Does anyone know of a tool to monitor settings changes on Amazon Seller Central?
For example, my shipping settings have been changed to “Amazon Managed” transit times. Amazon seems to think it takes me weeks to get products to customers instead of days.
Having the Brazil marketplace added was another example.
There are a lot of settings in Seller Central…
There SHOULD NOT have to be a tool for this, but I agree with you @liquid_rc, Amazon has a long history of changing the settings we all set.
As one not willing to spend time or additional funds trying to chase the Amazon whack-o-mole change game …
Something like Brazil there is nothing you could do after it has been added.
See this thread Emergency Help - Account Closed By Seller Support When asking about options on Marketplace closure as an example of even thinking of doing something.
This has been a sore spot for many of sellers. Automated Handle Time and Automated Shipping have been played with over and over. Only thing we know of to do is to check these two items once a week (or immediately if notified by Amazon) and change them back.
Most other changes like changes to listing attributes and categories are not as visible and may not happen to everyone at the same time. Amazon tends to make changes to a few sellers as a test and, when Amazon thinks they got it right, Amazon pushes it out to everyone (or everyone within a category).
Bottom line is Amazon is always making changes and the best way we have found to stay on top of them is reading the forums where the issues pop up and by monitoring our listings as they show to the consumer and as how the Manage Inventory Edit page (and category specific excel templates) show changes. Seller Central pages themselves are a whack-o-mole game. Solve one new feature issue problem and wait for the next one and repeat.
This sounds like a trivial task, but please make me a list of the URLs of the specific pages you want to monitor, and please describe your tolerance for adding a “user” with limited rights/access to do these daily scrapes of your internal account settings.
Now, the “false positive” rate is going to be high, as a “compare” is not going to be smart enough to understand context, so it will alert to a “change” even though the webpage itself changed, and none of your settings did. We can’t make it much smarter, as Amazon moves entire sets of things to new/different pages, forcing you to change how you navigate to a specific setting, and this may not actually change any setting values.
Reading, comprehending, and monitoring only the settings would be a VERY tough job, as one would have to walk the entire seller central menu, grab every page, parse it, and “learn” what values are associated with what “labels”. And even that won’t really work, as Amazon could change the label for a critical value… its inherently a mess.
But yeah - compare a daily snapshot to alert to ANY change? I can do that.
Oh wow @packetfire how generous to help a fellow Seller like that!
Didn’t even think of this, GENUS!
