GENIAL INDUSTRIAL GROUP INC.
What is following-an-existing-listing (FAEL)?
In the case that you are trying to sell a product, and the item is equivalent in all product descriptive aspects to an existing product being sold by other seller(s), your participation of joining the same listing and competing with existing sellers for “buy box” is called following-an-existing-listing (FAEL). All you need to do in this case are just defining the product pricing and setting the product inventory without initiating a brand new listing.
Why is FAEL (if not encouraged) by Amazon?
On most other e-Commerce platforms, seller often needs to create their own listings for the products they are trying to sell. How come Amazon allows FAEL? It’s Amazon's belief that as soon as a listing is created, instead of the seller, amazon owes the listing. Based on this principle, the possibility of FAEL helps to consolidate the number of listings of the exact same product, which in turn help to optimize the shopping experience of Amazon customers. It’s been reported that excessive listing repetition has caused listings on other e-Commerce platforms, such as eBay, to be blocked/de-privileged by search engines like Google.
Benefits for buyers of FAEL:
With over-whelmed amount of listings being more consolidated, information pulled for a single search is much narrowed. In the mean while, for the same listing, it allows the buyer to choose from multiple sellers, providing better user experience, faster ordering, and of course higher user satisfaction.
Benefits for sellers of FAEL:
The most immediate benefit is that product posting process gets simplified to the extreme: there is no cumbersome listing process, whereas, FAEL allows higher visibility of a certain listing, along with higher volume of reviewing which is essentially correlated to the volume of sales.
Therefore, FAEL is absolutely a shortcut for sellers who target to accomplish high sales volume in a relatively short time period.
Risks of FAEL:
The competition among sellers pursuing the same listing could result in unhealthy price competition, which could damage the profit margin, and could even cause selling at a loss in certain scenarios.
Due to the negligence based on the available information when the upfront listing investigation is carries out, FAEL may cause brand infringement. This could trigger complaints by brand owners, further resulting in selling privilege to be restricted or removed by Amazon given that Amazon regulates brand infringement with extremely high scrutiny. At the same time, FAEL may also lead to high costumer complaining in some cases where a certain product does contain misalignments with the detailed product/packaging description of the original listing.
Last but not the least, if a certain existing listing is removed or modified, there is a chance that inventory will be critically backlogged.
