Has Amazon suppressed your ASIN? You must have a few questions about listing suppression and what you can do to restore your hidden ASIN. Here’s your chance to find out all there is to know about ASIN suppression and the new ‘Fix Your Products’ menu.
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As common as it may be, ASIN suppression can put a damper on your sales forecasts and hinder your growth on Amazon. Looking back at all the times Amazon suppressed your ASINs this year, you must surely be looking for ways to prevent a repeat in 2023. So, here’s how to combat listing suppression, make your hidden ASINs resurface, and prevent listing suppression from affecting your revenue and your selling privileges in the future.
What Is an ASIN Suppression?
Amazon’s product listings undergo automated maintenance checks around the clock to make sure that they comply with the latest guidelines. But it’s the sellers who are responsible for their upkeep from start to finish. So, they can’t just assume that once a listing is live, it will stay live indefinitely.
If, at any point, a listing fails to meet Amazon’s requirements, the seller will risk an ASIN suppression. As mentioned earlier, listing suppression is very common on Amazon, and especially for new sellers or those with large inventories. But this doesn’t make it any easier to bear. To a seller, every Amazon suppressed ASIN means loss of revenue because:
- Its product page is no longer live on the marketplace it was listed on.
- Any ads and badges are deactivated.
- Customers searching for it won’t be able to find it on search results pages.
- There are no more sales for that ASIN on that venue.
- The seller who listed the item may have their account deactivated or suspended.
- Other sellers can also get caught in the crossfire.
Why Has Amazon Suppressed the ASIN?
Amazon is all about offering a positive shopping experience. When a listing doesn’t comply with listing guidelines and policies, it’s likely to detract from a positive outcome, so Amazon deactivates it right away. There are countless ways to end up with an ASIN suppression of Amazon, according to Seller CentralAmazon Seller Central is a portal or a h… More, including these 8:
- List items with images that don’t meet Amazon’s product image requirements.
- Choose non-compliant titles (i.e., over 80 characters, with ALL CAPS, prohibited symbols, or seller name).
- Forget to add a main image, a description, or other essential information.
- Omit or select the wrong category to bypass restrictions or hefty fees.
- List items that are restricted or prohibited from sale.
- Break gouging, MFP, MAP, or price validation rules.
- List items Amazon may believe to be expired, unsafe, counterfeit, or Used but listed as New.
- Engage in price fixing, misrepresentation, hacking, gaming, or other practices that go against selling policies.
How Do You Check If Amazon Suppressed an ASIN?
On Amazon, suppressed ASINs are invisible. Buyers can’t see them, whether they browse through the catalog or search for that ASIN specifically. As for you, the seller, you may not receive any notifications about them. But you’ll see it in your Seller CentralAmazon Seller Central is a portal or a h… More dashboard, staring back at you until you fix the issues or delist them.
To find suppressed ASINs, go to your Seller Central homepage, click the “Inventory” tab, and select “Manage Inventory”. You should see a button at the top that says “Search Suppressed and Inactive Listings” under “Listings Tools”. Click it to go to the “Fix Your Products” page and find out what went wrong.
How Do You Fix ASIN Suppression?
There are a few easy ways to address listing suspension issues instantly in Seller CentralAmazon Seller Central is a portal or a h… More, either from the editable grid shown above or from the Amazon product summary page, which lists content and quality concerns with red exclamation marks or yellow triangles. The 5 most likely options for fixing an ASIN suppression are:
- Where applicable, enter your text straight in the “Missing […]” box.
- Select “Manage Images” to add or replace product images.
- Update the quantity for out-of-stock items or select “Restock”.
- Update the price, if pricing rules were broken.
- Review the Potential Duplicates list and select “These are not duplicates” if the listing shouldn’t be merged.
After you make your selection and save, it may take a few minutes or hours for the listings to become available again. The more often you check this page, the more items you have available and likely to sell. Mind you, Amazon may also sometimes flag up issues by mistake, leading to stranded inventory and performance notificationsWarning messages sent by Amazon’s Sell… More.
