What is an orphaned listing?
Orphans are child listings that have been separated from the parent listing. They no longer have a parent which makes them harder for the customer to find, as a result they’ll have higher sales rank. We’ve seen orphans with a rank of 26,000,000.
How do you fix them?
There are multiple ways to fix them. Most of them can be fixed using flat file templates and the Variation Wizard. There are times when that doesn’t work, when that happens we’ll open cases and follow up until Seller Support has fixed the issue for us.
What’s the difference between a Parent listing and a Child listing?
Parent listings are just empty ASINs used to connect all the variations of a product. It is unsellable and has no variation specific attributes, meaning there is no color or size assigned to the ASIN.
Child listings are listings for individual variations. They’re each for a different color and size variation of a product.
How do listings become orphaned?
When sellers delete SKUs from their inventory it deletes all the contributions made by that seller to that SKU. This means whenever the seller whoever fixed the orphan last deletes the SKU used to identify the orphan, it will delete the parent child relationship. Shattering the listing again.
Any other questions?
Shoot us a message! We love helping out, but be warned I might share your questions in my group after I’ve answered you because I’m bad at coming up with content.