Keeping the wrong products off the wrong channels

Almost every catalogue contains things that must not go everywhere. A brand with distribution terms that forbid marketplace sales. Bladed items with channel-specific rules. Aerosols that cannot ship by air. Clearance lines you do not want representing you.

The stakes are asymmetric and worth being clear about: listing something you should not can cost you a brand relationship or an account suspension. Failing to list something costs you some sales this week. Those are not comparable, so the tooling should be biased accordingly.

Rules, not lists

The obvious approach is a list of excluded products. It works on the day you write it and decays immediately, because every product added afterwards is missing from it — and the products most likely to be added are new lines from the brand you were trying to exclude.

Rules are written against the properties instead:

• By brand — nothing from this vendor reaches this channel.
• By product type — whatever the marketplace restricts.
• By tag — anything you already tag in your own catalogue.

A rule written against a brand covers the brand’s next fifty products without anybody remembering to update it. That is the whole difference.

The options come from your data

A detail that sounds minor and is not: the brands, types and tags you choose from are read out of your actual catalogue rather than typed into a box.

A hand-typed rule can be spelled differently from the data — a trailing space, a different capitalisation, “Barbour” against “BARBOUR” — and a rule that matches nothing looks exactly like a rule that is working. You believe you are protected and you are not. Choosing from real values makes that failure impossible.

Exclusion is enforced at the push, not at the button

The rule is checked at the point every push has to pass through, not in the screen you clicked. That distinction is what makes it survive: a bulk list, a scheduled sync, a retry after an error and a manual push all go through the same gate, so none of them can be the one path that forgot.

Related protections you get anyway

Two other rules act in the same spirit, and both fail closed:

• Nothing is written to an account before it has been snapshotted. A blocked push queues the snapshot that unblocks it, so it resolves itself rather than becoming a support conversation.
• Marketplaces receive stock only by default. Content sync is something you switch on deliberately, per account.

What it cannot know

Qwikr does not know your distribution agreements, and marketplace restricted-product policies change without telling anyone. These rules enforce decisions you have made; they do not make them. Read your terms, then write the rule — and write it by brand or type rather than by product, so it still holds next quarter.