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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Because you may want to improve the picture, description, etc of a product. Not everyone can get everything perfect the first time.

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The person is asking why you can change it to a completely different product that’s in a different category. Like changing a listing for socks to a listing for a monitor stand.

Can you actually do that?

It is weird on Amazon marketplace. For our own product, for which we have trademark, registered in their brand registry, etc, we often can't make our changes reflect on a live product page. But then we see clearly highjacked product pages, like a 3d printed bracket for mounting GoPro on iris quadcopter I was selling many years ago to a USB cable.... Many in sellers community believe it is inside job, where current employees of Amazon with access to making changes to the product catalog making a side income from such shenanigans.

There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...

As someone who is also a long time seller on Amazon, my unscientific A/B testing seems to point at greater Buy Box control being tantamount to greater control over an ASIN's product details. I work mainly in drop shipping, and it's a constant battle to even get a UPC to actually point to the correct product info. Chinese sellers love to make a product's retail UPC point match to an ASIN for an arbitrary number of that item. But it just seems like in cases like that, Amazon likes to side with whichever seller is making the most sales on that ASIN, no matter the what the facts are

For us controlling but box never a problem. But making changes appear - almost always requires at least a week of back and forth with seller support

I've seen it, both with wildly off reviews, and also in my historical orders.

Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.

Yes, you can sometimes read a review where the product is mentioned and it has nothing to do with the product you are looking at.

Suppose you post a product initially and the listing is all messed up. Clearly the wrong dimensions etc. But some people buy it and it's a decent product so it gets good reviews. Now you notice the problems with the listing and want to correct them. Can you?

Yes of course. But that is not remotely close to what we’re discussing here.

If you have a system that allows you to do that, guess what else you can do with it.

If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?

Yes, and it's a feature that most marketplace platforms specifically build out because they profit from new products being sold with glowing reviews from older unrelated products.

This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.

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