After setting up your Amazon seller account and going over the strategy you will apply to make the most out of your e-commerce venture, the next step will involve searching for existing product listings or creating new ones with unique Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASIN). If you do not find exact or even similar listings that match your product, this will put you in the potentially favorable position of being a seller who introduces new products to the Amazon Marketplace.
Everything starts with the “Add a Product” option in the Manage Inventory section of your Seller Central account. For sellers who are not creating new ASINs, the steps to ensuring that the product listing is correct by:
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- Checking that the product does not have child ASINs, which may be colors, sizes, formats, and other variations of parent items, unless they are intended.
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- Describing the condition of the items.
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- Setting a convenient and competitive price that takes into account all of the shipping and handling costs.
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- Setting quantity pricing and stock keeping units (SKU) counters. The choice of using SKUs is entirely yours; however, using ASINs for this purpose can be confusing.
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- Carefully reviewing the shipping expectations set by Amazon.
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New ASIN Review Checklist
The process of reviewing new ASINs that you are introducing to the marketplace for the first time will include the aforementioned steps plus the following quality checks:
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- Your Universal Product Codes (UPC) should match the records of the GS1 organization. This is something that Amazon will soon start checking for automatically, and it could create product-listing issues. If you obtained your UPC labels from a third-party company, you will want to visit GS1.org to ensure that the numbers are properly assigned to your brand or company.
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- Pay close attention to your product categories. While it is true that most Amazon shoppers enter queries to search products, a significant number of shoppers will fine-tune their search results by means of clicking on product categories. These are shoppers who enjoy browsing, particularly on tablets and smartphones, and they are also very likely to either purchase on the spot or save their browsing session to review later.
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- Fill out as much information as possible. In the “Listing Info” section, you have seven tabs of information you can use. While you do not want to push the character limits of each field, you will certainly want to provide as much information as possible for the sake of shoppers and for the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO).
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- With regard to package quantity, you must ensure that the numeric value of this field matches your product description.
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- GTIN exceptions are not very frequent on Amazon, but if your line of products is sports collectibles, you will likely be exempt from getting UPC numbers and labels. The same goes for booksellers whose titles were published and printed before 1973, although new UPCs could be useful in this case if you have multiple copies.
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- With regard to variations, you will want to carefully review the accuracy of the information you provide herein because you do not want to learn the hard way that shoppers are ordering medium-sized shirts in white when you have never stocked any.
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- ASIN security. This is an important step if you are an inventor, manufacturer or exclusive distributor. If you have created 10 or more new ASINs, you will want to protect them with a subscription service such as Brandlox, which provides real-time monitoring of the e-commerce activity of your Amazon catalog.
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Brandlox is an online loss prevention system that helps you to keep counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers away from your brand. Find out if Brandlox is right for your business and get your questions answered here. Learn more about Brandlox by calling 866-848-6072. You can also contact us online today!
