Amazon falsely flagged listings as being miscategorized as “Seeds and Plants,” with many sellers reporting that bots misidentifying items including sporting goods, an industrial thread locker, shoes, toys, clothing, candy, books, and curtain rods included in the takedown notices.
In one of the threads on Sunday reporting both the Seeds issue and another issue, an Amazon moderator acknowledged the issue was impacting sellers:
“There has been an increase in these cases as it is impacting all selling partners. The moderating team and I are working to collect all of the information and get a speedy resolution for ASINs incorrectly flagged under this policy.
“Please do appeal the violations where able. This will be the quickest way to ensure your account health rating is not impacted and you are able to get your listings cleared.
“I do know the implications of this with those of you have a great number of violations, however, I want to make sure you address as many as possible to avoid further impacts and ensure your listings are once more live before the teams here are able to fix the issue.
“There is great information in this topic created by @Seller_qso9puw2G5kCa and I urge you to appeal the violations present where able at this time.
“Please do not acknowledge the violations as these will result in the deactivation of your listings.”
The moderator also linked to a thread titled, “Here is How You Appeal Your Live Plant or Seed Violation – June 29, 2024” where a seller posted instructions provided by Amazon’s Account Health Assurance.
A seller responded to the Amazon moderator with the following reply that encapsulated sellers’ frustration with Amazon automated bots: “Can you please tell us how any of us business owners can continue putting in anymore time and effort in growing our Amazon business when at any point a poorly programmed bot can take down your whole business in an instant without any customer support to fix the issue immediately????? This is out of control!!!!”
I really wish we would stop talking about Amazon’s “bots” as if they were some kind of independent creatures. There are no bots only Amazon employees of various levels of incompetency programming software, and the blame should be squarely on them, not fairies or gremlins.
It is Amazon’s management that does not care sufficiently to make sure this kind of thing does not happen, not rogue “bots” running around like naughty elves in the twilight. No, it is Amazon’s management, the people, who do not care sufficiently. Their level of care is in fact demonstrably decreasing.
A second point re the activities of the incompetent programmers — how many perfectly good products sold on eBay and Walmart etc have these carefree Amazon employees now deprived Amazon customers of but forcibly removing them from the catalog? I have a list and so does everyone else. You’d think they might care about lost profits if nothing else. They can’t all be pesticide!