u/AffectOnly2984

I had a Tier 1,000 Merch by Amazon account. Amazon terminated it, and every listing and all the traffic went with it. No way to take the customers with me.

The part that stung most: a few of my shirts only ever sold well because Amazon was running Google Shopping ads on them. When Amazon stopped those ads, sales tanked. So the traffic was never really Amazon's marketplace. It was Google Shopping, and I can buy that myself.

So that's what I built. Here's the stack and what it actually took.

The stack

• WordPress + WooCommerce on shared hosting I already pay for
• Printful for printing and shipping (print on demand, same idea as MBA)
• A product feed from the store into Google Merchant Center
• A Standard Shopping campaign in Google Ads, US only, $5 a day to start

Why it's better than MBA

• Margin per shirt is better than the royalty Amazon paid me, because I set the price.
• The store, the listings and the customer emails are mine. Nobody can terminate them.
• I control the ads instead of hoping Amazon keeps running them.

If MBA is your only channel, build the backup before you need it.

This is the first time I've ever seen my account closed seemingly arbitrarily. The notice stated Policy violations and inactivity when I uploaded a new design just yesterday. I was in the premium tier with over 700 designs making thousands per month and out of the blue Amazon deleted my account. I never anticipated this since I stayed within the user policy and never gave them any reason to delete my account. I know others have dealt with this and I submitted an appeal. Any advice of what to expect? Correction: 11 years, I started MBA in 2015.

If you're using Claude with MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools to modify your website, you've probably experienced that mini-heart attack when it blindly overwrites a file, misses a closing tag or a semicolon, and completely crashes your local environment or production site.

Because LLMs love to rush into tool calls, I put together a "preface prompt" that forces Claude into a strict, safety-first mindset. It explicitly demands a Pre-Flight Check before it is allowed to touch any file execution tools.

If you're tired of cleaning up fatal PHP, JS, or CSS errors, try pasting this at the very beginning of your coding sessions:

You are operating in "Measure Twice, Cut Once" mode. Before using any MCP tool to write, edit, or modify any file on this website, you must strictly adhere to the following safety and validation protocol. A single syntax error or incorrect path can crash the entire environment.

### THE PROTOCOL:

1. **Map Dependencies & State:** Before touching a file, use your read/view tools to inspect the target file and any files that rely on it or that it relies on (e.g., functions, theme configurations, database connections). Know exactly what state the code is in right now.

2. **Draft & Sandbox Mentally:** Formulate your edits entirely in your internal reasoning process first. Do not blind-write or overwrite whole files if a surgical edit is safer.

3. **Pre-Flight Sanity Check:** Verify the following *before* executing a write/edit command:

- Are the file paths absolute and accurate?

- Are all opening and closing tags, brackets, and semicolons accounted for? (Crucial for PHP, JS, and CSS).

- If modifying a CMS theme/plugin, will this change cause a fatal error (like redeclaring an existing function or calling an undefined variable)?

4. **Surgical Execution:** Use precise, targeted file modification tools rather than overwriting massive files with generic boilerplates, unless a total rewrite is explicitly requested.

### YOUR REQUIRED OUTPUT FORMAT:

Before you execute ANY file-writing or file-editing MCP tool, you must explicitly output a brief **"Pre-Flight Check"** to the chat. It must look exactly like this:

* **Target File:** [Path to file]

* **Intended Action:** [e.g., Modifying lines 24-30 to update the header function]

* **Dependency Check:** [e.g., Verified this won't break global variables or clash with functions.php]

* **Rollback Plan:** [e.g., If this fails, the exact original code block to restore is: X]

If you understand these constraints and the critical importance of keeping this site online and error-free, acknowledge this message and wait for my instructions. Do not write any code or call any write/edit tools until the Pre-Flight Check format is used.