All Amazon for India and US

What’s Covered!

Expert Advice: How to troubleshoot suppressed listings on Amazon? - Tips by Pritesh Mittal (COO & Co-founder, Growisto)

Tip of the week: How did a $100 million ARR global brand turn Amazon into a profitable channel within a quarter?

Case Study: How do brands leverage Growisto’s AI-based tool, Sellos, for online protection on Amazon?

Tool of the Week: Brand Protection on Amazon with VantageBP

Expert Advice

How to troubleshoot suppressed listings on Amazon?

Suppressed listings are quite common amongst Amazon sellers, especially for those who are relatively new and facing operational challenges. For a seller, this is bad news as the listing loses visibility and cannot be browsed by customers until the issues are resolved. This, in turn, results in the loss of Best Seller/Amazon Choice tags and sales, plus a negative shopping experience for users.

Monitoring and fixing suppressed listings becomes even more important for fast-moving/repeat purchase categories such as grocery and personal care, where competition is fierce, and compliance standards are more stringent.

So, why does Amazon suppress a listing?

1. Outright promotions and/or claims in listings: Amazon suspends listings for unsupported claims like top-rated, best, cheapest, or cross-promoting personal websites, or claiming to be ‘organic’ or ‘pesticide-free’ without proper certification.

2. Price gouging: If Amazon’s algorithm scans and identifies a price disparity between the pricing on Amazon and another website, it can blacklist your product for gouging prices. A client of ours from the essential oil category faced suppression after increasing their prices by just $2 and it was revoked only after the pricing was on par with that on other websites.

3. Providing inaccurate or misleading information: Your listing can get suppressed if Amazon believes you are trying to sell an expired product or a used product as new. Sellers operating under restricted categories must get ahead of the compliance standards by providing accurate information about the shelf life, ingredients, etc. beforehand.

4. Suspiciously high review rate or indulging in malpractice: If Amazon determines that your reviews are rapidly increasing via one user or a certain IP address, your listing will get deactivated. Amazon will suppress your listing if it receives safety-related complaints and believes that you are attempting to sell counterfeit products or that you are not the rightful owner of the product.

5. Utilizing more/less than the permitted length for titles or bullet points: The character length varies across categories, and so it becomes crucial for brands to check and adhere to category mandates.

6. Products listed with an incorrect or missing main image: Amazon can suppress a listing if the product images are not as per Amazon’s guidelines or if the listing does not contain a primary image. Make sure you don’t clutter the primary image with any elements (flags, icons, etc.) apart from the main product. In addition to this, check category-specific guidelines for images. For instance, the back of the pack must be added for edible products. 

7. Missing key information in product descriptions: Barring a few exceptions, such as books, product pages must have a detailed description adhering to the standards set by Amazon. For instance, in the grocery category, including allergen disclaimers along with a detailed list of ingredients would be important to avoid any negative reviews and subsequent suppression.

How to fix a suppressed listing?

Amazon does not always notify you regarding a listing suppression. For this reason, it is important to keep a tab on suppressed listings that appear in the ‘Manage Inventory Section’ of Seller Central. For price-specific suspensions, the ‘Price Alert’ tab would help you with the violations. In case of multiple suppressions, you can use the ‘Listing Quality and Suppressed Listing Report’ and tackle all of them together. 

How to prevent listing suppression?

Below are a few tips to keep in mind to ensure smooth operations:

1. Taking precautionary measures during the pre-launch stage and adhere to category-specific standards

2. Stay updated on the statutory guidelines and ensure compliance in your listings

3. Set up quality control measures during inventory planning, fulfillment (if self-fulfilled) and customer complaint resolution

4. Conduct periodic checks on pricing to avoid disparity and getting flagged by Amazon

At Growisto, we undertake a streamlined audit of all of your listings with the latest guidelines and policies as mandated by Amazon. Our team of consultants proactively tracks and enforces new guideline changes to ensure our clients do not face suspensions on any of their listings.

Tip of the week

How did a $100 million ARR global brand turn Amazon into a profitable channel within a quarter?

A $100 million ARR global brand selling their products across multiple countries on Amazon was facing losses.

Here's how data segmentation helped them took some hard decisions to turn marketplaces into a profitable channel for the business within a quarter.

The problem?

The brand was looking at the data at an overall level. The hypothesis was that ad campaigns are not efficient.

Therefore a lot of focus was on optimizing the campaigns. Identifying negative keywords, removing low-performing keyword, pausing nonperforming campaigns.

But they were still facing losses.

This led to wastage of a lot of money!

What was the solution?

Segmentation of data to find out the real root cause!

We helped the brand in creating the dashboards to understand the data better:

As a result, some products were discontinued in some specific markets. In those markets, demand for those products was not much. Even after a lot of discounting, they were not picking up

With this level of detailing it was clear, what all products were making profits and what all were making losses. This led to the focus on products and markets that were working well. Campaigns were scaled in these markets and for these products. The brand saw an immediate drop of 50% in topline, but the margins turned positive. With positive margins, they were able to invest more in ads in the right areas and scale back their business to original levels within a span of 6 months

Summary:

Initially, the problem was not in ad campaigns. It was with wrong assumption. If the initial hypothesis is wrong, then your actions are bound to be wrong. Data never lies. Take its help to find the right problem to solve.

Case Study

How do brands leverage Growisto’s AI-based tool, Sellos, for online protection on Amazon?

A proprietary AI-based powerful tool to identify counterfeit products and unauthorized sellers on Amazon, along with extensive MAP monitoring and violation reporting.

Our Objective:

• Identify counterfeit products sold on Amazon using the brand name

• Identify unauthorized sellers selling branded products on Amazon

• Conduct extensive Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) monitoring and violation tracking/reporting

Our Strategy:

• Crawl all the sellers of the brand’s product and mark them as authorized or unauthorized

• Give a severity score to the sellers based on seller rating, # of brands, counterfeit products sold, etc.

• Crawl for products in the brands category, seller, related search term & mark as original or counterfeit

• Give a severity score based on sellers selling, brand name usage in the listing, etc

• Hourly tracking of MAP violations and alerting brand owners with timestamp and screenshot

Results:

• 130+ Counterfeit products identified and action taken

• 900+ Unauthorized sellers identified and action taken

• 3000+ Unofficial/Duplicate listings identified

Tool of the Week

Brand Protection on Amazon with VantageBP

VantageBP offers end-to-end brand protection on Amazon from counterfeit detection to unauthorized seller tracking and MAP enforcement.

1. Counterfeit Detection: Smart data analysis and advanced pattern recognition weeds out suspect product listings and resellers for review.

2. Intellectual Property Enforcement: File expedited enforcement actions against trademarks, copyright images, and patent infringements using automation.

3. MAP Monitoring and Enforcement: Identity and enforce price violations automatically within our easy-to-use dashboard.

4. Database of 100,000+ Identified Sellers: Gain rich reseller information such as company name, company address, known suppliers, company contacts, and more.

5. Physical Unauthorized Seller Notices: Send automated physical notices through mail to addresses that have been identified through our routine investigations.

6. Online Investigations: Leverage a combination of machine learning and industry techniques to identify unknown resellers.

7. Fake Website Removals: Suspend payment processing and terminate websites through various processes depending on website host.

8. Unauthorized Licensee Enforcement: Identify and remove unlicensed resellers from 3P marketplaces helping to ensure authenticity of your brand.