It basically comes down to whether or not the IP Rights Holder has a “Pass-through Agreement” (aka “Conduit” aka “Flow-down”) in place - as entities such as Disney have used for many decades - that extends out from Wholesale Distributors to Retailers.
Amazon knows such agreements are common - and has many of them itself - but it’s long been recalcitrant in acknowledging that fact in cases brought by 3P Sellers, which is why it’s not particularly unusual for impacted sellers being forced to use legal representation to present the case directly to Amazon’s OGC.
Buying wholesale won’t protect a Seller from IP complaints from the rights holder. It just depends on so many other factors, like whether the distributor/supplier had capacity to convey rights to sell online, on Amazon. Or how that distributor/supplier acquired their inventory, etc.
No, Indy, it does NOT help a non-Amazonian find the SHC’s ACCESSIBLE Amazon Deals page @ https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/202111490 when you post an embedded link sheltered behind the Midway Authentication Portal (“M.A.P.”) like this:
And the tradition marches on; Cooper_Amazon posted this 091925:
Now, to be fair, I can’t admit to ever finding much use for the LQD (‘Amazonese’ for “Listing Quality Dashboard”) in the years since it first rolled out as part of the earliest efforts on the PT (“Product Types and Attributes”) Initiative/“Attribute Harmonization Initiative”/“Size Normalization Initiative” front (not to mention many another of Selling Coach’s subsequent spawnings), and well do I recall the horror stories related to experiences with engaging it posted by sellers such as our friend @TEXASEXILEBOOKS - but I would assert that the problem here is bigger than that:
Last week’s latest revamp of the Manage Inventory Dashboard by the MYI (‘Amazonese’ for “Manage Your Inventory”) Team deprecated the LQD, as may be seen in this screensnip:
As this change to MYI is new, I’m willing to at least entertain the notion that it’s still a work in progress, and that there are more capabilities that’ve yet to be rolled out - but I won’t find myself particularly surprised is that does not prove to be the case…
*
That page has also not been updated to reflect what’s apparently the new reality, but that may not mean much, as the Editorial Team is quite infamous for it’s tardiness in updating items in its bailiwick.
Even the mere mention of the LQD gives me the shudders!
I pray God TPTB don’t use us for another IT trial (I’m assuming that’s what it was) since nobody else seemed to be hit as badly as we were!! ( about 33% of our listings had 3-12 questions that required answering-when we didn’t originate the listing!!!)
Spent months trying to clear the ridiculous questions which TPTB should have contacted the publisher when needed (weight/dimension/amount of pages/ age of reader/ whether the title was some sort of board book or pop-up calendar. No categories as basic as Fiction/Mystery/History!) Then one fine day, they all just disappeared into the ether!!
All the information we painstakingly input… GONE!! And very little reflected on the products page-though when I see an obviously adult non-fiction title that states: “Suitable for ages 1 year and up” I know they’ve been thru the LQD wringer, too.
A vast - and seemingly ever-increasing - abundance of the available evidence seems to strongly suggest that the still-ongoing PT [“Product Types and Attributes”] Initiative has found itself at loggerheads with the earlier-deployed Listing Quality, Search Conformity, & Brand Integrity Initiatives, inter alia, right from the get-go - and that now, about five years after it was first launched (ca. Q3 2019), Amazon is still struggling mightily with the unintended consequences inherent in its warm embrace of the Silo Management Model of Bureaucratic Administration…
Further evidence suggests that Amazon, unsatisfied with that result, rather than clarifying the muddy waters of its Global Catalog’s Browse Tree infrastructure, chose to subsequently compound the problem farther-still with the Attribute Harmonization Initiative AND the Size Normalization Initiative - which almost certainly produced your experience, which as you know wasn’t unique back when it happened - and this latest development appears to be yet another example, dadgummit.
Bureaucratically-organized entities are inherently adverse towards making mistakes in day-to-day SOPs - but when upper management disdains ensuring that ensiled sub-entities cannot simply take that as a mandate to sweep dust under this or that rug, rather than actually fixing the problem(s) that led to a mistake, as has long been demonstrated by Amazon’s TPTB - what else but Chaos can ensue?
Not being privy to the pertinent details of the case, I can’t speak to just who’s IPR is being violated here - but if the serial accuser required ‘appropriate action’ being taken 3 weeks ago, and that wasn’t merely a fig leaf, it would seem to me a bit disingenuous to find that Amazon has apparently concluded that such serial attacks do not warrant further investigation.
