settings, then Notification Preferences. Most accounts can route notification types to their own address, so if a performance or account category is listed, point it at somewhere more than one human reads. Which categories you get depends on your selling plan, so it may not be there.

Either way, do the step that always works. Put a forwarding rule in the mailbox those emails already land in, matching the sender you just looked up, pointed at a shared inbox. That rule lives in your mail system rather than Amazon's, so nothing on the account changes and nothing can break.

Now the honest part about testing. You cannot make Amazon send you a policy notice on demand, so there is no true end-to-end test here. Send one plain email to the shared address and confirm two people got it. That proves the destination; the path is proven by the rule matching a sender you read off a real message.

One thing not to do: do not fix this by changing the primary contact email on the account. That can pull you into verification and two-step flows, and the fortnight before peak is the worst time to argue with Amazon about who you are.

Nobody has ever lost an account because the notification was badly written. People lose accounts because it was delivered, correctly, to somebody on annual leave.

And if you want to see the machine's paperwork: the European Commission's DSA Transparency Database is public and takes about a minute to search. Filter it to Amazon and read what actually gets flagged, and how often nobody looked first.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite

P.S. — If your Performance Notifications land in a personal inbox, fix it today. Fifteen minutes, and it is the cheapest insurance on this list.