Nine days to reinstatement, then the actual fix

Where they were

Ottersey’s hero listing was suppressed on a Tuesday morning for a medical claim in the bullet points. The copy said the sleep bag “helps prevent overheating”, which reads as harmless marketing and reads to Amazon as a safety claim on a product that sits in a cot with an infant.

The bigger problem showed up while we were fixing it. Thirty four child ASINs were split across six separate parent listings, mostly because different people had created them in different years. Reviews were scattered across all six. The best selling size had 340 reviews and the identical product in a different colourway had eleven.

What we did

1. 01

   Fix the claim, not the tone

   Reinstatement is a document exercise, not a persuasion exercise. We rewrote every claim across the catalogue against the actual TOGs and test certificates, pulled the lab reports, and filed a plan of action that named the specific phrase, where it came from, and what stopped it recurring. Back up in nine days.

2. 02

   Audit the rest of the catalogue for the same thing

   The phrase that got them suppressed appeared in eleven other listings. We found and cleared all of them the same week, before a second sweep found them for us. This is the part clients skip and then get suppressed again in March.

3. 03

   Merge six parents into two

   One parent for sleep bags by tog and size, one for swaddles. Reviews consolidated, so the colourway with eleven reviews now inherits 340. Rating went from 4.1 to 4.6 simply because the good reviews stopped being stranded on listings nobody saw.

4. 04

   Retire what was not selling

   Twenty one of the 34 variants had sold under 30 units in a year and were each generating storage fees and a chance of a bad review on a colour nobody wanted. We ran them down and closed them. The catalogue is now thirteen variants and every one of them earns its shelf.

Where they are now

Revenue on the merged parent is up 41% against the same months the year before, with a smaller catalogue and the same ad budget. Most of that is the review consolidation doing work that no amount of bidding would have done.

The suppression itself cost Ottersey about eleven days of their best listing in what turned out to be a quiet month. If it had happened in November the number would have been considerably less pleasant to write down.

I called them on a Tuesday in a panic about the suppression. They sorted that in nine days and then spent the next two months on the thing I did not know was wrong.

Figures come from the client’s Seller Central and advertising accounts over the period described. Past results are specific to that brand, that catalogue, and that category.