Suspected Intellectual Property Violation Fix Not Updating to Detail Page

Account Health
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Been having this problem for quite some time now and we’re trying to find a solution that works.

We have suspected intellectual property violations which require a change to the title to use the word “Compatible for”. When we apply the fix, the detail page does not update. Per the instructions under “How do I address this issue”, the instructions say “If your listing has ‘Edit’ as a next step, please edit it to ensure you are not misusing any trademarks. Once your listing is corrected, it will automatically be reinstated. Please allow 24 hours for reinstatement.”

I’ve talked to a lot of people about this over the years. Here is the variety ways I’ve been told to address this:

1 solution) Update our contribution to the detail page and the change will automatically be detected within 24 hours and update to the front end. The violation will then be removed and the detail page will reflect the change.
1 outcome) The detail page does not update.

2 solution) Contact the catalog team.
2 outcome) This works maybe 10% of the time and requires multiple follow ups.

3 solution) If we are not the rights owner we must contact them to get them to do it. They do not give out this information.
3 outcome) An ASIN that has a suspected intellectual property violation can be updated by sellers with an offer for that ASIN even if they are not the rights owner. I know this because if I escalate this enough it gets fixed about 10% of the time. The script they’re reading from is incorrect in that they’re not considering there is a violation.

4 solution) Delete the SKU then reupload it after removing the offending content.
4 outcome) It does not update.

5 solution) The intellectual property must be removed entirely
5 outcome) This is not true, there are specific Amazon published instructions regarding a product compatible with a trademarked brand. More astute agents are aware of this.

How exactly are we supposed to address this? In most instances we are the only offer on the ASIN. Has anyone actually found a consistent fix for this? Amazon INSISTS that updating the offending content on our end will automatically solve the problem. I don’t just mean the script reading AHS agents. All the way up to leadership they say just update the detail page information in Seller Central inventory and their bots will detect the change, push the change live and that will remove the violation.

1% of the time we are performing the action that is instructed. 99% of the time on Amazon we’re trying to solve a problem that they don’t know or admit exists. Meanwhile we are on the hook for it. Absolutely maddening.

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May I ask if you’ve investigated what appears on the PDP (‘Amazonese’/‘Amazonish’ for “Product Detail Page”) for the negatively-impacted ASINs of the Amazon Global Catalog in EACH of the far-flung & sell-siloed Amazon Global Marketplaces?

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No I have not tried that. Curious why you ask? I don’t think they’re live anywhere besides the US marketplace (amazon.com). I tried your suggestion and used amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk and didn’t see anything under the same ASIN but maybe I’m doing it incorrectly.

Exactly zero of our updates have actually been pushed live on the detail pages recently. The titles are in violation in the way they are identifying and I am fixing them precisely as they should be (brand, brand product, “Compatible with”, trademarked brand and trademarked brand product). There are no other references in the PDP to the trademarked brand (image, description, etc), it’s just the title that is in violation the way they’re currently phrased. However, in the past I have experienced the same issue if it were other attributes of the PDP besides the title.

I opened a case but I’ve been doing this for years and I have an idea of where this is heading. The catch 22 here is to remove the violation we have to delete the SKU (or actually get the change to publish…) but if we delete the SKU we can’t update the offending information. That actually would be “solution 4” in my list but it doesn’t work. So we sit with the violation affecting our AHR.

I’ve discussed this with leadership multiple times and it’s amazing to hear people who I know are competent switch to the script “Update your contribution to the detail page and the change will automatically be detected within 24 hours and update to the front end”. It’s like the Manchurian candidate gets activated.

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Just going to tag some others, in case they have any insight. @maintak @Jenga244 @Rand @Setalpz

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This only works if you have sufficient “privileges” on that ASIN to make those changes. If you are the brand owner (brand registered) this should work. If you are not, it depends on a number of factors but has a high failure rate.

Very hit or miss, but can be worth trying when nothing else works.

If the brand owner or IP rights holder is a seller, the details page can be locked to their account, preventing other sellers from making changes. In such cases, escalation to the catalog team, for example, would not help. Neither would most other avenues attempting to change the details page. If the the brand owner is not a seller, the pdp is less likely to be locked, and your attempts to change the info are more likely to succeed.

Waste of time, don’t even bother to try.

As you say, Amazon has established guidelines regarding selling items compatible with other brands. The bots that enforce these guidelines are not 100% accurate and sometimes they will kill ASINs that do not violate the guidelines. I have not encountered a situation where any human can override this bot, even when it is clearly wrong.

If the pdp is locked to another seller, you may be out of luck.
If the pdp is not locked to another seller, have you tried making product changes using a file upload instead of through the manage inventory page? For reasons that make no sense to me, these changes sometimes bypass whatever technological wall is blocking your changes.

There have been issues where a listing was ported to ather marketplaces, then changes were made to the listing in the other marketplace which caused problems for sellers back on the original marketplace. Locating and solving this issue is outside my personal experience, but others here have had success when this has been determined to be the source of the problem.

