Every guide on selling stock vectors says the same five things.
Make good art. Use the right keywords. Upload consistently. Pick a niche. Be patient.
None of it is wrong, and none of it tells you why your file actually got rejected. So I stopped reading blogs and read the source instead: the platform's own contributor documentation. Not summaries. The actual rulebook.
Fifty eight official documents later, here is what was different from what the blogs said.
The rejection reasons are specific, and they are listed
Blogs talk about rejections in vague terms: "quality issues", "not up to standard". The official docs list the actual reasons, one by one, with examples. Technical quality. Copyright. Trademarks. Recognisable people. Duplicate content. The list is short and the categories are concrete.
Once you read the list, rejection stops feeling random. You can check your own file against each item before you upload, instead of guessing after.
"Duplicate content" has a definition that surprised me
I was generating icon sets as a grid of tiles on one sheet, then uploading both the full sheet and each tile separately. I assumed more files meant more exposure.
The official docs call that out as a rejection reason: multiple versions of the same content. Same design submitted twice in different arrangements counts as duplicate. My own estimate from watching my rejections was that this specific mistake was killing most of those uploads.
The fix is boring. Upload the sheet, not the tiles. Pick one form and commit.
The format rules are hard numbers, not vibes
Blogs say "make sure your vectors are high resolution". The docs say the artboard minimum is a specific megapixel figure, the background must be transparent, and the file has to open with editable paths, not a flattened image in a vector wrapper.
There is a real trap here. It is entirely possible to produce a file that has an EPS extension and is still just a picture of a vector. No paths, no editability. It passes your eye and fails review. You have to validate the file's actual contents, not its extension.
A platform detail that saved me thirty files
One platform strips underscores out of filenames. Not rejects them. Silently rewrites them. If your naming scheme depends on underscores and you never check, you find out only when something downstream breaks.
I found that line in their official contributor docs. It saved a batch of thirty files from a rejection I would never have predicted.
The point
The internet's advice on stock content is mostly second hand. The rules are published, in detail, by the platforms themselves, for free. They are less fun to read than a blog post, and they are the difference between guessing and knowing.
If you are going to sell into a platform's marketplace, read that platform's rulebook. All of it. Then build your checks around it.
I compiled the parts that matter, the specific rejection reasons, the format limits, and the compliance entries, into the Compliance and Metadata Kit:
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