What is a suppressed listing on Amazon FBA? How do I Resolve it?
Anyone looking to buy a product online instinctively turns to the Amazon marketplace, and why not? All you have to do is key-in the relevant search term and at the click of a button, thousands to even millions of listings pop right up.
Even though Amazon is a great place to put up your product listings, many retailers fail to acknowledge and follow through on the maintenance and upkeep required to keep those listings active. On a platform like Amazon, you just can’t have a “set it and forget it” strategy.
What is a suppressed FBA listing?
According to Amazon’s own research, shoppers get an optimal shopping experience when listings have been completed properly – i.e. they contain full product information, have the appropriate images, are placed in the correct category, have the correct titles and price per unit, as well as 80 characters for certain categories, while a maximum of 130 characters for other categories.
If this stringent criteria is not met, retailers run into what’s called suppressed Amazon FBA listings. So, if any of Amazon’s standards are not complied with – such as issues with the image, title problems, undefined category type or, say, not enough details in the description – retailers must deal with suppressed listings.
The biggest reason an item gets suppressed once you have sent your items into FBA is that you have not changed your SKU from “fulfilled by merchant” to “fulfilled by amazon”, we also recommend you offer the customer both options, having the same ASIn but with 2 different SKUs – one which is fulfilled by yourself and one that is fulfilled by Amazon,
You may have also accidently deleted the listing after you have created the FBA shipment, this will also suppress your listing as amazon has no option to sell your FBA item.
How do I deal with an FBA suppressed listing?
Fortunately, Amazon retailers or sellers can fix suppressed listings without running into too much trouble. However, the only difficulty you may experience in doing so is having to check back on your listings from time to time – otherwise, how will you know that everything is up-to-date and running without any hitches, right? Alternatively, you could hire an Amazon marketing agency to do it on your behalf.
Anyhow, here is a 5-step method you can use to fix your suppressed Amazon listing::
- In your Seller Central account, look for the Inventory tab – under it, there’s a ‘Manage Inventory’ button. Click on that.
- If your listings have been supressed, you will definitely see a list of blue menu items at the top
- Check “remove unfulfilable inventory” as well as “search suppressed and inactive tistings” to see if any of your items are blocked from sale on amazon or have been removed from search results
- Go through each listing and edit the ones which require more information. If the issue simply has to do with listings that don’t have images or contain the wrong one, then you can correct this by clicking on “Manage Images”. Each product listing you have on Amazon has a Product Summary page – this will list out precisely due to which quality issues the listing was suppressed, so that you don’t have to guess why they were supressed to begin with.
- Once you have corrected all the issues and complied with Amazon’s criteria, click ‘Save and Finish’, and hopefully, that’s the end of your listing suppression issues, if everything has been completed per Amazon’s standard.3
If you ever find yourself dealing with this in future or asking yourself “How do I deal with an FBA suppressed listing?”, then simply refer to Amazon’s criteria and repeat the above steps in case you haven’t complied with it. On the other hand, consulting with an experienced Amazon agency can save you loads of trouble.