Your seller account just got suspended. Save these things in the next hour, before you can't.
A seller account suspension is not one event. It is two, and the second one is the one that hurts.
The first is the suspension itself: listings down, payouts held, an email that cites a policy by number. The second happens quietly, usually within days — your access to your own records goes away. Order history, message threads, performance metrics, the invoices you would need to prove your supply chain is legitimate. The evidence that would win the appeal lives inside the account that was just switched off.
Nobody tells you the second one is coming.
The first hour
Do this before you write a single word of appeal. Appeals can be filed late. Downloads cannot.
- Export every report you can still reach. Orders, returns, settlements, fees, tax documents. Take the widest date range the interface offers, not the period under dispute — the dispute will move.
- Save the suspension notice itself as a file, not as an email sitting in a mailbox you might lose access to. Print it to PDF. It contains the policy citation, the case identifier, and the date, and you will be asked for all three by people who cannot look them up for you.
- Screenshot the message thread with support, including the parts that are just automated replies. Capture the full window: URL bar, timestamps, case ID visible in frame. A cropped screenshot of body text proves nothing about when it happened or where it came from.
- Pull your supplier invoices out of email and into a folder. If your suspension is about authenticity or sourcing, these are the appeal. They are also the documents most likely to be scattered across three inboxes and a messaging app.
- Write down what you were doing in the 72 hours before. A listing change, a price move, a spike in orders, a returned batch. You will not remember in three weeks, and the pattern is often the answer.
Why the order matters
Because access degrades, and it degrades in the direction that hurts you.
Read-only access usually survives longer than write access, and report generation usually dies before the reports you have already downloaded do. So the sequence is: generate and download first, screenshot second, write narrative last. Most people do it in exactly the reverse order, because the narrative is the part that feels urgent.
The narrative is not urgent. It is the only part of this that will still be possible next month.
The appeal is a form, and it is read like a form
This is the part people find hardest to accept, and it is the most useful thing to know.
An appeal is very often processed against a checklist by someone with a queue and a handle time. It is not read the way you wrote it. What that means in practice:
- State the corrective action first, not the injustice. The reviewer is looking for a specific set of elements. Put them in the first two sentences.
- Answer the policy they cited, not the one you think they meant. If the citation is wrong, say so in one clause and then address it anyway.
- Attach documents that are legible as documents — invoices with a supplier name, a date, and your business name on them. A photograph of a screen is worse than a PDF for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness.
- Do not open with the harm. Not because the harm does not matter — it is frequently the whole story, and it is why this site exists — but because the first reader is not empowered to weigh it. Save it for the escalation, where a human might.
The system is built to be answered in its own vocabulary. Learning that vocabulary is not agreeing with it.
What to do about the money
If funds are being held, the notice will normally say for how long and under what condition. Save that specific sentence. It becomes the thing you point at later when the date passes, and it is remarkably easy to lose in a thread of follow-up emails.
Keep your own running ledger of what was owed at the moment of suspension — settled, unsettled, and in transit — from the reports you exported in step one. Reconstructing it afterwards from memory is not possible, and reconstructing it from their side requires the access you no longer have.
To be completely fair
Marketplaces genuinely do have counterfeiters, and a platform that never suspended anyone would be a worse place for honest sellers. Enforcement at scale means automated enforcement, and automated enforcement means false positives. That much is arithmetic, not malice.
The complaint is narrower and harder to defend: the process takes away the evidence you need to answer it. A suspension that cut off selling while leaving records intact would cost the platform almost nothing and would remove most of what makes this a catastrophe rather than a setback.
That is a design choice. It could be a different one.
If you are reading this before it happens
Export your reports monthly and keep them somewhere the platform does not control. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between an appeal and a guess.
The general principle holds far beyond one company: never let the only copy of your evidence live inside the account that can be switched off.