Avoid creation of item duplicates

To assure that your product offers will be surfaced to our buying customers, you need to make sure that they are listed on the correct product page. It’s our objective to present a single detail page for each product, where the customer can find all available information about that item. The customer can inform themselves about the product features and compare the competing offers without jumping between different pages. This principle supports the marketplace’s transparency and increases offer comparability.

In addition this single detail page allows us to track the popularity of an item and inform customers about this rank. Customer reviews and the popular shopping recommendations (“customers who bought A also were interested in B”) are based on the single detail page and suffer from duplicates.

Missing or wrong item information might lead to duplicate catalog entries. These duplicates lead to buyer confusion (“Is this the same item? Is there a difference not documented?”), and might result in the buyer turning away without purchasing the item at all. Furthermore duplicates weaken the sales rank statistics we provide to you and the quality of product recommendations for our and your customers. This affects the visibility of your offers in the search results.

For this reason we require the item’s barcode (EAN, ISBN, UPC) in the product upload, along with other attributes like title, release date, brand name or model number. Checking and comparing these allows us to either attach your offer to the right existing item, or create a new catalog entry for new items that we don’t know yet.

Only load items where you have access to the necessary item information. The quality of our catalog and the attractiveness of our marketplace would be impacted if you ignore this basic content requirement we have about your product data. We reserve the right to remove duplicate catalog entries, this can have an impact on your offer for such a product. If you notice a duplicate entry in our catalog, you may report this to our seller support, who will initiate the correction of the data.

Comments

[Stephen Whitaker]

"If you notice a duplicate entry in our catalog, you may report this to our seller support, who will initiate the correction of the data."

Only if the seller support person who receives the report has got enough intelligence to understand the problem.

I have been told that "Unknown Binding" indicates a different edition and other such nonsense.

[Post Mortem Books]

The problem of duplicate entries in books has been on-going for a long time on Amazon and has resulted in certain titles having 50+ entries. Most of such entries have been created by just a few rogue sellers - all known to Amazon - who continue to destabilise the catalogue. Amazon needs to toughen thier stance to these sellers and remove all their listings.