How to Block Notifications from Your Amazon Unsubscribed Customers

“Your Message to a buyer could not be delivered.” Getting a lot of these emails lately? Me too! But not to worry. This article explains what these notifications means, how they affect you, and how to create an Amazon email blacklist.

Overview

If your Amazon sales are fairly solid, you’ve probably received an email from Amazon that looks like this:

In short, Amazon now gives the buyer the ability to opt out of messages from sellers.

If you want the full details of this option, straight from the horse’s mouth, here you go:

Why I believe this is a good thing

Whenever Amazon changes something, I always hear from sellers things like “Another way Amazon is trying to screw over sellers” or “this isn’t fair”.  

However, at the end of the day, I think this is actually a GOOD thing and I’ll explain why.

First, while I’m not a lawyer, in my opinion Amazon was violating a national law called the CAN-SPAM Act.  In this law, set by the Federal Trade Commission, it states commercial emails must include a mechanism for opting out, which Amazon did not include.  

Through Jungle Scout, we did include an opt-out link. 

However, that only pertains to emails sent through Jungle Scout. It doesn’t apply if a different seller sent the same buyer an email through a different method.  

Second, and more importantly to me, the worst thing Amazon could have done was either to:

• no longer allow buyer-seller communication;
• or, no longer allow sellers to ask for reviews or feedback through the messaging system.  

For years I was worried they would choose option two. So, when they decided to give buyers the ability to opt out of these types of emails instead, I was relieved.

Personally, I believe this was long overdue. I also think we’ll be able to continue to ask for feedback and reviews for years to come without worrying that Amazon will make us stop.

What to do next

If you want, feel free to do nothing at all.  You will NOT get in trouble if you continue to do what you’ve been doing and sending out emails.

Amazon made this very clear in their buyer-seller messaging FAQ’s.

If you WANT to do something, though, we can help.

We’ve built a system inside Jungle Scout that allows you to forward these notifications, while stopping further emails from being sent to buyers who have opted out.  

This solves two problems:

1. You no longer have bounce-back emails from Amazon clogging up your inbox;
2. You don’t have to worry about Jungle Scout trying to send emails to people who unsubscribed.

And it’s a very easy process. Simply follow these steps to prevent any emails from being sent to customers who have opted out of receiving email messages.

Here’s a video on how to set it up: 

And here are the steps broken down: 

1.     Go to “Campaigns” in Jungle Scout:

2.     Get your unique Jungle Scout seller email address

3.     Set up a new forwarding address in Gmail

 

 

4.     Verify your forwarding address with the Jungle Scout confirmation code sent to your email.

 

 

5.     Finally, create a filter so that all emails go to the blacklist.

 

And that’s it!

If you have any additional questions about this, or need help setting up the filters, please don’t hesitate to email us [email protected].