Lazybit

If you sell your product on Amazon, you have to keep an eye on your feedback - a comment left by the buyer after the purchase. This article reflects everything I know about this subject, these tips are distilled from personal experience on the Amazon marketplace.

I am not a guru, and if you find anything that is explicitly contradicted by Amazon's documentation - it means that I am wrong, please point that out and I'll update the text.

Seller feedback is very important

• It helps you improve your service - people tell you what's wrong with it;
• People rely on this information when deciding whether to make a purchase or not;
• Amazon uses the feedback, among other things, to determine your product's position in the search results;
• A lot of negative feedback can cause your merchant account to be closed;
• Seller feedback is not the same thing as a product review. The former is shown on the seller's profile page, the latter - on the product page. Both types are important.

To see your seller feedback, log on to Amazon seller central.

The rules are simple

• Keep your average rating above 4.3
• Neutral feedback is not counted as positive, it reduces your rating
• Negative feedback is bad for you, learn from your mistakes and don't repeat them
• Negative feedback can be removed

What you should know about feedback on Amazon

• It can be removed within 60 days after it was published, so react swiftly; if you're late - the negative rating will stay there forever
• Feedback cannot be edited, only removed
• Only the buyer can remove the negative feedback
• Amazon will remove certain types of feedback, but they don't do this unless you ask them to; these cases will be reviewed below

What you must do

• Read the negative feedback, address the problem and make sure it never happens again. Feedback is a great way to see what your flaws are. It is easy to see the buyer as an enemy, but quite often they're just telling the truth.
• Contact the buyer and talk about the problem. If there is a way to solve it - do it. Explain how to deal with the error they ran into, give them a partial refund, etc. The solution varies from case to case, the point is to talk to the person and find a fair way to resolve the conflict.
• Calling is better than emailing. Amazon's internal mailing system is not always effective, some people simply don't read those messages, there is also a chance they will be flagged as spam.
• Be polite and remember that the customer is not an enemy. Think about the conversation before you make that phonecall. Ideally, a person who talks to clients is someone who knows about social engineering and who has read William Ury's "Getting to Yes", "Getting past No" and "The power of a positive No". You can also practice the conversation with a colleague, who will simulate the customer's answers; ideally - you'll have an answer for every case, such that nothing the customer tells you will catch you off guard. Prepare your BATNA too. Remember, the customer who left negative feedback is not your archnemesis.
• If you can't reach the customer, keep trying - call later, leave a voice message, write an email.
• Once you manage to address the problem and the person is happy - ask them to remove their negative feedback.
• If the customer is unreachable, write a response to the feedback. If you can't talk to the person, at least react in such a way that other people who read the negative feedback will see that you tried to deal with it, that the company has people in it - rather than insensitive zombies that read scripts.

If the customer is cooperative and they are willing to remove the feedback, they can do so:

• Go to the Amazon homepage
• Go to Community\Personalization\Seller Feedback Submitted By You
• Find the entry and click Remove

When Amazon removes negative feedback for you

• If the product is fulfilled by Amazon (i.e. they handle the handling and shipping for you) and the comment is about a late or lost package. Obviously, this is not your problem and the feedback is actually about Amazon's modus operandi. It is fair to remove it, and they do so, if you ask them.
• If the comment contains obscene language.
• Or if it reveals personally identifying information.
• If the entire comment is a product review, rather than a seller review. What this means is that negative feedback is not about the speed or quality of delivery, but it focuses on product features or faults.

Amazon won't remove the negative feedback automagically, you have to get in touch with them and ask them to remove the comment, and point out the rationale for the request (one of the reasons above). Do so via the contact seller support section, then click Orders\Customer feedback problems.

Good luck selling!

So, you and your employer are not on good terms anymore and you think it is payback time? Here is a beginner's guide to expressing disagreement.

Disclaimer: the article does not focus on the moral and legal side of the issue, the focus is purely technical.

Note: a complementary article for employers will follow shortly, but if you're sharp enough you can derive the protection methods from this information.

