Ever Wondered why Amazon Merch has such strict Content Policies?
I often see Amazon Merch sellers frustrated by Amazon Merch’s content policy and automated filters that block postings during the listing process. Sometimes certain words will trigger a shirt to be blocked. This problem has somewhat been alleviated somewhat by Amazon recently changing their content policy to allow cussing, swearing, and weed shirts. There are still however certain words which trigger Amazon’s filters and block shirts from being listed.
Oftentimes it can be something very innocent. For example if I had a shirt about running and it was something about me smoking you in a race, that shirt has nothing to do with actually smoking tobacco or marijuana, but oftentimes a shirt like that would be blocked from being uploaded. Another example prior to this recent policy change, and a mistake I’m sure we have all made at one time or another is accidentally leaving an “r” off the word shirt, leaving our listings saying something like “Cute Halloween Shit” and that shirt would be blocked.
People often get frustrated and “why is Amazon so stupid” or “why is Amazon so strict”. We have to remember at the end of the day it’s Amazon’s platform and they make the rules. We have to remember we are not the only seller on Amazon, they have literally thousands upon thousands of sellers to police and monitor.
Another thing we have to remember about Amazon is while Entrepreneurs and online sellers like you and I know that less than 50% of items sold on Amazon are not being sold by Amazon, the average Amazon user tends to assume everything sold on Amazon, and especially everything sold via Amazon Prime, is actually being sold by Amazon themselves.
The other day while browsing the r/AmazonMerch subreddit someone brought up an interesting story from a few years back. I remember when this happenned. Back in 2013 a tee shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb ran into some problems selling on Amazon, and made Amazon look really bad causing a lot of angry news articles and reputational harm to Amazon.
This company Solid Gold Bomb had thousands upon thousands upon thousands, of tee shirts listed on Amazon.Com. How they did this is they had created some type of bot program, that would automatically create variations of shirts and just plug in random words. The particular example that got them in trouble was a variation of the “Keep Calm and Carry on Shirts.” As you know there’s thousands of these shirts on Amazon saying things like Keep Calm and Hustle On, Keep Calm and Skate On, Keep Calm and Cook On.
This company had created a bot which would automatically plug in different words. Well unfortunately for this tee shirt company as well as Amazon whomever wrote this script didn’t consider adding negative keywords not to use. The result wound up being shirts listed on Amazon saying things like “Keep Calm and Rape on”, “Keep Calm and Stab Her” and other violent and mysogonistic phrases.
This wound up becomming front page news, and while there’s a perfectly good explaination of how and why this happenned, at the end of the day Amazon still has all these viral articles going around and the perception is Amazon allowed this on their site.
This wasn’t Amazon’s first brush with controversey. Back in or around 2008 they had caught a lot of flack for allowing the sale of a paedophile book to be sold on Amazon, but again at the end of the day it’s third parties and individuals listing these things and it’s up to Amazon to catch them, because if they don’t Amazon ultimately is the bad guy at the end of the day.
Anyhow, I wanted to share this story with you because not only is it just a pretty interesting story, but for any of you guys who have had frustrations listing shirts on Amazon Merch and getting innocent shirts blocked, this hopefully gives you an understanding of why Amazon needs to be overly cautious and run their platform the way they do.