Amazon Blackhat Tactic: Adult Flag On a Listing
We’ve already covered how merging Amazon listings technique can reduce blackhat listings.
But did you know: one of the most popular blackhat tactics on Amazon is for competing sellers to mark your item as “adult”.
For example, you can sell harmless children’s toys and your competitor can mark your listings as “adult”.
TLDR: you can prevent it from happening in the future. Ask a Seller Support to have the Catalog Team whitelist the ASIN.
How the “adult” blackhat tactic works:
- A competitor lists your product to their inventory
- There is a box that asks “Is this item adult?”
- They click “Yes”, and then click “Save”
This hides your listing in Amazon search results. As well as you can’t run sponsored products campaign.
You are forced to open an email only case with Amazon and wait 3–7 days (in some cases 2 weeks) for them to manually confirm your item is not adult.
Amazon refuses to fix this loophole.
No notices, no email notifications from Amazon that a product detail is changed. You might think that you’re left with the only 1 indication, that is — sales drop.
Our customers, Amazon merchants who use Bindwise, know that they’ve got covered with our alerting.
After you choose to track “Adult” flags with Bindwise, a product that keeps getting misidentified as ADULT will trigger an instant notification to your mailbox like the following
Important question: if there’s any way to prevent this from happening again?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes.
We’ve heard from merchants how they raised this question with the Amazon Seller Support. A Seller Support internally forwards it to the Catalog Team which can whitelist an ASIN.
They said they’d whitelist an ASIN so that it can’t be incorrectly flagged as an adult item again.
The Catalog Team (Americans working from Seattle) gets these false adult flag complaints often so they’ll know what to do, but seller support will only lift the adult flag temporarily, but if you ask them directly to ask the Catalog Team, you can avoid this annoyance in the future.
If you have other variations related to the ASIN that’s being flagged, tell them to whitelist all the variations (even the ones that haven’t been flagged yet) so it won’t happen to any of them in the future.
Some ASINs still might get flagged in the future, in that case, you can now refer seller support to this original case you started, and they’ll see they should have handled this before and will be quicker in taking off the adult flag the second time.
