Over the last month we noticed a rise in Amazon Marketplace sellers created for one purpose only - to scam people. All of them list a lot of products, have great prices, but as the orders start rolling it customers quickly realize that their products are not coming.

For example, Redline Street Performance this week started getting a lot of traffic and it only took us a moment to realize it’s one of the offending sellers. They already have 420 negative reviews at the time of writing, and of course by now Amazon has suspended their selling, but that’s at least 400 upset customers.

Here are are some of the worst performing sellers in the last month: Jinate’s Shop received 6,383 negative reviews, Lucky leuc - 2,762, shoooose - 2,570, ER store - 1,338 JINGHUIAM - 1,147, tanxiang - 1,140, MAX_efd - 1,069.

There are over 50 sellers with more than 100 reviews in the last month and all of them being negative.

Sometimes Amazon does not suspend sellers fast enough and thus they are able to receive some of the income from sales. Sellers on Amazon are paid every two weeks so if they can avoid getting suspended for longer than that the scam is successful. A lot of these scam sellers indicate shipping times as long as a month, thus by the time customers realize products are not coming sellers have already received the payment and are gone.

While those sellers get suspended eventually it still creates a bad experience for customers. As more sellers like this join the platform customers are going to learn to not trust any new sellers. Making it harder for new marketplace sellers to grow.

Many customers already only buy products with the Prime option available, those fulfilled by sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). The rise of scam sellers can make it even more of them not trust sellers doing their own fulfillment.

We expect Amazon to make some changes to make it harder to join the marketplace and start accepting orders without some verification first. We are seeing thousands of new sellers created on Amazon every day, out of those there is a pretty high risk to have some fraudulent ones. It’s worrying to see Jinate’s Shop with 6,383 negative reviews, meaning that likely over ten thousand customers didn’t get the products they were expecting.