Before the Suspension, There Were Signals

Let’s be honest. We all know someone who drives their car with the “Check Engine” light glowing bright orange on the dashboard for six solid months.

They just put a piece of black tape over it, turn up the radio, and pretend everything is fine. And then, one rainy Tuesday, the transmission explodes on the highway, and they look completely shocked. “I don’t understand, it was driving perfectly fine yesterday!”

If you sell on major e-commerce marketplaces, you see this same behavior every single day.

When an agency or a vendor partner comes to Ergode in an absolute panic because their account just got suspended, they always say the same thing. They swear the suspension came out of nowhere. A total lightning strike.

But when we pop the hood and look at their account health, we rarely see a lightning strike. We see a Check Engine light that has been screaming at them for three weeks.

Algorithms don’t just wake up in a bad mood and nuke your account. They leave clues. They clear their throat. They give you warnings. But because most brand owners are so obsessed with the daily sales dashboard, they completely ignore the account health dashboard until it is too late.

Here are the three “Check Engine” signals people ignore right before the transmission explodes:

1. The “Passive Aggressive” Customer Messages Everyone tracks 1-star reviews. But what about the buyer who leaves a 3-star review but sends a scathing message saying the packaging looked tampered with? Marketplaces scan those messages. If your negative sentiment is secretly brewing in the inbox, the algorithm is taking notes. It is building a case against you while you are busy celebrating your top-line revenue.

2. The Spike in “Item Defective” Returns Returns are a part of the game. But a sudden, weird spike in a specific return reason is not just a “bad batch.” It is the algorithm tapping you on the shoulder. If you just process the refunds and don’t physically investigate the inventory or update the listing, the algorithm assumes you don’t care. And algorithms hate people who don’t care.

3. The Ghost SKU Warning This is my favorite one. A brand gets a suspected intellectual property warning on a product they haven’t sold since 2021. What does the brand do? They laugh. “Who cares? We don’t even stock that anymore.” And they ignore it. Big mistake. To the marketplace, you didn’t just ignore a dead product. You ignored a direct warning from the platform. You just proved to them that nobody is actually steering the ship.

Stop Playing Russian Roulette

At Ergode, we manage millions of orders, and our entire philosophy with our partners is built on paranoia. Healthy, profitable paranoia.

We do not want to be the best team in the world at writing desperate suspension appeal letters. We want to be the best team in the world at never needing to write one.

When you operate at scale, you have to accept that the marketplace algorithm is not a human. It does not care about your payroll. It does not care about how hard you worked this quarter. It only cares about data and compliance.

If you are waiting for a suspension email to finally take your account health seriously, you are playing Russian Roulette with your business.

Take the tape off the Check Engine light. Stop waiting for the violation and start looking for the signals.

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Are You Missing the Signals?

We have built a system to catch these exact red flags before the algorithm drops the hammer.

Don’t wait for your screen to go dark. Download our Marketplace Risk Readiness Checklist. It is the exact framework we use to ensure our vendor partners stay online, compliant, and actually get to sleep at night.

[Download the Marketplace Risk Readiness Checklist Here]

Regards,

Rupesh