Last week we discussed the issues and annoyances of suppressed listings. Though, if you are selling through Amazon FBA there is another label you are probably familiar with. That being, “stranded inventory.” This has more to do with keeping track of your company’s inventory, making sure it is accounted for, and how it’s performing. FBA inventory issues can include stranded listings and unfulfillable listings. They both can cost you extra fees but are caused and dealt with differently. 

Unfulfillable inventory can have you racking up bills after each mid-month inventory cleanup until the issues are addressed and fixed. Stranded inventory can result in charges on your inventory such as monthly storage fees, overage fees, and long-term storage fees until the issues with the listing are resolved. The fix to stranded inventory is making your listing active again then relisting it.

Relisting your products is an imperative thing to remember, offers are not reactivated by default so sellers must relist their units themselves. Amazon should notify you if and when your inventory becomes stranded, it is up to you to take action within 30 days of the notification. A recent change made on June 30, 2020, is that Amazon no longer just classifies stranded inventory as unsellable after 30 days, it will actually remove the inventory automatically if no actions are taken. Do not totally rely on those Amazon notifications, you should always be on top of your inventory and check for issues. Now we’ve discussed what the problem is and how it is caused, but not the solution.

Here is how you can repair stranded inventory:

• In Seller Central you can manage and fix individual stranded listings under the Inventory tab, you can also download a stranded inventory report to get a full overview of all affected listings.
• When going over individual stranded inventory you can edit the listing or remove the products altogether (Whether the product is sent back to you or disposed of you must pay removal order fees.)

After fixing whatever errors were affecting your listings you now have to relist them. Before you do you should first determine why what caused it to become inactive. Since this isn’t always clear cut you can go through these 5 points on this to-do list one-by-one:

If you don’t want to do all of that manually there are automatic relisting options. Sellers can use the “edit automatic action settings” option while fixing stranded inventory. This tool lets you instruct Amazon to relist your products automatically. If there is an issue with your listing you can choose to auto-relist 1-30 days after the issue with the listing is fixed.

Do you or your company often find yourself going over stranded inventory while neglecting other tasks? How badly does this issue affect your brand or company? Leave a comment and let us know about your Amazon experiences. As for us at Avalanche Industries, we have a team that looks over and keeps track of all of our client’s inventory. We take on the hassle that comes with selling on Amazon and let our clients focus on other important tasks. If your company or brand is struggling to keep track of these things you can always contact us here to see how we can help out.

Suppressed listings are a problem everyone selling on Amazon has faced at one time or another. It is Amazon deeming your listing unsatisfactory for not providing all of the information they deem necessary. They then suppress it from all search results and it is hidden from potential buyers until the issue is addressed. Let’s briefly look at the history of Amazon platform development to understand how this request came into being. Amazon requested minimum information to have a live listing on the platform. This became popular because the second wave of sellers didn’t even need to provide that. It was claimed to be the easiest platform to sell on, all the information needed to sell a product that was already present on the platform was price, condition, and if you wanted Amazon to fulfill the order or the amount of inventory you had for sale. This attracted a lot of sellers who would come to sell but wouldn’t put a lot of effort into improving the listing’s information. With the pressure of the competition mounting on other sellers, the original listing creators would abandon the platform and all of the original listing information would begin to disappear. As e-commerce started booming and more competition grew for similar products, search engines needed to collect more information to make the customer’s searches more accurate.

Amazon needed to come up with a system that would help gather listing information if an original creator deleted their content. This is how suppressed listings were created. They would hide listings lacking necessary information and prioritize listings that met the information standards. This would penalize lazy sellers and reward ones who actually put work into their listings. Though this sounds like a good idea, there are a few issues with this system.

Amazon has a way of selecting which contributions they use for a listing. The selection usually goes to whoever made the listing first unless there is an Amazon retail contribution, then brand owner contribution, then everyone else based on the date they added it to their catalog. Amazon does not mix-and-match contributions from different sellers, so only the information that is from the selected seller is shown. This means:

• Any contributions you made, no matter how detailed, will not be shown, if you are not the one selected.
• If the selected seller didn’t provide this information and the listing is suppressed, your information will still not show.
• To change this you will likely need to create cases with Amazon that could drag on for months while trying to convince them to correct the issue.
• Now with Brand Registry, Amazon will usually ask you to contact the brand owner to supply the missing information, though they will rarely bother with fulfilling this request.

Amazon has also created various tools to help sellers to comply easily. There is a suppressed products page sellers can use to insert the missing information on listings. You can sort by category of suppression and then drop the information needed in place. Although even there, after a recent page revamp there is no filter to figure out which items are in stock and which are not. This may present a problem for big sellers who have massive catalogs as they cannot prioritize which items to work on first.

We suggest trying this:

• Under “manage inventory” you can filter the list of all items by inactive and organize descending by the quantity.
• There is a listing quality and suppressed listings report that can be found in Seller Central under inventory, then inventory reports. Pair that list with an active listings report or manage FBA inventory (found in Amazon fulfillment reports) for the quantity and you would be able to prioritize which listings to work on.

Avalanche Industries uses the best techniques to tackle the hurdle of suppressed listings. We have the workforce to look over any listing issues and address them so our brand partner’s products are visible to any potential buyers. If you as a brand or Amazon seller are trying to sell on Amazon’s platform, but keep hitting this roadblock and don’t have the time or resources to fix it, you can contact us here where we can discuss how we can help make your products active again.

Have you had a significant problem with listing suppression? Leave us a comment or feedback about your experiences here, we always look forward to hearing from fellow brands and sellers.

