Wow, I’m about to fall off of my chair.
I had an issue over the weekend where a whole ■■■■-load of products were blocked due to violating the ‘Washington football team’ trademark BS.
I watched my Restricted Product Policy violations grow from 1, all the way to 116 at one point.
Initially, I blamed Amazon’s stupid BOTS (still partly their fault) but it turned out the problem was more Amazon’s stupid sleazebag sellers.
After a lengthy and interesting conversation with ‘Lisa’ from Account Health (who spoke great English and knows a LOT about account health issues), it turns out that some rogue seller(s) had uploaded a long list of keywords… including all the NFL team names… on the backend of all these listings, and Amazon’s stupid bots came along and shut them all down.
I was watching it happen in real time too, I saw more and more listings go to the dogs, as my restricted product policy violations count grew and grew.
Lisa said she’d try and get the information to someone who could actually do something, since I told her the suggestion to contact Seller Support would lead nowhere, and that I wasn’t interested in filing over 100 (and counting) individual reports of violations that I also felt would go nowhere.
I eventually called Seller Support to ask if they could do anything about the additional ASIN’s being blocked after I spoke with Lisa. They said they’d pull a list from my Account Health page and send them to the appropriate team. At the time, there were 68 violations.
As they grew through the night, I sent a follow-up to the case, listing the 48 additional violations since the case was initially opened.
To my GREAT surprise, I see that I now only have 57!! violations on my Account Health page and there’s a response to my case that says -
Hello
We received your submission and we have started the process of reinstating the product detail page for the following ASINs: (with the list of 56 ASIN’s being worked on)
As infrequent as it is that I have anything positive to say about Amazon, they were actually on the ball on this one. I don’t know if that was due to Lisa in Account Health, or the fact that I told the Seller Support agent I was going to report the problem to the Executive Team, but I’m pretty shocked (and pleased).