How to Create Amazon Variation Listings

Learn to create Amazon variation listings to expand your brand's reach. Understand the why and how, use Junglytics to track success, and optimize your Amazon business.

Tom Rohlf

September 25, 2023

There’s always more to do in the wild world of selling on Amazon. Attracting and converting customers is an ongoing process, after all.

A big step in growing your business is expanding your offerings through Amazon variation listings. This includes new variations of existing products (in the form of new colors, sizes, materials, and the like) and separating individual variations into their own parent ASINs. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks.

If you have multiple Amazon seller variation listings, your Amazon brand gets to show up in multiple places on the search result page (SERP)—thus helping your brand get more real estate on Amazon. However, spreading your variations too thinly across multiple parent ASINs can reduce your conversion rates which will lower the rank of your listing on search result pages. It’s a balancing act between casting a wider net versus higher conversions and a higher organic ranking.

We’ll cover what Amazon variation listings are, how to create variation listings, when to split variations into their own product lines, and how to track your efforts using Junglytics.

What Are Amazon Variation Listings?

Amazon variation listings, often referred to as "parent-child" listings, are a powerful tool for sellers looking to offer multiple variations of a product under a single product listing. These variations can include different colors, sizes, styles, or other attributes.

Variation listings streamline the shopping experience for customers by allowing them to easily compare and choose the specific variation they want—all while keeping all the product options neatly organized under one listing. This simplifies the browsing process, improves search visibility, and can lead to increased sales for sellers.

Amazon variation listings are a valuable feature for enhancing product offerings and providing a more user-friendly shopping experience on the platform.

How to Create Amazon Variation Listings

If you have a specific reason to separate a variation into its own standalone listing—like if it's a unique product with distinct attributes—you should follow these general steps:

Locate the Parent-Child Product Listing: Identify the parent-child product listing you want to separate. The child product you wish to separate should be one of the variations under the parent listing.
Create a New Listing: Go to the "Inventory" tab and select "Add a Product.” Choose "Create a new product listing." Enter all the necessary product information for the new standalone listing. This includes title, brand, description, images, price, and other relevant details.
Remove the Variation from the Parent Listing: To separate a variation from the parent listing, you need to delete it from the parent-child relationship. In the "Inventory" tab, find the parent product listing, and click on it to edit. Go to the "Variations" section and select the specific variation (child product) you want to remove. Click "Delete" or "Remove" to remove that variation from the parent listing.
Submit the New Listing for Approval: Once you've created the new standalone listing and removed the variation from the parent listing, you may need to submit the new listing for Amazon's approval, especially if it's a new product that hasn't been listed on Amazon before.
Monitor and Manage the New Listing: After your new standalone listing is approved, you'll need to manage it separately from the original parent-child listing.

How to Use Amazon’s Bulk Upload File Feature

Alternatively, some Amazon sellers prefer bulk uploads to save time and effort. Here’s how to use Amazon’s bulk upload feature:

Prepare Your Data: Fill out all the necessary information for your products in a CSV or Excel spreadsheet.
Download Amazon's Template File: Amazon provides a template file that you should use to structure your data correctly. This template ensures that your data matches Amazon's requirements for bulk uploads. You can usually find this template in the "Inventory" or "Add a Product" section of Seller Central.
Enter Product Data: Open the template file and enter the relevant product information for each listing you want to create or update. This typically includes details such as SKU, product title, price, quantity, condition, and any other required product attributes.
Upload the File: Go to the "Inventory" or "Add a Product" section in Seller Central. Look for the "Bulk Upload" or "Upload File" option. Choose the file you prepared and saved in the previous step. Follow the on-screen instructions to initiate the upload process.
Review and Upload: Amazon will process your file and display a summary of the changes or additions you're about to make. Review this summary carefully to ensure accuracy. Confirm the upload, and Amazon will process your data. Once your bulk upload is error-free and processed successfully, your product listings should be updated or created on the Amazon marketplace.

Amazon Variation Listings: How vs. Why

While we’ve already covered how to create an Amazon variation listing, we haven’t yet covered the why.

Sometimes it’s prudent to launch new products from an existing variation. The goal is to increase the surface area your brand offers to capture more customers. But just because you can launch a variation listing, doesn’t always mean that you should—or at least, that you might want to be strategic about such moves.

