In this case, the violation had to do with my confirmation emails. I am in the practice of sending out an email whenever I ship a book, just to let the customer know that their books are on their way. It’s good customer service and doesn’t take much time once you develop a boilerplate message to send out. The issue was that in the signature of my email was the URL of my own website.

Now, these emails are only sent after the transaction is complete. I would never try and divert a customer from buying a book I had listed on Amazon to buy it from my own site instead. That is pretty much Amazon’s cardinal sin and if you get caught doing it, you can pretty much expect instant expulsion. The way I justified what I was doing was that the customer had already bought the book and Amazon had already got their cut. What was wrong with letting the customer know I also had an independent site after the sale was complete?

A lot.

You might think that what goes on between you and the customer is none of Amazon’s business. After all, their Participation Agreement makes Amazon’s role pretty clear:

“Amazon provides a platform for third-party sellers (”Sellers”) and buyers (”Buyers”) to negotiate and complete transactions. Amazon is not involved in the actual transaction between Sellers and Buyers and is not the agent of and has no authority for either for any purpose.”

You might think that but you’d be wrong. Here’s the thing, you’re entitled to interpret Amazon’s policies any way you want, but they have their own interpretation. Only one of the two interpretations counts. Guess which one? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not yours.

Amazon’s interpretation of their rules is that at no point during the process, before, during or after the sale, can you do anything that might be seen as diverting customers away from Amazon to somewhere else, such as your own site. I could have argued my point, tried to fight them on it.

But I didn’t.

Whether you’re right, wrong or indifferent, it does not pay to get cute with Amazon. If you are ever contacted by them regarding a violation, I highly recommend you do exactly what I did.

First of all, I stopped doing it. No more URLs in the emails.

Second, I spoke to someone at Amazon on the phone to confirm that I was now in compliance with their policies and standards. Amazon has a feature in their help section where you can request to have someone call you. It works like a charm.

Finally, after I got off the phone I sent an email to Amazon in which I referenced the phone call. I suggest you always call AND email, that way if there is discrepancy later on, you have some kind of record of the resolution of the issue.

Don’t try to take on Amazon. They will win. Play by the rules, and if they call you on something, fix it and then make absolutely sure they know you fixed it. Do that and everybody wins, and everybody gets to keep making money, including you.