When the Attack Is Not Coming From Amazon

I sat down with Chris McCabe on the ecommerceChris podcast the week before Prime Day 2026. Chris spends his working life on Amazon suspensions and abuse prevention, and he used to work inside Amazon, so this was less an interview than two people comparing scar tissue.

The conversation went somewhere I did not expect: what happens when the thing damaging your brand is not Amazon at all, but another seller, and Amazon is simply the instrument they are using.

What happens when a competitor attacks your reviews?

Last year a lawyer contacted me about a brand I had worked with. I came in as an expert witness and logged something like forty hours on the case, so this was not a letter and a signature.

The pattern was ordinary right up until it was not. The brand launched a product, it did well, and then the reviews started going bad. What made this one provable is that the person leaving them eventually left negative feedback on seller feedback rather than only on the product, and seller feedback carries a name. Once you can identify who it is, and that person turns out to be a competitor, you are no longer looking at unhappy customers. You are looking at defamation.

The work I did was the financial half. We tracked what the negative reviews actually cost the business by following the change in conversion rate and sessions and converting that into lost revenue. That is the piece brands almost never have, and it is the piece a court needs. He won, significantly. Six figures plus in compensation for a smaller brand.

The lesson I took is not that everyone should sue. It is that when Amazon dismisses something, you sometimes have to make the problem big enough that somebody pays attention. Whether that is bringing in someone like Chris, bringing in legal, or both, depends on whether the damage justifies it.

Chris made the fair counterpoint, and he is right: people throw the word legal around in places it does not belong. Abuse prevention teams and executive escalation exist and are usually the correct first route. Legal is what you reach for when the money on the line is large enough to justify it, and it is always available later.

Can a Temu listing take your buy box?

Yes, and it happened to a brand I own.

Somebody listed our product on Temu using our exact photos, with our brand name visible in the images, at a price I still cannot work out how anyone would make money at. It almost certainly originated in China. Amazon's price matching found it, matched it because the listing looked identical to ours, and acted accordingly.

I want to be fair here, because it would be easy to blame Amazon. This is not really Amazon making a mistake. Their system saw what looked like the same product being sold for far less somewhere else and did what it was built to do. The problem is that the burden of untangling it lands entirely on the brand.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. In the American justice system you are innocent until proven guilty. On Amazon it runs the other way. It is on you as a brand to go find the counterfeit listing on Temu, document it, and prove it, and that lift gets bigger every year as the number of marketplaces grows.

Chris has been seeing the same pattern with review manipulation framing. A competitor makes it look as though you are handing out gifts for five-star reviews on some site that has nothing to do with your brand, and Amazon falls for it. Brands were getting warnings, and in some cases reviews were deleted and later had to be restored. It is not a new tactic. It has been around for years, and it resurged going into Prime Day.

These are exactly the mechanics we watch for in Amazon brand protection.

What does "we did not find any abuse" actually mean?

Chris put this better than I could, because he has reported these cases with evidence attached and watched them come back rejected.

When a brand reports genuine, documented, actionable abuse and the reply is that Amazon looked and found nothing, it is one of two things. Either nobody opened it, because the team is so used to sending that response that it goes out reflexively. Or somebody did open it and failed to see abuse that was straightforward to see.

Both should concern you. My own read is more sympathetic than it sounds: I assume they are an overworked police department taking a million cases a day, and nothing gets proper attention unless it is put directly in front of the right person.

There is a related thing I noticed at roundtables in Seattle. Most of the brands we work with have a paid strategic account manager, and when I described the black hat tactics we deal with, some of them genuinely did not know. That gap is not incompetence. It is who Amazon has been listening to. They have been taking their advice from technology companies rather than service companies, and a service business is the one holding a brand's hand through the problem at eight at night.

When should you stop defending a listing and move on?

This is where my thinking has changed most.

The instinct, when an ASIN gets hit with a price match error or a suppression, is to fight it. Open the case, escalate, keep pushing. We are now much quicker to triage instead: get another ASIN listed under a different UPC, or create a workaround case pack, and get selling again while the original is still in dispute.

Sometimes we abandon a listing faster than we would have a few years ago, which is not a satisfying answer but is often the right one. Putting all your hopes on one ASIN, when Amazon has already decided something about it, is how a quarter disappears.

The cost is real and worth naming. When the product was a hero SKU, you are now back at the beginning, gathering Vine reviews on a relaunch. That is painful, and it is still usually faster than the alternative.

