Pesticide misjudgment is coming again! Amazon was fined millions of dollars

In the past two days, Amazon reached a settlement agreement with the California Pesticide Regulatory Department (DPR), and Amazon needs to pay up to 4.97 million US dollars in pesticide sales assessment fees!

Because there are some products with pesticide-like or insecticide-like effects on sale on Amazon, pesticide review has always been the most stringent review category on Amazon. The intensity is so strong that many sellers have been mistakenly killed because of sensitive words.

This time, it was because Amazon had multiple violations of DPR regulations, including not registering sales qualifications, not reporting and paying the assessment fees required to sell related products in California, and not holding a pesticide broker license. After this settlement and payment, Amazon will also officially reach a cooperation with DPR and accept DPR's screening and review of related products in the Amazon mall.

It is foreseeable that after DPR intervenes in product review, there will definitely be a batch of products that are mistakenly killed. Every time a large number of sellers have their products taken off the shelves because of pesticides, the sellers are basically because their products contain words such as "antibacterial", "anti-mite" and "antibacterial" in the title and description, and they are judged as pesticides and taken off the shelves.

Regarding these misjudgments, Amazon said that these delistings were not actually misjudgments, but rather that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which manages pesticides/insecticides, stipulates that all products with terms such as "antibacterial", "anti-mite" and "antibacterial" are under the jurisdiction of the EPA. Regardless of whether they are pesticides or not, as long as a product claims to have the above functions during its promotion, it will all be regarded as a pesticide by the EPA.

Therefore, it is not a misjudgment that clothing containing antimicrobial fibers is identified as pesticides, but such products do need to be registered with the EPA.

And if the product description claims "free of pesticides", "non-allergenic", "non-toxic", "harmless", "all natural", etc., it is also under the jurisdiction of the EPA and the seller needs to register with the EPA and obtain relevant declarations.

The real misjudgments are products that have nothing to do with these functions, such as books with "antibacterial", "anti-mite" and "antibacterial" in their names, clothes with patterns of "toxin" and "mushroom", etc. These do have a high probability of being misjudged and removed from the shelves. Sellers need to pay attention to their status in a timely manner and make modifications to remove the corresponding sensitive words.

If a product is removed from the shelves due to sensitive words, how can we quickly determine which words are in violation?

In response to this issue, Amazon said that there are special pages for displaying various EPA-related materials and resource links . These links contain a large number of sensitive words that may be caught by the algorithm and identified as pesticides. (Sellers who can't find the page can add me zyqmda to send you) Sellers can search these pages by themselves to find the sensitive words that may be involved. The critical period of Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday is coming soon. We must protect the safety of products and cannot remove them from the shelves!