I can’t really offer you any advice but I really hope you manage to get sorted and I’m very sorry for your loss x

This happened to somebody else a few years back, I believe @retro_emporium spent a lot of time working with them to sort it out.

Sorry to hear of your loss , I did speak (write) with your Dad here on several threads.

Have you thought about taking it to a phone shop or one of those places that unlock phones? There are probably who can help you get into it.

As for trying to sort out your father’s estate in Malaysia you have my sympathies. My parents also lived abroad and I’m still trying to sort out their affairs many years later. My dad died 10 years ago and due to various complications we still don’t have probate.

I sorry to hear of your situation, I hope you manage to get everything sorted with Amazon.

So there a few different issues here:

1. You said the account was for a Ltd company, if that’s Otter Socks Ltd (which it appears to be)
   https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13158660
   Then the company was only formed in January 2021, and as he would have been classed as a NETP, has the Amazon account even been verified yet? (They’ve been seriously slow, although maybe not that slow)

2. If your father died in November (sorry to hear this) companies house are still showing him as the only shareholder, so that neds to be filed immediately with companies house, or you’ll get absolutely nowhere with Amazon before you even start asking them for access.

3. Was the account in good standing? Since you can’t access it, are you sure there’s anything in the seller account that’s worth salvaging?

[quote=“OTTER_WATERPROOF_SOC, post:23, topic:497910”]
The sales in my Dad’s store went down immediately after he died, as in more than half of what he was achieving the month the year before.[/quote]

If the company was only formed in 2021, are you referring to a different Amazon account?

@Singularity

1. Yes it was only formed in January, but the account has been verified and on the account details is registered as his business.

2. I’ve spoken to companies house, they are aware and are waiting for the accountant to transfer the shares to myself and my siblings. We’re just in the process of signing all the legal documents but it needs to be signed by 3 of us so has to be posted all over the UK as we live all over.

3. I can access the account through a secondary login. This login was the one his girlfriend used (she would often do a lot of the work for him on the account) she has given us the details and allowed us to change the email/password/mobile from hers to ours. It has limited permissions though. I believe he was making a success of it, he had sold 6 figures worth of product in 2020. This year was due to be on track but since his death it has all dropped off, I’m trying to understand why.

4. No it’s the same account, he registered it as a business I presume for tax purposes when he started selling a large amount. He has a market place in USA, uk and Europe. He’s been selling his product for years but only in 2021 did he register as a business and applied for trademark.

@The_Little_Shop they don’t own the factory, or at least he doesn’t. I believe she has a factory space for labelling and packaging. My Dad died without a Will, he was divorced, he has no other children but myself and my 2 siblings, he didn’t speak to anyone in his family and instead focused on his passion (golf) and developing his Amazon business. Nobody is contesting anything because sadly there is nobody in his life to contest. Yes he is still making sales, though these have drastically reduced and he’s losing the buy box pretty much every day. I presume the competition for the buy box is with his girlfriends store? As that’s the only other place selling this stock.

@Singularity the support around me would be useful, but other than the person who designs Amazon stores they all have little experience with selling on Amazon. The store designer knows a little and works for other sellers, but he really only knows about the creative side of things.

I posted on this forum to ask for advice to see if any other seller has been in a similar situation and if there is a magic trick for speaking to the right department.

Thank you @Blackadder

This thread has been really helpful for me, even just as a reality check as perhaps I was naive to think that as long as I have my passion and determination that I could continue his success - but you’re all right. I do need to check out the seller university and learn more, I get it’s not as straight forward as just letting it run itself.

I’m hoping to build a trusting relationship with his girlfriend, we don’t know each other but we need each other in this to continue if that’s what we’re doing. I guess I was just a little suspicious of her, and still am because of the circumstances surrounding his death. She was the only person he regularly spoke to and shared his feelings with, he spoke to her about his heartbreak of not speaking to his adult children or having never met his only grandchild (which wasn’t our decision at all, I’ve been trying for years to reconnect with him) and then his divorce was finalised in October… a month later he dies in very suspicious circumstances. His girlfriend couldn’t reach him through phone, so sent a “friend” in Malaysia to go check on him and then this “friend” took a picture of his body (in really unusual circumstances) and sent it to her, she then sent this picture to my aunt (my Dads sister). The first contact I had with her she said the Amazon business was just a small store making hardly any money and she would take it and run it. I think she presumed, from what she knew about my Dad or what he said to her - that his children wouldn’t care about his death. I’ve single handedly arranged everything and I’m still fighting the embassy and Malaysian authorities for answers, I even have my MP involved to discover the truth to what happened to him. Meanwhile his sales drop significantly and hers go through the roof. She very well may be genuine and with good intentions, and she very well may have loved him a lot despite being 30 years younger than him, not speaking English fluently and not having seen him for 2 years due to the pandemic. It’s just all not really adding up to me.

She did say that going forward we can run this account, she will run her store. She will continue to do our shipping, she will pay for her own stock, in return she will give me secondary access to her store so I can reply to her customers and do the descriptions/writing as she uses translator software for all her communication and it’s very broken. She would like me to develop the brand marketing with new graphics, photography, fix the spelling mistakes on the stores, social media presence etc.

I guess I’ve got a lot to think about, you’ve all been so helpful so thank you so much to everyone who has participated in the thread.

Just posting an update for anyone who searches for similar threads in the future.

It’s been 4 months since my Dad died and just this week I have finally been able to access the primary account.

What ended up working in the end (and I went through the painful process of being passed back and forth from seller central to customer service to bereavement team and back in what felt like a never ending cycle)

I emailed the UK managing director of Amazon who forwarded my email to the customer escalations team, they supported changing the account email address to one I could access but basically just changed my Dads email, and didn’t remove his phone number. I then had to go through verification as the new business director/shareholder and once that was complete I was verified but still couldn’t access the account for over a month because the old mobile number I couldn’t access was linked to the account and even when removing OTP it couldn’t access.

I was reading some of my Dads posts on this forum and some advice he gave to another seller was to write everything down in a long word document and attach it to a new case on seller central - his advice was they take one look at the long document with screenshots and bump it up for someone to read. So I uploaded a 13 page document of the chronology of the case and the next day I got a phone call from escalations again who transferred the case to a guy I can only describe as an actual Amazon angel called Mario who clicked a few buttons and removed the old mobile number!

I hope this helps someone else in the future, thank you all again for your support and advice.

Have you applied for and been granted probate as an administrator? If he was a UK national, even though he lived abroad, I’m pretty sure you would need this to access any accounts belonging to him.

Also, I assume you have a death certificate?

Once probate is granted you automatically assume responsibility for any accounts he owned, banks, building society, companies etc, and all must comply with your requests for information and transfer. In effect you become your father.

Be warned though, to transfer anything to yourself without granted probate will be seen as an attempt to defraud the estate…