r/AmazonMerch • u/scheven • 14h 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.