Marketplace deleted my products

[elsa Liebknecht]

Hello, I got some message today saying several of my items had been removed because they had been marked as "spam" and something about the description...

So first of all I doubt it very much, they were dresses and I didn't have any spam in the keywords but now I can't even check what might have been the problem because they are gone from my marketplace... I didn't get any warning before the deletion, so basically I want to ask, what the heck is that about? is this a new stupid 'feature' I need to be aware about the markeplace, and most important, is there anywhere I can get my items back without having to list them manually??

[Czari Zenovka]

From what I understand, whoever at LL is in charge of the MP basically responds to items that are flagged by those using the MP.  I took a look at a few of your listings and I didn't see anything that looked like spam to me except perhaps the word "cute" on the items I checked out which, granted, was only a handful.

It could be a competitor that was looking for a way to knock out some of your items or the equivalent of a griefer but, except for that one word, I personally didn't see any spam in your keywords.  Others may have more insight.

[elsa Liebknecht]

Thank you for your reply.  The word cute is kind of subjective I guess, I usually use it in girly and "gothic-lolita" type of items. So you are saying that if I flag someone's item LL will simply remove it without even warning the merchant?? that's grotesque! I wonder if I should submit a ticket, these items were on the first page for a particular search and had been for a long time, I used to get  sales for these items, multiple times every day and they had a good rating... I'm very annoyed at this unfair system.

[Extraneousnomenclature]

You may find this discussion about the marketplace relevant to your experience.

[Czari Zenovka]

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elsa Liebknecht wrote:

Thank you for your reply.  The word cute is kind of subjective I guess, I usually use it in girly and "gothic-lolita" type of items. So you are saying that if I flag someone's item LL will simply remove it without even warning the merchant?? that's grotesque! I wonder if I should submit a ticket, these items were on the first page for a particular search and had been for a long time, I used to get  sales for these items, multiple times every day and they had a good rating... I'm very annoyed at this unfair system.

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The "warning" is basically after the fact as you found out.  I don't know if someone flagging the item will automatically mean someone from LL will delete it; what I meant was that LL employees (from what I gather from reading these forums) don't spend time combing through the MP looking for spam or other infractions; they respond to flags.  I would hope that the LL person reads the listing himself before deleting it.

Since you mentioned in your first post that your items were marked for "spam," that usually denotes keyword spam.  Many people  are annoyed with keyword spam because that causes unrelated items to show up in MP search so some people will flag listings.  As I mentioned previously, it can also be a competitor.  Since you said the items in question were on the first page for a particular search (assuming you mean search term) looking at what word/s those items have in common in the listings would be one way to figure out what was considered spam.

[Tari Landar]

Sorry, I've been away for a bit, so this is a late response to your thread. One thing I can answer with any amount of certainty is that NOT everything that gets flagged, gets removed. I know, because I have flagged things, and I know for a fact others have flagged things, that have never been removed.

That could mean two things. It could mean someone reviewed our flagging(s) and decided they weren't valid, or that no one reviewed them at all. I often think it's more the latter than the former.

The other thing I can say with certainty is that SOME things that get flagged do get removed, also because of personal experience in that something I did flag was removed. That doesn't necessarily mean I was the only one who flagged it, but it does mean that someone at least reviewed one report and removed the item. Whether or not they actually went over the item thoroughly before removing, is of course not something anyone here can answer either. Sometimes I do believe they don't actually review and just remove, other times it seems they may actually review them on occasion.

In a nutshell, the flagging system is often as useful as the rating system, and functions about as well as the rest of the MP does.

I've had a couple items flagged and removed myself. One, was entirely my fault because I, like an idiot in a rush, copied over some keywords from a very similar product and forgot to remove two that weren't necessarily related(to others searching anyway). So, in that right, it was most definitely keyword spam and I've only myself to blame. The other, however, was because of some freaking moron(s) who went a little too flag happy when they(LL) did the Madstyle promo thing a while back. Because something I sell has the word mad, it came up when people searched that specific keyword(or clicked on that promo banner which brought up any product with that particular keyword, plus quite a few thousand more items that just had the word mad, including some creator and store names, despite not actually using that keyword anywhere in the listing) and got flaged as "keyword spam". Yeah, that promo was a mess and a LOT of people had items flagged and removed, that should not have. I tend to believe it's why they haven't done that sort of promo since-it was a total bomb and a HUGE mess.

As annoying as having items flagged is (and I totally understand the frustration, believe me), sometimes it's easier to just get past it. Sure we all get frustrated, angry maybe even, but trying to make any sort of sense out of it is about as sensible as attempting to nail prepared jello to a tree. Your attempts to understand it will be even more frustrating, trust me on that one. This is definitely nothing new, it's been like this since MP was created and I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon. There has never been any type of warning. LL assumes merchants will read the MP guidelines and consider that their only warning, apparently(this is my take, LL has never actually said this specifically, but it's what i gather from their generic responses they always give regarding this). Your only "warning" is, as you noticed, the removal and lovely auto-generated message that almost always says the same exact thing, regardless of the real reason for removal. If you search the forums, you'll see this has been a problem for a while.

[Sassy Romano]

What Tari said.  Sometimes you see things that are blatantly ripe for removal which never get removed and others which are totally compliant and still get removed.

It just depends on the droid that reviews the listing.

You can even get an apology from LL for incorrect removal of a listing too if you try.