Kenneth Eade on building an e-commerce appeals practice
Kenneth Eade is the Supervising Attorney at AMZ Sellers Attorney®, an attorney-led e-commerce appeals service and IP law firm. The practice grew from helping a family member get an Amazon account reinstated, and Eade explains how the business found its first paying client and why honest expectations and human support matter.
An appeal can be carefully prepared, but the marketplace makes the final decision, so service providers need to set expectations honestly. Eade also stresses that quality, not being the cheapest, and trained human support are important in this work.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I have always been a lawyer all my adult life, but this business was a niche that evolved from helping my brother in 2017 with a problem he had on Amazon. He was selling products on Amazon, and the business was very succesful, and his only source of income. He woke up one day and Amazon had frozen his account, meaning he was out of business. I helped him write an appeal, which resulted in his account being reinstated.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Well, my first customer was my brother, but obviously I didn’t charge him. In researching how to write an appeal for him, I came across a company called Thompson and Holt, and a lawyer in New York, both of whom offered appeal services. It looked like competition was not very fierce in this feield and it would be a good niche to break into the business. I started an advertisement on Google search and got my first client.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The biggest mistake is not to undervalue your services. You don’t have to be the cheapest to compete in a competitive world. But you do have to offer a quality product and good customer service.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Clients have come to expect positive results, and this is a problem. Nobody in our industry tries harder than we do to help a client get back on an ecommerce platform, and we never give up. But the decision on any appeal is up to the platform itself. We have no control over that. We love to win, and obviously clients do to, but there is some expect that they can pay for a win, and that has no basis in reality.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Build a good team of well trained people, because a lot of industry is converting many jobs to AI, and that will not work in our industry. The platforms recognize AI slop and will not accept it, and clients are in critical need and have to talk to a live human when they need support.
Thank you to Kenneth Eade and the team at AMZ Sellers Attorney® for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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