Amazon Seller for 10 years here. I haven't had my account shutdown, but some tips that could help. At the top, your brand is listed as "Generic", this is because you do not have a brand registered. The way to have a brand registered with Amazon is to first get a Trademark for your brand. This will also help you fight against counterfeiters on Amazon that could try to sell their own version under your listing. In that case, they would need a signed letter from your brand. I don't know that it will help in your specific case, but it could give you more credibility with Amazon. It will cost a little money to get the TM, so that's a decision to make if it's worth it or not.
Have you tried just having a single trademarked brand in your title, rather than Airtag and Samsung or changing the wording at all? Something like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Samsung. How about targeting other popular brands like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Apple TV?
You have been lucky so far, but there is no guarantee that luck will not run out tomorrow. The algorithms making these decisions are not open to review. They are opaque, and there is no way to know when something in your account might be flagged as suspicious.
> but some tips that could help.
I know you are trying to help, so thank you for that. So don't take this personally when I say this. I'm just frustrated with how things have turned out.
It is absurd that we have reached a point where people must rely on unofficial and unverified tips just to possibly avoid losing access to their source of income. It seems incredibly unhealthy for a market this important to be governed in this way.
I don't disagree with most of your comment, although I don't think my tips are questionable, they are well within Amazon's guidelines. I have been through counterfeiter issues on my account before and very familiar with the brand registry process. Changing listing titles also happens on a regular basis to chase trends in search results. My recommendations are pretty much directly from the cited guidelines in sellercentral.
Sorry, I didn't mean questionable. I meant unverified and I updated my comment soon before you posted yours. But looks like my "unverified" complaint was wrong too? Do you know if the seller guidelines doc is published somewhere? I tried searching but I see multiple results and cannot tell which one of them is the actual deal. Curious to find out what kind of guidelines they officially recommend. Could be a great resource for the community.
Here is the relevant section copy pasted (which his original listing is pretty close to adhering to, it's really just the second brand mention which I was concerned about):
"
When making truthful statements that a product is compatible with a trademarked product. For example, if you offer a cable that is compatible with the Kindle e-reader, you can use the brand name “Kindle” to indicate that compatibility in the text of your detail page. You cannot use a logo to indicate compatibility, only the brand name. Any statement you make about compatibility must be true.
If you want to indicate the compatibility of your product with a product of a different brand in the product title, build your product title using the format below, taking account of the Amazon Brand Name Policy. If you do not apply this format to your product title, your listing may be removed as potentially trademark infringing.
Title format for branded compatible products
[Your Product’s Brand Name] + [Product Name] + "for"/''compatible with''/''fits''/''intended for'' + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)
Examples:
Xandu USB charging cable, compatible with AmazonBasics speaker
TonTon Sleeve intended for Kindle Fire
Title format for generic compatible products
"Generic" + [Product Name] + "for"/”compatible with”/”fits”/”intended for” + [Brand of Main Product] + [Main Product Name] + (other product title elements, if applicable)
Example:
Generic Replacement filter for AmazonBasics Waterfilter A3
Note: When making genuine claims that a product is compatible with a trademarked product, use either of these terms that indicate compatibility as listed above, in the bullet point and product description as well.
"
There's a bunch of services that charge to help you with the reinstatement process because they know what keywords to use to help you navigate the Amazon system.
I think they're worth reaching out to (I don't have one that I personally recommend as I've been out of that industry for too long). Because if things haven't changed recently then there's no "penalty" for waiting and the mistake most sellers make is rushing to put through a crappy response and they just make things worse.
This is really cool and I was hoping something similar existed earlier this year when looking into protein powders following the Clean Label Transparency Project report [1]. Basically they said about half of protein powders tested showed signs of heavy metals, but did not disclose which brands. I would be interested in funding testing for some specific brands as I am sure others would as well. I did a bit of digging on a few brands and found lawsuits against them for violating prop 65, sometimes multiple [2][3] from the same brand.
Some testing has been done on https://labdoor.com/ where they basically fund the testing with affiliate links, which I think could be another revenue source for your site. I did contact them in January and they said they would add the brands I requested to the list, it's just not crowdsourced the same way your site is. They received some form of backing from Mark Cuban [4].
