The day two listings disappeared

They were not our worst listings. They were two of the better ones: good photos, all thirteen tags filled, a description that had been rewritten twice, a steady order history. By any checklist we had at the time they were in good shape.

One morning they were gone.

What we had done

The listings used a brand name in the title and in several tags. Not as a claim to be the brand — as a description of what the item looked like, which is how a lot of sellers use those words and how we had used them without thinking about it for months.

That distinction matters to us and does not matter to the process. A rights holder reports a listing, the listing comes down. There is no stage at which someone weighs how good the photography was.

The part that stung was that the words were sitting in the fields we looked at every day. We had read those tags dozens of times. We were reading them for the wrong thing — whether all thirteen slots were used, not what was in them.

Why the warning does not lower the score

When we built listing health into Stallsy, the obvious move was to fold a trademark check into the score. A listing with a risky brand term scores lower, sinks in the queue, gets fixed.

We built it that way and then took it out, because it encodes something false. Those two listings were excellent. Their score was high and their score was correct. Lowering it would have said “this listing needs improvement”, which was not the problem. The problem was that a good listing was about to vanish.

So the trademark warning in Stallsy is a separate flag. It does not touch the score, and it is not sorted with the score. It is a different question:

• The score asks: is this listing doing its job well?
• The warning asks: is this listing at risk of not existing?

A listing can be a 96 and still be the one you should look at first. Merging the two numbers would have hidden exactly the case that cost us the orders.

What the warning is and is not

It is a word list. It flags brand terms that we know get listings removed, in the fields where they cause trouble, and it tells you which term and where. That is all it is.

It is not legal advice, and it cannot be. Whether a particular use of a particular word is permissible is a legal question about your specific listing, and no word list answers it. There are legitimate uses of brand names, and the flag will mark some of them. We would rather it did. A false flag costs you thirty seconds; a missed one cost us thirty‑one orders.

The list is also not complete. It cannot be — new brands appear, and a term nobody enforced last year gets enforced this year. We add to it when we learn something, and it is still a net, not a wall.

If you take one thing

Go and read your own tags — not to count them, to read them. You have almost certainly looked at that field a hundred times without once asking whether any of those thirteen words belong to somebody.

It takes ten minutes across a whole shop. We did not spend those ten minutes, and it cost considerably more than ten minutes to recover.