Content Being Replaced by 3P “Biggest Vendor Central Headache”

39% choose disappearing brand content as largest frustration with the Amazon platform, followed by baffling rejections and never-ending tickets.

The sheer number of ways that Amazon’s Vendor Central platform can provoke you to tear your hair out are as numerous as they are painful. In almost two decades of dealing with the retail giant, we ‘ve experienced a lot – from endless ticketing loops with unhelpful agents, to baffling reasons for content rejections.

The results from a recent LinkedIn poll prove we’re very much not alone in this. Asked “What’s Your Biggest Vendor Central Headache?”, members of the Amazon VC Group responded to say that “Brand content replaced by 3P” is their largest frustration, with 39% choosing this option. This came ahead of “Rejections that make no sense” at 28%, closely followed by “Never-ending tickets” at 26%.

Why is third-party content replacing my branded content?

Amazon, famously, defines itself as a marketplace rather than a pure retailer. This is because the vast majority of sales offers on their website are through third parties, even going so far as to host multiple sale offers on a single item, with the cheapest price often the one that takes prominence on a product page.

Because of this arrangement, Amazon seeks product listing details and content from all sellers on their site, as well as through their own direct relationships with the actual brands. As brand owners, the content you provide should have precedence over other sources of content on the platform – after all, you own the product and are the definitive resource for all customer information. Right?

Well, in practice that’s not always how it works. As it stands, Amazon make no commitment to ensuring brand content will always be used. Their commitment is to have the “best content available” on the page, and although brand content is given a higher weighting algorithmically, it is an unfortunate truth that this often counts for naught. All too often, we see meticulously assembled and optimised content replaced, overwritten or hidden behind sloppy or incomplete third-party assets and copy. Or worst of all, simply disappearing from the page.

What can we do to combat this problem?

A first and vital step is to ensure you complete your brand registration on Amazon – this will allow you to leverage your position as the brand owner in order to get the appropriate treatment of your content by Amazon. Beyond that, there are three weapons against this issue that you can utilise:

• Vigilance – by maintaining a schedule of checking on the status of your products, you can spot issues as early as possible and minimise the amount of time your content is missing from the page.
• Republishing – the resubmission of content to Amazon can often fix these issues. When done within a RAMP platform such as Digishare, this may even be quick and efficient process. However, any changes on Amazon’s end may only occur after a delay, and you may still encounter situations where this process doesn’t re-establish your content.
• Ticketing – by promptly submitting tickets and following up, you can maintain pressure on your Amazon account managers and contacts, and attempt to cut down on the time it takes to return your product pages to the desired state.

To make these processes more efficient, it may be helpful to engage with a Digital Shelf Management service, such as the ones offered by Digishare partner Sitelucent. These services include content monitoring, allowing you to outsource these tasks to specialists. As Sitelucent themselves put it:

“Gain full transparency on both the textual and visual quality of the content of your products. Content is crucial for online product presentation, answering consumer questions about appearance, usage, benefits, and features. We provide insights into existing content, missing elements, inaccuracies, non-brand-compliant content, SEO opportunities, and discrepancies between syndicated content and what is live.”

Digital Shelf Monitoring is just one of the additional services you can access through a RAMP like Digishare, allowing you optimise and manage all your products for retail in a single platform. If you’d like to know more or book your free demo, please contact us for a chat about how Digishare can help.