A few weeks ago I received some great comments concerning starting a second seller account. However, I’d like to explore selling the new products from our current seller account. For background, our company is a long-time Amazon Seller and also an Amazon Vendor. Our metrics are excellent, shipping on time at 100% and 96% positive rating. We also have 5 brand names registered with Amazon that belong to the current company. The reason for a second account is because I’ve invented another product that is in a completely different industry than the first. My current seller account is in the self-defense market and the second account would be in the auto & camera accessories industry. Both companies are their own separate corporations, different websites, and have filed for separate trademarks and patents. My wife and I are listed as the sole owners of both companies. Both companies ship from the same facility in Gainesville, Florida.

Here’s the problem, trying to actually solve a legal or prohibited issue with Amazon customer service is akin to dealing with an insurance company or government agency. From my experience, getting Amazon to overturn a mistake they’ve made can take up to a month. The issue will finally get resolved, but the income will shut off until the agents get the case to someone within Amazon who understand’s Amazon’s own rules. So I’m very hesitant to risk our current account even when the Seller University says you can open a second account, as long as certain criteria is met. I guarantee the first few weeks of trying to find an agent that also agrees that the criteria has been met will be in vain. They’ll eventually get it right, but it will be a painfully long process.

So now that groundwork has been laid down, I’m also fine with selling the new company’s products on our current seller account as long as we can build brand awareness without mentioning the other company. For example, if you click on the product detail page, the seller shown would be the second company only and not the first. So the product detail page portions that shows who the seller is would say “Ships and sold by Company 2”, instead of “Ships and sold by Company 1”. The automotive consumer will find it odd that the seller is the same company that sells self-defense products. Since both companies are so different from each other, their brand identity has to be completely separate.

Any thoughts? Am I being overly cautious about starting a second account? That would be the cleanest but I don’t have confidence that Amazon, once a BOT red-flags the accounts (not due to our performance metrics or some other fault of our own, I’m just talking about a mistake that Amazon’s BOTs make when looking for restricted products, wording, etc.) would quickly realize that a second account is deserving. I guarantee that the process of getting a human involved to do the right thing will be extremely painful and long, but ultimately will work after a lot of effort.