Hello,

our accound has been deactivated since december for the following reason :

Examples of restricted products you have listed include, but are not limited to:

ASIN: B004CS9WKK Title: COUTEAU OPINEL POUR ENFANT BOUT ROND N7

It was our mistake to not have withdrawn, deleted and ''take care'' of products that were flagged as violating the restricted product policy. We did not have intent to sell those products.

Since, we've cleaned our violations in the account health page and deleted all products flagged.

We tried to appeal amazon's decision but keep failing to do so. To make our point, we tried explaining that Opinel knife do not violates canadians law regarding assisted opening knife, such as butterfly knife or spring knife. Opinel knife needs two hands to open them as they have a thumbnail slot in the blade itself for you to manually pry open the blade from the handle. While it makes sense for us, we seem to not be able to word it or show it correclty for Amazon to understand it. It doesn't help that we are not the brand owner and changing the ASIN description or picture seems impossible.

Our lasted attempt at an appeal was the following :

Dear Amazon Canada performance seller team,

I would like to appeal for our selling privileges that have been removed due to restricted products on December 7, 2023

This is for the account :

Market place : Amazon Canada

Merchant Token :

We understand that Amazon takes restricted products very seriously and any failure to follow Amazon policies might end up in our account being suspended. We would like to share with you our plan of action in which we explain what happened, what we will do to resolve the issue and how we will prevent it in the future.

We would like to note that since the beginning, all of our performance metrics/ Account Health are positive. We have a healthy account and no major issue has arisen prior to this incident. We once in the past had products that got flagged for being pesticide and we deleted them right away. We are a distributor so we don’t own the listings, we simply list items to sell on existing listings. So if anything changes on the said listing we do not have the right to change them.

1. Who is in charge?

, our marketing coordinator, is the one who manages our Amazon sale channel.

2. Why did this issue occur?

We have listed products that are prohibited that we thought were not. We believe that Amazon identified those products as “Spring Knife '' or “Butterfly Knife '' which are prohibited on the platform. These are Opinel Knives, they have a thumbnail slot that can be used to open the blade with a slotted stainless steel clip that securely locks the blade open or closed. So it’s nothing like a spring knife. It's made for foraging and is okay to sell in Canada whereas “Spring Knife '' or “Butterfly Knife “ aren’t and we understand that.

3. Did we know what was happening?

No we did not. We already listed some of these products without any issues. Like mentioned above, we are a distributor who lists products on an already existing listing. So if one of the listings changes to include a prohibited keyword we have no say in these changes and we are not notified when these occur. Also, since we are a distributor, we don’t have the control of the listing so if any keywords / images are prohibited by Amazon. We would not be able to update it fast enough so we can comply with your guidelines. Therefore, we decided to remove all the products that were flagged as restricted. We do not intend to list them again.

4. When did we realize this was happening?

We did realize it too late, we sadly realized it when the account got suspended.

5. Did we understand the policies?

We totally understand and agree with the policies, we don’t want to relist those products, we simply want to get back to selling our other products again. We will be extra careful when listing new products and double check with Amazon policies in the futur.

6. What action did we take to remedy the situation

We went ahead and deleted all those products from our account. We now have a direct link to Amazon policies to verify before adding new products onto Amazon to make sure this issue doesn’t happen anymore.

7. What measures are we putting in place to avoid the recurrence of the problem?

We will look carefully at the Amazon policies and different prohibited products to make sure our is not on the list before listing them on our account. We now understand that it is not because a product is already on Amazon that it is cleared from being prohibited. We’ve also added a formation for all our employees that are in contact with the platform so that they can flag those types of products faster on our account and before they are even listed.

8. What is the time frame for the implantation of this POA?

We already changed our methodology and the prohibited products are already deleted. You’ll be able to see these changes as soon as our selling privileges are reinstated. You don’t have to worry about those types of products coming back on our account.

Thanks for the consideration

Sincerely,

At this point, any help is welcome.

Thank you