• Pestigate

    By ZonSupport | Posted on May 18, 2019| Blog

    Two months of drama on the Amazon platform – seems the word pesticide and anything deemed to be related has become an issue. Initially, we thought it may be a cyber attack or their AI (Artificial Intelligence) taking control!

    However, it seems there is a compliance reason that prompted this. As is their style, there was no explanation – just many thousands of listings taken down since March. 

    The lesson to be learned here is while the keywords you have in your listing are critical to your sales success, they are also how Amazon “finds” you for compliance or other issues that come to their attention. Perhaps another reason to really niche down and work on attracting very targeted buyers to your listing – helps your conversion rate as well of course!

    Here’s a list of words and phrases that Amazon finally stated are of particular concern to them:

    Intended for preventing, destroying, repelling, or mitigating any pest

    Makes any antimicrobial, antifungal, antibacterial, or pesticide claim

    Has the words mold or mould

    Add to this a few more that have come up in conversations with Amazon and clients as we worked to resolve this issue:

    Poisonous, toxic, natural and all variations eg non-toxic.

    The process to extricate yourself from this drama is long and involved as once your listing is closed you are unable to go in and remove the offending words. Clients have gone through pesticide training as a way to try and get their products back on sale even though completely irrelevant. Some have still struggled to get reinstated.

    Yes, there is a workaround so get in touch if you need some help with this – it’s simple but complex in a way…

    Nothing grey or black hat, just a process so you can get into your listing to delete any words and phrases likely to have caused this mess which is all Amazon actually wants! This then allows you to raise a new case and push yourself to the top of the (massive) queue.

    Of course, as with all things on Amazon, what works today may not work tomorrow!

    As always, ask us anything. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll know someone who does!

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