Catalog Management
Account Troubleshooting
Why Brandwoven is the Right Fit to Guide You Through Marketplace Blind Spots
Trusted Partners
Educational Support
Troubleshooting Experts
Proactive Management
Common Account Challenges Brandwoven Supports
Account Setup
Account Setup
During account setup on Amazon and Walmart, there is a lengthy list of possible roadblocks sellers or vendors can run into. Our marketplace experts come from both the brand side and the agency side, and that combined knowledge paired with years of experience allows our team to ask the right questions, dive into the root of the issues, and provide quick resolutions. Common account setup issues we see are troubles navigating a maze of settings, policies, and requirements, getting approval to sell in restricted categories, providing the required documentation for seller identification or product compliance, and brand ungating or approvals. We are very familiar with all of these challenges and break down the requirements in a clear and simplified manner. Our business model is set in a way that motivates us to help you work quickly and effectively through those challenges so that you can get up and running as soon as possible.
Attention to detail is extremely important to us, and it allows us to learn the ins and outs of each marketplace so that we can be effective in our communication and troubleshooting efforts. We audit and find all the areas you didn’t even know had an impact on the issue and make sure every area is squeaky clean and set up seamlessly.
We’ve all tried escalating to a Vendor Manager or Seller Support hoping to navigate an ongoing challenge, but with heavily siloed teams, minimized effectiveness in understanding the bigger picture. Our team is repeatedly able to solve challenges even the best seller support reps are unable to solve simply by trial and error and knowing the right strings to pull at the right time.
We specialize in cleaning up vendor codes, addressing purchase order and pricing issues, resolving account suspensions and preventing future suspensions by ensuring your account settings are set up to match your operational capabilities. This includes configuring critical features such as FBA & return settings and educating our brands on how to manage direct-to-consumer order tracking (FBM) to avoid late shipment rates that impact your overall account health.
Maintaining a healthy account is equally important, and brands often come to us to understand what they are doing wrong to cause repeat violations. We help brands monitor and improve their Account Health Rating (AHR) and Assurance Program by addressing issues such as repeat listing violations and compliance.
Brand Protection
Brand Protection
When it comes to account troubleshooting, brand protection is a common topic of interest. We consider brand protection a mix of actual brand portal or Brand Registry setup, protecting your brand image through consistent and professional brand messaging, monitoring brand consistency across marketplace platforms, reseller activity, and customer returns to ensure your brand and product integrity is held to a high standard.
Although the idea of a registered brand and brand portals on Amazon or Walmart are known terms, it’s not as apparent what is actually needed to get them accurately set up. Depending on your approach to selling product on a particular marketplace, such as through a distribution model or through 3rd party selling, it is vital to make sure your brands are registered, you understand who has access to your Brand Registry account (and with which roles), and which selling or vendor accounts are linked to maintain security and control of your brands.
We get a lot of brands coming to us saying they have Brand Registry set up but their content still won’t flow through or that Amazon is still requesting approval to sell their products. Our team does a thorough audit and consult on your setup and connection to Brand Registry, which includes: user permissions and brand representative roles, ensuring the correct spelling and capitalization of brand names, advising on the complete list of trademarks to connect, confirming your brand and products are linked to the right selling accounts, the consistency of access between brand portals, and advertising consoles for brand store access and the correct selling accounts.
Additionally, we handle brand code and manufacturer code clean-up in retail analytics, ensuring your reporting data is accurate and you are able to attribute sales to the correct vendor and brand for the most accurate sales trends and insights.
To enhance brand and product integrity, we review return reasons and provide actionable suggestions to minimize returns and improve customer satisfaction. We also work with our brands to navigate tricky switcheroos and make sure customers aren’t trying to pull a fast one by returning the completely incorrect product after purchasing your authentic product. We work to claw back as many reimbursements as possible and often make recommended test buys to ensure your inventory remains authentic and protected.
Listing Setup
Listing Setup
When our partnership with brands begin, we not only look at account level troubleshooting, but also a deep dive into systemic listing setup issues that might be blocking your ability to list them, ship in inventory, and maximize your sales during peak seasons.
As a part of our deep dive, we take a look at catalog reporting to start, which gives us a better understanding of current-state and existing challenges that may be unknown to the brand, including reports such as the CLR or Category Listings Report (which is historically unavailable and unknown unless requested from Seller support to be enabled within your inventory reports), the Retail Analytics Catalog Report where we assess brand name, brand code & manufacturer code accuracy, and flat file/NIS template accuracy. We also go as far as requesting Case Pack Quantities (CPQ) / MOQ reports from vendor support to audit logistical setup and ordering accuracy.
A deep dive of the flat files and category reports will help us assess backend detail completeness and consistency across vendor codes or product lines which, when cleaned-up and implemented effectively, will resolve a ton of historical listing setup and content issues. We look at not only required fields but the recommended attributes for the product type as well.
The most common issues we see are products pulling into inconsistent product categories or products types, listings connected to multiple UPCs, missing key attributes, matching errors, and incorrect population of particular fields like brand name, manufacturer name, or AVS related fields.