(edit) To make this more clear - If you are looking for expansion or making it a little wider, allowing users to request other types of testing besides the plastics would be cool.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I will look into Labdoor and their funding models. I'm definitely open to expanding to other types of testing if/when this project grows. I'm actually already able to test for nearly everything you'd want to check for in a consumable, I'm just keeping the focus of the public website on plastic chemicals for now to avoid feature creep and scope management issues.
I have considered creating specific ad-hoc campaign pages for folks with special interests and let them drive people to the page (like a more focused Kickstarter or GoFundMe with a lab on the back end).
If anyone has a special interest I'm happy to mock up what funding targets would be.
Can confirm, never felt more tired day to day than when I was drinking two cups of coffee per day. Stopped 2 years ago and never looked back. The first 30 days are the worst, but after that, a glass of water wakes me up just as effectively.
> Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening)
This is fascinating to me. I wonder if it would work the other way, that FMT could be used to treat obesity. I figure if FMT from someone with the predisposition for obesity can be transmitted, can whatever causes that predisposition be killed off by FMT from someone who is not obese, the same way it is getting the C-Diff under control.
Amazon FBA seller here. I came to look for the Amazon comment. Their returns are pretty messed up and hurt the sellers. Customer can return for any reason and the seller has to eat it. Often times it is very hard to track returns down if people return the wrong stuff. If it's broken or damaged, amazon will side with the customer 100% of the time. On top of all that, if you dispose of a damaged, non-sell-able item, they will list it in amazon warehouse, we agree to that in the TOS by having an FBA account.
If someone knows how to work with their system better regarding returns, let me know.
I stopped selling on Amazon nearly 10 years ago. FBA was a newly introduced feature which was the trigger for me see Amazon's disrespect for 3rd party sellers.
They skim the seller for the sale (because they do the marketing for you).
They skim on payment processing (it costs them less than they charge)
They skim for exposure (ads are almost a must have to ever appear in search results).
They then skim on delivery via FBA (they charge more than it costs them).
And they skim on warehousing via FBA (the pricing was already unbelievable back then).
Fast forward 10 years, they have started to skim sellers off their business analysis and risk taking effort (They have the data, and will compete with 3rd party sellers on products that sell decently enough, and even place their product before yours).
I've recently taken the time to edited and publish a book that is in the public domain, on their KDP platform, a few days later I see that Amazon is selling that same book and even redirect customer clicks from my page description and book cover to their line item to buy.
>a few days later I see that Amazon is selling that same book and even redirect customer clicks from my page description and book cover to their line item to buy.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Is Amazon redirecting direct links to your free book to a non-free version?
The biggest feature I will be looking for in this is a true push to android mobile devices. It looks like you can use the subscribe function for this, but I'd need an android example to get up and running quickly. Right now it seems like firebase is the only game in town for that functionality unless you want to roll your own with websockets or some sort of MQ. Google also strongly encourages use of firebase for that in the TOS in the play store I believe. I'm very excited to see how this progresses.
I also went right to the pricing page to see if you would charge for on-prem hosting, but looks like it is still TBD. I would like the ability to host everything on-prem. Security and encryption would be next on my list of wants after that.
You're correct that the Firebase Cloud Messaging is essentially required for Android push. As of Android 8, Google prevents background connections from being held open by apps, and requires FCM in order to wake up apps (eg: to receive a notification). This is documented here: https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-sta...
If the app is already running (eg: in the foreground), then you can (and probably should) use your own non-FCM connection for sending messages or data.
Thanks for the feedback! We've had a few people asking for on-prem + support, it's looking like it's going to be bumped up the feature queue.
Also thanks for sharing the android use case - we definitely want people to use this directly from the client. We're working hard to get the auth model right for this.
I just switched to g suite for business over the weekend and setup mail checking from my main account. I found enabling "Less secure apps" to get sending and receiving emails from my other accounts via POP3 to be very odd. Also had to create the app specific password. How is it a less secure app? It's a gmail account checking another gmail account. That really didn't make sense to me, but the tech support from g suite was happy to read the script to walk me through the setup. It was pretty frustrating to not be able to figure that out myself, it was not intuitive.
