Numerous Amazon sellers in the US said the company added the Amazon Brazil marketplace to their seller accounts, resulting in major headaches. “Sometime overnight on 3/29/24, Amazon Brazil was added to an unknown number of US Seller accounts,” a reader informed us. “We discovered this on Saturday morning when we tried to open Seller Central and were blocked due to Invalid Credit Card /Payment method.”
Sellers also reported the problem on the Amazon seller discussion boards. As the reader and sellers on the boards explained, they were unable to delete the Brazil account that Amazon had added.
“We went into support chat, were told to simply delete the Brazil account, but when we tried to do so we got an error message saying that could not be completed without deleting the US account as well,” according to the reader.
It appears the problem is related to an issue a seller had reported a week ago in a threat titled, “AUTOMATIC ENROLLMENT TO SELL TO BRAZIL! Where’s the AUTOMATIC UNENROLLMENT OPTION???” The original poster in that thread pointed out that sellers are prohibited from selling certain of their items in Brazil, and bemoaned the fact that Amazon was making it so difficult to avoid this “un-requested obligation to sell to a South American country and automatically violate Manufacturer’s agreements.”
An Amazon moderator confirmed instructions from a seller responding to the original poster that included the following advice: “DO NOT attempt to close that Brazilian account. Put it on vacation. Make sure no listings have been added; make sure synchronization (BIL) is not enabled.”
The Amazon moderator also wrote: “…since you asked about Auto-enrollment in the Brazil Store, please see the following help pages. The Brazil Store is a part of the North America Unified Accounts for sellers based in the United States and China.”
The EcommerceBytes reader added in a followup email, “I just don’t understand why Amazon would automatically add other country sites to a seller’s account. It is not as if sellers can simply just start selling on other country sites without jumping through lots of other hoops, from deposit accounts, to return addresses.”
This happened to me! I had no idea anyone else was experiencing this. I thought I’d added Brazil accidentally, or that maybe I’d been hacked. It didn’t cause me any problems, though, and I just put Brazil on vacation.
(But also… Brazil is in South America, not North America, lololol)
I sometimes describe selling on Amazon as Kafkaesque, and this is a nice example.