Getting Listed and Staying Listed

A marketplace listing is judged three separate times, and only the first of them happens before you press upload. A machine reads the file. A buyer opens the parcel and holds the piece against the photograph. Then your account’s own record decides whether the listing keeps being shown at all.

Sellers prepare for the first judge and get surprised by the other two. A blocked catalogue is loud, and usually it is cheap: nothing has shipped, and what it costs you is days. Those days turn expensive in one situation only — when they are the days an enrolment window is closing in. The complaint that lands four weeks later is quiet and expensive on any date, because by then the money has been counted, spent and reordered against.

This section covers all three, in the order a listing meets them. First, what has to be true before a catalogue is accepted. Then what has to be true when the buyer has the piece in her hand, and what has to stay true for months after that. Underneath every page of it sits one rule: the same fact about one piece, said the same way in four places.

Most of what the first judge reads is arithmetic about your file, and most of that can be settled this afternoon.

Platform behaviour below was read in the seller panels in August 2026. No approval time, commission or ranking rule is printed here, because each is set per platform and per category and rewritten without notice. Where one of them decides your answer, you get the name of the screen in your own panel that carries it.

Why was my jewellery listing rejected?

Four families cover almost every jewellery block, and they fail at different stages of the same check: the image is judged unfit, the image is judged not yours, the image carries more than the piece, or the photograph was never the problem. The reason string in the panel names the family and stops there.

Which string belongs to which family, and the order to work through them in, is set out in the guide to a catalogue that came back blocked. Start there if one is sitting blocked this week, and come back for the rest.

What those four families cannot tell you is that they are one gate out of three. A block is usually the cheapest thing that can happen to a listing, because it happens before a single parcel has moved.

Read the second row twice. The white ground, the square, the file size — everything a seller does for the first row has nothing at all to say about the second, and the second is where the money goes.

What do the image checks actually measure?

Six things, all of them arithmetic. The shape of the frame, how many pixels it holds, what the file weighs, how white the ground reads, and how much of the square the piece fills. Then one more: whether that file, or one close to it, has been seen on the platform before. A camera has no opinion about any of the six.

The resizer above reads five of the six off one upload: the square, the pixel count, the fill, the ground, and the size line for whichever of the three you are filing to. That is why nobody selling on all three has to hold the numbers in their head.

The sixth is the duplicate check, and no tool on this bench can run it. Only the platform can see what is already sitting on the platform.

Jewellery photographs fail on the ground more than on anything else, because a pale grey cloth or an unevenly lit sheet of paper looks white to you and reads grey to the check. The Background Whitener lifts the surface you actually shot on, and tells you plainly when a surface is past lifting.

Anything drawn onto the main image counts as more than the piece, and the list of what counts is longer than most sellers expect. The marked copy still has work to do on WhatsApp and in the folder you send resellers, made once with the Bulk Watermark Adder. Only the main seat has to stay bare.

Now the half no check reaches. All six measurements are about the file. None of them looks at the piece.

A photograph can be square, white, sharp, light and unmarked and still show somebody else’s necklace, or a sample that came in a different plating, or a jhumka carrying a row of pearls your stock does not have. Whose photograph it is, and whether the piece in it is the piece you post, is a question with its own guide, and it is the one that reaches the second gate.

Our own tools read pixels too, and it is worth saying plainly. The resizer can tell you the square is right. The whitener can tell you the ground reached white. Neither can tell you the piece in the frame is the piece in the box, and nothing on this bench ever will. That check is you, with the piece on the table beside the screen.

What stops a listing when the photographs are fine?

The other half of a listing is text and numbers. The category the piece is filed under, the attribute fields that category then demands, the title and the bullets, and the commercial fields: price, MRP, stock count, handling time.

Category is the field everything else hangs off. It sets which attributes you are asked for, which filters a buyer can reach you through, and which listings yours is read against on price. It is also the costliest edit later on, because moving a piece can mean refilling every field and going through review again.

Underneath the whole section sits the rule this pillar is really about. Your title, your attribute fields, your photographs and the piece in the parcel are four statements about one object, and all four have to say the same thing. The platform believes the fields. The buyer believes the photograph. Only one of the four can be weighed, and when they disagree, the piece on your table is what everybody ends up arguing about.

Which of the four you correct is settled by the same rule. Three of them sit on a screen and cost nothing to change. The fourth left your bench in a parcel and cannot be edited at all, so the listing moves to meet the piece every time. Make that move before the next order goes out. After a complaint, the same edit arrives too late to prevent anything.

