How to efficiently manage Amazon product variations and merge them compliantly

1. Understanding Amazon product variations

What are product variations?

Product variations refer to products of the same type, but with differences in color, size, packaging, etc. These products are displayed as a single product on Amazon, and customers can find products of different specifications on the same page to facilitate comparison and selection.

Why use product variations?

Using product variations provides the following benefits:

• Simplified product listings: Instead of creating separate product listings for each variation, you can merge them together to reduce confusion.
• Improve shopping experience: Customers can easily compare products of different specifications on the same page, making their shopping more convenient and enjoyable.

2. Background and significance of product variant merging

Background

As product lines continue to expand, sellers may face a large number of variations, making management cumbersome and prone to errors. This may include product variations with different colors, sizes or packaging.

The meaning of merging

Combining product variants can help sellers better organize products, improve management efficiency, reduce confusion and errors, and provide customers with a better shopping experience. This benefits both sellers and customers.

3. Basic steps for Amazon variant merging

To merge product variations, you can follow these steps:

1. Log in to Amazon Seller Center: Log in to Amazon Seller Center using your seller account.
2. Enter the “Inventory” option: Select the “Inventory” option on the Seller Center homepage to enter the inventory management page.
3. Select Variations: On the inventory management page, select Variations to list all product variations.
4. Select variations to merge: Use the checkboxes to select the variations you want to merge, making sure they belong to the same main product.
5. Click ‘Merge variations’: Click the ‘Merge variations’ option on the page to begin the process of merging variations.
6. Confirm variant relationships: On the page where you merged variants, confirm the relationship between the variants to make sure they have the same properties and information.
7. Submit a merge request: After confirming that it is correct, submit the merge request and wait for review and processing by the Amazon platform.

4. Benefits of variant merging to sellers

Combining product variations has many benefits for sellers, including:

• Simplify product management: Merging variants can greatly simplify product management, reduce confusion, and reduce the probability of errors.
• Improving operational efficiency: By reducing cumbersome variant management steps, sellers can handle inventory, price and other operations more quickly, improving operational efficiency.
• Reducing labor costs: By reducing errors and simplifying management processes, sellers can reduce labor costs, allowing them to focus more on business development and innovation.
• Optimize customer experience: Merging variants helps optimize product pages, making it easier for customers to browse and select products of different specifications, improving the shopping experience.

5. The Importance of Amazon Variant Compliance

What are Amazon variations?

Amazon variant, also known as parent-child relationship. It is a collection of items that are related to each other based on size, color, type, etc.

How to determine whether a product is suitable for creating variations?

Only products that meet the following six rules are suitable for creation as variants:

• Accurate product information
• The products are basically the same
• Share the same product name
• Category supports variant themes
• The only differences between products are the variant theme attributes
• There is no difference between the old and new versions of the product.

Five situations of variant violations

The following five situations occur in Amazon variants and may be determined to be non-compliant:

• The sub-categories are not basically the same products
• The variant theme is incorrectly named
• Incorporate some long-unsold ASINs into variants
• Product images look inconsistent
• Change the product details page, resulting in a product that is significantly different from the originally published product.

Methods to resolve variant violations

1. Identify the most likely reason for the split and reassemble the correct variant of the split child ASIN.
2. Based on the reasons given by Amazon, check whether other variants have similar problems and make modifications in advance.
3. The cause of the problem is determined based on the performance notification. If there is a misjudgment, a complaint will be made on the grounds of misjudgment; if there is indeed a variant violation, the violation will be corrected before making a complaint.
4. Check other variations in the store to see if similar issues exist and make changes in advance.
5. Write an effective Plan of Action (POA) for submission. Describe the specific violation, actions taken, and future resolutions.

6. Things to note when listing multi-variant products on Amazon

When creating parent-child variant product pages, you need to pay attention to the following common mistakes:

• Sellers create multiple auxiliary products, each with a certain number of buyer reviews, and then merge them with the main product into a parent-child variation model. This practice is a serious violation of the ASIN creation policy.
• The only divisible attributes specified in the variation are size and color. Therefore, when making parent-child variations, sellers can only divide child products according to size and color, and must maintain the consistency of the variation attributes and the main product.
• Incorrect variant merging may lead to the elimination of suspicious ASIN reviews, or even the ASIN being removed from the shelves and the seller’s account being blocked, because these all violate the ASIN creation policy.

7. Things to note when operating Amazon variants

Sellers need to pay attention to the following points during operation:

• Combine completely unrelated products together.
• Incorporate a well-selling variant into other products to drive sales.
• Tie zombie links and use the comments and word links in these links to merge them with the original Listing.
• Tie the new upgraded product to the variant group of the old product and comment on it.
• Directly replace the product information or pictures in the sub-ASIN with other products or products that need to be updated.
• Create multiple sub-bodies and merge them after Review.

8. Summary

By combining product variations, sellers can manage their products more efficiently and provide a better shopping experience, which helps increase sales and customer satisfaction. Therefore, knowing how to properly use and combine product variations is one of the keys to success as an Amazon seller.