When Rufus Meets the Price Comparator
I tested Rufus on a simple IKEA bin.
It could tell me the product was made by IKEA, made from polypropylene, 28 cm high, 10 litres, and currently £5.95 on Amazon.
It could tell me the seller appeared to be IKEA.
It could even say the product looked available today and that there were “no apparent pricing concerns.”
Then I asked the obvious customer question:
“I can see this is £1.50 on IKEA’s own website. Why is it £5.95 on Amazon?”
The answer was:
“I can’t help with this type of request.”
When Rufus Meets the Price Comparator
I tested Rufus on a simple IKEA bin.
It could tell me the product was made by IKEA, made from polypropylene, 28 cm high, 10 litres, and currently £5.95 on Amazon.
It could tell me the seller appeared to be IKEA.
It could even say the product looked available today and that there were “no apparent pricing concerns.”
Then I asked the obvious customer question:
“I can see this is £1.50 on IKEA’s own website. Why is it £5.95 on Amazon?”
The answer was:
“I can’t help with this type of request.”
15 replies
Seller_mS10UjVYuuGor
In fairness you should have blurred out the sellers name before posting images on the forum.
This however is the question every Amazon seller should ba asking their chosen AI agent, to find their product (excluding any own brand name) as a customer would, its likely Amazon won't be mentioned unless specifically mentioned in the prompt. Then decide what they're going to do about it.
AI has yet to work out how its going to payback the hideous sums invested in it, so unless the average person in the street becomes willing to pay for it there'll be some form of advertising served up to 'free' users within a few years. Plus the interfaces are still dog ugly at the moment but it can't be ignored, especially by online sellers.
There'll be winners and losers as it shakes itself out and no one really knows what the landscape will be in 2 or 5 years time.
Seller_Fg2fqaWOnEtha
This is interesting. It's not IKEA selling these products, from IKEA's own mouth: " IKEA does not sell products on Amazon or other third-party sites. Any IKEA product for sale on a third-party site is sold by an unauthorized reseller with which IKEA has no relationship. Our products are only sold in IKEA stores worldwide and online at IKEA.com". If you click on the brand, you will see it doesn't have a shop which is actually quite strange when we are talking of a major brand. If it had been really IKEA, there would have been a large selection of products. But it's not IKEA.
As I suspected as I have seen with several other well known brands. So whoever created the brand IKEA on Amazon did so without authorisation. Yet Amazon is ok with it and even allow some products to be FBA. It's crazy.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
Another impressive Amazon logic.
Risk has memory. Clearance does not.
Seller_Fg2fqaWOnEtha
The problem with this is that it all falls apart once you have to deal with Seller Support. I sell, among other things, incense packs which come in a box of 12 packs from the wholesaler. On the invoice it says 1 box (sometimes it adds 12 packs, but not very often). When I have to prove authenticity to seller support, they always reject the invoices, if I sold 40 packs they want to see 40 boxes, while 4 boxes would be 48 packs, more than enough. Sometimes I manage to convince them, but I have had violations that I haven't managed to clear yet. With authentic products and invoices. It's a lot of work and stress for a sole trader.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
Support bot confession: Round 3
This does not look like an authenticity failure. It looks like a unit-conversion failure disguised as an invoice rejection.
If the wholesaler sells incense in boxes of 12 packs, then 4 boxes = 48 retail packs.
If the seller sold 40 packs, the quantity may be sufficient — but only if Amazon reviews the invoice using the correct unit of measure.
The key question is not “does the seller have invoices?”
The key question is:
Did Amazon count 4 boxes as 4 units, or as 48 retail packs?
That is the review issue.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
This may also be a review-tool design issue.
The maths is simple: 4 boxes × 12 packs = 48 packs.
The problem may be that the review UI only captures “invoice quantity = 4,” without a separate field for “box contains 12 retail packs.” If the tool compares 4 against 40, the invoice looks insufficient even though the converted quantity is 48.
So this may need forwarding to the internal team responsible for invoice-review tooling / Account Health evidence evaluation, not just ordinary Seller Support.
Seller_Fg2fqaWOnEtha
We are talking about appeals to violations for selling inauthentic products, so they should know about this, as many wholesale products come in boxes. I also sent them the link to the supplier's website where it's clear that one box=12 retail packs. But it doesn't always work, in a few occasions they insisted I sent them an invoice covering all the units sold. I did but they see boxes as units. These invoices don't exist as I buy wholesale from the manufacturers or authorised importers, they don't sell individual retail packs, they sell boxes.
My point is if Amazon relies on case by case assessments, they should have the tools and staff able to handle these situations. In my experience they don't have the know how and competence to assess inauthenticity claims properly and fairly.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
I think this is where normal retail common sense is missing.
Tesco can handle this better at customer level. You can buy one apple with a label, a pack of apples in packaging, one onion by weight, or a bag of onions. The receipt may describe the product in different ways, but if there is a problem, Tesco can still understand what was bought and deal with the refund or replacement.
That is basic unit-of-measure understanding.
Amazon should be able to do the same in seller support. A wholesaler may invoice by box, carton, case, tray, dozen, or pack. That does not mean the goods are not authentic. It only means the supplier’s unit is different from the Amazon retail unit.
The frustrating part is that sellers pay Amazon subscription fees, FBA fees, referral fees, storage fees and other service charges, but when something goes wrong we are often not treated like customers of the platform. We are treated more like contractors feeding documents into a black-box process.
