Some sellers reported that their listings were rebranded due to out-of-stock. When they contacted the platform customer service for help, in addition to submitting a large amount of information in accordance with official requirements, it was also unknown whether they could change it back.
Why does this happen?
To a large extent, when your listing is out of stock, it is captured by some shameless sellers through software, who modify the brand name through VC accounts, trying to make it their own and use the original reviews of your listing.
Of course we denounce these shameless people, but it is also undeniable that since it is an ecosystem, there will always be garbage people.
What should ordinary sellers learn from such incidents?
First, we should know that when we create a listing, the Amazon system will automatically capture and collect the content of this listing. Even if one day you no longer sell it, the information of this listing will still be stored in the Amazon system. In other words, according to Amazon's rules, all listings, to a certain extent, do not belong to seller A or seller B, but to the Amazon platform. Even if you delete your own listing, the content of this listing will not be removed from the platform database;
Second, some shameless followers will use software to automatically scrape data based on the combination principle of ASIN codes. Once they find that a listing has reviews but no seller is selling it, they will collect the listing and call it an ownerless zombie listing.
Third, since VC accounts have greater authority, they have the ability to follow a listing and edit the details of the listing, including the brand name. Therefore, malicious followers will use software to automatically collect zombie listings and then modify the listings to steal the reviews of the original listings.
Through the above three points, it is not difficult for you to understand why the trademark of your listing was changed after it was out of stock.
So, how to avoid it?
If it is maliciously tampered with, it will be a real headache and it is really difficult to change it back. Or after it is changed back, it is tampered with again by the other party.
But we can avoid those copycats who hope to take advantage of the leftovers to a certain extent.
The specific operation method is as follows:
For a listing shipped by FBA, as a seller, we need to do two things before it runs out of stock:
1. Appropriately increase the selling price. The reason for doing this is that the product is almost out of stock, so shouldn’t we earn a little extra profit?
2. Self-shipping and selling. Many sellers understand self-shipping and following sales as following sales before the stock is out of stock, and the price of the self-shipping SKUs sold is lower than that of FBA shipments. This is a wrong way of thinking. If you ship the goods yourself and sell them later, then the price must be higher than that of FBA shipment. How much higher? My suggestion is about $5 higher. Doing so can ensure that after the stock is out of stock, this listing is still a selling listing of your account. On the other hand, assuming that the follow-up sale has sales, you can also create a multi-channel distribution method to call the next batch of FBA inventory to ship these self-delivered orders, and the excess amount can just balance the additional costs incurred by multi-channel orders.
By following your own listing, you can, to a certain extent, avoid having your listing tampered with by those spam followers who mistakenly identify it as an unowned listing.
Of course, there is another question: What if I don’t want to sell a product myself?
It's very simple. It's not just deleting it directly. Instead, modify the listing first, change the picture, change the title, and even better, post a series of direct negative reviews, and then delete it. After all, if a seller uses software to filter out your listing and then sells it under your trademark, even though you are no longer selling, it is definitely not a happy thing.