The only thing that deleting the SKU at this point will accomplish is to prevent additional AHR defects. It will not help resolve the issue.

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Step 1

Although sometimes if you make multiple other edits to add in missing info Amazon will accept your title changes,

Step 2 after waiting 48 hrs

I’ve had this work much more than 10%, but it does require a few follow ups.

Wording is key here.
"Please escalate this issue to the Catalog Team.

I am opening this case because ASIN ________ has a suspected IP Violation in the title.

I edited the title over 48 hours ago and Amazon has not updated the offending title to remove the violation.

ASIN: ____________
SellerSKU: ______________"

Keep reopening with the same text until they fix it.

Expect every ASIN to take a while.

I’m not saying this is your fault, but it’s what happens when sellers don’t follow Amazon policy or the Style Guides.

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When Amazon has issued a large number of SIPV’s due to “improved” bots, the latency associated with fixing the pages increases geometrically.

If you wait long enough, you might see a result or they may just flush all the queued changes into the bit bucket.

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I just received an SIPV on a listing for a Minolta Camera manual. One of my “on vacation” listings.

When Amazon is educating bots to look for trademarks which are no longer actively used, we can assume that the process will be overloaded.

Since there is a low but finite chance that I might someday reactivate my Amazon account, I deleted the listing, It also gave me an opportunity to exercise the portion of my vocabulary I usually reserve for politicians.

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Yeah….so a few things.

I am assuming you are not the brand registered owner on this? Our only experience with these has been on our brand registered listings. I suspect it’s way harder to change live page information if this isn’t your brand.

Also, are you in the initial 48 hour period now where the listing is still live on the site? They normally give you 2 days to fix these before they actually remove the listing I think.

They are absolutely correct in that once you remove the offending trademark from the live detail page….this policy does get removed from your dashboard automatically within a few hours….100 percent of the time.

Screw around with a couple other things, too. Change a couple pictures…change some of the description a little. You can always go back and change this back after.

We also have experienced the issue of a change not “taking” and the secret for us is to change other things. Mind you, you literally might have to change this stupid ASIN 10 different times to get the changes to finally take. I don’t know why that is.

You can try seller support and you might get that 1 in a 1000 awesome rep who actually knows what to do and fixes it….but again, that’s probably a long shot.

I wouldn’t delete the listing no matter what. There is no guarantee you can fix it once you bring it back and it may not even let you bring it back if it’s marked as having a policy violation (until the policy violation is resolved(.

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@papy I’m honored you thought of me on this one haha.

@Monty Typically as long as you change it to say “compatible with” or “for” before the trademarked word, you are good. Make sure it isn’t in the description and bullet points too. It usually would take 10-15 minutes as long as your changes are accepted.

If you can’t get the product listing to be changed, I feel that is a different issue. You may kinda be SOL on that. Does the manufacturer have a website showing the compatibility? Sometimes you can get the catalog team to change it as long as you show them a URL with proof.

I was also going to recommend with @oneida_books already mentioned, just going through the entire listing and improving it helps push edits

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Well I can’t tag @oneida_books every time :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Seriously, I knew you @maintak @Jenga244 and other experienced Sellers had some recent experience with this–sadly.

It’s a club full of good Sellers, that no one wants to belong to.

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Been working pretty consistently on this since I posted, so this is what I noticed in relation to suspected intellectual property violations:

  1. If you have a contribution in your SKU data which is correctly formatted versus what is being flagged on the published detail page at the time of receiving a violation, you do get a suspected intellectual property violation but the level is “No Impact”. For example, if a detail page says “Apple Iphone 14 case” in the title and your contribution was “Generic Brand Phone Case Compatible with Apple Iphone 14”, it will be flagged it won’t be counted against your AHR. From what I’ve seen this is correct 100% of the time.

  2. On most of our SKU, we are not the rights owner. Changing the detail page in this case is nearly impossible if there isn’t a violation on the ASIN. The only exception is if you have the only offer or the data field was missing entirely but even then it is hit or miss.

  3. If a single ASIN is flagged as a suspected intellectual property violation, using the chat option is actually fairly effective. More so than opening a case or talking to someone and trying to overcome the language barrier that you’ll run into 9/10 times unless you’re lucky enough to be connected to someone in Washington state. I’ve been using some variation of this and it seems to work:

“Asin XXXXXXXXX is flagged for a suspected intellectual property violation. Our contribution to the detail page for the SKU XXXXXXXXX associated with this ASIN is correctly formatted with “Compatible with” as required by seller policy. Please update the detail page with our title/description/bullet point information in order to fix the violation”

Typically they respond with “I have updated the detail page with the information you provided, please allow 48 hours for the change to reflect on the ASIN”. If there’s some other issue they’ll open a case and close the chat.

This is similar to what @oneida_books oneide_books mentioned and I’m sure that would work too.

