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Amazon keeps having to pull ‘deny, defend, depose’ merch from online shelves
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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I have a successful store through Amazon Merch program (the one all these shirts are sold through) and there is some serious shit about what is and is not allowed to be sold. Each shirt is sent through an approval process that is first automated, and then any that fail will go to manual review. They base the automatic review process off the text (anything from the description or title of the shirt to the additional bullet points that help the shirt sell). The filters are based on their own list of banned phrases, a database of trademarked stuff, and some arbitrary rules. A classic one was when someone trademarked the words "hot sauce" and Amazon took down anything that used those two words in sequence. If you have a flagged word or phrase, manual review happens, and this typically means a human will look through your whole catalog of products as part of the review. And usually, you get a max of like two warnings before they remove your store. And the appeals process is non existent - all the email responses are automated. Then there's this fun part - the terms of selling on the Merch program say that profits are only realized 60 days after the shirt sells, and that termination is immediate. Basically, they keep the last 60 days of profits from your account. So, they have this really volatile review process with no clear guidelines, no way to appeal, and a flaky TOS that allows them to skim 60 days of profits from each account they terminate. Type in "orca" with your Amazon search to see all shirts in the program (I guess it's some kind of dev passcode?).
I had a friend lose $20k of profit from this nice little loophole. Amazon really have a nice racket going on.
So I guess all this to say I'm not surprised they're doing it.
I spent about 6 months just trying to signup for an account. I kept getting locked out and sent in a loop trying to talk to support. I had to reverse engineer my way into creating an account (something about first creating a seller account, then registering as a customer for the same email, then setting up 2fa, then switching back to the seller)
Then I had to go off and buy barcodes and print new labels. When that was all done, I was locked out of my account. I went in loops again and eventually gave up.
I have an amazon seller account and ive never sold anything and never added a product. I dont understand how anybody uses that platform. Its trash.