3 Harsh Realities of Amazon Listing Overrides

As a business owner, you know you need to keep track of every event that could potentially threaten the health of your Amazon business.

So, you’ve been doing well on Amazon. You have products listed, all doing pretty well. But, more and more you’ve been having problems with abnormal listing overrides. You had your main image removed from your listing, your product description edited, and, of course, you’ve lost your buy box due to all of that.

Let’s break it down. Why listing overrides happens?

When a detail page for one of your products displays information you did not contribute, it is because another contributor has detail page control for that product as well. This contributor can be either Amazon or another seller. Detail page control determines which title, description, image, and other product information is displayed.

For determining which contributor’s product information is displayed, Amazon’s automated system takes various factors into account, for example, a seller’s sales volume, refund rate, buyer feedback, and A-to-z Guarantee claims. This automated process is regularly repeated to update product information automatically.

So here come 2 issues:

• Amazon randomly changes product detail page and sellers don’t notice that for a while.
• Since Amazon allows multiple sellers to sell their products on a single ASIN, it’s easy and legal for a competitor to replace any of your beautifully crafted listing details with shoddy images, poor titles, sub-standard descriptions or worse, incorrect product details.

We’ve seen scenarios when competitors after their inventory got empty, were changing 1 item listing to “pack of 5”. Other sellers who were selling the same ASIN, of course, didn’t notice that and got a bunch of negative consequences, because they were still sending only 1 product, instead of 5 as it was stated.

Or here is another use case from one of our sellers. Amazon had tried to split a few of his products and combine into one listing 3 others that were similar. Ouch! That hurts…

Here at Bindwise we’re aware of the issue. That’s why we’ve created a tool for you to address it. We provide email based alerts, so you can let the software do the watching and informing. You’ll get notified by email when any part of the listing changes. Stay tuned!