  1. For a large list of ASIN that need a fix, you have to open a case via email and provide the ASIN and the actual info you’re trying to contribute. They won’t go searching for it in your inventory. Opening a chat for a large list will just result in them closing the chat and opening a case. There is literally zero reason to talk to someone about any of this, it’s easier for their bots to read what you write versus someone who doesn’t speak much English to translate what you’re saying. Not sure why this is because we put the details in the case prior to calling but I think they route it to the wrong people/bots.
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Side note on 1.: “If you have a contribution in your SKU data which is correctly formatted versus what is being flagged on the published detail page at the time of receiving a violation , you do get a suspected intellectual property violation but the level is “No Impact”.”

This is frustrating because the fact that the suspected intellectual property violation has no AHR impact and your contribution to the detail page is correct means they “know” it and they’re not automatically updating it.

Like I mentioned in the original post: “Amazon INSISTS that updating the offending content on our end will automatically solve the problem. I don’t just mean the script reading AHS agents. All the way up to leadership they say just update the detail page information in Seller Central inventory and their bots will detect the change, push the change live and that will remove the violation.”

So, yes it is correct that their bots recognize this but they are wrong that it will automatically update all the time. You have to go through seemingly purposefully obscure steps if it’s flagged.

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Just want to clarify….as there are suspected IP violations for trademark name use and then also trademark logo use.

You primarily have dealt with just the trademarked logo, correct?

As mentioned, we also have a decent amount of experience with these and the nuances. I will say we received a trademarked logo once a week or so ago where it actually let us get it removed immediately from our account health dashboard BUT it didn’t actually relist the listing. I’ve never experienced that flow before for trademark logo issues. Normally you have to remove the trademarked logo and get it ok’ed by seller support before they reinstate the listing and remove it from your dashboard.

The problem we are running into is the violation is gone but the listing still is down and we are having issues getting it back up. I’m going to try the chat option today to see if we can get it working…appreciate your time in complaining this knowledge base, though.

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This is specifically about data within the product detail page as it relates to text and formatting.

In most cases (for us) the image of the detail page is not flagged. However, I have dealt with these suspected intellectual property violations when it comes to, for instance, logo shirts where they are using a brand name. Let’s say a the shirt manufacturer has authorization from Apple to use their logo. In this example, I’ve submitted signed letters of authorization from Apple that the manufacturer can use their logo and it never works. Since it’s such an arduous task to escalate the case and the cost/benefit is so out of balance we typically abandon the ASIN since the suspected intellectual property violation also has an AHR impact. In those cases, the intellectual property is in the image and there’s no way around it.

If you find a solution, I think that would help everyone.

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Yeah…most of ours don’t get caught, either.

They all are from pics of parts on cars where the hood or trunk emblem happens to be showing and not due to us putting it anywhere. These seem to be much harder to fix only because you have to go through seller support and their maze of stupidity.

I do appreciate the distinction of the no impact to account health score. We’ve had one or two of those and I didn’t really know why some counted and some didn’t. Your explanation makes sense.

I’d be curious to know what happens in your example above if you originally provide a title that doesn’t have compatibility terms……and it’s the winning contribution. You then go back and fix the title in your manage inventory to comply but the product page doesn’t accept that updated title. So, at this point, you technically have the title right in your manage inventory….but it’s still wrong on the product page (but it’s your contribution originally).

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The fact that a suspected intellectual property violation has no impact does not necessarily mean you contributed the correct information. It could just be because you never received any or very few violations for a certain trademark in the past. For instance, if it’s your first time having a suspected IP violation for “Apple”, it may be no impact even if you didn’t contribute the correctly formatted info. However, in our experience, over the years we’ve received so many for certain terms that the fact that some had “No Impact” and others were “medium - repeat violation” for the same trademark led us to check the difference and indeed in 100% of the cases the “No Impact” violations had the correctly formatted info while the ones with an AHR impact had no info or incorrectly formatted info.

Side note, we’ve been doing this for a long time. Amazon used to have a format for IP which is contrary to what they demand from sellers now. So essentially they want you to clean up the mess they made. Is what it is, it’s their playground and their rules.

As far as suspected IP violations in our experience, it doesn’t matter what is published. It only matters that you provided the right info at the time the violation was received. It doesn’t matter who has the “winning” contribution as it relates to your AHR. Again…frustrating because their bots can see you had the right info and contrary to everything Amazon says it often doesn’t update automatically. I think there’s a wrench in the cogs somewhere between brand registry and the detail page which can only be bypassed if a violation is detected.

If it’s really important that the title is updated but there is no violation and you are not registered as a user in the brand registry for that brand, it’s really hit or miss on whether or not they will update it. I’ve found they send an email to the users in the brand registry and it’s completely out of your control whether or not they will accept the update. Rarely does Amazon accept an update under the above circumstances. Almost always they will accept the update if the field was blank, for instance, if a listing is suppressed because it has no description or there was no image.

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To add to this, often they want you to include the title information or whatever field you’re trying to update in the case. So:

ASIN: ____________
SellerSKU: ______________
Tite: ____________

They can’t be bothered to do that themselves, it seems. However, they definitely won’t do it if you don’t have that info entered for that SKU. So they somehow know what info you’re referencing but refuse to take it a step further and apply it without having it put in front of them.

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