We received an intellectual property violation for a listing that has not been in our inventory for at least 8 months, maybe longer. When I called account health support they said the only way to have this fixed is a retraction or a letter of authorization.
Here is the complaint: [ASIN 1] is the real [Product] which we onboarded first in 2007. [ASIN 2] and [ASIN 3] onboarded these products years later to duplicate ours.
Complaint type is “Trademark”
So they’re trying to clean up duplicate ASIN by filing intellectual property complaints. We did not create the ASIN. In any case, I would wager it’s been over a year since this ASIN has been in our Seller Central Inventory. Not that stock was 0 - there was no SKU associated with the ASIN. Not really sure how to proceed, this is a new one.
Appeal options are:
I understand the policy and acknowledge the violation. [ Select this option if you have made the required changes to reactivate your listing.]
I understand the policy and have evidence or documentation to submit for review to confirm my compliance with the policy.
This won’t help you on this one, but these notices are becoming a frequent occurrence on Amazon.
Even deleting them as noted by @lake is not enough because they still populate the vast Amazon memory bank and can come back to bite any of us even years down the line.
Delete SKUs Using Inventory Loader
You can use the Inventory Loader to delete SKUs from your inventory. Deleting SKUs is different from deleting offerings. Product detail pages are created based on input from many sellers. Using the Inventory Loader to delete SKUs will remove your contributions to the descriptive product attributes that are rendered on product detail pages. This enables you to manage the item data associated with specific SKUs.
Delete both your offers and item data contributions.
Enter an “x” in the add-delete field in your Inventory Loader file. This will completely remove all data associated with your SKU.
Deactivate your offers without deleting item data contributions.
Enter a “d” in the add-delete field in your Inventory Loader file. When you delete offers by entering a “d” in the add-delete field, it sets your inventory for the SKUs to “0”. This will make those listings show as inactive.
If you submitted a category-specific inventory file originally and want to use an Inventory Loader file to delete SKUs or make other changes to your listings, you can modify an Active Listings Report. See Use Reports to Update Inventory
Reuse of SKUs
• In general, we discourage reusing SKUs for different products. Each SKU should have a one-to-one relationship with a unique ASIN.
• Assign a new SKU to each new product being sold. This will maintain previous item data contributions that are associated with a specific SKU.
• If you do reuse a SKU, first delete the active ASIN data or you will receive an error message. To remove old associations before reusing a SKU, enter an “x” in your Inventory Loader file. This is important for sellers who routinely reuse SKUs to associate previous SKUs with new ASINs.
We use the product API to control SKU which has the same effect but yeah it was deleted entirely.
I recall talking to a non-script reading AHS agent and he said “yes you can still receive a violation for SKU you already deleted”. So I pressed a bit further with “so if we deleted a SKU 10 years ago we’re still on the hook for it even though we took proactive action long ago and laws change over the years?” He said “I’ve never seen a violation for a SKU that was deleted over a year ago”.
I would suggest double checking this. The deletion via the Inventory Loader template with an “x” in the add-delete column is different than using a “d” on the same template or a delete via a product template. Using the “x” via the Inventory Loader template removes all of the contributions that you have made to the listing, while the other deletion methods will leave this data in tact, so if you want to completely sever your relationship to an ASIN, using this method would be better.
I see what you are saying but I have serious doubts that there is any method by which a seller can delete offer history on Amazon’s back end system. It seems more likely that they extended the time that sellers are “on the hook” for past offers, per their usual MO. However, I am interested to see any evidence to the contrary. In my experience, Amazon never truly forgives or forgets.
As far as I’m aware, there are 6 methods to delete a SKU with no effective difference between them:
Product API [ Delete ]
Inventory Loader [ X ]
Inventory Loader [ D ]
Product Template [ Delete ]
Product Template [ Purge Option ]
Website option through Manage Inventory
We do keep records of all SKU we have ever posted and I will use your method to re-delete via Inventory Loader [ X ] just to be sure.
In the ‘tutorial’ from Amazon that I shared above, it says “Enter an “x” in the add-delete field in your Inventory Loader file. This will completely remove all data associated with your SKU.” which IMPLIES that it would delete everything.
I agree with you that I doubt very much that everything is deleted everywhere within the Amazon data bases. I don’t think that their massive collection of attorneys would allow anything like that to be done.
They will need everything ever sent to them at some point and it could be for their defense in some cases or it could be to actually help any number of global Government Agencies for a prosecution.
Short of someone burning down all of their computer data bases, blowing up ‘the cloud’, and taking a hammer to any portable disc drives, I seem to remember hearing that NOTHING is ever completely erased once it is out there.
So let’s assume it’s not a glitch, what exactly are the options for Brand Registry users? In this case they filed a trademark complaint against ASIN which appear to be duplicates. Are they able to request or force an ASIN merge instead? I’m trying to compile options for them because often they feel filing these complaints and (possibly inadvertently) destroying seller AHR is the only option.
They even admit in their reasoning to Amazon that one is “real” and one is a duplicate. They’re both authentic so I’m not quite sure how they can get away with filing a trademark complaint against their own authentic detail pages. My only guess is a syntax difference in the ‘brand’ field.
In this case I don’t think it was necessarily malicious but I’ve also seen competitors partner with rights owners in order to weaponize the Brand Registry in an attempt to work out seller exclusivity and knock off their competition, sometimes permanently.
