Dear Jeff, we're breaking up 💔

I'd like to say 'it's me, not you' but that simply isn't the case.

We've had some great times together, some fantastic memories and, with over 800 positive reviews, we've had some great experiences, but it's become too much of a one way relationship. From my side, it's all give and no take.

Things got deep between us. 11 marketplaces and over 50 SKUs to be exact. I've tried to work at it. My over 1,500 [seller support] messages, over the last 12 months, trying to deal with issues that are and were afoot shows this.

But it's just not working...

I'm now eight weeks without access to my Amazon US account. This eight weeks includes all of the New Year health season, our main selling season. In trying to sort this, I've been ghosted, no reply in over a week. All the hard work of building up the trust and being your #1 have gone to waste.

Then our new Nespresso compatible Matcha pods resembled more of a one night stand than a relationship, banned after two weeks. For us to sell our Matcha pods, among other things, you've advised:

1. 'Your business must be physically present in the EU.'
2. 'Your products must be shipped to Amazon (FBA) or to the customer (MFN) from within the EU.'

Well, if that's the case, you've completely misunderstood the UK's relationship with the EU post-Brexit. Then you walking out on me, leaving me with:

Our aim is to provide the best possible shopping experience in our store. As such, our selling requirements are based on a number of factors that ensure a good shopping experience for customers.

If an application becomes available to sell this product, you will see a Request Approval button appear next to the product in the Add a Product feature in Seller Central.

I'm not sure that 'best possible shopping experience' involves making a product unavailable to customers. In fact, I'm not sure what this even means.

In 2021, on an individual product basis, due to deleted listings, reviews and bans for use of ingredients (we do not use synthetic raspberry ketones in our Keto Coffee), we lost out on over 300 days of sales on Amazon. This is doesn't benefit any shopping experiences.

We, and thousands of small businesses, are trying to build brands and your platform should be an integral part of this. But, for our relationship succeed, we need consistency. That means that we don't have to check our listings on a daily basis just to make sure that they still exist or haven't been fundamentally changed. When we have problems, we don't want to have to dread speaking to your support team in order to rectify and if you 'lose' our stock I don't expect it to appear as a competing listing the following week at a 50% discount to our listing. This isn't a reciprocal relationship that it needs to be.

As a small business, and even with assistance of an agency, we don't have the time, resources and emotional energy to spend time building up our momentum before having the rug pulled away from us followed by spending endless hours dealing with your circular, repetitious support teams.

Our relationship has been a tumultuous 6 years but we are at a cross roads. With your customers being unable to purchase on your platform, we've seen our own website sales grow by 278% in February. This calls into question if I still need you. One thing is for sure, if we are unable to sell on your platform, it becomes a very straight forward choice for us.

On behalf of my business, and many other businesses that can relate to our non-functioning relationship, we deserve better.

Kris x