Amazon wants to kill duplicate ASINs
Finally Amazon has decided to confront one of its biggest messes on Marketplace: the epidemic of duplicate ASINs. It's gotten progressively worse ever since sellers were given the ability to create detail pages (and automatically generate a new ASIN) a couple of years ago.According to this announcement, Amazon is going to start merging ASINs when the same title is being sold under more than one ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number).
Supposedly the ASIN with the highest sales ranking and most merchants will be retained, and other listings will be migrated over. No word on whether this is going to be an automated process or whether humans will be taking care of this. Hopefully the cure won't be worse than the disease.
Here's the entire announcement:
In order to provide Amazon customers with a better discovery and shopping experience, duplicate ASINs for the same books will be merged beginning on November 13, 2007. This will mean that sellers will not have to list on multiple single detail pages that refer to the same product.ASINs will be merged when a duplicate ASIN is detected. This will result in all merchant product data, image data, offers and seller listings for one ASIN (the “merged” ASIN) being transferred over to a second ASIN (the “retained” ASIN). The first ASIN will no longer be viewable on the Amazon.com website. We will make a concerted effort to retain the ASIN that has a higher sales ranking and more merchants using it.
If a listing in an inventory loader feed refers to the first ASIN after the merge, the listing will be assigned to the second or retained ASIN. A warning will be displayed in the processing report and the new ASIN will be identified. You should verify that the new ASIN correctly identifies the product you are selling and use the new ASIN in subsequent uploads. You will not have to make any other change to your feeds.
In rare instances, you may believe that an incorrect merge has occurred. If you believe an incorrect merge has occurred, contact Seller Support and include the original ASIN and the new ASIN in your correspondence.
Labels: Amazon Marketplace
posted by Steve Weber at 11/13/2007
4 Comments:
My 2 Worries
1) Depending on how the merge is actually done, we could end up with more materially different claims. Will they merging a 1942 Hardcover with a 1970 Hardcover? etc.
2) This sounds pretty major to do during a holiday season. Is this going to make our sales wonky for a few days? Or even a week?
I agree with the above user.Also
Notice what Amazon states
"We will make a concerted effort to retain the ASIN that has a higher sales ranking and more merchants using it."
I'm thrilled they're finally addressing this problem. My books are mostly out of print, and it's ridiculous to find a listing with seven or eight or even more listings that are obviously for the same book, same edition.
Of course there will be problems, but I hope they are minimal and that we sellers can deal with them appropriately as they come up.
But I anticipate they will help my sales, at least to a small degree. When there are five listings for the same book, my listing will hve a better chance of being seen by buyers interested in the title when they are merged.
Sales rankings should be easier to interpret when there is only one listing, as well, instead of having four listings with rankings of 1.5 million or greater.
I do hope there will be a procedure in place for sellers to contribute to the listings' accuracy, as many of those listings are missing important product details.
As for the issue of different editions, many of the duplicate "editions" are really just later printings, thus I've 10 to 15 listings for the same book, with a separate listing for printings from 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, etc.
If the subsequent printing is indeed a new edition, it warrants a new listing, but much of the time, the only difference appears to be the printing date.
Honestly, this seems like a bit of a maintenance nightmare for us. We have a catalog of almost 120,000 items (only about half of that are in stock at any particular time), and it sounds like there's no programatic way to sort them out. How long are they going to report the duplicate records on file for? A year? It's going to be a maintenance nightmare for us at that point.
I'm also concerned about keeping the highest sales rank. Wouldn't they add the sales ranks together anyways? What if the item that actually has the ISBN that's on the back of the book is merged with something that has a higher sales rank? Hopefully they will *not* keep the ASIN that has the highest sales rank, right?
Ryan
UsedIsBetter
Ryan
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