There are tens of thousands of products on Amazon. In order to better recommend products to consumers and help them find their favorite products, Amazon will use the numbers in the Browse Tree Guide (BTG) to assign one or more category nodes to products. When sellers upload products, they need to find the most suitable category node for the product. Most products have only one category node, but some products have multiple category nodes.
Consumers can find products through search and browse functions. When browsing products, consumers may narrow their search by locking in certain categories. Compared with a single category node, if a product has more category nodes, it means that it will get more exposure, which can increase the product’s traffic and ranking. In the process of uploading products, how to select and successfully upload category nodes, we need to pay attention to the following points.
Amazon requires that each product needs to set a category node in order to expose the product more accurately to consumers. Once the correlation between the category and the product is very different, it will greatly affect the consumer experience. Nowadays, many Amazon sellers hope to expand traffic sources by adding multiple category nodes to their products. There is no problem in doing so, but we need to ensure that the category nodes and products have a certain correlation. If the correlation between the two is not great, then this is very unfriendly to the Amazon search engine and consumer experience. Moreover, if the product already has two or more category nodes, it is not recommended to add more nodes. At this time, the added nodes may be removed by Amazon because they are not accurate enough.
In addition, in order to put products in some small categories with little competition and low sales, so as to easily obtain the “Best Seller” logo, some sellers abandon the original correct category nodes and deliberately put the products into the wrong nodes. This operation is a serious violation. Amazon will restrict this product in advertising display and natural ranking display, for example, blocking keywords, etc., which will directly lead to the natural ranking of the product not being able to go up, greatly affecting the weight and ranking of the product.
In response to the frequent occurrence of misplaced categories, Amazon will force products in the wrong categories to be classified into the categories that the system considers correct. In this way, the high product rankings created by the seller in the early stage will also fall short (if the category node changes, the previous ranking and weight will also disappear, and the weight is bound to the category node). What’s more, the seller is likely to receive a warning letter from Amazon, or even have their sales privileges removed.
Regarding the selection skills of Amazon category nodes, different sellers have different ideas and methods, and sellers can also try boldly, for example, and Amazon customer service to ask for more category nodes. However, for novice Amazon sellers, it is recommended not to set category nodes based on your own feelings and cognition. You may wish to learn from the category node settings of the top-ranked products in the same industry. It is usually necessary to investigate more than a dozen excellent competing products. After completing a detailed investigation, you will find that your competitors will have a variety of category node selection methods.