It is imperative to understand the current state of the existing catalog regardless of what “should” be actively selling today. Having the full picture of what’s listed in your catalog can help us troubleshoot many listing issues upfront. Agencies often leverage tools like Keepa or the variation wizard in Seller Central to get a sense of what ASINs are already connected to the product variation or grouped on a listing. Those tools often uncover the products that are already grouped together even though we didn’t intend to list them. Having those stray listings be live and unknown will often prevent your listings from coming together in the way you hoped or expected them to.
Once we’ve completed the catalog deep dive, we determine whether any/all compliance documentation is available and provided to us and to Amazon or Walmart, including GS1 Certificates, battery compliance, GPSR compliance for international catalogs, import compliance, or necessary letters of affiliation to the brand or parent company to unlock product level or ASIN level approvals that have been requested.
Once we have the full picture across the board, it’s simply a matter of implementing timelines for listing clean-up and the most efficient order of operations to get things rolling quickly.
Product Pricing
Product Pricing
Pricing setup and control on each marketplace is often far more complex than most would expect as there is room for issues to arise quickly. The most common challenges brands bring to us or have challenges navigating are things like high pricing errors, frequent pricing updates for soft line products or seasonal products, automated pricing rules, retaining control of your retail or MAP pricing, cost discrepancies or cost reduction requests and related soft suppressions or featured offer loss. Our team identifies the root cause of these issues and works to restore pricing accuracy while also consulting on the limitations of each area.
High pricing concerns, including price gouging claims, can lead to account warnings or suspensions if not properly addressed. We monitor your pricing against competitor prices and consult on maximizing margins or lowering prices to strategically win the buy box.
We help brands navigate the intricacies of pricing strategies and management, and very quickly resolve issues that could impact sales performance. With a clear understanding of effective pricing management strategies and a partnership with an agency like ours in place, brands can avoid disruptions to their sales and minimize account or listing downtime. From proactive error monitoring to thorough audits of cost structures, our team ensures your pricing setup is accurate, compliant, and aligned with your business goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why don’t I have access to view or edit my brand store?
The advertising console is the platform where your brand store is set up and occasionally not all the necessary users are added to all Seller Central, Vendor Central, Brand Registry, and the ad console. If they are not consistent, then you will need to find the admin of each website and add the necessary users. It may be that you have access to multiple ad console accounts and need to change the dropdown selection in the top right corner of the Amazon advertising website. In either case, we can hop on a screenshare and ask the necessary questions to find out exactly what’s going on to get you the control and access you need.
Why is Amazon telling me I need approval to list products under our own brand even though we are setup with Brand Registry?
This can depend on the order in which you set up your selling account, listed your products, and got your Brand Registry connected. Most of the time, if your Brand Registry account is appropriately connected first and products are listed afterward, the approval request should be automatically approved. That being said, very nuanced Amazon-specific issues can arise where a manual backend edit of the listing needs to occur to “refresh the listing” so Amazon sees that it is already approved. We have a team of experienced catalog and Brand Registry experts to help you navigate those hiccups and prevent them if setting up for the first time.
We want to ship our products with our UPCs instead of using FNSKU labels, but Amazon is saying they are ineligible. Is that something Brandwoven can resolve?
This is a common issue that can be due to a few reasons, most often being that the backend details of the product listing were not filled in accurately to give Amazon the details they need to know your products can be shipped with the UPC instead of the Amazon label, but occasionally it is because of product category, duplicate UPC listings, or supply chain issues that need to be resolved before we can take that route. We can audit your listings and case work to find out the best solution to get you up and running as soon as possible.
How do I get Amazon to order my products in the correct case pack quantities?
This is something that can be managed by providing the necessary case pack information in a case to Amazon using their specific field names or through setting up package hierarchies. Package hierarchies setup has a different meaning in Seller Central than it does in Vendor Central. Our team has successfully audited and set this up for our partners where we started to see orders on products not previously receiving PO’s on and Amazon finally purchasing in the quantities our partners are setup to efficiently ship their products in. It requires a unique GTIN for each case or pallet you want to set up, separate from the UPC at the individual item level – so that is the first step. Feel free to reach out for more details on this topic and see how we can help you navigate your existing challenges.
Why is our product not appearing on the Amazon listing even though we have available inventory?
Amazon Vendor Central can implement a soft suppression of your listing or you may receive andon cords via email where there is a high rate of return due to a particular customer complaint. If you are not set up to receive those emails, which can be hidden in the contact settings of Vendor Central, or if you are not aware of the cost reduction requests Amazon has submitted, then your listings can go a while without being visible to the consumer even with available inventory. Brandwoven tracks those issues on your behalf, so you don’t miss out on valuable sales.
Why are our products switching from FBA to FBM automatically even after we convert back to FBA?
The first thing we recommend is looking at whether your ERP connection has the correct fulfillment setting for the SKU. If the ERP tries to update available inventory for that SKU, it will auto convert it to FBM – then you’re stuck trying to ship product out direct to consumer and potentially dealing with cancelled orders or late shipment notifications impacting your account health. If this is something you’ve run into, we can help support you through it.
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