Or Shamosh of Amazon Sellers Appeal put up a LinkedIn post last week that pulled in 38 comments, and the thread underneath it is as useful as the post. Credit to Or for the heads-up and the framework below.

What's happening. Enough sellers messaged Or about disappearing reviews in the same few days that he stopped treating it as noise. Not one or two accounts. Dozens of reviews gone per listing. In some cases 100+. No Performance Notification. No Account Health violation. No email from Amazon. Just fewer reviews than yesterday.

Is this a Q4 purge? Maybe. Or's read is that it looks consistent with a broader review re-evaluation happening right now. But Amazon hasn't announced anything, so he won't call it a purge, and neither should you.

Is a competitor doing this? That's the second question he keeps getting, and his answer is probably not. Competitors can report reviews. They can't press a button and delete 100 of them. Amazon still decides what comes down. And when a pile of unrelated sellers all report the same thing in the same week, sabotage is the wrong place to start.

The tells that it's not a competitor: your Vine reviews vanished too (a competitor can't touch those), the removals hit multiple ASINs, and sellers you've never met lost reviews the same day.

Samuel Cohen added what an actual attack looks like in the supplements category: competitors flood a listing with reviews, positive and negative, then report either direction as manipulation. That's a pattern with a fingerprint. A quiet drop with no notice usually isn't one.

The appeal is the real problem. Or laid out the conversation every one of these sellers is having:

If you don't have the URLs, reviewer names, dates, or screenshots, Amazon has nothing concrete to investigate. Opening five more cases with the same before-and-after count doesn't create evidence. It creates five closed cases.

Cory Martin has been fighting this for months. The brand lost roughly 35% of its organic reviews, and Amazon repeatedly confirmed the reviews still exist and were never removed. They just aren't displaying.

After multiple escalations, including ESR (Executive Seller Relations), Cory found a backend classification mismatch on the parent ASIN, flagged by Amazon's own missing-review diagnostic. That's being corrected now to see if the reviews re-aggregate.

Sana Ullah lost 25 reviews about three weeks ago with no notification. They came back on their own, two or three a day. Sana's read: Amazon is re-evaluating and temporarily pulling reviews, not permanently deleting them.

So before you write the appeal, check whether the reviews were deleted at all. Variation structure, Vine, and a parent ASIN classification issue explain a lot of these cases, and none of those get fixed by arguing with Seller Support about a count.

What to do this week:

Walmart did their big “Let’s Grow” Seller Summit in San Diego last week. And Amazon Accelerate is back in Seattle in two weeks.

September 22 to 24. Seattle Convention Center. Somewhere north of 4,000 sellers, agencies, tool vendors, and Amazon employees in lanyards. It's Amazon's one annual conference built specifically for third-party sellers, and it's the biggest single gathering of our industry in the U.S. every year.

Should you go? Depends what you want out of it.

The content is not why you go

The main stage content at Accelerate is bland. It's rah-rah. Every session gets sanded down by legal and PR before it hits the stage, and what's left is a product announcement wrapped in a success story with zero tactics attached. You will hear the word "empower" more times than you can count. You will not hear anyone tell you how to actually fix a suppressed listing or which ad structure is working right now.

Sometimes one of the side rooms has something practical, but you have to seek it out.

That's not a knock on the Amazon folks on stage. They're good people. They just can't say anything interesting in that room.

What makes it worth the trip:

The Seller Café. This is the best thing Amazon does all year and most sellers skip it. You book 1:1 appointments with actual Amazon subject matter experts across 75+ categories: Ads, FBA, Brand Registry, Seller Support, compliance, catalog, you name it.

Bring your stuck case. Bring the listing that's been in limbo since June. Bring the reimbursement claim nobody will answer. A ten-minute face-to-face here can close out problems you've been fighting over email for months. Slots go fast. Book the minute registration opens the booking portal.

The networking. Four thousand people from your world in one building. Every serious tool company, every agency, every aggregator that survived, and a lot of sellers you only know from a Facebook group avatar. Hallway conversations at Accelerate have started partnerships, exits, and hires. The hallway is the conference.

The food, drinks, and swag. Amazon does not skimp. Breakfast, lunch, coffee all day, an open bar Block Party at the Space Needle and MoPOP on Wednesday night (included with your in-person badge), and enough vendor swag to fill a second suitcase. Nobody goes home hungry or empty-handed.

And this networking dinner:

If you want tactical, go to Cyprus instead

If your goal this month is real, no-fluff tactics from people actually running 7- and 8-figure Amazon brands, Tomer Rabinovich's Top Dog Summit is the better choice. It's September 8 to 10 at the St. Raphael Resort in Limassol, Cyprus. Eighty seats. Sellers only. No service providers on stage or in the audience. Workshops and 1:1s instead of keynotes.

It starts tomorrow, so if you're not already holding a boarding pass this one's a "put it on the calendar for next year." But it's the opposite of Accelerate in every way that matters, and that's the point.

Accelerate is the big one, but it and Top Dog are not the only ones. September has quietly become the most crowded month on the ecom calendar. Here's the full map, in date order.

