A human talks to another human and they discuss the situation, figure out what documents or proofs they could provide and come to an agreement. Make those humans lawyers if you have to. It's not some unknown landscape of grey area in content moderation, it's a marketplace holding onto another businesses money unfairly. We can't treat it like a social network or other ephemeral software platform, this is real transactional commerce and Amazon should behave like it and provide support to resolve things like this quickly.
To argue Amazon's side here, they most likely don't view this as unfair withholding. From Amazon's point of view, this seller moved from FBA to self fulfillment and had a massive increase is sales. The OP said they were averaging $1M per month, and that Amazon had held $4.2M for 15 days, so it looks like they'd had an up to 8x increase in sales while simultaneously moving to a system where Amazon had no oversight.
As I said, while I can feel the pain of getting automated replies from a company that owes you a lot of money, I don't think this situation lends itself to easy solutions without a waiting period, even if you involve lawyers. There are circumstances where payment processors will hang on to the cash for much longer than this. Concert tickets come to mind.
Amazon doesn't even have real oversight in their own FBA program. They comingle fake products all the time and then also punish sellers when customers receive those fake products.
I agree. In order to get access to an API which enables you to proxy web requests through a network of participating consumer computers, I had to do a Zoom meeting a few years ago with the service provider.
Obviously their service could be used nefariously and they asked a few questions, wanted to see my office and validate a few things to ensure I was going to use it for valid purposes. (I used it to scrape publicly accessible data for research purposes).
Sometimes the low tech, manual human process is the best final filter.