One change worth watching if you sell on both: Amazon and TikTok Shop are moving toward looking at each other's marketplaces for buy box suppression. TikTok Shop is discount-heavy by nature, with deals and affiliate commissions built into how it works, so a strategy that assumed those two would never see each other needs revisiting. We work through that in our TikTok Shop and multi-marketplace practice.

Who should you actually hire for a suspension?

Chris said he had annoyed someone by saying there is nobody useful on Upwork to advise on a suspension, an abuse report or a brand registry problem. I have a soft spot here, because I got my own start on Upwork, so I would put it slightly differently.

Pick and choose. Getting an image edited by a freelancer is fine. Handing a suspension to the cheapest available bidder is a different decision, because the downside is your entire revenue.

The way I think about it: if you are building a house your family will live in, or you are facing something with one shot to get right, that is not where you look for a deal. Nobody shops for the cheapest heart surgeon.

What you are buying on the serious problems is not effort, it is pattern recognition. In the early days of Marknology, suspensions were genuinely awful. One account issue could take down four or five customers at the same time through no fault of anyone's, just systems tripping wires. We had to learn to write appeals, articulate the problem, and work the flows. That experience is not something a language model has, and it is exactly what you need when you are trying to convince Amazon that you are in the right and someone else is in the wrong.

The broader version of the mistake is spending a lot of time saving a penny to lose a dollar.

Why did Prime Day feel smaller this year?

Chris asked whether I expected brands to come out of Prime Day disappointed. Honestly, yes, and I do not think it means the event stopped working.

What changed is what brands are optimizing for. The pandemic was tight, coming out of it was a mountain top, and the last two years have been a valley of tariffs and economic pressure. Brands that were pushing top line revenue to grow or be acquired have moved to profit and margin, both large and small.

If you are margin focused, Prime Day can be a blip. You have given away good margin, cleared out inventory, and now you have a cash flow problem getting more product in, and you will not know until July or August whether the lift was worth it. By then you are into the last part of the year.

The advice I am giving brands, and I hear it echoed back, is that we will accept less year over year. Growth with healthy margins is what lets you weather the storm.

There is a rhythm to the year that follows from this. New engagements cluster in Q1. June through August is slow. Then late August into September it picks up sharply, because brands decide that if they are going to make a change in time to save the year, it has to happen now.

Frequently asked questions

Can you sue a competitor for leaving fake negative reviews on Amazon?

Yes, and it has succeeded. In a case where Andrew Morgans served as expert witness, the competitor left negative feedback on seller feedback, which carries a name, making them identifiable. The damage was quantified through lost sessions and conversion rate, and the brand was awarded six figures.

Why did Amazon price match my listing to a Temu listing?

Because the listing looked identical. If someone copies your photos and brand name onto another marketplace at a much lower price, Amazon's price matching can treat it as the same product and act on it. The system is working as designed, and the burden of finding and disproving the counterfeit falls on the brand.

What does it mean when Amazon says it found no abuse?

In practice it usually means one of two things: nobody opened the report, because that response is sent reflexively, or somebody reviewed it and missed abuse that was documented and provable. It is not proof that nothing happened, and it is worth escalating when you have evidence.

When should you give up on a suppressed ASIN and relist?

When defending it will cost more time than rebuilding. Getting another ASIN live under a different UPC, or creating a workaround case pack, can put you back in market while the original is still in dispute. The cost is starting over on reviews, which is often still faster than the alternative.

Is it safe to hire a freelancer for an Amazon suspension?

For reversible work such as image editing, freelance help is fine. For a suspension, an abuse report or a brand registry problem, the downside is your entire revenue, and what you are paying for is pattern recognition from someone who has worked many of these cases before.

What to take from this

1. Track what an attack costs you, in sessions and conversion rate. Without that number you cannot escalate seriously, and you certainly cannot litigate.
2. Search the other marketplaces for your own products. Your photos and brand name on a Temu listing can move your Amazon buy box.
3. Do not accept "no abuse found" as final. It frequently means the report was never properly read.
4. Decide in advance when you abandon an ASIN. A workaround UPC or case pack can be back in market while the dispute is still open.
5. Match the expertise to the stakes. Cheap help is fine for reversible work and expensive for anything that can take the account down.

Thanks to Chris McCabe for having me on. If something is happening to your listings that you cannot explain, and Amazon keeps telling you there is nothing there, that is usually the point at which it is worth having someone else look.