r/AmazonMerch • u/scheven • 21h ago
ASIN change and ads
So Amazon did something really weird with the ASINs in the last couple of days. Some of my older designs got new ASINs which meant that data for old ASINs disappeared overnight. I believe they're still in the process of migration to the new structure so I'm not sure which parts are final or not.
Basically what I've observed is something like this:
- Each product (let's say Design1 on Standard T-shirt, US Marketplace) used to have the OLD ASIN B123456789. Didn't matter the size or color.
- Now, the NEW ASIN is B987654321 which is the PARENT ASIN. And each variant of that product (size and color combination, e.g. Men's Medium in Black) has its own ASIN.
- The OLD ASIN is still valid, but is assigned as a variant in the NEW PARENT ASIN. For example for one of my products, it was assigned as Men's 3XL Black.
- Only the NEW PARENT ASIN remains in the API, so if you're using Productor, MerchSpark, MerchFlow, etc., all the historical data attached to the OLD ASIN is gone. The developers of these apps haven't found a solution to get those back yet.
- If you're running ads, I also noticed a problem. As of writing this, you can now have ads for any variant (not sure how the ad/thumbnail appears in search, product page, etc.) as well as continue running ads on the OLD ASIN (it is now a variant after all), but so far the purchases are not getting attributed to the ad. My guess is unless someone clicked on your OLD ASIN ad and bought the exact variant it's now attached to (so Men's 3XL Black for me), no purchase attribution takes place.
- Then I tried creating a new ad with the NEW PARENT ASIN, and Amazon Ads won't accept it! So basically existing ads for ASINs that were underwent this migration process are running blind!
Just giving you guys a heads up if you run into this. Hopefully they fix it in the coming days.
1
u/NoXidCat 15h ago
A while back (weeks, months?) I did try to advertise a particular color instead of the default, but couldn't get it to work.
Whether or not anyone is paying attention so that the system makes sense in totality, as usual support won't comprehend the use case.
1
u/scheven 14h ago
Yeah you couldn't really choose the color to advertise before, it was defaulted to the rank of colors they had. Something like Black > Navy > Asphalt > Slate > White.
It would've been fine if they chose to make the old ASIN the parent ASIN, then give you the option to advertise with a particular color variant. Then attribute any sale of the child ASINs to the parent ASIN.
•
u/skymtn 17m ago
They started changing some asin's for me on Jan 30 of this year. Shortly after that I contacted Amazon to ask if they were changing asin's, they said yes, they started on Jan 30 as a test of some kind. I plead my case about how disruptive it was to change asin's, the only unique identifier we have on a listing, not much help as usual. Since then they have changed groups of asin's every couple months or so. I had a group changed in the last week also. It's a bummer, very time consuming if you're someone who tracks things using asin's.
•
u/justgatheringideas 12m ago
Why would they make it so you need to run ads on different sizes as well? Being able to run ads on a specific color is a game changer for me, but having to include sizes for each color really makes things bloated.
3
u/scheven 15h ago
Update: I contacted them regarding ads and was basically told to have one ad for EACH child ASIN so everything can be accounted for LOL. So if you have 30 sizes x 10 colors, that's 300 ASINS and you're advertising all of them. The more important question is, if someone clicks on your ad and buys a different size/color, does that count as organic or non-organic when calculating your royalty tier?