This was my latest POA with urls removed due to forum limit and personal information omitted:
Good afternoon,
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to appeal our policy violations and learn from our mistakes to continue selling on Amazon. We are committed to continuous improvement as a company, aligning our product detail pages with Amazon’s policies, and giving Amazon’s customers the best possible purchasing experience. This appeal is not only referencing the parent ASIN xxxxx and child ASINs xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxx as noted in the original performance notification, but for all of our product listings and company actions that violated Amazon’s ASIN creation policy.
The main root cause of all of our failures to create compliant product listings was a lack of understanding of Amazon’s policies due to failure to utilize the included Seller University and many of the other tools included in Seller Central. We apologize profusely for not only violating the ASIN creation policy (policy-link) by creating inconsistent child and parent listings that ranged across multiple browse nodes, varying product descriptions and bullet points across child variations, but also by not completely filling out parent ASIN that represented the product. These mistakes were amplified by not responding to the original policy warning in a timely fashion, but also by not reviewing our remaining catalog for other non-compliant listings. This was a mistake made out of ignorance for the conformity, consistency, or urgency expected from Amazon and a mistake we do not take likely or will make again.
Looking at the original notified ASINs: parent xxxxx and child ASINs xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxx, I can see that the child ASINs were located on different browse nodes while contained within the single parent listing. ASIN xxxxx was located within “Tools & Home Improvement > Power & Hand Tools > Power Tool Parts & Accessories > Vacuum & Dust Collector Accessories > Vacuum & Dust Collector Parts” while ASIN xxxxx was located within “Tools & Home Improvement > Power & Hand Tools > Power Tool Parts & Accessories > Power Tools Replacement Parts”. This creates confusion for the customer by conveying different product information arranged in different configurations or formats. The root cause of this policy violation was due to a lack of foresight and business vision. As a small business with an ever expanding catalog of products, we would create new products every month without regard for an overall direction of the company. Only after selling a number of these products for months or a year did we decide to merge some of our ‘like’ products within a parent and child listing. We did not take into consideration the gravity of the situation that multiple of these future child ASINs were located on different browse nodes or by having different product descriptions or “about this item” bullets. By merging them within a parent listing, it changed the product’s detail page (parent or child) to become fundamentally different from the original product listed, and gave a negative customer experience. We now understand the basis and reasoning behind the policy and guarantee that this mistake will not happen again.
We were notified of this violation of the ASIN creation policy on February 27th, 2024 within SPC-USAmazon-xxxxx, but only the original parent ASIN xxxxx per the performance notification was remedied by deleting it (SPC-USAmazon-xxxxx). Our failure to provide a plan of action for ensuring that this violation would not be repeated and not reviewing our remaining catalog to ensure that other parent/child listings did not also violate Amazon’s policies cannot go understated. We were focused on our account de-activation due to a linked account not completing identity verification and did not give the ASIN creation policy violating the immediate attention it deserved. It is difficult to review our remaining catalog at this point with many of our ASINs removed from Amazon’s catalog, but I can assure you that we most likely also violated this policy within the child ASINs xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxx, and their parent ASINs as well. We are committed to not only planning out our business strategy so that we can create all of these listings at an earlier date to ensure consistency across the parent and children, but also reviewing the current listings for conformity if we decide to merge compliant product listings at a later date.
Since all of the our product listings have been removed from our inventory, I cannot reference the parent ASINs, but on some of our most recently created product listings, we only filled out the parent ASIN with “dummy” information. Child ASINs xxxxx and xxxxx were created with parent listings that featured almost no product information due to the belief that since the parent listings were not visible and only a placeholder to group child listings, that information was not needed. After watching and re-watching all of the Amazon Seller University videos on listing products, did we realize how big of a mistake that was. Specifically, the “Intro to listing products”, “Intro to product detail pages”, “Best practices for product detail pages”, and “Create product variations one at a time” were particularly helpful for guidance through our recent policy violation and understanding our mistakes in detail. The parent listing’s product detail page is required to match the children and in some categories, is the product that is shown through search.
As a remedy, the original offending parent ASIN xxxxx was deleted out of our inventory in order to alleviate the inconsistent child product listings and due to our lack of action, the remaining ASIN or listings within our inventory were removed. In response to the previous inaction, we have implemented an internal policy within our company to hold emergency meetings within 24 hours of any policy violation to review the performance notification, the offending listing or ASIN, and our remaining listings for any other potential violations. Within 48 hours, we must have a plan of action on understanding the root cause of the violation and have actions in place to fix the mistake. As a small & growing business, many of these steps are skipped while trying to grow our product catalog, but after we took a look back to look at the damage we cause to Amazon’s customers by providing incorrect information, did we realize the importance of having policies and procedures set out to ensure compliance with Amazon’s policies to ensure a world class customer experience. We would rather provide a quality and well-reviewed product through spending more time on best practices than three sloppy or poorly created products no matter the sales.
While our business is small and only my husband and I will be modifying our product listings, we decided it was a best practice to have written procedures to follow and to provide a rigid guideline. QS-01 is a procedure we created to ensure conformity to the ASIN creation policy and consistency across parent and child listings for newly creating ASINs while QS-02 covers edits to pre-existing listings. We have referenced a number of Amazon’s stated policies that have created the groundwork for these procedures:
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Product Detail Page Rules (policy-link)
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Determine Variations for Your Products (policy-link)
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Selling Policies and Seller Code of Conduct (policy-link)
Going forward, we will create an offline common product listing for each part family that will drive the information that is input on Amazon .com when creating a new or editing a current listing. This will ensure that the product listings are in-sync between the child and parent and the only differences will be in the variation type. This will be required prior to creating any new listing or editing a current listing, so that we do not leave any product detail page incomplete that could be referenced by a potential customer.
Through the knowledge we have gained through the study of Amazon’s Seller University, we have dedicated to review a new category monthly to aid in our continual learning. While we may have violated policies for the creation of an ASIN, we do not want to offend on any other policy for advertising, FBA, FBM, pricing products, etc. We had previously been using competitor’s product detail pages as a guideline for how to structure our own, but through this process, we have learned to follow Amazon’s guidance as a main focus. Competitors listings may have policy violations that have not been flagged yet and they are a poor guideline to limit ourselves to for the product we can offer Amazon’s customers.
While there may still be gaps through interpretation or missing the intent of certain policies, we have also consulted with firstname-lastname from business-name for support and training over all aspects of Amazon selling. While we work our way through Amazon’s Seller University, firstname will be able to review other sections of our Amazon selling business to ensure that we are in accordance with policy and ensure that we put the customer first.
I appreciate you spending the time to read my appeal and listen to our mistakes, corrective actions, and planned next steps ahead. If granted re-instatement, we will continue to strive to put the customer first, comply with Amazon’s policies, and continue to learn and grow. Please let me know if you need any further information in your review of my account.
Sincerely,
my-name
