Amazon Report a Violation: Submission History, and the Acceptance Rate That Gates Project Zero

Your acceptance rate on Amazon violation reports is a number you probably can't quote, and it's the gate on the best enforcement tool Amazon offers. Project Zero asks for a record of reporting through Report a Violation in the last six months with at least a 90% acceptance rate on those reports. Not a volume of reports. An acceptance rate. Most brands we talk to have never seen the figure, which means they've been spending it for years without knowing the balance.

That got considerably more interesting in July 2026, when Amazon rebuilt Report a Violation and gave brands a Submission History tab. For the first time the filing record is visible to the brand that owns it. If you run enforcement in-house, or you're weighing whether to hand it to an operator, the two changes below are the ones that alter what you can actually do. The same discipline sits underneath Amazon unauthorized seller removal run as a managed service: the reports aren't the work, the evidence behind them is, and the evidence is what gets scored.

We've run this on brands where the listing page was splitting the Buy Box four ways. With Kizik, channel restrictions, restriction notices to the rogue sellers, cutting off violating distributors and a MAP policy written to survive enforcement moved Buy Box placement up 81% in four months, with page views up 281% and monthly sales improved by $162K. The full write-up is here. If you want to go through your own seller list with us, book a call and we'll pull it apart on the call rather than after it.

What Amazon actually changed in Report a Violation

Amazon's Selling Partner Blog announced the rebuild on 31 July 2026, under the heading of reporting brand violations faster with one guided experience. Four things changed, and they're worth separating because only two of them change how you operate.

What changed	What it means in practice
One guided flow covering intellectual property infringement, store policy violations and regulatory compliance concerns	Mostly a convenience. You stop guessing which of Amazon's tools a given problem belongs in.
A single landing page consolidating all violation reporting	Also convenience, though it removes a real source of mis-filing. A report submitted through the wrong tool was a report heading for a rejection.
Structured fields replacing free-text forms	This one matters. Free text let a weak report look like a strong one. Structured fields show you the evidence you don't have before you submit.
A Submission History tab tracking every report's status in real time	This one matters most. Enforcement stops being a black box and starts having a cycle time you can measure.

Submission History is the change we'd build a process around. Before it, a brand filing reports had no way to answer two basic questions: how long does a report of this type take to resolve, and what share of ours are getting accepted. Both are now readable. The second one, as the next section gets into, was always being scored whether anyone looked at it or not.

Who can file a store policy report now

Amazon dropped the Rights Owner requirement for store policy violation reports. Any Brand Registry user associated with an enrolled brand can file one, and Amazon states plainly that you don't need to be assigned the Rights Owner role. Brand Registry enrollment is still required.

This sounds like an administrative detail and it isn't. Across the accounts we run, the single most common reason enforcement stalls at a brand is that one person holds the Rights Owner role, that person has a day job that isn't enforcement, and everyone else forwards screenshots to them. Then they go on holiday. A rogue seller that shows up on a Tuesday gets reported eleven days later, by which point the test buy is stale and the listing has been edited.

If your brand has been running that way, the fix is now a permissions change rather than a staffing argument. Give the person who actually watches the listings the ability to file on what they see.

What your acceptance rate gates, and what keeps it

Two different thresholds, and almost every write-up we read while researching this collapsed them into a single "90 to 99%" range, which is two separate requirements mashed together. Amazon's own Project Zero page states them separately.

Threshold	What it is	What it governs
At least 90% acceptance rate	On reports filed through Report a Violation in the last six months	Getting into Project Zero
At least 99% accuracy rate	On your use of the self-service removal tool	Keeping access to it

The rest of the eligibility list is a Brand Registry account where you're the rights owner of a registered trademark, and a history of using Brand Registry and Report a Violation in line with Amazon's policies. One honest caveat, which Amazon itself makes: it weighs the acceptance rate alongside other criteria, so clearing 90% doesn't guarantee you get in. It's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

What you get on the other side is worth the discipline. Amazon provides the self-service removal tool free to enrolled brands, says it should only be used to remove counterfeit listings, and says each removal strengthens Brand Registry's automated protections at no additional cost. Serialization through Transparency is a separate, optional, paid layer, with codes that brands buy and possible volume discounts. Amazon's position is that brands combining the removal tool, the automated protections and Transparency see the best results.

Why filing fewer reports is usually the right move

Follow the two thresholds to their conclusion and the standard advice inverts. If acceptance rate is the gate, then a brand reporting everything it can see is actively disqualifying itself from the tool that would have let it remove listings without asking. Volume isn't free. Every rejection is a withdrawal.

So the operating rule we'd give any brand running its own enforcement: file the reports you can evidence, and park the rest in a queue until you can. A seller you're certain about, with a test buy, lot codes and photographs, is worth more than nine you're guessing at. That's not a patience play, it's arithmetic on a percentage.

The queue matters too. The reports you park aren't dead, they're waiting on evidence, and the work that generates the evidence is the test-buy and lot-code tracing that tells you which distributor leaked the product in the first place. That's the half of this job that Amazon can't do for you, and it's the half that decides whether a removal holds.

What none of this fixes

Amazon doesn't police your distribution. A counterfeit claim filed against genuine product gets dismissed, correctly, and no amount of reporting discipline changes that. If the sellers on your listings bought real units from a real distributor who sold outside your terms, Report a Violation is the wrong instrument no matter how well you fill it in. The route there runs through the agreement that distributor signed, and if there isn't one, writing it is the first job.

Which means Submission History can tell you something uncomfortable. A brand with a healthy acceptance rate and a listing that keeps refilling doesn't have a reporting problem. It has a supply problem, and six months of clean filings is the evidence that proves it. We'd rather a brand learn that in month one than month nine, and it's part of why our Amazon brand management engagements start with tracing rather than filing.

The first thirty days, if you're starting from nothing

Four steps, in order, and none of them need a vendor.

1. Read your Submission History. Count accepted against total for the last six months. That's your rate. You now know something you couldn't know in June.
2. Fix the permissions. Whoever watches your listings should be able to file store policy reports. That no longer needs the Rights Owner role.
3. Stop filing speculatively. If you can't evidence it, queue it. Protect the percentage.
4. Start one test buy a week. Lot codes and packaging point at the distributor. Without that, you're reporting symptoms forever.

If your acceptance rate is already under 90%, the six-month window is the thing working in your favor: it's a rolling window, so disciplined filing from here rebuilds it. If you're over 90% and haven't applied, apply.

The part worth sitting with is that Amazon has been grading this all along and only started showing anyone the gradebook in July. Brands that treated reporting as admin have a number to explain. Brands that treated it as evidence have a tool to collect. If you'd rather not find out which one you are on your own, that's a call.