Consider the Number of Reviews

Launching a new product without any reviews is a catch-22: Zero reviews make it difficult to garner new sales, but low sales numbers make it tough to get reviews.

To solve this challenge, try launching new products on an existing parent page—even if it’s not a perfect match. This gives your new product a chance to grow in popularity until it has reviews of its own. Once you have enough reviews to help shoppers form an opinion of your product, you can move the product to its own listing.

So, if you sell baby blankets, a hooded baby blanket might merit its own variation listing. But for the time being, you keep it on your existing parent ASIN until you’ve garnered enough positive feedback and customer reviews to launch it as its own listing.

Examine Search Volume

Before you break out the product variation as its own listing, you should consider the search volume for the keywords you’re targeting. Since nearly all Amazon shoppers start their buyer’s journey in a search engine, sellers must target keywords and phrases to draw in buyers.

A customer uses a search term, then lands on a SERP, then selects a product, and goes to its detail page (this is where variation actually lives). New product variation listings can make it easier for shoppers to find exactly what they need.

It only makes sense to launch new products if there’s search traffic for what you’re offering. If this product can’t stand on its own, then use adjacent search terms and keep the variation with the parent product.

Use New Variation Listings to Clarify Products for Shoppers

Sometimes, it can be difficult for shoppers to infer details about a product from an image alone.

If you sell shoes, shoppers can’t tell the difference between a size 8 or a size 12 from the image alone. But they can search “size 12 black Chelsea boots” and find a product variation listing for that exact product and size. In this case (and other cases where it's hard or impossible to tell the difference between variations from the SERP), you should always use a variation listing.

Another example is selling products with different pricing, materials, or uses. It might make sense for you to sell cotton shirts as a different variation than organic cotton tees. You should always use a variation if these differences are not clearly expressed within the listing content. It’s all about helping customers make decisions about what to buy.

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of different color variations of the same product, you can consolidate demand under one parent ASIN to maximize your conversions.

Investigate the Success of Your Amazon Variation Listings With Junglytics

The Amazon seller business intelligence tool, Junglytics, makes it easy to see and measure the success of each product variation in ways that tools like Seller Central simply cannot. By matching powerful data with simplicity, our customizable dashboards invite Junglytics users to track:

Sales trends
Profit
Total advertising cost of sales (TACoS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Traffic
Conversion rates
Amazon fees
ROI
Margin
Organic vs. PPC
Inventory
And +40 other metrics

Alternatively, Amazon sellers and agencies can use Junglytics Assistant (an AI-powered business intelligence tool) to “talk” with their data. Simply give a prompt to the Assistant and watch it deliver an answer in seconds—complete with text copy, graphs, or charts to help illustrate its findings.

A line graph showing the performance of color variations.

This level of unparalleled granularity helps sellers make informed decisions they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. For example, how do you know if your advertising of product variations is giving you the best return on your investment? If you’re advertising a pink version and a blue version of the same product, how do you know which one is giving you the best returns?

‍

Junglytics makes it easy to measure the success of your variations—and see which variations you're spending advertising dollars on and how these ads are performing.

With Junglytics, you can easily see that the blue version has a better ROAS. So, why are you putting ad dollars behind the pink? In this example, it makes sense to focus your investments on the variations with a higher ROAS. This kind of data is very difficult to get elsewhere.

Perhaps you have different goals around revenue, profit, traffic, or advertising. In which case, you’ll put your attention elsewhere. Junglytics empowers Amazon sellers to see what they want, when they want, thanks to our highly customizable business intelligence dashboards.

Your business and product line will evolve and grow to meet customer demand. Use Junglytics to track your data and help you make smarter decisions.

For more thought leadership for Amazon sellers, check out our content and follow me on LinkedIn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Rohlf

Tom has been selling on Amazon since 2014 - He exited his first business (Playerten.com) in 2019 and is the CEO and Co-founder of Cuddle Club an Amazon native children's clothing brand.

Enjoyed this read?

Stay up to date with the Amazon seller news, strategies, and insights sent straight to your inbox!

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Related Articles

How to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2024

How to Use Junglytics for Amazon Seller Analytics

Junglytics Assistant: Pro Tips for Amazon Business Analytics

Junglytics Reports for Amazon Agencies and Businesses

hello@junglytics.com