- The EU platform to business rules give a suspended seller a written statement of reasons on a durable medium, and 30 days notice before a full termination, with named exceptions.
- That statement has to cite the specific facts relied on, including the content of any third party report that triggered it. A generic policy reference does not satisfy it.
- Under the Digital Services Act, a platform's internal complaint route must stay open for at least six months after the decision, and the decision on your appeal cannot be taken solely by a machine.
- The EU transparency database recorded more than 3.8 billion moderation statements from 368 platforms over 180 days, of which 43% were fully automated. Automated is the normal case, not the exception.
- One certified appeals body handled roughly 1,500 disputes and overturned more than three quarters of the original decisions, though its caseload is mostly social platforms rather than marketplaces.
- Appeal the specific listing cited. Almost every failed appeal argues about the seller's history instead of the fact the platform named.
The email arrives at 06:12 and it is four sentences long. Your account has been deactivated. It references a policy by number. It says a decision has been made after a review of your account. It invites you to submit a plan of action, and it does not say what for.
Somewhere in there a threshold was crossed by a system that scores sellers continuously, and the part that hurts is not the suspension itself. It is that you are being asked to explain something nobody has told you.
Most advice at this point comes from seller forums and consultants, and most of it is folklore: write in this format, use these words, be contrite. Some of that helps. What almost none of it mentions is that in the European Union, and in the United Kingdom under the retained version of the same rules, you have written entitlements about what that email must contain and what has to happen next. They are worth more than any template.
What must the platform actually tell you?
The facts, not the policy. Article 4 of the platform to business regulation requires a provider that restricts or suspends a business user to supply a statement of reasons on a durable medium, before or at the moment the restriction takes effect. The statutory text, readable in the consolidated version of Article 4, says that statement must include the specific facts or circumstances relied on, including the contents of any third party notification, and the applicable ground the platform is using.
Read that again with your own notice in front of you. A message saying your listing violated the intellectual property policy is not a statement of specific facts. A message saying that on 14 August a rights holder identified as a named company reported listing B0xxxxxxx as infringing a registered trade mark is. The gap between those two is where most appeals die, because sellers try to answer the first one and the platform is required to have sent the second.
The same article separates two things that sellers routinely conflate. A restriction or suspension of individual goods requires a statement of reasons at the time it happens. A termination of the whole service requires that statement at least 30 days before it takes effect. If your account has been terminated outright with no notice period, the platform is relying on one of the listed exceptions: a legal obligation forcing immediate action, an imperative reason under law, or repeated infringement of the terms. Which one it is matters, because the first two are rare and the third obliges them to have a record of the repetition.
There is also a provision almost nobody invokes. Article 4 requires that where a decision is reversed, the platform reinstates the business user without undue delay, including restoring access to personal data. If you have ever been reinstated and found six weeks of order history missing, that clause is the one you were entitled to rely on.
Does a human have to look at your appeal?
Yes, if the platform is large enough to fall under the Digital Services Act. Article 20 requires online platforms to run an internal complaint handling system, free of charge, covering decisions to suspend or terminate an account, and it must remain open for at least six months from the day you were informed. The summary of the Article 20 internal complaint handling obligation sets out the part that matters most: complaints must be decided under the supervision of appropriately qualified staff, and not solely on the basis of automated means.
That single clause changes the shape of an appeal. You are not arguing with the classifier that suspended you. You are producing a document for a person who has to sign off on the outcome, and who will spend a small number of minutes on it. Write for that person. Lead with the specific item cited, attach the evidence that resolves it, and put your general good standing at the end where it belongs.
The six month window is worth writing on a wall somewhere. Sellers often assume an appeal route closes after a week of silence and give up. It does not.
How normal is an automated suspension?
It is the default. The European Commission's public transparency database of moderation decisions showed more than 3.8 billion statements of reasons submitted by 368 active platforms across a rolling 180 day window, with 43% recorded as fully automated. That number reframes the whole experience. Nothing about your case was singled out. A rule fired.
It also explains why the tone sellers instinctively adopt is counterproductive. Arguing that you have been a good seller for nine years addresses a judgement nobody made. The system did not weigh your record. It matched a pattern, and the appeal is where a human weighs anything at all for the first time.
| What you are told | What it usually means | What the appeal must answer |
|---|---|---|
| Intellectual property complaint | A rights holder or their agent filed a notice against a specific listing | Authorisation, invoices, or that the notice names the wrong product |
| Inauthentic or counterfeit goods | Buyer reports or a supply chain check on one item | Supplier invoices with matching quantities and dates |
| Linked account | A device, address, bank or IP overlap with a banned account | Who the other party is and why the overlap exists |
| Policy violation, unspecified | A classifier score crossed a threshold | A request for the specific facts, which you are entitled to |
| Review manipulation | Statistical anomaly in review timing or reviewer overlap | Where the reviews came from, and any promotion you ran |
Notice the fourth row. When the notice genuinely does not name a fact, the correct first move is not a plan of action. It is a written request for the statement of reasons the regulation entitles you to, which forces the platform to either produce the fact or drop it. That request also creates a dated record, which is what every later step depends on.
The first seventy two hours
Save everything before it moves. Screenshot the notice, the account health page, the listing in question and the message thread. Suspension often removes your access to the very evidence you need, and the interface changes underneath you while you are appealing.
Separate what happened from what you were told. Write two columns. On the left, the platform's words. On the right, what you actually know: which listing, which order, which supplier, which date. Most sellers cannot fill the right column at first, and discovering that is the point of the exercise.
