Tens of thousands of listings were deleted, and Amazon robots went crazy again

Amazon AI robots are committing crimes crazily !

A large number of sellers' listings were identified as restricted products by AI, and their pages became disabled . Some people had tens of thousands of listings deleted. Recently, AI was suspected to have marked banned words on a large scale, and many listings were suddenly deleted without the sellers' knowledge. Sellers in the industry complained that Amazon's robots had no common sense and acted recklessly, and should be completely eliminated.

A large number of listings were deleted, and some sellers had tens of thousands of listings affected

Recently, a large number of Amazon sellers’ listings have been deleted , and the platform’s robots are increasing their efforts to mark banned words, this time related to words that violate sanctions.

Seller Eric said that he only sold carpets, but the platform marked them as products that violated sanctions laws. The email he received mentioned that this product has been identified as a product that does not comply with applicable sanctions requirements, and Amazon prohibits the release or sale of any products that violate sanctions requirements. If you believe that the product does not violate sanctions laws, please provide a valid certificate of origin or compliance certificate.

Coincidentally, A Fei, who is also a carpet seller, encountered the same problem. According to his judgment, his product uses the design of "Persian carpet", and it is probably the word "Persia" that caused the product to be marked. Although he knew that such violations might be Amazon's judgment errors, he immediately closed all product listings with the same design and re-edited the titles to avoid such products being incorrectly marked by the platform due to the same problem.

The experience of another seller also confirmed that there are indeed problems with such words. He said, "I thought I was a victim of sanctions policy issues because part of the product name contained "Persian", but Amazon's artificial intelligence robot identified it as a product from a Middle Eastern country."

This problem is not encountered by just a few sellers, but by more peers. They think that the keywords marked this time are inexplicable and are even more afraid that it will affect their accounts.

“My ASIN was incorrectly flagged as violating sanctions under the Restricted Products Policy because it has a design on it like “Persian Carpet”. In reality, this listing has never sold and I don’t mind having it removed but don’t want it to affect my account health rating.

——We also encountered this situation. Hundreds of listings were deactivated, which had a great impact on the account health rate and was quite worrying ;

-- 9 ASINS were flagged as "Violation of Restricted Products Policy", all of which were manufactured and exported from India, which is not sanctioned. I have submitted a complaint and attached import documents to show the country of origin;

- The word "Persian" appears in the description of the rug, which of course refers to a design. I have appealed with the export/import documents but have not heard back. I tried to get country of origin certificates for the products but some of them are no longer in production so I deleted them. ”

According to feedback, the number of listings deleted for each seller varies. Some sellers have hundreds of listings deleted, some have thousands of listings deleted, and some sellers have tens of thousands of listings deleted .

“We removed tens of thousands of listings last week for this reason . There are still some listings on Amazon , but most of our products are listed elsewhere. Our account has been threatened twice in just over a month, not because of listing violations, but because their department is so incompetent in resolving cases, and it took many people 12-14 days to get them to resolve the issue, which is ridiculous!” lamented the victimized seller.

Sellers worried about damaging account health

What’s even more frightening is that this violation marked by the platform has threatened the accounts of some sellers, with some of their products moved from pending to repeated violations, damaging the health of their accounts .

"Hundreds of items have been flagged, and I have deleted many of them out of fear for my account. Nearly 400 items are currently showing up in restricted product violations with health impacts of 'pending'. About 20 items were moved out of pending and into 'high' account rating impact status last night. At this rate, my account will be deactivated soon," said a seller.

Based on this, the affected sellers summarized the illegal words that they identified as possible marks by Amazon robots.

Turkish

Persian/Persia

Aydin

Bohemian

Adja

Asher

Moroccan

Izil

According to Amazon's response: It was found that some of the seller's ASINs were marked according to the restricted product policy because they may have violated sanctions requirements. According to the platform's trade control law policy page, products imported or originating from the following countries are not allowed to be sold on Amazon.

Cuba

Iran

North Korea

Syria

Crimea region of Ukraine

Sellers of related products should pay special attention. In addition, the Amazon robot is not limited to catching this type of keywords. Other keywords may also be marked by the platform, resulting in the deletion of the listing.

The scope of tagging has been expanded, and robots have been criticized

According to the seller A Fei , his other listings were also marked by the platform.

One product was a hair product, and the AI ​​robot identified it as a sex doll with a head because the picture showed a girl's face photo and hair. Another case was a US product that was only written in English, but the Amazon AI robot identified it as having only a foreign language label.

A Fei sent product pictures and appealed, but the case was not resolved until more than a month later. He said he was worried that Amazon's artificial intelligence robots kept trying to delete his product listings.

"I called the Amazon Health representative, but there was no good solution except deleting the items. I want to add more new products, but I'm scared that Amazon wants to delete the listings for ridiculous reasons," said A Fei.

People familiar with the matter said that the robot's new targets also include "offensive products". Amazon's email notification mentioned that "this product has been determined to be prohibited from being sold or listed in our store. We use a variety of automated means to identify this issue and make decisions."

In addition, a seller selling groceries had multiple products flagged and he believed that the problem might be caused by words such as "loaf," "weenee," and "tenderquick," which are considered suggestive or offensive by the platform.

A colleague who has dealt with similar issues before said that it is difficult to appeal this violation, and in the end, the inventory had to be cut. He described his own experience: "In the last month or so, we received two ban threats for this kind of reason. We appealed within 24 hours of the new ban notice. Some ban notices need to be reopened 4-5 times, and many times they don't even look at them for a few days. Until last week, the number of inventory units on Amazon was quite large. We decided to cut tens of thousands of inventory and only list a few products on Amazon."

This and previous flagging actions were all robot actions. Sellers called Amazon's artificial intelligence robots ridiculous and hoped that the platform would solve all the strange restrictions . One colleague said, "I'm even thinking that I'd better sell on more platforms instead of limiting myself to Amazon. It's so panicking!"

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