Demystifying Your Amazon Product Catalogue

Your Amazon product catalog is a mess, and you are not alone. Many of our partners face the same issue. It leads to mistrust in data and, even worse, wrong decision-making. In this post, we aim to demystify the product catalog to help you understand and resolve these issues. So let's get started.

There is no such thing as "the one catalogue"

You might have hundreds, if not thousands, of products (SKUs). For the sake of simplicity, we will pretend it is only 20 going forward.?You are probably are aware of all of your SKUs. Some of them might be relevant for eCommerce, some of them not.?

Here you can see a visual representation of your entire assortment:

A subset of your brand's products is listed on Amazon. As shown in the visualization, most SKUs have an ASIN, but some do not. ASINs are assigned when a product is first listed. Other retailers can also create the initial listing and generate ASINs for your products.

Here you can see that "Your ASINs" are a subset of "Your Products":

It's important to distinguish between "Your Catalogue," "Your Brand's ASINs," and "Your Products."

In your catalogue, you'll find all products listed in your vendor central. These are typically the products you and your team are aware of, but you might not know about the missing ASINs.

This often leads to confusion when you receive data from third parties or Amazon containing information for those other ASINs belonging to your brand, but you can't find them in your catalogue.

Solution: Contact your vendor manager or submit a support ticket with a list of these ASINs to inform Amazon that these products belong to your brand registered with them. Amazon usually resolves these cases within 48 hours.

Here you can see that "Your Vendor Catalogue" contains a sub-set of "Your ASINs":

You'll also encounter situations where your catalogue includes products that don't belong to your brand.

This can happen for various reasons, such as products being wrongly listed under your brand by someone else.

Solution: Contact your vendor central manager or open a support ticket to inform Amazon about this and have them remove these products from your catalogue. This process typically takes Amazon one week to resolve.

Here you can see that "Your Vendor Catalogue" can contain products that do not belong to your brand:

Diving into advertising

Your marketing team can advertise any product, as advertising is not restricted to your vendor catalogue. This means you might be advertising products that are not in your vendor catalogue but do belong to your brand. Even when you advertise products from your catalogue, attribution can still attribute sales to other products of your brand that you might not be aware of, as they are in "Your ASINs" but not in "Your Vendor Catalogue." We often see that approximately 10%-20% of the catalogue sold through advertising is unknown.

This leads to issues when you sell products that you don't sell directly to Amazon. Brands often compare advertising sales to total sales to calculate media contribution (Ordered Revenue / Media Sales) / Ordered Revenue, which can make the media contribution appear very high due to missing retail data.

Another detail to consider is missing manufacturer data, which contributes to data mismatches and wrongful analysis. You can read more on this topic in this post: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/whats-wrong-your-amazon-data-how-fix-benjamin-weyrich-s1sue/

Here you can see that you advertise products that belong to your brand but are not part of your vendor catalogue:

The final boss: virtual bundles

Virtual bundles technically exist within your vendor catalogue, but from a data perspective, the ASIN does not exist for retail data.

In advertising, performance data like clicks, sales, and costs are reported on the virtual bundle.

However, in retail data, which includes everything reported to you in the vendor central or retail analytics, all data is reported on the ASINs that make up the virtual bundle.

This means if you advertise the virtual bundle, you'll see one sold unit and the revenue on the virtual bundle. In retail data, such as ordered units, you'll find one ordered unit on both ASINs that make up the virtual bundle. This complicates the comparison between advertising and retail data.

Here you can see how the advertising and retail data needs to be mapped:

So, what is the solution?

First, it's important to understand this behavior which you hopefully have done after reading this post.

Second, use Catapult, as we handle all this complexity by properly mapping all products and catalogues to each other, giving you full transparency and avoiding reporting errors and costly decision mistakes.

Get a free demo for Catapult: https://www.catapult-analytics.com/