In jewellery that rule breaks on the metal more often than on anything else. Brass, an alloy, silver — whatever the piece is underneath has to read the same in the title, in the base-metal field, in the bullets and on the tag in the box. Say it in all four places in one sitting, or you will be saying it in three of them for a year.

The commercial fields make promises in your name, and two of them get set once and never looked at again. The handling time you declare sets the clock your orders are timed against, so a figure typed in a quiet January is still running in a wedding week, and an event week can hold you to a shorter one. The stock count is the other: a listing showing stock you no longer hold ends in a cancellation, and cancellations are what the third judge counts.

Then a decision nobody warns a new seller they are making: whether six colours of one jhumka are one listing or six.

One listing with variants keeps a design’s history in a single place: its ratings, its position, whatever the platform has learnt about it. It also lets a buyer change colour without leaving the page. Six separate listings give each colour its own title, its own keywords and its own photographs, which earns its keep where the colours genuinely sell to different people. The price of six is six sets of frames, and reusing one photograph across them is how a seller gets their own catalogue flagged as a duplicate.

Decide it per design and write the decision beside the stock code, because changing it afterwards means rebuilding the listing and giving up whatever it had earned.

Less of a listing carries across three marketplaces than sellers expect, and most find out which half the slow way. Your own work travels: the stock code, the photographs, the words you wrote, the variant decision. The panel-side half stays where it is, and it is the half that eats an afternoon — each platform’s own category tree, the names it gives the fields, the size cap it holds files to, the rate card your price has to survive. Build the piece once, file it three times, and keep one sheet saying which code you used where.

One field on the row belongs to somebody else. The HSN code decides how the sale is taxed; your accountant answers it, and a professional signs the return this page never sees. A wrong code stays quiet until the month it becomes expensive.

Why did an approved listing stop selling?

Three different things look identical from where you are sitting: the listing has been taken out of view, the listing is visible and competing against prices you never enrolled at, or the listing is visible and buyers are choosing something else.

Only the first is a platform decision, and only your own panel can confirm it. Hunting for your piece on your own phone proves nothing, because results move by buyer, by pincode and by day, and a listing you cannot find may be perfectly live. The status field against the catalogue in the seller panel is the authority on it.

Being pulled down weeks after approval is the expensive version. It runs on complaints and returns, and a resubmission has nothing to answer there. What helps was decided months earlier: your own frames of every design, a note of which listing carries which face, and a record of what actually left your table.

The record behind that decision is made of ordinary weeks: how many orders you cancelled, how many pieces came back, how many buyers said the piece was something other than what the listing showed, and how often you dispatched inside the clock. Every one of those lines sits in your seller panel where you can read it long before it is used against you, and a quiet month is the month to go and read them.

The second cause catches sellers who did nothing wrong. Event pages are filtered to the listings that enrolled, so a catalogue that missed the window trades all week against prices it was never offered. That window shut weeks before the festival did. Where the dates are announced, and what accepting an event price commits you to afterwards, is set out in the platform’s own calendar.

The third cause is the least dramatic and much the most common. The listing is shown, and the buyer picks the one beside it. That is a photograph, a price and a title question, and it is the only one of the three you can work on this afternoon.

One warning about editing a live listing. Changing the main image, the title or the category usually sends it back through review, and it returns when it returns. Batch those edits into a single pass, and keep them out of any week you are depending on.

What do I fix first, and which guide covers each step?

Work through one live listing, not the whole catalogue. The order below is the order the three judges meet it in.

1. Open the catalogue’s status in your seller panel and read what the platform says about it. Which of the three states you are in decides everything after this.
2. Correct the fields before you touch a photograph. They cost nothing to change, and they are the family most often mistaken for an image fault.
3. Then the file, once, in one pass: ground, square, fill, and the size checked last.
4. Put the piece on the table beside the screen and hold it against every image on the listing. Count the stones, read the drop, look at the plating and the clasp. Anything that differs is a return waiting for a slow month.
5. Settle the structure, one listing with variants or several, and write the decision beside the stock code.
6. Put the next enrolment window in the order book on the day you read this. Both dates arrive together, in the seller panel and the seller email, and that notice is the only thing that carries them.

Each of those steps has a guide under this pillar, linked above at the point the question comes up: the blocked catalogue at steps one and two, where a photograph came from at step four, and the event calendar at step six. Read them in that order and you are reading them in the order a listing meets them.

Start tonight with step one and step four, on your best-selling design. The status screen takes a minute. The comparison takes ten, and it is the check no machine on either side of this page will ever run for you.