The options are different, but if you're in the IT industry, the common choices are:

• change all the passwords and do not disclose them;
• delete all the data;
• encrypt all the data;
• apply subtle changes to the systems configurations, so that they seem to be working right, but somewhere deep inside a problem is waiting to happen;
• share private data with your employer's worst enemy.

Change all the passwords

It is a matter of time before they find a new person who knows how to apply the password reset procedure - most (if not all) systems have one. Sometimes it is as easy as reading the manual (which they should've told you to write in the first place) and following the instructions.

As an IT expert, you are aware of the fact that if someone has full physical access to a system - they can override pretty much every security measure.

Cons:

• it is a matter of time before they reclaim access to the resources. Since the bridges are already burnt down - your image suffers badly, your future employment opportunities are quite shady. You gained nothing.

Pros:

• easy to implement;
• it is more difficult and time consuming to get past this if there are remote resources (ex: servers) controlled by other companies, in other timezones;
• once they get everything back and sue you, you can say "I didn't want it to be serious, so I chose this trivial method" [then pray they'll buy that].

 

Delete all the data

This is a better approach, because in this case there is nothing to recover. They can have the passwords for every server, the key for every door - but there is nothing to be found behind any of the doors.

Cons:

• there are backups, you'll have to delete those too, thus there is more work to be done;
• there are data recovery techniques, you'll have to make sure they won't work
  • destroy the data (crash the hard disks; burn the DVDs, literally);
  • wipe the data - wiping is the process of deleting data, then overwriting it with other data, to prevent recovery software from being able to retrieve the original files. In spite of the belief that you need multiple overwrite-passes to make a file impossible to recover - even one pass is good enough.

Pros:

• the more time passes since the files were deleted, the more difficult it is to recover them. The employer will feel a lot of pressure because they have to do everything fast, or they'll have to disrupt the service for a while. This should make it evident for them that they should've given you the raise you asked for, it would've cost them less;
• if you were unprofessional enough to not make those regular backups, the employer will understand that they made more mistakes than they originally thought, one of them was that of employing you in the first place.

 

Encrypt all the data

This is an extension of the previous method, and it is psychologically more aggressive, because this time they know they have the files, and "all they need" is the password. This gives them the false feeling that they're almost there.

Cons:

• encrypting data takes time, especially if there are large amounts of it;
• you may be foolish enough to use an encryption program that has backdoors in it - which makes your effort useless;
• the employer may have keyloggers installed on your systems, thus they will be able to find the password - rendering the exercise useless again;
• if you use a weak password - they can guess it or brute-force it.

Pros:

• the method is meaner than simply deleting the data;
• even if they have full physical access to the system - it does not help them;
• if you are sure that you are using the best encryption program that does not have any backdoors and employs the best encryption algorithm, you're safe;
• if you use a smart card to encrypt the data, any brute-force or dictionary attack attempts will be futile.

 

Apply subtle changes to the systems configurations, etc.

If you need an example of this, remember the movie "Office space" to get an idea about how this is done.

Cons:

• they won't know you've had them, because these backdoors are so subtle - thus you lose some of the moral satisfaction;

Pros:

• when the new guy shows up, it may take a long time until the flaws are revealed (especially if you were insightful and weren't kind enough to document what you were working on, making it difficult to understand the system you left behind);
• you can exploit these flaws for many years, and perhaps get some benefits out of it. If you're not greedy and keep everything below the radar, you may never get caught.

 

Share corporate secrets with the competition

If you are not bound by an NDA, they won't be able to use this against you.

Cons:

• if you don't keep this low profile, future employers won't be able to trust you, and your career may not get far from where you're standing.

Pros:

• if there were no NDAs, technically you succeeded in making them suffer without breaking the law.

 

Final thoughts

All the methods above have one thing in common - you'll have to pay for it sooner or later, and there is no approach that enables you to get away scot-free.

I do not encourage employees to cheat their employers (and vice-versa), I consider that a direct dialogue is the best way to solve a problem, as well as to prevent it from happening in the first place. This article must not to be used as legal advice.