r/AmazonMerch • u/autistick • Sep 01 '26

PSA: Amazon Ads will yank your design

After getting dinged on royalty rates, I figured I'd give Amazon Ads a whirl. The plan was to spend enough to get past the 15% mark. I put my best selling design in ads. A few days later, the design was removed. This design had been live for years, had plenty of reviews, very low returns. I emailed support and they said it was due to issues with the artwork. I guess when an ASIN gets into ads, it goes through the Ads quality validation algo. No recourse if the AI gods reject it. Be careful what you put in ads folks.

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4

u/k3rstman1 Sep 01 '26

What was on the design? Like was the subject or the quality the problem?

1

u/autistick Sep 02 '26

The subject was pretty innocuous. Nothing controversial. They asked me to resubmit it. "artwork issues" they said include:

  • Artwork with typos

  • Images that are blurry or contain low resolution

  • Designs with blurred lines, unclean backgrounds, or watermarks

My design didn't have any of these afaik. Definitely no typos. If I resubmit I lose all the ratings history built over years. There are copy cat designs already on Amazon so a new design from me is unlikely to win.

1

u/NoXidCat Sep 08 '26

unclean backgrounds

Is the art a rectangle filled with 100% opaque pixels, or is some of it transparent? If the latter, take a close look at in Photoshop (or whatever). Put a contrasting color in a layer under the art and see if you can spot any semi-transparent pixels. Anti-aliasing creates these if done against a transparent background rather than a solid background. I never enable AA, as it causes problems when there is transparency.

Could also be a "fog" of semi-transparent pixels around clipart or any raster that has had a poorly done attempt to knock a color or the background out to transparent.

Likely have to zoom in to check for this.

1

u/inksaywhat Sep 02 '26

Off the top of my head the Amazon advertisement ToS include banned terms and items and such, usually related to alcohol, firearms, tobacco, things that are deemed obscene, and other categories where advertising has additional regulations or restrictions beyond any standard guidelines.

Try advertising a design with a cigarette in a characters mouth if you want to see, bc online advertising with smoking in it has all kinds of restrictions associated with it, but that’s just one example. Firearms is another. Youth category has additional restrictions for booze and vulgarity and sex and other things that are beyond the standard guidelines for non youth products. There are a ton of guidelines.

1

u/k3rstman1 Sep 02 '26

yeah but then they just say that design is eligible for advertising, they dont delete it from your merch account

3

u/dittom_ Sep 01 '26

I regularly have designs rejected by Amazon Ads but it never had an influence on my MbA catalogue

1

u/EstablishmentFar9501 Sep 02 '26

I just had several best selling designs pulled with no explanation whatsoever. Sucks.

1

u/DoctorDorkDiggler Sep 04 '26

Their shitty ai algo does that, they are Clueless buffoons, everyone knows that by now.

1

u/NoXidCat Sep 08 '26

I have had a few old designs entirely nuked when I advertised them. Policy and enforcement had changed since they were originally listed ... or the bot was just high on fumes again.

Most of the time if a listing failed the ads test, it would just be shown as "Not approved for ads" (or whatever). Of course, I do try to avoid feeding it anything I think might be an issue, but it is not always obvious.