Account verification nightmare

I too have been going through this verification process (a complete nightmare) since February. After selling on Marketplace since the beginning of 2005, I now need to have a bank account in the same name as my seller account.

I switched to Pro-Merchant in 2008, with a business bank account in the UK (which was difficult to set up, as I wasn’t resident in the UK at the time). In 2011, I decided to cancel my Pro-Merchant subscription, and linked to a different personal bank account, but have also never been able to change the business name on my Amazon account as this is greyed out. Emails to Customer Support about this had never resulted in a solution.

Then this February, Seller Verification requested a bank statement copy and after uploading it, I was informed that it was unacceptable, as the names did not match. After explaining to them that I had not been operating as a business for 7 years, they told me that the only solution would be to open an Individual account (this got me very confused, as I have an email from Amazon from 2011 stating that I am registered as an Individual account). But I wanted first to know about my inventory (650 items) and 97% lifetime feedback.

Nearly 50 emails have gone back and forward (including to/from the support situated somewhere on the South Asian subcontinent, which didn’t seem to comprehend the situation at all). Finally last week I received a call back from a guy from the Health Check Team who advised me that if I opened a new account, I would lose my feedback (not an option for me, as I don’t sell enough to build it up all again), but that I could move my inventory via Reverse Feed File backup. He told me that another solution would be to open a bank account through Payoneer, Currency Direct, WorldFirst, etc. in the same name as our registered Amazon account.

I opted for Payoneer, and over the last few days, I have this now set up. I uploaded a Payoneer account statement (it’s of course blank, as no funds into it have yet been received) through to Seller Verification. I thought that this would be sufficient, but of course not, as Seller Verification has just come back to me saying there is no bank account number shown on the Payoneer statement. This is an official statement from Payoneer and I was advised by their employee to go down this route to solve this ongoing verification problem!

I have now contacted Payoneer support to ask whether they can produce a statement with my Barclays-allocated bank account showing, but I am not sure whether they will be able to help me.

In the meantime, I have also received an email from Seller Support saying that I have been receiving incorrect information from their own department/Payments Team/Seller Support (including India) since February, and that I actually have an Individual account and not a Business account (which is as I understood to begin with!)

I just don’t understand why Amazon cannot just change the name on our selling account to that of our original bank account? I have never received any answer from them about that.

I can well understand that small individual sellers are abandoning Amazon, due to all this stress and many other reasons (I am now just a very small seller, offering my own personal DVDs, books, CD collection, many collector items where often I am the only one offering the item). As I have read on the forums, Amazon seem to be trying to make life very difficult for the small sellers. But I won’t be bullied, so am still holding out until someone comes up with a way out of this….