Amazon recently added false product information to one of my listings ASIN B0711HHWMF. I am the inventor, patent holder and only seller of this product on Amazon. They added “Power Source- Electric” to the listing without my consent or being notified. This product requires NO POWER of any kind to use it.
After multiple attempts to edit the listing by selecting the “Irrelevant attribute”, the false “Power Source” value information remained for weeks. I opened a seller support case (ID 16565010891) and was, at first, told that the Power Source attribute value would be changed to “None”, even though this value is not present in the drop down menu for this attribute. Obviously, the change never happened.
I reopened the case several days later and was simply told that the attribute or value cannot be removed saying “Please be informed that certain information has to provided mandatorily in Amazon.” and “Unfortunately we can’t do anything about it.” They also refused to escalate the case to the catalogue team after multiple requests.
How is it that Amazon can arbitrarily add false and misleading product information to a listing but they are unable to remove it?? A broken dysfunctional system???
The dysfunctional nature of Amazon has many fathers, but I’d assert that the root cause underlying situations such as you premise is founded mainly upon its heady embrace of the long-discredited “Silo Management Model of Business Administration” - which inevitably produces circumstances where the right hand has no idea of just how firmly the left foot has been planted up the posterior end.
Toss in Amazon’s warm embrace of ill-formed AI technologies (link, SAS horror story), along with the simple fact that the A9/A10 Algorithm is much more of a Sales-driving Engine than it is a properly-formatted Search Engine for the increasingly-convoluted Amazon Global Catalog, and you’ve got a recipé for disaster.
May I ask if you have tried overriding the obviously-inaccurate, Amabot-provisioned ‘electrically-powered’ attribute for your manually-powered Offer-Listing via the use of a properly-formatted flat-file template upload?
We second what @Dogtamer has suggested. Using the category specific excel template will often correct issues like this. Just know that it doesn’t always happen on the first try. Sometimes it is a matter of correcting one part (like title) first and then submitting again for another part. If you are not familiar with using the excel templates, there are several of us here that can help you through it.
A case in point, regarding the Silo Management Model of Bureaucratic Administration, is this NSFE post made earlier today (111424) by the FMT-CMT’s Dougal_Amazon here:
Amazon has it listed in the “Vacuum Sealer” category, which it clearly is not. Several other futile battles in the past with Amazon’s SS to correct this error went nowhere as the product does not suck the air out of a zipper bag and vacuum seal it when the tool is used to close the zipper. More misleading product information for customers, courtesy of Amazon. I just gave up on those cases.
I understand, but I would guess “power source” is required for that category. You will need to get the category corrected for the irrelevant data to get removed
Thanks for the Welcome @Dogtamer and @Lost_My_Marbles! I remember you guys from the OSFE. Glad I found this forum as well! I have zero experience with uploading excel flat-file templates and am somewhat hesitant to try anything too complicated. I do use excel regularly for my own uses though. Sometimes the most simple change on Amazon can lead to some completely unrelated yet very significant changes to other details in a listing. It can turn into a game a “whack-a-mole” very quickly.
I wish I could get it changed. I originally listed it in the Kitchen Gadgets, Specialty Tools & Gadgets category but Amazon decided it knew better than me (the inventor) as to what my product was and declared it a Vacuum Sealer several years ago. All attempts since then to have Amazon categorize it correctly went nowhere.
May I ask if you’ve attempted to utilize the “Self-Service Tool” for re-categorization found on the SHC (“Seller Help Content”) page “Change a product’s category or browse path” page @ https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/201950630 (link ‘broken’ for Discourse display, will redirect) for changing the Browse Tree Path?
Ever since said tool was originally deployed in the waning weeks of 2021’s Q1, many reports have surfaced of its actual efficacy being rather hit-or-miss - as you astutely allude upthread, Amazon demonstrablydoes tend to believe in the sheer infallibility of the A9/A10 Algorithm’s ability to drive sales, and given the long-demonstrated success of padding its coffers via that automated mechanism, it’s not particularly easy to mount a convincing argument to the contrary, Brand Integrity be damned - but were I to find myself in your position, I’d likely be inclined to determine, first, whether or not I could simply pull Amazon’s head outta its arse by using that tool, before wading into the somewhat-steep learning curve of wielding Flat-file Template/XML Feed uploads properly.
Thanks @Dogtamer. I’ll check out the link and give the “Self-Service Tool” for re-categorization a shot and see if I can get something to stick. I was able to get SS to fix the browse node for the listing on the Canada Marketplace a number of month’s ago, but the bots reverted it back to the wrong one within a few days. I’ll let you know how things turn out after I dive into this potential fix.
In the meantime, I have edited the listing through the Manage Inventory page by selecting the “hand powered” drop-down value for the “Power Source” attribute. At least this might help avoid any customer confusion. Again, we’ll see if it sticks.
As a side note, the Australian marketplace has it categorized as a “Zipper” though this browse path:
Arts & Crafts, Sewing & Fabric, Notions, Fasteners, Zippers.
SMH
An ever-increasingly vast abundance of the available evidence strongly suggests that the ongoing PT [“Product Types and Attributes”] Initiative has found itself at loggerheads with the earlier-deployed Listing Quality, Search Conformity, & Brand Integrity Initiatives, inter alia, right from the get-go - and that now, more than five years after it first was launched (ca. Q3 2019), Amazon is still struggling, in Sisyphean fashion, with the unintended consequences inherent in its warm embrace of the Silo Management Model of Bureaucratic Administration…
Further evidence suggests that Amazon, unsatisfied with that result, rather than clarifying the muddy waters of its Global Catalog’s Browse Tree infrastructure, chose to subsequently compound the problem farther-still with the Attribute Harmonization Initiative AND the Size Normalization Initiative.
Toss in to that unpalatable mix Amazon’s heedless embrace of its GEI (“Global Expansion Initiative”), Brand Integrity be damned, and you’ve yet again got a recipé for looming disaster.
Amazon is and has been removing Product Types and Attributes for sometime. When they remove a Product Type, they send a bot through looking at the items that are in it and reassign them to another Product Type. Unfortunately, the reassignment appears to be back end and doesn’t show up in the Manage Inventory Edit pages. An email comes to you saying the item is going to be reassigned on X date. When that date comes, the fees associated with the new Product Type are charged and the product page looses the Product Type reference but the Manage Inventory Edit page remains with the old Product Type.
We have 13 items that bot changed Product Type on 11/4/2024 (the original Product Type is now gone in the category hierarchy). It has now been 10 days and the Manage Inventory Edit page remains as the old Product Type and does not give out an error if we change something else and save. We are going to give it a little longer (might even wait until after the 1st of the year) to see what if anything happens before we play the category specific excel template game.
We would take one aspect and see if we could get all of the marketplaces that you use to be change to the same thing. This might keep the bot from looking at one marketplace and using that info to change another marketplace.
