Why can’t your developers code rules disabling listings due to being potential pesticides to ignore categories like books to begin with? It seems so obvious to all sellers, so there must be a technical reason or a default to a one size fits all approach on the dev side. Thank you.

Susan, perhaps a little bit of background on how we arrived here is in order along with an official statement on exactly what control Amazon has in this regard. The EPA/Amazon Master Settlement is public record, and while you can’t discuss certain things for legal reasons, it might help some Sellers if they knew that Amazon isn’t at full liberty.

Also, I would like to know if the attestation that a Seller can make declaring that their product is not regulated by FIFRA is reviewed manually (particularly, if the EPA is reviewing these declarations, as that could have serious ramifications for Sellers who just do what they need to do to keep selling).

First as Sawie noted some background on the settlement would be appreciated by all as giving some sense of where the pesticide debacle started and why .Amazon rolled out the violations. Helpful.
Second why no means was implemented to resolve the violations for books even after testing and passing.
Third is this also related to the CPC requirements for toys and games even when such are not for youth under the minimum age for usage?
Fourth is Amazon going to be more Proactive in messaging sellers when such actions have these unintended consequences?
On a side note will Amazon address or stop the High Price De-Listings for books? Or are such Alerts driven by Publishers instead of by poorly written Bots?

While there are tons of comments about books, I haven’t seen anyone talking about the segment that has caused us hundreds, if not thousands, of ASINs - shoes, clothing, and other soft goods. Colors like “Mushroom”, “Washed Black”, etc. have been inappropriately flagged as well as many seemingly random “normal” items.

We have scrubbed the pages for any potential verbiage and there is nothing remotely “pesticide” related. Even after wasting hours going through each ASIN to fill in the Compliance tab for “NOT a pesticide or pesticide device”, we continue to receive dozens of emails with old or new “affected products.”

I know this will probably receive a standard copy/paste reply like most official Amazon correspondence, but we had to add our voice to the complaints regarding the poorly tested and implemented bot usage surrounding not only pesticides, but also restricted products, CPSC claims, and suspected IP “violations” that are devastating so many businesses on Amazon.

Why are jewelry charms that are meant to look like mousetraps (and other similar items) being removed for being a pesticide listing? Why cannot a person look at the product and tell that a small solid piece of metal looking like a mousetrap is not a pesticide item especially when it is on a necklace? Why is it impossible to win an appeal on something so obviously not a pesticide item?

We have also received pesticide claims for one of our products. We have closed the listing and deleted it without knowing we can just change the “compliance” issue since the product is not pesticide. We have also completed our training in 2019. Will the policy violations stick and how can we remove them since we do not want them to damage our account. We do not want to appeal to open the products back up since we have already removed them and did not sell them. Keep in mind they were just paper bowls.

The pesticide rules are heavy-handed. It seems like the system is operating on an overabundance of caution rather than a good-faith effort.

We had a listing marked as a pesticide because we used the word “deodorize” - which is obviously not a term for a pesticide.

It wouldn’t be as big of a problem if it didn’t take an eternity to get relief. I opened a case on my product last week and have been editing the content trying to figure out what the trigger words are so I can get the product reinstated. That’s not how I should have to do business to fix your errors.

In fact, most of my time is spent telling Amazon support that my products don’t violate the rules and providing proof as to why. It takes 30-50 days at times to get them to read a 510k correctly, and even longer if there is a word they don’t understand. I haven’t clocked a pesticide issue because I’ve yet to get one resolved; they continuously provide new ways to fail to communicate.

That’s ultimately the biggest problem - you have a heavy-handed policy and a response speed that tortoises would mock.

I forgot the question - “How can we encourage Amazon to enlist seller support and deal with these issues efficiently to minimize the damage, if we’re never going to see competent policy?”

[Moderator edit: SEAmod removed/edited out biased language targeting seller support]

Q2: I received the following email, and yet not one of these disabled listings was reactivated. They remain Inactive… Does “reinstated” mean able to be made active again, rather than automatically done so, the latter of which is implied?

"Hello,

You recently received a notice from us regarding one or more of your ASINs that may have been incorrectly identified or restricted as a pesticide. These requirements do not apply to books. We have taken steps to ensure that all incorrectly restricted ASINs are promptly reinstated.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Amazon Services"

…glad I saved the emails stating which were deactivated.

I would like to know what research is done by Amazon before sending these complaint to the sellers and how does a children’s book or make up remover get considered pesticide?

I’m genuinely concern with regards to the pesticide claims. We received over 235 emails from the bots.
Some ASIN’s are duplicates. There is a major disconnect between Amz retail catalog and standard catalog dept. Majority of these senseless emails are coming from the Retail Catalog Team.
There is no real human look. Senseless moronic feebleminded entities can’t and will not write a proper SQL statement to exclude words.