How to Deal With Rejection — The Knowledge
Rejection hurts. But do you know what hurts even more? Avoidable delays to your carefully-created Amazon A+*. To help take the sting out of this content cold-shoulder, we’ve put together a quick guide on how to pull yourself together and move on to bigger and better things (albeit on the same content platform).
Step 1: Read the content rejection reason carefully
If your content has been rejected, the chances are you’ve been given a reason. Well, most of the time.
If you’re one of the lucky ones, and the reasoning make sense, it’s a good opportunity to revisit your content and look for the offending items. Is it an image that breaks guidelines? Is it a restricted keyword or phrase? Would your content be significantly harmed if all instances were removed or modified?
If you answered yes to thethe last question, our recommendation is to make the change and resubmit. Although it’s always preferable to have the A+ go up in your preferred form, our experience has taught us that even minor disputes with the Vendor Central editorial team can drag on for months. The price of a few small amends is worth paying to avoid the potential of weeks of lower conversion.
Pros: Resolves the problem quickly, low overall cost
Cons: Content is no longer fully optimised/consistent across all platforms/locales, message may become diluted/fragmented, reasoning may not be given or might be unreasonable
Step 2: Raise a “Contact-us” about the issue
Occasionally you’ll disagree with the reason why your content has been rejected. Or you won’t understand the reasoning given. Or they’ve not been bothered to provide you one.
That’s when it’s time to venture into the often-frustrating world of the Amazon “Contact-us” system.
It’s something that we could (and will!) write an entire blog post on in future. But here some helpful hints to get you started:
Choosing a subject: You’ll want to make sure your request makes it through to the correct person, but you might not find a subject on Amazon’s list that fully meets what you’re looking for. To further complicate matters, these subject can vary by Amazon locale, so occasionally you’ll have to try your luck and hope it gets forwarded onto the right place. We find that in Vendor Central UK “Manage my Catalogue –> A+ Content” works more often than not.
Explain your issue: The chances are that your email will find its way to one of the large Amazon CS centres scattered across the world. In these situations, there’s always a possibility that whoever responds to your query may not speak your language as their first/second language, so might not understand the context around your issue. Try to be as clear and straightforward in your response as you can, to avoid the increasingly-ubiquitous form replies.
Include examples: Are your competitor’s A+ pages uploaded without issue? Have you had your A+ uploaded in a different locale without issue? Include links to these examples in your request, and question why these were allowed while yours was rejected.
Keep on top of it: In our experience, Contact-us queries have a tendency to linger, so it’s in your best interests to chase and follow-up as vigilantly as you can. It’s a time sink, but it can be the difference between getting a response.
Step 3: Apply some pressure
Pressure from within Amazon tends to produce better and quicker results than pressure from without.
Are your products key lines for the Amazon category this quarter? Do you have a good relationship with your Amazon contact? If you’re having persistent issues in getting your A+ on the site, it might be worth talking to your Amazon contacts to see if they can chase this internally.
This will be more successful if your issue is something genuinely unreasonable/unfathomable, rather than a clear breach of the current Amazon content guidelines, but it often gets results. The downside is that some Amazon sales teams will use this as an opportunity to get you to sign up for a more comprehensive (and eye-wateringly expensive) Amazon content service package. We might be biased, but we’ve heard enough stories that suggest that these sort of problems continue regardless of the service level you’ve signed up for.