Black Hat Amazon Services

There are a lot of black hat Amazon services out there, many of them originating directly from employees from within Amazon selling these reports. In this article, I'll take a look at some of the different illicit services available.

Some of the services I'm about to discuss are a direct result of the unjust monster that Amazon has made (for example, the annotation report to find out exactly why your account was suspended). Others, like requesting personally identifiable information about a reviewer, have serious ethical questions. Regardless, EcomCrew in no way endorses using any of these services but they're good for you to be aware of, nevertheless.

Related Reading: How Chinese Sellers Are Manipulating Amazon in 2020

ASIN Report

An ASIN report (also called an A9 Report) is a list of the keywords generating sales and views for your product. These reports are far different from the white hat Reverse-ASIN reports (available through tools like Helium 10) which simply show you what keywords your ranking for. The ASIN report shows you what keywords are generating sales for your listing.

These reports have gone up significantly in price and now generally cost around $80-$120.

Annotation Report

Annotation reports have been one of the most popular reports available lately.

These reports reveal the the internal notes that Amazon employees have made on your account. Normally these relate back to policy violations your account has incurred. Sellers normally purchase these reports when they have been suspended to see what they were suspended for and to write the perfect Plan of Action. It's often valuable as a preemptive step if you think your account may be in jeopardy of being suspended.

Prices range from $250-$500.

ASIN Re-mapping

Ever had to relaunch a product because of poor reviews or suspension?

Normally this means you create a new ASIN and then remove all of your stock, relabel your products, and send it back in.

With ASIN remapping, you can have your product remapped to another ASIN and avoid having to remove/resend inventory. The product still loses all of its reviews and other data but you avoid all of the transportation and labeling fees.

Review Deleting

Review deletion services go up and down like a seesaw and it changes by the day.

These services are pretty straightforward: you simply give the link to the review you want removed, wait a few days, and voila, it's gone.

These services get expensive though, often upwards of $100 per review with a 5 review minimum.

Other Black Hat Services

Here are some other black hat services available:

• Reviewer Email Addresses: Want to find out the email address of the person who left a review to bombard them with bribes to change the review? It's possible.
• Category Ungating: This one doesn't need much explanation. For a fee you can get ungated into difficult product categories like Toys & Games, Beauty & Personal Care, etc.
• Hijacker Removal: It's sad that a service like this needs to exist, but it does. For a fee, you can have a hijacker knocked off your listing.
• Review Upvoting: These are services to upvote your positive reviews (often to help water down a negative review that's appearing as one of the top reviews).

Related Listening: E336: The Latest Amazon-Related Indictment and What It Means for Sellers

Conclusion

Amazon's dominance in ecommerce means black hat services like these will likely only continue to emerge. In many ways, it's reminiscent of the ‘old days' when learning the latest black hat strategies for ranking on Google was the minimum table stakes for running a successful website.

Are there any black hat services I missed above? If so, let me know in the comments section below.