Who is responsible for Amazon listings?
Glenn is one of Tamebay’s regular commenters and has been contributing to the site for many years. Today he notes that Amazon ask sellers to update incomplete listings, but are happily selling the same product against the same ASIN with missing product information.
Any Amazon seller will very aware that Amazon monitor just about everything and invite feedback on every aspect of selling, which I find encouraging because it appears that Amazon actually listen to their 3rd party sellers.
Customer Metrics are very important to Amazon and any seller seeking to win the coveted ‘Blue Buy Box’ will be very aware that the status of their Account Health, Customer Feedback and response time to customer questions.
Sellers will also be aware of the numerous emails Amazon sends encouraging sellers to use FBA, open a webstore, sell internationally or sell in new categories.
Amazon also advise sellers of any listing deficit such as a missing image, product description or brand and any omissions are shown on a seller’s home page under the heading “Amazon Selling Coach”.
My “Amazon Selling Coach” currently shows one recently listed ‘Inactivate’ product requiring a description. In this context ‘Inactivate’ relates to a FBA submission not yet received at a fulfillment center, and can also relate to a previously sold product with nil stock.
The bulk of my FBA products are clothing items which are sent to the Amazon fulfillment centre at Rugeley. The offending product is a listed within the Home and Garden category which goes to Hemel Hempstead or some other fulfillment center and in the absence of sufficient stock to justify a submission will remain with me for the immediate future.
Now the easy option is to simply add a description and the offending product will no longer be flagged as deficit, which I intend doing. The point of my long winded story however is that Amazon sell this product and I listed against an existing ASIN, which may or may not have been created by Amazon, but which they were happy to list against without a product description.
Considering that at this current time I don’t actually have any of this product for sale, but Amazon does perhaps Amazon should consider just who is responsible for listing content.
Dom says
12:08 pm on 08/01/2013
I have spent ages correcting errors on listing and then some Muppet comes along and changes it. My gripe is with other sellers who change the product name to add stuff to the name like ‘makes a great gift’, ‘BNIB’ and ‘as good as new’ or changes the manufacturer to their seller name. Also Amazon seems to do nothing about sellers who upload product images with text on such as URLs.
Stuart says
12:19 pm on 08/01/2013
I do think that there is a real issue with listing on Amazon sometimes and in some categories.
One of our brands imports and sells it’s own range of products, they are not something we just buy from another company to re-sell.
However we have a real issue with other sellers coming along and selling against our listing when the product is different from our own. There maybe minor differences but still different all the same. An example would be a product we sell which is 30cm in height, another seller comes along lists his against ours and theirs in 35cm in height and a slightly different design, we then receive a load of unhappy customers who are complaining about the size difference when ordering from us, but we have done nothing wrong!
It’s just very frustrating!
fusion says
12:51 pm on January 8th, 2013
Had a similar situation to this before. Got threatened by Amazon with suspension for complaining.
I can understand it is had for Amazon to monitor this, but its annoying.
Clarky says
2:06 pm on 08/01/2013
This is one area where Amazon are SHOCKING with regards to merchants.
They allow changes to be made to long standing inventory and don’t even tell you that some git has put “2x” or “pack of 2″ in the title or rebranded your product to their branding etc, it wastes a lot of time and money, speaking to someone at Amazon is usually ok but not with these, just like seller performance, the catalog team are only available by email and always ask for a link to a supplier page… how many suppliers use ungated websites with a full catalog? This of course is if they answer the actual question you ask as opposed to cut and paste answer to something irrelevant.
Dom says
5:12 pm on January 8th, 2013
Yes we have come a cropper with established ASINs with another seller adding ‘buy one get one free’ to the product name and in another case adding ‘Free P&P’ to the name. They didn’t even have the buy box.
Sam says
2:22 pm on 08/01/2013
Wrong or incomplete information on Amazon listings is a massive problem, and a huge effort to correct – especially if you have several thousand listings. The worst offenders tend to be people listing multi-packs and using the EAN for a single item, or stating that the item ‘includes …*insert anything here*’