Case Study - Protalus
Pointstory fixes complex retail problems for health and personal care brand.
Once retail issues were resolved:
+25%
Unit Session %
+20%
Ordered Product Sales
–10%
ACoS
Situation
Protalus experienced some retail issues where their products' variant names were incorrectly changed, even though they are brand registered. Due to a bug on Amazon's end, the normal methods of updating size and color did not produce the expected results. Sales were down 20 - 30% due to this error.
Goals
Resolve unconventional retail issues while maintaining profitability through advertising.
Solution
Due to a complication with ghost asins associated with a few of their items, this made it impossible to go through the standard procedures to update the parent / child relationship. Even deleting the listing and relisting the product with proper variant names rendered invalid results. These kinds of catastrophic errors are impossible to deal with using the self service portal, and many Amazon business managers can attest, reaching out to support could land you in canned response hell.
First off, this is not an issue that you can resolve through email. You must talk to someone on the phone through support, and even so, you'll need to get someone with experience. You'll notice in these calls that there are at least two tiers of support personnel. First tier support will translate your problem and escalate the issue. If you're lucky enough to get someone with more experience, you may have more luck in the resolution of more complicated issues.
We called in dozens of times, focusing in first on resolving one asin out of about forty five. Once we reached a tier two support person, they discovered that ghost asins were created and that they were attached to the existing asin. This locked the incorrect size and color attributes to the asin. In this case, we needed Amazon support to un-associate the ghost asin from the existing asin, so we had to create an offer and attach it to the ghost asin. Once that was done, we deleted the listing, waited 24 hours, and reuploaded a bulk upload sheet with the correct information. Once this worked, we contacted support once again to go through this process for the other 44 asins.
Once this was resolved, we saw unit session % increase by 25%, ACoS decrease by 10%, which allowed us to be more aggressive in advertising, and top line sales increase 20% within a matter of just a couple of weeks. If you're experiencing retail issues, sometimes they're easy to resolve. Other times, it may seem like you've done everything possible. We've seen a lot (not all) of retail issues and have a process to move things forward, to come to a quick resolution.