What is the truth? Has Amazon removed cotton products from its shelves?

Xinjiang cotton has been the hottest topic in China these days. Just when everyone was indignantly protesting against H&M and Nike, news suddenly came out yesterday afternoon that Amazon had removed all cotton products from China from its shelves!

Because cotton products are of great importance, home textile and clothing sellers account for a very high proportion and are all involved. Therefore, this matter immediately caused a big stir, and a large number of sellers asked in our communication group whether the news was true.

I traced the source of this news. In fact, Trump announced that cotton from Xinjiang would be banned from entering the country in August last year when he was still in office, and in December last year, formal regulations were issued to ban Xinjiang cotton and its products from entering the US market.

From December to now, there has not been a large number of Xinjiang quilts removed from the shelves in the cross-border circle, and most cotton home textiles and clothing are selling normally. It was not until the recent H&M and BCI incident that the matter was further exposed.

I traced the source of this news and found that the place where this situation was exposed was not the cross-border circle but Douban and North American International Student Daily, two media that often appear on hot searches for gossip and revelations. Yesterday, a hot post exposed this matter and directly became a hot search on Weibo, which made this incident really popular outside the circle (many cross-border sellers were unaware of this situation at this time). Most of the information on the Internet now comes from this post. If you look closely, you can see the Douban watermark on the back.

After the incident went viral outside the circle, it spread to our cross-border circle, but many sellers doubted the authenticity of the incident. Because the cotton textiles of most Chinese Amazon sellers were not affected, and they never received any request to remove the products from the shelves or ban entry. I searched the platform myself, and there was almost no change in the products of textiles and clothing. I asked several sellers who sell clothing and home textiles, and they were still selling well and there was no sign of removal from the shelves.

Now let me tell you a little bit about our judgment.

First, the ban on cotton is not a new policy. If the customs really would check, then a large number of sellers would have received news of removal from the shelves or entry ban since the end of last year. It would not have happened in the past two days.

Second, many sellers of cotton textiles do not specifically mark the origin of the cotton, and Amazon has no way of distinguishing whether a cotton product is made from Xinjiang cotton.

Third, because of the second point, Amazon can only filter and remove suspicious products through keywords. But in fact, if you search for "xinjiang cotton" directly on Amazon's US site, you can still find a lot of cotton socks and T-shirt products, which shows that this keyword has not been officially blocked.

Fourth, the news was not first revealed in the industry, but became popular in a completely unrelated place. A group of spectators who were not Amazon sellers at all hyped up the incident, and it became popular in the industry instead. The credibility of this news is very questionable.

The most important thing is that there are not many cotton products that have been truly taken off the shelves in various seller circles. They should still be sold as they should be. This is the most critical point.

To sum up, this is true. The United States did issue a cotton ban last year, but Amazon has not done much in this regard and has not removed products on a large scale. So I suggest that you don’t panic, wait and see, and don’t be led by the media seeking hype! I suggest that you share this so that more people can see the truth of this matter!