If Amazon relies on case-by-case assessments, the system needs staff and tools that can understand normal commercial documents, not just whether one field on a screen matches another field exactly.
Seller_Fg2fqaWOnEtha
See this https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/seller-forums/discussions/t/c9933fd4-dc87-41bc-a412-4ca0ada20a27?ref=forums_sc_homepage_ml_c9933fd4-dc87-41bc-a412-4ca0ada20a27&communicationDeliveryId=34dcd690-7de5-4686-b300-5a5fb1b0a924
It's a serious problem with honest sellers at risk of losing their livelihoods. I nearly lost my account last month when Amazon chose to believe several authenticity claims by the same person who claimed to be the brand and trademark owner. No matter what I sent, it was all rejected and my products were 100% genuine, with all documents and seals. . It's only after the REAL brand owner wrote a strong email to Amazon that all my violations were removed. But as it involved several products from the same brand, my account health was down to 204. it's a worry as not all brand owners are so responsive.. I have two outstanding violations that I haven't been able to clear since the end of last year. Plus the usual ones for cannabinoids that are a bit of a joke to be honest.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
Yes, this is exactly the problem.
A seller can have genuine products, valid invoices, seals, and a legitimate supply chain, but still fail Amazon’s internal authenticity or authorisation workflow if the system believes the wrong claimant or routes the case to the wrong review path.
Your case is a very good example. The products were genuine, but Amazon appeared to accept the wrong signal until the real brand owner intervened. That means the seller’s evidence alone was not enough to correct the decision path.
That is the worrying part for honest sellers. Not every seller can get a responsive brand owner to write directly to Amazon.
So I think these cases need to be framed not only as “my products are genuine,” but also as:
- Which signal triggered the enforcement?
- Who did Amazon believe?
- Which document or claim failed review?
- Which team owns the correction?
- What can the seller do when real-world evidence and Amazon’s decision record do not match?
Otherwise sellers are trapped resubmitting documents into a workflow that may not be checking the actual problem.
Seller_tRuvBEHDedp4q
Very interesting discussion.
There is also another problem that was not discussed above. Some time ago I had a customer complaint of fake product, so Amazon closed the listing. Considering I bought the item directly from the manufacturer so knew they were not fake I appealed. Amazon wanted me to prove authenticity. So I sent off 6 months invoices (as requested by Amazon), copies of emails from the manufacturer saying I was an authorised re-seller, full contact details of the manufacturer including the name of a director of the company, the company website address and a copy of the GS1 report showing that the GTIN belonged to said company/manufacturer. All was rejected by Amazon with the response that they could not verify the information. I checked with the manufacturer (thinking perhaps they had not responded to an Amazon request) to be told no one at Amazon had contacted then at all - not by telephone, email or letter!
After weeks of back and forth and getting nowhere, something Seller Support said suddenly shown a light on the problem. The 6 months invoices I supplied showed me buying in X amount of stock but I had sold X+Y amount over that period. For some reason (it seems) Amazon assumed that I had therefore bought Y amount from an unauthorised source.
Now it became clear - if Amazon had asked for 7 months invoices they would now see I had bought more than was sold on Amazon. I obviously needed to get in stock BEFORE first listing on Amazon. Once I sent off the invoice from 7 months ago and fully explained it I finally got the listing re-instated.
So a single complaint from a customer who had no authority to make the fake complaint was believed by Amazon, Yet my good standing and proof were all rejected by Amazon on a technicality. Not only that but the responses by Amazon (that the information could not be verified) just muddied the waters further. If they had simply stated - 'we have checked the documents supplied but can not verify the amount of stock bought against amount sold' or something similar then the issue would have been resolved quicker. And as for Amazon actually physically checking directly with the manufacturer/brand owner - well this never seems to be done despite what they say.
Seller_kSZCywEhJQQ8J
This is a very important example because it shows another hidden failure point in the authenticity workflow.
From what you describe, the issue was not that the manufacturer evidence was weak. You had invoices, manufacturer emails, authorised reseller confirmation, contact details, website details, and GS1 evidence.
The real problem appears to have been a stock reconciliation assumption:
Amazon asked for 6 months of invoices.
Your 6-month invoices showed X units purchased.
Your Amazon sales showed X+Y units sold.
Amazon then seems to have treated the missing Y units as a possible unauthorised-source problem.
But the missing Y units were not unauthorised stock. They were stock purchased before the 6-month invoice window.
That is a very different issue.
If Amazon had said clearly, “We cannot reconcile the quantity purchased in the submitted invoice period with the quantity sold,” you could have supplied the earlier invoice immediately. Instead, “we cannot verify the information” made the seller guess which part of the evidence failed.
This is exactly the problem with these cases. Amazon often asks for authenticity evidence, but the real internal check may be something narrower, such as:
1. invoice date range
2. quantity reconciliation
3. supplier verification
4. brand-owner confirmation
5. GTIN/brand ownership
6. authorised reseller status
If Amazon does not say which check failed, the seller is left resubmitting documents blindly.
Your case also shows why a single customer authenticity complaint can trigger a very heavy burden on the seller, even when the customer has no authority to assess authenticity and the manufacturer could have confirmed the supply chain directly.
The lesson seems to be: when appealing authenticity complaints, sellers may need to include not only invoices, but also a stock movement explanation showing opening stock, purchase dates, sales quantity, and why the invoice period covers the units sold.
This is not a fake-product issue. It is a traceability and explanation failure.
