Hello, everyone.
I’m in trouble and would like some advice from you all.
On November 30, 2021, I received a performance notification in the UK Marketplace stating that 2 of our ASINs for alleged misuse of text trademark (NIKE), and then our EU account has been suspended.
After receiving the notice, I did a detailed investigation and found the reason:
The two ASINs involved are the women tunics we listed in Germany. To save time and effort, we updated offers from the German Marketplace to the UK Marketplace by Building International Listings as suggested by Amazon. Since the tool automatically performs to translate and create product detail pages in a target marketplace, we did not manually update the product detail pages. During this process, some words we used in the German Marketplace were not perfectly translated into the UK Marketplace. The word “Tuniken” we used in the German Marketplace, which in German means “Tunic”. The tool “Building International Listings” retains the word when translating from German to English. Caused our UK Marketplace to be detected as Potential Trademark Text Misuse (Nike) by Amazon.
However, I would like to stress that we were not misusing NIKE’s text trademark. We have a good awareness of intellectual property protection, and we know that trademarked terms cannot be used on product detail pages without authorization. So we don’t do it at the risk of infringement or even account suspension. The meaning of the word “tuniken” is just “tunic”, it’s not an abuse of Nike, and which does not confuse customers about the source our products.
With these points in mind, I filed two appeals. But without exception, no response from Amazon has been received. So I tried contacting seller support via case and phone for help, but the answer was that they couldn’t help us.
Now 2 months has passed, I feel so lost and wronged that we are not abusing the trademark, Why Amazon treats our account this way?
What can we do now to reactivate our account?
In order for sellers to assist you with this, you will need to share your original notice, and the POA submitted so that we have the full facts in order to advise further.
There are some excellent posters on here who should be able to advise you further once you have uploaded these.
Hi @Hailmkont
Thanks for reaching out to us regarding your account level policy violation.
We request you to submit a Plan of Action with the below information:
How did you misuse Trademark Text (NIKE)?
Corrective Measures: You can explain about your immediate action you have taken on your account to resolve the issue and as mentioned in the notification and Account Health Dashboard.
Preventive Measures: You can explain about your future measures to avoid the policy violations going forward ensuring that there is a counter preventive action as per the root cause identified.
Please go through this policy pages: “ASIN creation policy” to get a complete idea about the policy.
Please make sure that in the appeal you provide the sufficient details, what happened? who did it? and how the policy got violated? and for the corrective measures what steps you have taken already and what is your future plan to prevent this violation addressing the root causes?
For any further assistance we are here to assist you.
Regards,
Danii
Hello,
whether you agree with notification or not - you need to submit POA with root cause, corrective and preventative actions taken. You can explain it was flagged incorrectly, unfortunately, you have to acknowledge violation. Violation will still stay on your account for 180 days. But at least you can get your account reactivated.
Hi @Hailmkont
I understand that your account is flagged for an intellectual property violation Trademark text.
As mentioned
You had used a tool to translate and thus state that it had caused the issue.
As in when you are flagged for such a violation you would either need to provide a proof of authorization for the usage of the intellectual property
letter of authorization or a licensing agreement that meets the following criteria:
Includes name and address of rights owner.
Letter explicitly authorizes you to list the rights owner’s product under your own brand name.
OR
as mentioned by @Danii_Amazon
We would not be able to quote in this regard, as it goes beyond our abilities within the forums to identify the specific reason(s) on why the flagging was done.
Regards
Xavier
@Danii_Amazon and @Xavier_Amazon
Hello, can you guys give me more advice?
I still need help