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.
If you use the same SKU to create a new listing (new-listing flat file, not update-listing flat file), they just overwrite the old listing with new info. I’ve accidentally done it a few times. The new listing comes up with images from the old listing, so that’s what cues me.
Evidently that is not a solution as I just came across another ghost FBM offer (for an FBA listing that predates my most recent upload) that should not exist. In fact, this is one I have even “fixed” individually in the past.
So something is regenerating these ghost offers after they have been zeroed out multiple times.
Do you use third party integrations with your Amazon account of any kind? Inventory or sales management, advertising, an FBA reconciliation service, anything?
There are two entries on my Manage Your Apps page, ASellerTool Inc., which has had a Status of Disabled for many years, and Veeqo, which has had a Status of Disabled for six months. No other third parties have ever been associated with the account.
When I add a new offer, I do it individually using Add a Product, and I enter a unique SKU based on the inventory tier, date, and time, e.g., t3-202605311912.
I note that no other seller has described this problem. So I hypothesize that you must be doing something that most other sellers do not.
I, for example, do not have hyphens in my SKUs. Otherwise, your SKUs look like mine.
That hyphen may be the problem. It shouldn’t be, but if an Amabot stopped reading the SKU when it hits a hyphen, it might be able to produce the kind of problem that you have.
Let’s assume that Amazon hires some rather lazy programmers. ( I don’t think that is a stretch)
Let’s further assume that those programmers use some AI to help write their programs. ( Possible, indeed likely, I think )
The end result could be an Amabot of the particular ineptitude described above.
So, I suggest removing the hyphen, and making your SKU purely numbers and letters. It should not work, but I fear that it might.
, Veeqo allows duplicate skus, and creates additional duplicate product IDs each time an eBay listing is closed and relisted, even if it is the same sku.