We have recently encountered multiple instances of Amazon creating and displaying an active FBM offer that mirrors an FBA listing we created.
This has happened with both active and inactive FBA listings. These ghost FBM listings are not visible in Manage Inventory, Active Listings Reports, or anywhere else that I have found in Seller Central. They have been discovered only by seeing dual offers on the product page or receiving an order which we must cancel (and which Amazon refuses to exclude from our cancellation rate). They appear on Amazon’s end in their “system” as a single SKU with both fulfillment channels.
We do not use any bulk tools, file feeds, or third-party software for inventory, nor do we enter a quantity when creating FBA listings. All SKUs are created individually using Add a Product.
I now know how to fix the issue once an offending SKU has been identified (uploading a price and quantity flat file with the only data being the SKU and fulfillment-channel=amazon), but I have been round and round with various levels of “support” and it seems they do not have the capability to identify the root cause.
We have far too many SKUs to scroll through offers on product pages on any regular basis.
Does anyone have any insight on how to identify currently affected SKUs and/or to prevent this from happening in the future?
What’s the SKU of the FBM order? Is it something generic, something indicating Amazon creation? Searching for the SKU, not the ASIN, in your catalog returns no results?
The SKU of the FBM order is identical to the SKU of the FBA listing, and it’s a SKU that we entered. Searching for the SKU returns only one entry, the FBA listing.
Then the answer is to upload a flat file with all the SKUs that should be FBA only, whether or not you know if there is a ghost listing, and make them fulfillment-channel=amazon. They should be that anyway, right?
Good idea, thank you. That should conclusively address current exposure for 1,000+ existing listings.
We create ~500 new listings per month, so that would be an obnoxious solution moving forward, especially since no one knows how or when these ghost listings are generated, so it would essentially require a daily upload.
But for better and worse, we are in the process of transitioning away from FBA, so presumably the issue will become moot (at least for us) by the end of the year.
Here’s hoping the upload of a price/quantity flat file with all FBA SKUs doesn’t result in some new unforeseen issue…
How many of these ghost orders have you seen? If they are rare, you probably don’t have too many of these listings, which means they aren’t being generated very quickly. A daily upload would be overkill, and you would be fine with a weekly or monthly upload just to keep things clean.