Parent-Child listings make me want to break things

Selling on Amazon Listings and Variations
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So here’s the deal - we bought a company, and they had a huge listing with multiple colors and sizes. 35 variations.

We trimmed out a bunch of this, and am now down to 12 sizes and one color. Rather than try to run two accounts, we transferred the trademark, surrendered brand registry, made listings on our new account, and just left the existing parent in place to tie it all together. Then we downgraded put the other account on vacation and let it leave the professional world.

Now, we’re looking to expand this out a bit, update the brand storefront, and make it all look nice. In all this, I also wanted to get all these inactive ASINS off of my parent.

So I prepped a flat file V2, checked it over for errors, and then… Deleted the existing parent. I orphaned all of my sizes.

After this, I uploaded my flat file and was crushed by all kinds of errors - category, title, variation themes… It was incredible.

My best guess is that the old listing was grandfathered into an old configuration. Color is no longer a variation theme in my category, and neither is size.

Title updates weren’t allowed but I just made it match the existing listings and just dealt with it.

So now I’m in a state where some of my listings have their parent, and some of them are solo.

Then, because I cleaned it up, we lost hundreds of feedbacks because they were size-specific.

So now my boss wants me to fix it.

But I’m pretty sure once things are deleted, my best bet is to delete everything and start over from the top - but are there any other options?

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Can you manually add the orphaned ASIN’s into the parent from the Edit Listing screen? I’ve had to do that on occasion.

Is it maybe due to the items being added wrong from the start? When we joined Amazon, someone already added some of our products and it was a hassle to correct them all.

I’m not the most knowledgeable, but I somehow always make variations work. Just my two thoughts.

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What is the category?

What Theme are you using?

Likely you will need to edit the deleted children and add them back in. It can be done.

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The category in the spreadsheet is Insulation.

It’s like Rough Plumbing > Insulation.

The original category was somehow Outdoor Living - but when you went to the listing it was still listed as insulation.

So I’m up to 10/13 variations of pouch on one listing, and 4/4 for the tapes on a separate one.

Just three that want to fail on me. Should I just delete them and add them back in full later?

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I still need a higher Category to determine anything. A usual the Product Type Search doesn’t narrow it enough.

image

Color would not apply here, but I would expect Size to be.

I’m never for deleting unless all else fails, and you have a complete backup of all item details, along with the SKU, for recreation.

I would try:

  • Set quantity to ‘0’ (Although this page has changed to mention deleting, it use to be more about just setting the quantity)
  • “Update” on the remaining ASINs
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Yeah it’s that fourth one - the rough plumbing > pipes, fittings > pipe insulation

I have backups of everything - content, images, all of it.

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Huh … I find this a bit odd (no Size)

numberofitems
shape
material-stylename
stylename-unitcount
stylename-material
voltage
NumberOfItems
Material
stylename-model-numberofitems-partnumber
numberofitems-stylename
Style
model
itemweight
capacity-itemshape-numberofitems-partnumber

Since you have a Relationship already, what are you using?

Also, have you gotten all into the same category & Brand Name?

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Well, what I did was use Style name, and put in sizes.

Then, when I completed the list, Amazon’s bots converted it to size automatically - which is now messing up adding any new variations.

I mean, it doesn’t shock me. I don’t think size was intentionally omitted because it’s still telling me to just use that variation theme.

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I might create another Relationship for just the orphans to see if they get converted. Then delete the parent and try adding them to the original new parent.

Make sense?

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Got it - I will give that a try.

It’s weird, the one size isn’t giving me any conflicts, it just won’t add to the listing.

I’ll try building a spreadsheet with just those.

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