A group of Chinese companies has filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon for withholding their rightful earnings.
They claim this after being dismissed by Amazon for using paid reviews on their items. They now seek all their earnings to be released and stop further misappropriation actions by Amazon. There’s no response from Amazon on this case yet.
Amazon vs. Chinese Sellers
With nearly 2 million sellers on the Amazon marketplace, it’s the home for diverse online shopping for anyone in the world. But, as with the reliable brand Amazon has amassed, it introduced various policies in recent times to counterfeit bad practices on the platform.
One of them is banning the use of paid reviews by sellers. As many users lean on buying a product with maximum positive ratings, malicious sellers often use paid reviews from third-party services or direct customers to push their product sales.
Thus, to thwart such illicit practices, Amazon banned this paid reviews usage in 2016. But, a group of Chinese sellers is now complaining against Amazon for withholding their earnings since they’ve used paid reviews on the marketplace.
This is intriguing, as Amazon Services Business Solutions, which includes Fulfilled by Amazon, states in the agreement that it has sole discretion to withhold any seller’s funds if they violate the marketplace rules. And using paid reviews is one of them.
The sellers as mentioned in the lawsuit, Sopownic, Slaouwo, Deyixun, Cstech, Recoo Direct, Angelbliss, and Tudi, are now seeking
“recovery of funds that Amazon is illegally and improperly withholding” and to “stop any further misappropriation and misuse of funds that are legally and rightfully due to thousands of Amazon sellers and merchants.“
What happens to this lawsuit is interesting, as Amazon has already blacklisted over 3,000 seller accounts selling 600 Chinese brands for the same reason earlier. But, unfortunately, there’s no public response from Amazon on this case yet.
