What Is Amazon Doing? Can You Help Us?

I received this email 2 days ago from Amazon claiming I am influencing customers to leave bad reviews on competitors listings.

I thought it was odd so I contacted seller support and was told there is almost no way back from this and in approximately 72 hours my account would be terminated. I was told I can file an appeal  that would probably do little for my cause. With the help of an Amazon specialist, I filed an appeal. How do you prove or disprove this? Amazon would not tell me what specifically I had done.

This is just the latest in the Amazon shenanigans. Over the last 3 months I have had noticed an increasing number of our Scepter Salt Cell copies on Amazon and Ebay. I order them to see if they work for the intended application and have found they copy my instructions and make them look almost identical cosmetically. Most of these do not work and out of 6 there was 1 that had a support email and domain that are completely useless. www.zelinhol.com

One customer, (Dan from Golden, CO) clicked re-order on his order history and was sent one of the copies. He contacted me because it wasn’t working. He sent it back to me and I noticed a tested/SN sticker which wasn’t ours but then saw it was missing the potting material so it would never work. I had one other customer who sent me a picture of the same exact thing. I sent Dan a replacement even though it was a fake.

At this point, I can’t say exactly what is happening at Amazon but whatever it is is not helping customers or sellers. I went ahead and replaced this cell even though it wasn’t mine. Of course, I cannot continue to do this or I will be out of business. Amazon also keeps increasing fees and does nothing to protect my intellectual property. I feel like a frog in a pot of water.

As Hot Spring owners know, the Hot Spring ACE® system can be temperamental and has a pretty specific range that it operates in. Just throwing a cell on it won’t work. An example would be a cell marketed as an ACE® replacement under the name Xtreampower is a replacement cell for their SWCG which is a poor copy of The ControlOMatic ChlorMaker. It will never work on an ACE® system. I’ve done a review on it and many others found on Amazon.

My greatest fear is that all of the saltwater junk on Amazon will turn people away from this amazing technology because it doesn’t work when in reality, a good, properly maintained salt system will provide a great experience.

As far as Amazon, we will be leaving. Either in the next day or two if they terminate my account or when my FBA inventory is gone. Chances are that if my account is terminated Amazon will sell my inventory and keep the money. I say this because of a lot of things I have read on the Amazon Seller’s Forum. If this happens, we will not be liable for warranty claims from Amazon purchases. We will post the Amazon termination date. As of June 16, 2025, any warranty claims from Amazon purchases will require a physical receipt along with the actual product to be returned to us. I really hate to do this as we have operated on the honor system but I can’t continue to replace someone else’s cells. We have replaced 3 known copies so far. While we’re at it, there are people purchasing on Amazon that will buy a replacement cell, put an old one in the bag and send it back as defective. This practice has become increasingly common over the last 3 years. One return was an OEM cell!

So what does this mean for us? We may struggle at first but if we get support from the hot tub community, we can make it. What it will mean for our customers is we can pass our savings from not being on Amazon to them while providing better service.

If it is important to you to have an American company that makes products in the USA with as many domestically sourced materials as we can find while providing expert US tech support then I would ask for your help in spreading the word.

We are also coming out with new products to specifically help those with saltwater hot tubs. As always, we will continue recommending helpful things to our customers even if we don’t sell them. We are pioneers in the saltwater hot tub space and have learned a lot since starting development back in 2003. Does anyone remember the ColorChlor from 2008 or TechniChlor which followed? I worked with Scott Lenney who started ControlOMatic on those projects. After continually being asked if there was a salt system for hot tubs. I finally asked Scott if he could miniaturize the technology. He came up with designs and I did field development. Scott and I also worked together in the early days of Acu-Trol developing chemical automation systems for commercial pools and spas starting back in 1992 and we always had fun working together.

The good news with our salt cells is we are shipping units with our new plate material. The cosmetics of our Scepter Salt Cells® have changed to help differentiate us from the copies as they have become increasingly difficult to spot. We are also working hard to produce a better replacement cell with chlorine detection for those with ControlOMatic SmarterSpas. We are hoping to have one available by July 2025.