Major, major problems selling wine on Amazon

Sorry in advance. This is a bit of a rant, but any help would be much appreciated.

I’ve been working in IT for 30 years and I have never come across a system that it quite as poor as Amazon’s system for listing wine products.

The problem appears to arise because Amazon incorrectly assumes that a product is uniquely identifed by it’s barcode. It seems all of Amazon’s systems and helpdesk training are built around this premise.

For wine, nothing could be further from the truth. Every vintage of a particular wine will share the same barcode as all previous vintages, yet they can really be considered as unique products in their own right as they may have different alcohol levels, grape blends etc.

The problem arises when a previous vintage exists in Amazon’s catalogue and you want to list the new vintage. Amazon will generally tell you that your vintage doesn’t match what’s in the Amazon catalogue and that you need to accept Amazon’s value. Not great when a customer buys the wine and gets a different vintage to the one they were wanting, as well as probably breaking the Trade Descriptions Act.

Talk to Amazon support and they tell you the same thing and that you then need to raise a ticket to change the details on the listing which may or may not be actioned. But if you do this and get the vintage details changed what happens to the other poor sellers who were actually selling the old vintage.

What’s actually needed is for a new ASIN to be created for the new vintage. A brand new ASIN for same barcode that represents the new vintage. I know this can be done because you sometimes find wines that do have different ASINs for different vintages I’ve also managed to get Amazon to create new ASINs for new vintages a few times but it seems to be a major fight before the helpdesk finally understand what the issue is. It’s taking hours of my time and a huge amount of presistence to keep on explaining why a new ASIN is needed.

A similar situation but arguably worse situation arises when another listing has been created for 6 bottles of the wine you are trying to sell which seems to happen a lot. In this case when you try and create a new listing (with the same barcode), Amazon automatically links your listing for a single bottle to the existing listing for 6 bottles so now it looks like you are selling the wine for a bargain basement price. I don’t understand why Amazon would allow this to happen. Normally the six bottle listing has te ‘Number of Items’ set to 6 so why does Amazon not recognise that a listing for 1 bottle needs a new ASIN ? And to make matter worse Amazon support tell me that the resoultion is to get the title changed on the 6 bottle listing and therefore turn it into a one bottle listing. This is utter madness. The six bottle listing is correct and sellers are using it. Why then break it? I don’t understand why this isn’t a major problem in other product areas ?

If anyone has any bright ideas how to raise this issue with more senior staff at Amazon I would much appreciate it? Has anyone found out how to create new ASINs on Amazon for products with the same barcode ? At the moment I have some days where it’ll take all day to list 3 products. In 20 minutes I can list 500 hundred products on Vivino.

Kind regards

Mark