Policy Compliance Checklist

Most suspensions don't start with a dramatic violation. They start with a seller who answered "no" to something they thought was minor — images scraped from a competitor, a listing that drifted from the real product, reviews begged from friends. This checklist runs five of the most common policy areas in ten seconds and tells you exactly which ones you're failing.

Answer each yes or no. The tool counts your passes, counts your flagged items, and lists the ones marked NO so you can't pretend you didn't see them.

The five that bite most

• Return policy — Amazon requires one. "I'll handle it case by case" is not a policy.
• Images — using someone else's photo, even "just for reference," is a copyright flag waiting to happen. Own it or license it.
• Listing matches product — the thing in the box has to match the thing in the photos. Drift here is the fastest route to a product- authenticity complaint.
• 24-hour responses — slow message replies hurt your metrics and annoy buyers into negative feedback.
• No incentivized reviews — offering discounts or freebies for reviews violates the rules flat out. Don't.

Why a "no" is urgent

None of these is a soft suggestion. Each is a policy area Amazon actively enforces, and a flagged item is a hook they can hang a warning or a suspension on. The scary part is they often don't warn you first on images or reviews — they just remove the listing or close the account. So a checklist like this isn't busywork; it's a cheap insurance scan you can run before Amazon runs its own.

Use it as a habit

Run this whenever you launch a new product or bring on a VA who touches listings. A fresh set of eyes and a stolen image can slip through in a hurry. Five greens means sleep easy. One red means fix it today, because the cost of a policy flag is never just the flag — it's the week you spend writing a plan to get back what you lost.