Amazon's official new plan! The changes that sellers have been waiting for a long time

Recently, Amazon launched a new program in the official seller forum - "Ask Amazon" , a new forum column designed to help sellers solve popular issues in Amazon operations.

However, sellers cannot ask casual questions. When each "Ask Amazon" column opens, a certain topic will be specified. Sellers need to ask their questions under the topic within a limited time, and Amazon will answer the sellers' questions before the time limit expires. The duration is about 1 day.

The theme of the first issue of "Ask Amazon" is the pesticide issue that comes up every year with sellers. In 2019 and 2020 , there were several large-scale incidents where sellers' products were misidentified as insecticides/pesticides and removed from their shelves . This time, even Amazon officials came forward to give a detailed explanation to the sellers.

This episode of "Ask Amazon" will start at 8 pm on the 23rd and end at 5 pm on the 24th. No new questions will be answered. At the same time, a seller can only ask one question, and redundant or similar questions will be merged by the administrator.

The reason why we chose the issue of pesticides is because Amazon recognizes that the platform's own policies and EPA regulations are very complicated and there are problems with their compatibility. Therefore, this time we specifically asked members of the product assurance team to talk in detail about the pesticide issues that sellers are concerned about.

The content of this column is quite informative. I have dug deep into some of Amazon’s answers and summarized them for you based on the two points that sellers are most concerned about.

First of all, what everyone is most concerned about is the problem of accidental killing of pesticides/insecticides . Every time a large number of sellers are removed from the shelves because of pesticides, most of them are mistakenly killed. Sellers are basically removed from the shelves because the titles and descriptions contain words such as "antibacterial", "anti-mite" and "antibacterial" and they are judged as pesticides.

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.

This brings us to the second core point of the pesticide issue. 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 captured by the algorithm and identified as pesticides. (If you can’t find the page, I will add me zyqmda and I will send it to you.) Sellers can query these pages by themselves to find the sensitive words that may be involved.

I'm sure you won't be satisfied with this answer. With so many sensitive words, who knows which one is the trigger? And the official explanation page is just as complicated and difficult to understand as stated in the announcement. The good news is that I found another official content in another answer.

In the highlighted passage, Amazon stated that it is working to adjust its processes so that Amazon can provide sellers with more direct and specific reasons for product removal!

This really hits the pain point of sellers! The most annoying thing for many sellers who were wrongly delisted is that they don’t know where the content was captured . They don’t know what the sensitive words are, so they can only modify them little by little and submit them again and again to try to figure out what words triggered the review, wasting a lot of time.

This time Amazon will tell sellers more directly and specifically why the products were removed from the shelves, and will certainly provide some information related to sensitive words to facilitate sellers to rectify and re-list. More importantly, this is not only for pesticide removal, but also for other reasons that are removed from the shelves, and more specific information may be provided! This is definitely a major good news!

However, this kind of change is unlikely to be announced directly. Generally, it will be implemented on a small number of sellers first, and then rolled out on a large scale. It will take some time to track the specific changes.