Maximizing your Amazon listing potential with uniQin's QSmartSell
Maximizing your Amazon listing potential with uniQin's QSmartSell
Avoiding TOS violations and increasing sales with comprehensive listing analysis and optimization
Amazon is taking steps to stop bad actors from manipulating listings to gain an unfair advantage. A few of our sellers are facing this and we were doing deep dives to help them with this. We learned the following.
Improper Listings
Adding false child variations to existing listings, or removing parent listings, which can lead to the "orphaning" of child listings
These actions by bad actors can lead to confusion and suspension of legitimate sellers, who may accidentally violate Amazon's listing policies
Amazon is currently focused on two main areas of variation abuse:
Improper child variations
Improper UPC codes
To be compliant, sellers should ensure that their variations are identical to the parent product with only minor variations such as size or color.
UPC codes should be valid and match the brand name or owner on the GS1 database.
Child Variants
Amazon sees them as the result of bad behavior and prefers that variations be under a parent.
Too many variations can create confusion for buyers and violate TOS.
One of my clients deleted the parent listing and created new parents, which turned out to be orphan products and caused the client to be suspended for review manipulation.
Review aggregation is where a seller creates a variation relationship between products to manipulate reviews and boost a product's star rating.
My clients were changing their own listings and were trying to fix a problem but did wrong by doing this without Amazon's help and not having identical titles for all parent and children listings.
The only difference allowed in titles is the variation.
It used to be possible to fix your own listings, but now it's best to work with the catalog team to ensure proper resolution and avoid false positives.
Some hygiene to keep
Amazon TOS does not allow different types, lengths, and specifications as variations.
For example, colors and other feature flavors can be variation under “color”
Products should be identical and only differ in flavor or whatever variation type
Amazon does not allow patterns as an additional variation and cannot be interchanged with color
Bundles need to be exactly the same for each variation and cannot have additional items as features
Multipacks and Bundles
Multipack is a package with multiples of the same item.
A multipack must have the manufacturer’s UPC code for the multipack
The items must be contained in one retail/manufacturer’s package, not a bunch of solo items wrapped in shrink wrap or a poly bag
A bundle is different items put together.
For a bundle, you still need a unique UPC code for that bundle or a GTIN exemption
If the manufacturer sells a bag of mixed white IKEA towels, then that is its own listing and you have to sell their bundle and not create your own.
If you want to bundle different types of towels together, you can create that bundle if it is not offered by the manufacturer but you need a UPC code and it needs to be clear that this is your bundle and not the manufacturer’s.
Let’s help you
We offer Listing Audits to help sellers with Variations, multipacks and bundles which can be confusing
Our Product QSmartSell from UniQin.ai can help sellers with audits
We can help you identify and clean up listing mistakes before Amazon makes you do it the hard way
Our service is open to all sellers, if you are concerned about the state of your listings or have questions about setting up your listings, contact us.