As a seller on Amazon, you should know how difficult it can be when you first start selling or when you start selling a new set of products attached to an unknown brand. What is especially difficult is getting those first few reviews to roll in, which can aid you greatly in gaining trust with other buyers and lead to more sales. There are things you can do to remedy this problem, such as advertising through Amazon. Though this may bring clicks and views, it does not guarantee sales. People can click on your product, but if they are scared off by a listing with no third-party input or by a brand they have never heard of before this will just create ad spending without any sale. Are there any things that can be done to help get your new products off the ground In this difficult review-less phase? Yes actually there are, we have a few tips to offer to start gaining some momentum with your new listings.

To start you can include info on your listing that builds trust in your brand. Give buyers piece-of-mind by giving some information on your company. Some good examples are:

• Has the brand been around for over 10 years? Include that in the description or A+ Content.
• Do your products have official certifications that enhance the product, such as good recommendations from the Better Business Bureau or a no animal testing certification from Leaping Bunny. Include their logos in an image on your listing and include this info in the bullet points.
• Inject some humor and reliability in your bullet point and description writing. Be informative about your products and who you are, but don’t do it in the way that all brands do by just blandly listing stats.

These details can help build trust for people viewing your products even if you don’t have any reviews. This information will add character to your listing and brand. You want the consumer to know what they’re getting and to be comfortable about the transaction. Get creative, fun, and informative with your details.

If you find yourself with little to no reviews, but you have sold this brand or product outside of Amazon there is a possible way that you can already have reviews for customers to see. If you have previously sold in other places or in brick and mortar locations you may have gotten some customer testimonials, yelp reviews, or positive reviews from magazines or news organizations. Always include things that will legitimize your product to prospective buyers, even if you already have reviews. It will build better trust and prestige with your brand and will result in more sales.

Time to get visual, did you put 110% in your images? If not, this can be one of the most detrimental things that you could do. Humans are visual creatures and will make a lot of their first impressions and opinions on your product just by looking at what images you have laid out on the table for them. Stats show that 67% of customers value the quality of a product’s image over the bullets, description, and even reviews. You want views of multiple angles of your product, while also visually relaying information about the product with these images. Graphics on features, size, and benefits will show the customer why your product is great instead of them having to read long descriptions. Go above and beyond and include a short informative video showing how products function. Fewer than 5% of vendors include videos and you’ll find there is a lot of different competitors that don’t take advantage of these strategies, so this is a great way to stand out from the rest. 

We employ all of these methods on our partner’s products and listings so we can achieve the best results in sales. We could help out your brand as well.

Third-party sellers and brands alike have had to adapt to a lot of changes in the past year. Amazon has thrown a new curveball to Amazon sellers when it comes to Amazon Prime and Prime eligibility. They announced these changes to Seller Fulfillment Prime (SFP) in August 2020, but they just went into effect on February 1st. SFP is a fulfillment method that allows professional Amazon sellers to display the Prime badge on orders fulfilled via their own warehouse or third-party logistics providers. To be eligible for this you have to have been a Professional Amazon seller for at least 90 days and must meet some requirements for a trial period of 30 days (sometimes it can be less). These include:

These sellers have the option to show Prime offers and get the attention of countless prime members. Having that badge can often gain more sales for you and shorter delivery times for the customer. However, less than 16% of all SFP orders have been meeting Prime’s two-day delivery guarantee, according to Amazon, mainly because many sellers do not operate on weekends. This is where the new requirements come in:

These new requirements can create issues for sellers. If your warehouse doesn’t already operate on weekends, you’ll have to change that. You will also have to negotiate with your carrier partners like UPS, USPS, or FedEx to do pickups on either Saturdays or Sundays.

Meeting the one-day delivery promises has also created issues. This requirement states that the one-day delivery option must be available to at least 30% of your page viewers for standard size items (5% for oversize). Two-day delivery options must be shown to 55% of viewers for standard items (30% for oversize). They have loosened these requirements due to COVID-19, one-day delivery is down to 5% instead of 30% until June 1st, 2021. This can create issues for all sellers for different reasons. Say you are on the East Coast, but most of your orders come from West Coast areas? How could you fulfill that order with the one-day delivery promise? Regional Prime offers, which are based on zip code, limit your buying audience and you may not reach your page view goals. If you only have one warehouse or very few, meeting that one-day promise sounds impossible or at least quite expensive. If none of your warehouses are near major populated areas with a lot of orders such as California, Texas, New York, Illinois, or Florida this can also make this one-day delivery promise hard to keep.

The reason Amazon may be doing this is to push more sellers toward FBA. Losing Prime eligibility can often cost you the Buy Box on product listings. Losing that, your offer is less likely to get noticed, which will lead to far fewer sales. Plus, there are over 126 million customers engaged in Amazon’s Prime loyalty program, making them eligible to order items with Prime benefits. This stat is growing more as Prime benefits are being expanded upon for the customer. Being without Prime offers with that large of a customer base is going to cost you as well. So, do you have a plan for your company to adapt to these new standards? Are you experiencing issues with trying to meet the requirements which are costing sales? 

If you are trying to sell products on Amazon, but are having a tough time keeping up, it may be better to partner with a third-party seller that is set up to meet these new challenges. Here at Avalanche, we’ve quickly adapted to Amazon’s new way of doing things and we are prepared to meet any future challenges as well. One of our goals for our partners is to take on the difficult tasks that come with selling on Amazon. If you have any questions about how we can help you with selling on Amazon you can contact us here on our site. Also, leave a comment with your experience with these new requirements, we love to hear other seller’s feedback.