As we all know, it’s not particularly uncommon for Amazon to extend opportunities to foreign-domiciled sellers that are not available to domestically-domiciled sellers.
Often enough, such dichotomies are dictated by prevailing legalities of this or that nation’s statutory law - but I’d submit that it’s probably difficult to make a convincingly-compelling case that sheer greed doesn’t come into play in Amazon’s decisions on these fronts.
Here, we can see a likely example, posted by Glenn_Amazon a few hours ago, for why there’s been such a sharp uptick of complaints about the SAFE-T Claims Team proving recalcitrant over the last 6 biz quarters or so in granting rightfully-brought claims (bolded, italicized & underlined emphasis in Glenn’s self-written portion of his post mine):
Those of us who can read the King’s English - for comprehension - are well-aware of the function of “or” in connecting the two separate alternatives posed by the sentences Glenn quoted from that SHC page, and how the meaning would be different IF “and” had been substituted for “or” in the linking.
Just a technical question that goes more to IP violations than training any MODS –
In those situations it would seem to me that those pass through agreements would only be valid IF the wholesaler was on the brand list as one that is authorized.
That would invalidate all of the gray market sellers out there that so may Amazon sellers have migrated to as a result of all the TikTok and YouTube junk, would it not?
Nothing like creating even more ‘gray’ areas for Amazon to use for enforcement…
In anticipation of the latest ‘Ask Amazon Event’ re: the PLS (‘Amazonese’ for “Product Lifestyle Support”) Program scheduled for today, 092525, Jameson_Amazon posted an earlier v. of this to the NSFE on 091525:
Leaving aside the glaring misspelling of “Today” in the FMT-CMT’s unacknowledged revision once the event went live, we can see that the link to the Product Lifecycle Support (PLS) Home/Landing Page is inaccessible:
I suspect that the many notifications of the inappropriateness of ‘.dev’ links made by the seasoned vets who still post over in the NSFE may have prompted a manual modification of what the FMT sees; what our friend @Lost_My_Marbles noted about re-crafting .dev URLS in his 12223 Post #6, upthread, seems to have fallen on deaf ears so far - and although it can’t be denied that there are some Amazon pages that use the non-secure http protocol, it does seem a bit strange that it would be used in this context, as that is not so on the public-facing page.
The reason I refer to the execrable “Day One-Day Two” paradigm is simply based on the fact that this isn’t the first ‘Ask Amazon Event’ regarding the PLS Program to have been “hosted” by Jameson - and she got the Home/Landing page link correct in that 072825 post (the ‘updated by moderator one month ago’ notification reflects the addition of the “[Now Closed]…” portion to the original title):
Saddest of all? Once someone posted to today’s event that the URL was malformed, it took more than two hours before Sandy_Amazon was able to correct it.
We ALL make mistakes - everybody on this mortal coil is only human, after all (w/ the possible exception of yours truly, according to some) - but I’m hard-pressed to make a compelling argument that Amazon’s frequency of doing so has not increased over the years, despite its unprecedented success in garnering profit…
Often there is a notice at the bottom of my Fulfillment Insights Dashboard that suggests setting my daily order capacity, saying it is not set. (My daily capacity is, in fact, set and has been for a long while, as I verify frequently under Shipping Settings.) When I click on the link (just a teal blue box) provided in the note on the Fulfillment Insights Dashboard, it gives me a message that says I can’t access the page because I am not an Amazon employee. I would post the link here, but it’s not shown on the page, and the teal blue box containing the suggestion about setting the capacity is not currently displayed.
Just thought I would post more evidence of this ongoing inaccessible link garbage.
Reinforcing that new approach, Manny posted this on 100625 (emphasis mine; “police_car_light” in Manny’s in-post link to his 021225 discussion is an idiosyncrasy of the way the Discourse platform handles emojis):
I would strongly suspect that the ‘new reporting process’ was founded in Amazon’s desire to avoid even-more fines stemming from the 16 CFR Part 465/16 CFR §465-based Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (link, Federal Register) having gone into effect, once the Final Rule was issued (081424), on 102124 - but almost a year later, Amazon’s efforts to comply would seem to be rather…ineffective.
What! They admitted it. Wow. It has not been a valid address (works – just nothing ever read) for many many years. It did work once upon a time, long long ago. But it has been nothing but a placebo for at least ten years, probably more.
