Amazon Changing Listing Info Without Approval, Not Letting Me Fix It. AI Gone Wild?
by Exotic
6 days ago
I tried searching for similar issues, but the forum search didn’t pull anything. Closest thing was a thread about splitting variations off the parent ASIN, which I have ALSO had happen, may be a separate issue, but perhaps is related. I noticed this awhile ago, but since it seemed to only mess up a limited number of listings and then stop I haven’t had a chance to try to fix it until now.
First, I am the original lister of all my products, and nobody else has ever tried to hijack any of them or list under them alongside me. At least I’ve never seen it, so I don’t believe this is another seller messing up listing details.
I am guessing Amazon has run some experiment where they let loose an AI to “improve” listing information without the sellers approval… But it of course made everything worse.
A long time back I had some listing titles slightly messed with, but it seemed like uploading an update with original titles fixed it. Also the changes weren’t drastically bad, they just cluttered the titles a bit with useless info. The new changes are awful and outright break the functionality of the listings.
First off, you’ve butchered important and key information by removing them from the product titles. Second, you’ve butchered the Bullet Points by removing some information, adding in other information, and generally changing the wording to things that are inappropriate and sound bad. You changed “Material” to “Composition” which is just outright incorrect wording. You changed “Color” to “Hue.” Hue is a great word… When used in the right context. But it sounds like a foreigner wrote it being used in the context for my listings and is inappropriate. All the changes are bad, and poorly worded.
You also removed a ton of relevant information from the main description text, and changed the wording to sound like badly worded flowery fluff that says nothing useful about the products. I had actual relevant and useful information someone shopping for my products would like to know. It’s mostly all gone now. Way to go guys!
All of this is unacceptable and makes the listing worse. But the two most egregious issues are thus:
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You changed the data in the “size” field, which is one of the fields used to make the variant grid/group things. Hence it created multiple random, and not even the same, additional options in variations. Ones that are completely meaningless and useless and only serve to make it impossible to correctly select the options one is looking for.
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More insulting if less practically important… You seem to have randomly scraped search engine results, and then incorrectly added a totally unrelated company name to the product title! We use Shopify for our backend. They came out with a feature called “Collective” awhile ago which lets other Shopify stores list your products to sell on their website. They then pop into your Shopify store and you fulfill them directly to the customer. You changed the name of some of our listings to “Butchered but technically correct product name by Completely Unrelated Company Name” implying this random company is the maker of our product! The only place this data could have come from was a search engine result pulling up their listing for our product on their website. This is like listing “Cordless Power Drill By Walmart” on a Dewalt drill or something. It’s ridiculous.
It would all be absurd and infuriating that you did this with ZERO approval, but if I could simply fix this with a spreadsheet upload it wouldn’t be a big deal. The problem is I have tried on multiple listings to do an update, and it never changes this incorrect info. It’s like it’s locked to your bad info.
I cannot let these butchered listings stay the way they are. I need to have my proper variations sorted how they should be, and proper bullet points, and proper listing titles, and proper descriptions. So how do I override these changes???
I also have variations that have broken off from their proper parent listings. This may be due to you changing so many key fields that they were not allowed to be under the same parent anymore? Every listing that is broken off from its parent ALSO has its info changed, so it does SEEM related. Some your system altered enough to break the parent/child relationship by changing KEY data, others it only messed up enough to create new and bad variant drop downs of?
In the listing I found about fixing JUST that issue, the Amazon employee suggested deleting the child SKU, then reuploading with the correct parent SKU info. Will that work here? Or will it retain the BAD information you entered for various data points/fields based on the UPC?
Is there a special something I can change to simply allow spreadsheet uploads to actually trigger a change without all this manual nonsense? Like if I try to alter the fields data by a character vs replacing it with exactly what it had before, will that trigger it overriding your AI changes? Thus far I’ve tried to upload exactly what my original data was.
This is all very frustrating. Something like this should NEVER happen in the first place. How do you not realize that allowing a half baked AI to change crucial details without ANY seller input is an awful idea? I am 1000% fine with the AI suggested enhancement feature. Someday I might even get a useful suggestion. However that is user initiated, and user approved. But you simply cannot let it run wild changing things without notification or approval. If I wasn’t manually looking at my listings I might have never noticed you messed up so many of my listings. I have no idea how many in total are broken. I “ONLY” have a few thousand SKUs to check… But somebody with more listings, this would be an unimaginable nightmare.
The truth is you should have the geniuses that did this look at the logs and see what listings were altered, and automatically revert them all back to their previous state. I guarantee on the whole you only made listing quality worse. But if you’re not going to do that then you really need to allow users to fix this with a simple update. Locking your bad edits in is beyond the pale.
Thanks, and I look forward to getting a solution.
