Listings being suspended have always been a headache for Amazon sellers. Just do a little searching on any FBA seller community, you can easily find pages of complaints about listings being closed out of blue. In this article, we will shed some insights on why Amazon suppresses or closes your listings, how to fix it and what precautions can be taken to avoid it.

Why does Amazon Close My Listings? 

It’s known that Amazon aims to provide the best experience possible for customers. To protect their buying experience, Amazon has to make sure listings that fail to meet their quality expectations are not shown in the marketplace.

Here are 4 of the most common case scenarios that can result in the removal of a listing:

Violating Amazon’s title guidelines

You are putting your listing in danger if you breach any one of the following Amazon’s listing rules.

1. Title being too long or promotional.
2. Missing any key information including the UPC, Bullet Points, Description and Brand Info.
3. Containing false information about pricing, freight and logistics costs, manufacturer that don’t relate to your products.
4. The length of a title exceeding 200 characters.

Compliance Issues

Restricted items: Amazon does not approve all items to be sold. Sometimes items authorized by a government are not allowed to sell on their marketplaces. For detailed information about restricted product, check here.

Review manipulation: Don’t try to invite your friends or lure buyers to leave positive reviews if it’s not legitimate, or chances are very good that you will get a warning email from Amazon to suspend your listing.

IP infringement: It is highly likely that your listing might be removed if you are involved in IP infringement, which includes coping a patented product, using another company’s tagline or appropriating a well-known logo for your own use, etc.

Poor Services

Report on poor services will directly trigger listing removal, which mainly boils down to bad customer service attitude, wrong or delayed delivery, etc.

In most cases, you will receive complaints about poor services from buyers if their messages or emails were not handled in time, or a disagreement occurred in communication.

Nevertheless the problem, try your best to reduce conflicts with buyers and engage with them as fast as possible whenever they have a concern.

As for shipping time, later than 3 working days is deemed as a delayed order. Amazon caps delay rate at 4 percent, if exceeded, you may get a warning message from Amazon and risk losing your listings.

Quality Issues

A string of negative feedback on product quality can be the #1 threat that gets your listing removed. You don’t want any complaints shown in the review section like counterfeit, inauthentic, used sold as new, expired, safety incident or material difference .

To avoid this type of problem, just remember that nothing matters more than strict and comprehensive quality control!

*Pro Tip: For items with potential safety hazards like a sharp end, it is suggested to attach a card of clear instructions on how to properly use them.

What to do if your listing got suppressed?

• Write an appeal to Amazon and include your Plans of Action, try to be as sincere and detailed as possible.
• Make changes promptly to ensure that errors stop.
• Issue refunds at once if needed.
• Remove the non-compliance item from your sales inventory if necessary.

General practices to avoid above-mentioned problems

If you finally appealed successfully and got all your seller privileges reinstated, you need to know how to avoid the nightmare from arising again. Here are a few tips that may help.

1. Avoid listing suspensions by utilizing SellerMotor’s newly-developed risk assessment tool: SellerMotor Risk Assessment. It visualizes 5 essential metrics including de-listed products and risk level, helping you make safer sourcing decision in early research stage and avoid risky keywords in your listing and search terms. No need to spend days reviewing hundreds of pages of Amazon’s product rules, start a FREE trial of Risk Assessment now!
2. Download Amazon Seller app for quick addressing of the after-sales problem.
3. Double check your listing descriptions, make sure you are accurately describing your items without false information.
4. Check your inventory on a regular basis.