Amazon motors fitment creates problems

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Starter MotorRon sells aftermarket car parts & accessories on Amazon.co.uk and other European Amazon sites. He have recently noticed that 90 of his products disappeared from the Amazon store front and is expecting more will follow. They are listed as active in his inventory but are not showing up in the Amazon store front any more. We have

Having contacted Amazon to query this and it has taken several seller support cases to finally find out that Amazon EU apparently is switching over to requiring listings to include part finder information. The interesting bit is that:

1) They have not been informed at all that this was going to happen
2) The inventory management interface doesn’t appear to allow you to specify any part finder details (!)
3) There is no detailed information available from Amazon how to transition

Eventually they were sent a template where they could enter partfinder information for their products. That template seems to be out of date though and not suited for the products we sell (aftermarket parts – not standard car parts from the manufacturer). The KBA table provided in that template doesn’t even include the cars that they sell products for (e.g. MINI 2014 models).

Ron asks “How do they expect us to update our inventory listings?” Not much information is given and questions remain unanswered by Amazon on how to go about filling in that template. For instance, we need to know how to specify multiple KBA codes per products, what TecDoc k-type data is they require (no database is provided), what the format is for their ‘Universal fit’ field, etc. They are still waiting for answers from [email protected]. In the mean time a (growing) portion of their products remain unsellable via Amazon UK and EU.

Ron wonders if any other car accessory sellers on Amazon have had a similar experience and possibly could find out more for them (seller support only goes so far).

Ron finishes by saying “It is great that Amazon is finally working on specifying exact fitment information with car parts but it seems they are going about it the wrong way. eBay has done this much much better and allows you to specify fitment information much more straightforward (and they don’t ‘disable’ your products along the way)”.

4 Responses

  1. For Amazon its a case of a little knowledge is dangerous. All they’ve done is stick the Tecdoc catalogue into Amazon with little thought of how an end user will choose the correct part.
    You are supposed to upload a product, amazon will then say what it fits; when it doesn’t fit you will cover the return costs and be penalised for sending incompatible parts!
    The notion of sending your own ‘fitment parts’ is merely a notion; they’re not ready for it.

    I’ve had hundreds of emails with Amazon about this. They’re missing a £500million opportunity because they don’t have a team with an eye on all corners of the problem.
    It’s great shame as eBay are now also losing focus on vehicle parts.

  2. Interesting article! (for me anyway)
    we also had most of our listings removed by amazon.
    Years back i got called by a real person at amazon encouraging and guiding me on how to buy barcodes and populate the amazon catalogue with car parts – it was a miracle. It didn’t last long though, and now they’ve removed all my listings, and havn’t communicated with me since. I once tried to trigger a response from them but hit a brick wall. I only realised they were back into car parts when one day I saw a vrm lookup box on their site. i thought they might be working and communicating with a ‘priviledge club’ of big players of which I’m obviously not one. Selling more seriously on amazon is on my to-do list, but I keep thinking of more fun things to do (things which don’t involve 15% commission)
    i’ve heard amazon themselves are buying their parts from a large factor called andrew page. shhhhh

  3. We have stopped using ALL fitment programmes on eBay and elsewhere because they only work for manufacturer catalogued databases and not for everything else.
    Even then, they’re still WAY too generic and don’t have enough depth of data to say if a part will fit or not.
    Since we stopped using eBay’s vehicle fitment, our sales have gone up (because the website has stopped telling people ‘this won’t fit your car’), returns have gone down (for the same reason) and things are running generally smoother,
    My advice if you’re buying parts for a car or van – contact the retailer with the car’s Reg number or preferably full chassis number, and you’re much more likely to get a part that fits first time and stops a load of hassle for both buyer and seller.
    We use a digital catalogue that in three years has had 99.997% accuracy, it costs a lot of money each month, but what it saves is immeasurable.
    Noel

    Deutsheparts
    New genuine VW Audi Skoda and Seat parts and accessories.

  4. Same problem here, we got large part of our products blocked without any warning because we were reporting some cross details with oem manufacturer in the title. It took one week with the customer service to understand they’ve been blocked by [email protected] and why.
    I got a excel file from them i filled with all oem cross data and sent to the given email. We’re out of amazon from 20 days, it’s been a week I’ve sent the file but still blocked and no answers at all.
    I simply find all this completely crazy and out of control.

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