A product review TPTB never wanted to see the light of day

My 3-star review of a set of nut drivers was unacceptable to Amazon.com.

A little over a week ago, I submitted an Amazon.com review for the first time in, unless my memory fails me, years and years. The post-form-submission Review submitted – Thank you!” message advised me that processing the review could take several days and promised I’d get an email when the processing had been completed. And so I did. Today, I received an automated, no-reply-possible message from Amazon.com that said Hello, We couldn’t post your review because it doesn’t meet our community guidelines. Please edit and resubmit your review. Before you do, make sure it meets all of our guidelines.

They've got the text of the review as well as the attached image, but clicking 'edit' takes me to a blank form. — They’ve got the text of the review as well as the attached image, but clicking ‘edit’ takes me to a blank form.

Nothing jumped out at me during a quick perusal of said guidelines. Wondering whether Amazon might highlight what it considered to be the offending portion(s) of what I’d written, I clicked on Edit review and was taken to a completely blank review form (as shown above) for the product in question.

I don’t see any easy way to inquire as to the nature of the alleged community guidelines violation present in my submission or to appeal the verdict. Since Amazon is showing me an excerpt of my rejected review, I’d guess they’ve retained the full text and likely the image I uploaded. As it happens, I also kept the image I’d made for the review and took a screen capture of the review before hitting the submit button, so here they are:

Here's a screencap of the review I submitted, in its entirety. — Here’s a screencap of the review I submitted, in its entirety.

Here's the image I submitted along with the text of the review (watermark added for this post). — Here’s the image I submitted along with the text of the review (watermark added for this post).

One possibility that occurred to me was that Wiha had, in response to the request I made to one of their customer service representatives over email, already updated the product images for this set of nut drivers on Amazon.com and that one of the two points I raised had been rendered moot. But no, when I checked the product listing just now, the yellow-and-black images were still up.

As it stands, I don’t see any low-hassle way to pierce the veil of inscrutability of TPTB at Amazon and extract an explanation or get them to rectify what seems like an error on their part. This episode has given me a new perspective on the Amazon.com review system and the value of the reviews that do make it through processing. Oh well.