File through the internal route first. Not email, not social media, not a lawyer's letter. The internal complaint system is what the six month clock attaches to and what every escalation afterwards will ask whether you used.
Answer the fact, once. One document. The item cited, the evidence, what you changed. Repeated submissions of slightly different plans train the system to treat you as noise, and each one restarts the reviewer's clock rather than adding to a file.
Keep selling somewhere else while you wait. This is the unromantic one and it is the difference between an inconvenience and an insolvency.
What a good appeal document actually looks like
Short, dated, and built around one fact. The reviewer reading it has a queue and a template of their own, and the appeals that succeed are the ones that let them close the case without doing any research themselves.
Open with the identifier. Not a greeting, not a history: the listing number, order number or claim reference the notice cited. If the notice cited nothing, say so in the first line and ask for the specific facts, quoting the entitlement rather than complaining about the service.
Then the evidence, attached rather than described. Supplier invoices should show quantities that plausibly cover the units you sold, dates that precede the listings, and a supplier who can be looked up. Sellers routinely send an invoice for 50 units against 900 sold and cannot understand the rejection. Brand authorisation should be a letter naming your selling entity, not a distributor agreement that names somebody else.
Then one paragraph on what has changed, written as a control rather than a promise. A control is a thing that would now stop the problem: a supplier approval step, a check before a listing goes live, a person who signs off. A promise is a sentence saying you take compliance seriously. Reviewers have read the second one thousands of times this month.
Finally, keep the record. Every message, every date, every reference number, in one place outside the platform. If this ever reaches an out of court body or a regulator, the case will be decided on whether you used the internal route and what you were told when you did. Sellers who lose those threads lose the escalation regardless of the merits, and the platform's own copy of the conversation is not something you control.
One practical warning about tone. Nothing in the regulation obliges a platform to be reasonable about a badly written appeal, and nothing obliges a reviewer to infer what you meant. The rights described in this piece are about process, not outcome. They guarantee that somebody qualified looks and that you are told why. They do not guarantee that you win.
What if the internal appeal fails?
In the EU there is a route above the platform. Article 21 of the Digital Services Act lets a user take the dispute to a certified out of court dispute settlement body. The practical terms, set out in the Article 21 out of court settlement summary, are unusually favourable: if the body decides in your favour the platform pays all its fees and reimburses your reasonable expenses, and if it decides against you, you owe the platform nothing unless you acted in manifest bad faith. Decisions are due within 90 days, extendable once for complex cases.
The catch is real and should be stated plainly. These bodies cannot impose a binding settlement. They produce a decision the platform is expected to honour, not an order. Whether that is worth your time depends on evidence about how platforms actually behave, and the first year produced some.
Tech Policy Press reported on the earliest out of court settlement caseload, covering roughly 1,500 disputes handled by one certified body, where more than three quarters of the platforms' original decisions were overturned, either because they were wrong or because the platform did not produce the material for review. Average handling time fell from around 115 days to about 19. Two caveats belong with that figure: the caseload is dominated by social platforms rather than marketplaces, and a large share of the reversals were defaults recorded when the platform failed to engage within 30 days.
None of this is legal advice, and the routes differ by where you and the platform are established. Outside the EU and the UK the statutory scaffolding mostly is not there, and your leverage comes from the platform's own published policy plus, in the United States, state level marketplace seller laws that vary considerably. The behavioural advice in this piece transfers. The entitlements do not.
Why the automated systems get harsher, not softer
Because the same regulation that gives you rights also pushes platforms to act faster on illegal listings, and speed at that volume means classifiers. A platform facing an obligation to remove infringing goods promptly, at a scale of billions of decisions, is not going to add human review to the front of the pipeline. It adds it to the appeal, which is precisely where the law puts it.
The practical consequence for a seller is that the front door gets stricter each year and the back door gets more formal. Sellers who plan for that fare much better than sellers who treat every suspension as an aberration. Planning looks like keeping supplier invoices that name quantities and dates, keeping the authorisation letters for every brand you resell, and keeping your listing data accurate about things a classifier can check. The compliance fields that trip listings most often are the boring ones we itemised in the audit of legal fields missing from most product listings.
There is a related trap on the other side of the same coin. Bulk edits generated by a model can introduce claims you never intended to make, which is a fast route to a policy flag on hundreds of listings at once. We went through which marketplace fields to override by hand in the piece on what to override when a marketplace writes your listings for you. A suspension caused by your own automation is still your suspension.
And if the trigger was somebody impersonating your brand rather than anything you did, the evidence you need is different again, which we covered in the article on what to do when someone clones your shop.
The structural answer
Every seller who has been through this arrives at the same conclusion, usually while refreshing an appeals page at two in the morning. A channel that can be switched off by a rule you cannot read is not a business. It is a lead source with unusually good conversion.
That does not mean leaving marketplaces. They work, they carry demand you cannot buy elsewhere, and for many sellers they are the majority of revenue for good reasons. It means that the proportion of your revenue that arrives through a channel you control needs to be non zero and growing, because that is the only version of this problem that has a solution rather than an appeals process. It is the whole argument behind running a storefront you own rather than one you rent, and it reads very differently at 06:12 on the morning of a deactivation email than it does in a normal week.
Start with the customer list, because it is the asset marketplaces are structurally designed to keep from you and the one that makes a second channel viable in weeks rather than years. Everything else follows from having somewhere to send people.
Forty three percent of moderation decisions on large platforms are fully automated. Your suspension was not a judgement about you. The appeal is the first time anybody looks.MaShop, reading the EU transparency database, 4 September 2026