Guide To Automating Marketplace Content Moderation
Manual content moderation works fine until you're processing hundreds or thousands of products. Review queues that once cleared daily stretch to weeks. Error rates climb during seasonal spikes when accuracy matters most. Your team burns out checking endless listings against policies that keep changing. Growth turns what seemed manageable into an operational crisis.
Garmentory hit this wall hard. A thousand new listings every weekday created seven-day backlogs, and holiday season pushed that to 14,000 items. Four contractors working eight-hour days, trained on a 24-page SOP, still produced a 24% error rate.
They solved it with Logic, a plain-English automation platform that turns written rules into live moderation. Queues cleared in real time, errors dropped to 2%, and most of those contractor positions got eliminated. Here's exactly how they did it.
Why Should You Automate Marketplace Content Moderation?
Automating marketplace content moderation unlocks catalog growth, faster time-to-market, and better unit economics.
Garmentory's results show what's possible when you move from manual review to plain-English automation. Before automating, they processed roughly 1,000 products per day with a small team of contractors. Products under $50 couldn't be listed because moderation costs exceeded margins. Review times stretched up to seven days, and a 24% error rate meant customers often saw mismatched sizes, incorrect categories, or policy violations. The team was bottlenecked by repetitive work that was exhausting to scale.
After deploying Logic, throughput jumped to over 5,000 products processed in real time. Review time dropped from seven days to 48 seconds and the error rate fell from 24% to negligible.. This allowed them to lower their product price floor from $50 to $15, which unlocked thousands of new listings and directly contributed to their best financial quarter ever. Almost all contractor positions were eliminated. The system has now processed over 250,000 products.
While these outcomes are specific to Garmentory, any other marketplace that implements automated content moderation will see comparable improvements like:
Scale your catalog without scaling headcount
Make previously unprofitable products viable by lowering moderation costs
Handle seasonal volume spikes instantly instead of creating week-long backlogs
Free your team from repetitive decisions so they can focus on edge cases that need human judgment
Reduce review times from days to seconds
Cut error rates while processing higher volumes
How to Execute Plain-English Content Moderation
Garmentory’s process followed these steps: Document, Test, Connect, Launch, Iterate. And the best part, as you’ll see, is that each step took minutes to hours, not days to weeks.
1. Document Your Moderation Rules in Plain English
Garmentory started with a 24-page Standard Operating Procedure. By lunch, the merchandising team had copied those pages into Logic, trimmed the legal padding, and saved it as a single document. That document became the source of truth.
Plain English keeps every sentence readable: "Reject listings that contain 'replica' or 'fake' in the title." No regular expressions, no JSON schemas. When a policy auditor asks why a listing vanished, anyone on your team can point to the exact sentence, not some cryptic code reference.
Example Logic snippet:
Reject listing when title contains "replica" or "fake"
Flag listing for manual review when price < 0.3 * average_category_price
2. Test Rules Before Production Launch
Before going live, open Logic's Test tab and either use it to auto-generate test cases, or drop in your own real examples: a sneaker description in four languages, a handbag photo covered in brand logos, a vintage item priced suspiciously low that might trigger fraud alerts. The dashboard shows pass/fail decisions in milliseconds and highlights what triggered each one.You can also use the web UI preview in Logic to manually test your automation against various scenarios you enter.
Regardless of how you choose to do it, common problems surface quickly during testing. Teams often forget edge categories like vintage, refurbished, or digital goods that behave differently. Rarely used attributes like material composition can get skipped, creating gaps where bad actors slip through. Multi-language slang is another challenge. Terms that seem innocent in English can carry different meanings elsewhere, and English-only tests will miss these entirely.
Build a test dataset with known good listings, known violators, and edge cases. For example, you might start with 50 good listings, 50 violators, and 10 edge cases, though you should test more or less depending on your catalog's complexity. Run your new rules against yesterday's manual outcomes and look at every mismatch. Each difference reveals either a gap in your automation or a previous human mistake. By the time you hit Deploy, you'll know it works.
3. Connect Logic to E-commerce Infrastructure
Logic exposes a REST endpoint when you configure an HTTP trigger during document publishing. Garmentory called that endpoint from Shopify's product-create webhook. If your platform doesn't have native webhooks, you can route through alternative integration tools.
You need three things: a product feed with taxonomy tags, a webhook that fires on create/update events, and a destination for the verdict (approve, reject, or queue for review).
During integration, keep things separate. Business users own the Logic document completely, while engineers handle the technical connections exclusively. This separation means you won't need engineering involvement for every future rule change.
Once the flow runs (listing in, verdict out), you can expand into moderating images by sending URLs for analysis, validating pricing against category averages, or flagging missing required attributes.
4. Launch With Gradual Rollout and Monitoring
Day one, roll out to 10% of your traffic. Logic's live dashboard shows executions per minute, pass rates, and the top five rejection reasons. Set alert thresholds so spikes in "counterfeit" flags will ping your policy lead through Slack. A sudden drop in total calls? Your ops team gets an email before orders stall.
Watch these early metrics: median decision latency (keep it under a second), human-override rate (target under 5% after the first week), and error trend versus your old manual baseline.
Train your moderation team on the new flow. Simple mantra: "Check dashboard first, override if needed, comment why." Within a few days, backlogs disappear and reviewers can spend their mornings on the stubborn 5% instead of drowning in the obvious 95%.
5. Iterate and Expand Automation Coverage
Policies change, so your document should change too. Because rules live in plain English, a policy manager can open the file, add a new sentence ("Reject listings advertising 'cash only' deals"), and hit save. No sprint planning, no hotfix deploy.
Garmentory now edits rules every week and has moved beyond text. Image checks scan for stolen brand logos. A size-chart generator reads descriptions and fills missing measurements. Enrichment rules tag sustainable materials for shoppers who filter by ethics. Each new addition follows the same loop: document, test, connect, launch, iterate.
Over time, the document evolves into a living map of your marketplace's risk appetite. Update lines as threats emerge, and Logic will redeploy within seconds. You're keeping pace with your marketplace, not waiting on your codebase.
Launch Automated Content Moderation Today
Automated content moderation isn't about replacing your team's judgment. It's about letting them focus that judgment where it actually matters. When you automate the obvious decisions like counterfeits, policy violations, and formatting issues, your moderators can spend their time on the nuanced edge cases that need human expertise.
That's how Garmentory transformed their marketplace moderation from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. "Before, we had to cut out products under $50 as moderation costs outweighed sales," says Sunil Gowda, CEO of Garmentory. "With Logic, we dropped the floor to $15 and expanded our catalog. Logic directly contributed to our best financial quarter ever. We've processed over 250,000 products through the system."
If you've read this far, your marketplace probably faces the same challenges Garmentory solved: volume that outpaces manual review, policies that change faster than you can retrain teams, and costs that make certain products unviable. Logic's plain-English automation turns your written rules into production moderation that scales instantly.
Ready to automate content moderation? Sign up for Logic and deploy your first moderation rule today.