1
The client sells shoe inserts across 4 European Amazon marketplaces.
2
To increase profit margins and bypass the competition, the client naively decided to position their products as providing medical benefits.
The client placed their listings in specialized medical foot care categories and described their products accordingly by making medical claims.
3
Amazon demanded that the client provide justification for the medical claims.
4
At this point, the client should have:
- Either immediately corrected the market positioning of their products and then admitted in their response to Amazon that their §2 actions were wrong.
- Or hired an expert (e.g., me) to prepare a proper justification for the medical claims (provided that such a justification exists).
5
Instead of §4, the client decided to argue with Amazon on their own (relying on AI advice) and took other actions that aggravated the problem, causing their listings to be banned.
6
Amazon regional marketplaces operate with a significant degree of autonomy.
The client caused the problem of §§2-3 to escalate into a ban independently across 4 marketplaces: Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
7
§§5-6 drove the client into an AI-deadlock (typical of 2026) across all 4 marketplaces: the client, armed with their poor-quality AI, against the Indians at Amazon Seller Support, armed with their poor-quality AI.
The client was trying in vain to get Amazon Seller Support to remove the medical claims from the corrupted and suppressed listings.
A typical AI battle occurred in Italy: «Charmi» (चारमी) from Amazon Seller Support, surely located in India, claimed in Italian that she had applied the edits requested by the client, but in reality, no edits were applied.
Certainly, she did not even delve into the client's inquiry or the response she received from Amazon's internal IT systems while processing the inquiry.
Employees of such offshore support centers are assigned strict inquiry processing quotas, strictly limiting the time available to process each inquiry.
8
Trapped in the §7 deadlock, the client hired me.
9
When a listing is suppressed due to unjustified medical claims, it can be corrected programmatically via SP-API.
This is the first step to reinstatement: then it is necessary to wade through the multi-tiered Amazon Seller Support system to admit to the mistakes and ask for reinstatement.
10
You can significantly speed up such a project if, in addition to the credentials for SP-API access, you provide the expert with access to your Amazon Seller Central account's UI as a «secondary user»: sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external/G901
With this access, an expert will resolve your problem significantly faster.
In particular, it will allow the expert to:
10.1. Analyze your Amazon Seller Support cases related to the problem.
10.2. Conveniently conduct a comparative analysis of suppressed and active listings and of their contribution history to identify the patterns and actions that led to past suppressions or would lead to future suppressions.
10.3. Retrieve from the UI relevant information unavailable via SP-API.
11
The client decided not to provide me with §10 access.
Without it, the expert's workload increases significantly: to successfully complete this project, in addition to the primary application for correcting the suppressed listings, I had to develop 3 auxiliary applications (§§12-14).
12
An application for retrieving and analyzing the current Amazon data schema for the specific type of the problematic products.
The schema has strategic importance; it documents Amazon's requirements for the specific product type: which specific attributes are allowed for products of this type and what the exact requirements are for the attribute values.
The schema is unique to each regional Amazon marketplace (specifically because each country imposes its own legal requirements).
This application uses the «Product Type Definitions» API: developer-docs.amazon/sp-api/docs/product-type-definitions-api
13
An application for conducting §10.2: a comparative analysis of suppressed and active listings to identify the patterns that led to past suppressions or would lead to future suppressions.
This application uses the «Catalog Items» and «Listings Items» APIs:
- developer-docs.amazon/sp-api/docs/catalog-items-api
- developer-docs.amazon/sp-api/docs/listings-items-api
14
An application for testing listing changes and tracking their asynchronous moderation process.
Due to its scale, Amazon usually processes listing changes asynchronously: obviously invalid changes are rejected synchronously, but valid requests enter the moderation pipeline.
When working via SP-API without access to the Amazon Seller Central UI, it is important not to delude yourself when SP-API responds with 200 OK: this only means the request lacks completely obvious errors and starts the moderation process.
This kind of delusion is a typical cause of §7 deadlocks.
Due to §6, such testing and tracking must be performed for each regional marketplace.