Hey watch out! We don’t want you to fall into a compliance quicksand. It will be a long slow journey filled with days of back and forth between you and support, as your product potentially gets discontinued and/or the ASIN gets a removal notification from the fulfillment center.

As Compliance Document questions are one of the most highly discussed issues within the Create and Manage Listing category, here are a few tips that can turn into lifelines when working on submitting compliance document information to the respective partner team:

Ensure you are providing all the requested documentation the first time.

• Under the ‘Product compliance’ tab in the Seller Central, there are 60+ products that have help pages regarding their compliance. Read the help page thoroughly and then reach out to support if you still have questions regarding what information is required to be submitted and/or testing that needs to be done.

Craft solid appeals if you believe you have been incorrectly asked to provided compliance information.

• If your listing should not be flagged for providing compliance documentation, ensure you are providing the team with a thorough well-written appeal. It’s also highly recommended you share additional evidence that demonstrates the specific nature of the product. This could include manuals, schematics, photos, or a video recording showing your product should not be flagged for the compliance information that was originally requested.

Compliance document review takes around 10 - 15 business days (weekends are not counted in this review process).

• Here at Amazon, we strive to protect our customers to maintain their trust. This means we receive a high volume of inbound compliance cases, so please be patient if you do not hear back from the team within the time frame mentioned above. If your documents have been submitted and you have not had a response from the partner team in over 15 business days, you may create a discussion of the forums with the respective CASE IDs of the ASINs requiring compliance document review. (As a best practice, please only post up to 3 cases that need to be reviewed per forums thread).

The product you are selling and detail page should be aligned.

• Often times, sellers are told that the detail page and the product are not aligned with the compliance information or appeals that are being submitted. Seller’s should ensure their detail pages and products match and if changes are made to the detail page that they have successfully gone through (You can use guidance from this discussion thread on how to update listings, while also double checking that you are maintaining product detail page rules.)

Product images are very important for getting compliance documentation or an appeal approved.

• Occasionally during the compliance or appeal process, the partner team will request photos of all sides of your product. This includes the packaging of your product and the product itself using real world images taken within your possession (not downloaded from a website). These images should be clear (not blurry) and show all sides of the product (even if its a rounded object).

Ensuring your documents meet submission guidelines can help mitigate additional back and forth and cut back review time

• Documents should be high resolution and unobstructed (clear, readable, visible and in focus).
• Be complete and not cut off from any sides (not angled or cropped).
• Display the full document (front and back, if applicable).
• Be in one of these formats: TIF, TIFF, PNG, JPG, PDF, and JPEG. Do not include special characters in the file name (examples: $, &, or #).
• Be authentic and unaltered.
• Must not be password-protected.

To wrap up our quick tip conversation about Compliance Document information, I just wanted to share our Community Manager written discussions that go over some of the more common compliance topics we have seen around the forums in case you would like to learn more:

• Beyond Skin Deep - Unpacking Skin Lightening and Whitening Products
• Button Cell Batteries, what's all the fuss?
• Children’s Jewelry Compliance
• Demystifying Pesticides and Pesticide Devices
• My Product is Not a Pesticide
• New Requirements for Dietary Supplements
• Pesticide Products, EPA Registration, and You
• Prohibited Claims
• There is no way THIS is a Medical Device! Appealing Your Product IS NOT a Medical Device.
• You got the Docs for that? Selling Medical Devices on Amazon

Now it’s your turn!

➡️ We would love to hear any of your compliance document tips and tricks that could help other sellers who may be going through the same situation. ⬅️

Looking forward to your responses below. ~ Cooper_Amazon