Price Per Unit required on Amazon or offer suppressed

Amazon are going to start suppressing offers that do not have the Price Per Unit displayed from the 31st of March. This means you’ll need to add it for all new ASINs and edit existing ASINs to add the Price Per Unit if you have not already done so.

“Starting March 31 and affecting all consumables offers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, listings that do not follow the new Price Per Unit requirements mentioned below will be removed from search. Following the search suppression of listings that do not follow the new Price Per Unit requirements, you will be able to find these listings under Fix Your Product (FYP).

Affected are all items sold within the following categories: Baby, Grocery, Health & Personal Care, Beauty, Pets, Wine and Cleaning Products. These items will require the unit_count attributes, namely a value (unit_count, e.g. ‘5’) and a unit type (unit_count_type, e.g. ‘ounce’, ‘count’, ‘gram’). For new consumables products in these categories, these are mandatory fields that you must fill out during the listing process. For existing products, you can submit or update unit_count values through the listing templates or by visiting the Listing Quality Dashboard.”
– Amazon

Whilst in theory this sounds like a sensible thing to do to enable consumers to compare like for like offers between a unique product offered in different quantities or pack sizes, and to compare similar products to see which is best value, the reality is that as merchants can choose to enter a value for either Unit, Count or Type it often ends up being a nonsense value that does nothing to assist consumers.

At it’s very basic for example, how do you compare apples to apples when one is a count of how many apples you’re actually going to get when another merchant offers apples based on their weight? This is a problem you’ll find with just about every vendor, not just Amazon and you’ll often find similar inconsistencies when doing your supermarket shopping.

On Amazon it only took one product search to find an example – Whiskers Cat Milk. One offer is for a 3-pack of cat milk with the Price Per Unit displayed as ‘(£2.26 / count)’. The next offer displayed the Price Per Unit as (£7.97 / l) for 5 x 3-packs. If you know which is the best value please send answers on a post card (There is no prize on offer!).