If the listing is missing an attribute or is flagged up by mistake, you can try to replace any offending terms (e.g., pest, mold), add missing data, relist, or submit an appeal. Also, before sending any Plan of Action (POA), use the Voice of the Customer dashboard to identify any buyer comments that may have triggered a performance notification.
Also, in the event that an ASIN is suppressed because it was listed as a child item to the wrong parent ASIN, the only solution is to close the existing listing and make a new one using the right parent ASIN.
How Do You Prevent Listing Suppression?
When you list on Amazon, you commit not only to existing policies and standards, but also to constant upkeep, updating, and fine-tuning. If you’ve had your fill of ASIN suppression, you know that there are ways to make this maintenance work easier. Here are a few key tips for preventing another listing suppression:
1. Check for restrictions
Amazon’s list of prohibited and restricted items keeps growing by the day and it may even be different from one marketplace to the next. There are also items you can list, but not promote on Amazon, as can be seen here. It’s important to keep an eye on these lists and make any adjustments before your listings are deactivated.
2. Provide key information
It’s easy to get sidetracked when you’re working on a long-winded product description. Some essential product data can only be a few characters long; but without it, your listing can’t go live. This includes the name of the brand, the GTIN code, safety standards, compliant keywords, a main image, and bullet points.
3. Rule out UPC issues
You may come across simple data input issues that cause your listing to stay hidden. Amazon requires a variety of GTIN codes from both uploaded inventory files and manual listings. Even if you know your UPC-A from your UPC-E, there’s always a slight chance that a formatting error can slip in during listing.
Also, Amazon may simply reject a code for no logical reason. The solution here may be to add a “0” at the start, take out the last digit, or use a Check Digit Calculator. If all else fails, you may need to buy new barcodes. So, it’s best to crunch those numbers beforehand.
4. Check for obvious culprits
You don’t need to hire someone to check your listings for compliance. Set a few basic QA rules for photos (e.g., white background, no promotional text). Every now and then, run your inventory list through a word processor to proofread, check character counts, and sift out prohibited terms (e.g., ‘new’ or ‘best’ in titles, ‘sale’ or ‘cheapest’ in descriptions).
5. Look at similar listings
Most sellers use the ‘Create a Product’ tool to list their items, which can lead to duplicate content. There are software tools that can help identify identical or very similar products on Amazon to avoid duplicate listings. Sellery, for instance, has a Private Label feature you can use to identify your competitors for an existing listing, as well as find ASINs you can clash with if your products are too similar.
6. Stick with a winning formula
If you find a listing format that works every time, don’t go about tweaking it, especially if it’s sales season. Create a template for your listings, so that everyone who lists your items- be they temps, stand-ins, seasonal workers, or old hands- can do so quickly and without worrying about lost sales.
7. Stay close to a POA expert
There may come a time when there’s simply no reasoning with Seller Support. This is when a Listing Reinstatement service can make a difference. If you want to open a case, but you don’t know where to start, SellerEngine can help. Whether you’re a brand owner, private labelThis is what you call products manufactu… More seller, manufacturer, arbitrageur, DTC or B2B seller, you can hope for the best when you rely on Amazon experts with 20 years’ worth of experience.
Listing suppression has been a thorn in a seller’s side for as long as Amazon’s been around. But most cases of ASIN suppression are reversible and very easy to fix. So, let’s get to work on those Amazon suppressed ASINs with Fix Your Products, and let those hidden ASINs reemerge stronger and more sellable than ever!
Melanie takes an active interest in all things Amazon. She keeps an eye on the latest developments and keeps Amazon sellers up to speed.
One Response
Good afternoon to whomever may be reading this ! I recently had this issue with one of my best selling ASIN’s however , the ASIN didn’t just “suppress” it was completely removed from the listing ! I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to try to fix the situation , I am yet to send these in for FBA yet so would be ecstatic to fix the issue.
Thank you for your time !!
Best,
Carter