Managing Large Amazon Catalogues: How Complexity Impacts Performance

Large catalogues can certainly be a powerful driver of sales. However, without the right structure and clear governance, these extensive listings often create significant operational and commercial risks. Established brands prioritise more than just listing products. Instead, the focus must be on managing thousands of SKUs in a way that actively protects both profitability and brand equity.

Catalogue Governance

Expansive catalogues often contain issues such as duplicate or orphan ASINs. Furthermore, fragmented variation structures and incomplete attributes frequently appear. These issues split customer reviews, dilute traffic, and reduce discoverability because of Amazon’s COSMO algorithm. With multiple contributors editing content, catalogue governance becomes essential. This coordination is necessary to maintain accuracy and sustain search rank over time.

Buy Box And Reseller Dynamics

Controlling the Buy Box presents a frequent difficulty; this is often because competing resellers introduce inconsistent pricing, which in turn diminishes margins. Furthermore, they can create variable delivery promises, which ultimately undermines the customer experience. Price suppression adds yet another layer of complexity when Amazon identifies lower prices elsewhere in the market. Maintaining Buy Box share requires consistency, irrespective of whether a brand engages in direct trade with Amazon or uses a third-party account.

Advertising At Scale

Managing advertising for very large product catalogues can create significant complexity. Often, campaigns suffer from underfunding due to the uneven distribution of budgets. Therefore, without a structured approach to identifying new keywords, refining negative terms, and using a disciplined placement strategy, existing inefficiencies are likely to increase. Moreover, as cost per click (CPC) continues to rise, achieving a favourable total advertising cost per sale (TACoS) becomes more difficult unless all spending is closely linked to the product’s contribution margin.

Data And Reporting

Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics, and Amazon Marketing Stream offer valuable insights. However, these all require sufficient timeframes. Optimising too quickly, before attribution cycles close, often results in wasted spend and misleading conclusions. Therefore, established brands must ensure their strategy is reviewed against meaningful data, rather than focusing on short-term fluctuations.

Inventory And Profitability

Inventory planning should always align with advertising demand. However, large catalogues face specific challenges. For instance, there are FBA capacity limits, IPI constraints, and replenishment issues to manage. On Vendor Central, problems like chargebacks and shortages directly reduce the net Profit Per Mille (PPM). Therefore, regardless of the operating model, analysing contribution margins is essential. This analysis must carefully factor in all fees, advertising expenses, and returns to ensure profitable scaling.

From Insight To Action

Often, agencies inherit accounts where catalogue complexity, reseller activity, and advertising inefficiency have damaged performance. The agency’s role is to impose order. This involves disciplined governance, effective Buy Box control, and data-driven advertising management. By aligning Seller Quality Performance (SQP), Brand Analytics, and retail data with profitability models, the catalogue’s scale can reliably drive growth instead of creating chaos.

Therefore, if a brand is managing a large Amazon catalogue and wants to ensure that complexity genuinely translates into profitability, the agency would welcome a discussion. During this conversation, the agency can explain its approach to catalogue control, advertising efficiency, and achieving sustainable growth.

Want to see your Amazon performance skyrocket?  Book a call with our team or email us at amazon@marketrocket.co.uk to take your brand to the next level.