Amazon inauthentic complaint: how to prove your stock is genuine

Work out which complaint you actually have

Open Account Health, then Product Policy Compliance, and read the exact wording. Three notices look similar and need completely different responses.

What Amazon accepts as an invoice

This is the whole guide in one section. Almost every rejected appeal in this category fails here, and almost none of the failures are about authenticity.

The last one matters more than sellers expect. Amazon may telephone or email your supplier to confirm the transaction. An invoice from a supplier who will not answer, or who has no traceable business presence, fails verification no matter how genuine the goods are.

If your paperwork is imperfect

Most sellers reading this do not have a clean invoice set, which is why they are reading it. There are honest routes forward, and one route that ends the account permanently.

1. Go back to the supplier and ask for a proper invoice. Legitimate distributors reissue invoices routinely. Ask specifically for their full contact details and your registered business name on it.
2. Ask the supplier to confirm in writing that they will verify the purchase. A short letter on letterhead, alongside the invoice, addresses the exact question Amazon is asking.
3. If you bought retail, say so and change the model. An appeal cannot succeed on retail receipts, but Amazon does reinstate sellers who acknowledge the sourcing was not defensible, show a new wholesale supply agreement, and undertake to sell only from it.
4. If the supplier has closed, provide bank records alongside whatever documentation exists. Weaker, but it is a real evidential trail rather than an assertion.
5. Never create or alter a document. Amazon verifies with suppliers, and a fabricated invoice moves you from a recoverable authenticity complaint to permanent closure for fraud, with funds retained. There is no version of this that works.

The appeal

Submit through the complaint in Account Health, not as a general Seller Support ticket. Keep it to one page, put the documents first in your own mind, and resist the urge to argue that the buyer was mistaken. Amazon does not adjudicate that and saying it reads as deflection.

ASIN: [ASIN]
Complaint type: Product authenticity, customer complaint
Complaints received: [number and dates if stated]

Root cause
[Two or three sentences. Be concrete about the sourcing gap that allowed the complaint, not about the buyer. Example: units of this ASIN were bought from two suppliers, and while both are genuine wholesalers, we did not keep the invoice for the September batch, so we could not evidence the whole sales period on request.]

Supply chain for this ASIN
Supplier: [name, address, phone, website]
Relationship: [authorised distributor / wholesaler], purchasing since [date]
Invoices attached: [invoice number, date, quantity] covering [total] units against [number] units sold in the period.
[If applicable:] The supplier has confirmed it will verify these purchases on request. Their letter is attached.

Actions already taken
1. [Done, with a date. Example: on [date] we consolidated purchasing for this ASIN to [supplier] only.]
2. [Example: remaining stock from the unevidenced batch has been removed from FBA and will not be relisted.]
3. [Example: we have requested reissued invoices for all branded ASINs and attached the list.]

Preventing recurrence
1. [The control, who runs it, how often. Example: no purchase order is raised without a commercial invoice carrying full supplier details, checked by [role] before payment.]
2. [Retention. Example: invoices are filed by ASIN and kept for a minimum of 24 months, so any request can be answered within one working day.]
3. [Monitoring. Example: Account Health is reviewed daily and any authenticity complaint is actioned within 24 hours.]

Attachments: [list in order]

After you submit

Expect days rather than hours, and expect a possible request for more documents. If the appeal is rejected, do not immediately resubmit the same package: a rejection usually means a specific requirement was not met, and the productive move is to work out which one and fix it. If the wider account has been deactivated alongside the complaint, the Section 3 deactivation guide covers the account-level appeal, and the Plan of Action template covers the structure Amazon expects.