AMZN: Buyable and Searchable Scraper

Summary:

In my role as a category manager at AMZN, I created a simple tool for category managers to quickly audit their product listings. Category managers have thousands and thousands of products and vendors in each category. In emerging categories, such as mine (Tools and HI), many of the products had underlying issues that were hard to find at scale.

The common practice was to use traffic, conversion, and revenue data to triage where problems were. If there was a drop or increase, then something is going on. The issue with this is it's difficult to know whether the output metrics are better or worse than they should be. So I made a point and shoot spreadsheet tool to check key inputs. Specifically, if a list of products were: 

• Active in the catalog

• Had a detail page on site

• Had an active offer 

• If the product was buyable for customers

• If the product was searchable on the platform

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Here's a copy in google sheets if you wish to peruse. I circulated the tool across the organization and category managers started auditing their inputs at scale, complimenting the outputs based triaging. The tool was adopted by every department and added to the internal category manager wiki. It was small win - but as a strident marketer I know once said: "think big, act small, change the world".