Amazon will shut your seller account down if you fall below a certain customer approval rating. I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s around a 96 or 97 percent satisfaction rate. We were Organize.com and treading along that line for around 12 months. We got the “suspension” notice one day asking for us to respond. I remember seeing the look on our office manager’s face. She came into my office pale-faced and told me the news. Amazon represented 70 percent of all of our business. This was catastrophic; we had done almost $700,000 the month prior. It significantly hurt our business and ultimately ended in us closing the office and laying off everyone. It was the scariest time in my life. I’d just gotten married, and now we were out of business with piles of debt. I was worried about everything. Lessons learned: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And don’t put the future of your business on someone else’s platform. It may one day be gone and there is nothing you can do about it.