Alibaba CoCreate | September 9 to 10 | Los Angeles Convention Center
Alibaba's sourcing and manufacturing summit for product businesses. Meet factories face to face, sit in on the "AI + everything" supply chain sessions, and watch the CoCreate Pitch startup competition.

Commerce Roundtable | September 21 to 22 | Port Pavilion, San Diego
The DTC crowd's show, built by Taylor Holiday, Nick Shackelford, Chase Dimond, and Jimmy Kim. About 750 curated attendees, a 3:1 brand-to-vendor ratio, morning keynotes and live podcasts, afternoon workshops on paid media, retention, and channel strategy.

Amazon Ads unBoxed | September 28 to 30 | Moscone West, San Francisco
Amazon's advertising conference, and where the ad product announcements actually land. Three days of keynotes, breakouts, and hands-on demos aimed at brands, agencies, and partners. More marketer-heavy than Accelerate. If you or your agency spends real money on Amazon Ads, this is the one to watch.

And one for October: DealCon | October 19 to 21 | Archer Hotel, Austin
Tom Shipley's M&A summit for 7- to 9-figure founders. Deal sourcing, structuring, creative financing, integration, exits. If you run an agency, or you're thinking about buying one or selling yours, this is the room in Austin next month.

Go to Accelerate for the people, the Seller Café, and the parties. Set your expectations for the stage content accordingly. Get on Athena's list for her Tuesday night event before it fills (more info coming in Thursday’s newsletter).

In Europe? Check out this website for a full list of European ecom events

Ask a 7 or 8-figure seller where their money is and they won't point at a bank account. They'll point at a warehouse.

Inventory is the biggest check most Amazon sellers write. And the better the business does, the bigger that check gets.

Every new SKU, every bigger PO, every Q4 stock-up pulls cash out of the account and parks it on a shelf. You can have $500K in inventory, sales climbing, and still be sweating the next wire to your supplier.

That's not a broken business. That's a normal one.

Why It Happens

Money goes out, product comes in, and you wait 60 to 120 days to get it back. That's how most sellers see inventory. A use of cash.

It's also usually the single largest asset on an Amazon seller's balance sheet. It's sellable, it's trackable, and Amazon reports on it down to the unit.

That's collateral. Most sellers never think of it that way.

What Bigger Sellers Do

More large sellers are borrowing against inventory they already own to fund the next order.

One example is eCapital's Liquid Inventory, a revolving line of credit backed by your inventory. As inventory grows, the line grows. As product sells through and you pay it down, the credit opens back up for the next PO.

It moves the way your inventory moves.

Why It Fits This Business

A revolving line backed by inventory matches how the business actually runs:

The Mindset Shift

Inventory will always be one of the biggest uses of cash in this business. The question is whether it's also working for you while it sits there.

Sellers who make that shift order bigger when the numbers say to, launch without draining the account, and go into Q4 stocked instead of rationed.

If your inventory already drives sales, it can probably do more than that.

See how Liquid Inventory works

Amazon is running a promo most sellers haven't noticed. Since July 16, Multi-Channel Fulfillment takes 35% off Standard and Expedited fulfillment rates on every TikTok Shop order shipped to a US address. Amazon says it runs for at least 12 months.

No enrollment. No application. The discount lands on its own, and you can see it in the Your Incentives dashboard in Seller Central and in your MCF reports a day or two after the shipment.

The catch

The order has to hit Amazon tagged as a TikTok Shop order. That only happens through a participating integration partner. Shopify (the MCF app or Buy with Prime app, not the old Multi-Channel Fulfillment app), ShipStation, Rithum, Linnworks, CedCommerce, Celigo, ChannelEngine, ByteStand, and about twenty others are on the list. Key TikTok orders into Seller Central by hand and you pay full price.

It won't stack. If you're in the 2026 Preferred Pricing program (up to 15% off MCF fees plus up to $1 in FBA credit per unit), the 35% replaces it on TikTok orders only. Everything else keeps Preferred Pricing. TikTok units also don't count against your Preferred Pricing unit cap or FBA credit cap, so you lose nothing on the rest of your business.

The 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge still applies. So do holiday peak fees from October 15 through January 14.

Why Amazon is doing this

Amazon is buying your inventory position. Every TikTok order that ships from FBA stock is one more reason to keep your units in Amazon's buildings instead of a 3PL or TikTok's own fulfillment. Amazon's pitch: sellers running FBA and MCF off one pool cut out-of-stocks 19% and turned inventory 12% faster. Amazon's numbers. Read them that way.

Does it clear TikTok's rules

TikTok Shop wants orders dispatched in two business days and delivered in six. Amazon says 96% of MCF orders dispatch and 99% deliver inside the required windows. TikTok updated its MCF guide in February: it now validates that tracking numbers actually come from Amazon (with a five-order allowance for setup mistakes), and you can run up to three MCF warehouses per shop under Seller Center > Logistics > Warehouses.

What to do

If you sell on TikTok Shop and sit on FBA inventory, pull one month of TikTok fulfillment invoices and run the same units through the MCF calculator with 35% off.

✌🏼 See you again Thursday …

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
YouTube does over $45 billion in annual ad revenue.