What to Expect When Selling on Amazon.com – The Drill Down: Accessory Relationships

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ccessory relationships – what does that mean? Accessory relationships are a method for cross-selling your products on Amazon.com. The use of the word accessory stems from the early days of the Selling on Amazon program when the apparel category crafted a way to connect a belt to a pant listing and a blouse to a skirt listing. The term carried through as new categories launched and here we are today. What it means is that this is a method to “accessorize” your products in order to show buyers that you have other related items.

This merchandising option is not available in all categories since each has been designed a bit differently. Also, it may display differently in one category vs. another. Use the table below to determine if your category displays accessory relationships. Accessories also involve a number of logic steps to connect products, so we recommend that you try one or two to see how they will work for you. You’ll use a specially formatted inventory template file to upload these products, so the key to success is planning the relationships between your products ahead of time.

Accessory Relationships work in the following categories:

Apparel	Auto Accessories	Beauty
Camera & Photo	Gourmet Food	Grocery (Food & Beverage)
Health	Home	Jewelry
Musical Instruments	Office Products	Pet Supples

Frequently asked questions about this feature:

1. Why use the accessory relationships?

• Accessory relationships increase exposure for your products and promote additional purchases.
• Accessory relationships between products help customers find complementary products for the product they are viewing. For example, a T-shirt might include links to matching shorts, or even to a larger T-shirt.
• Customers often want to purchase multiple products from the same merchant and accessory relationships help customers find multiple items from one merchant.

2. Where do I manage these relationships?

• Accessory relationships are built using the same inventory templates available in Seller Central for product data upload.
• The information about how to set up these relationships is in Seller Central at: Creating Accessory Relationships (You will need to log-in to your account to access the link).
• You’ll be providing a subset of information to identify these products – titles, SKUs and the fact that they will be related as accessories. An example of the data for adding two or more accessories to a single product:

SKU	Title	Parent SKU	Relationship Type
101	Lip Glace
102	Lip Pencil	101	accessory
103	Lip Kisses	101	accessory
104	Lip Silk	101	accessory
103		102	accessory

o Please note:  You cannot establish accessory relationships between products using the Add a Product feature. If you want to take advantage of accessory relationships, you must use inventory templates to create product feeds that you then upload to Seller Central. See Building an Inventory File for more information.

3. How can I set up a feed where I indicate one specific product as an accessory under multiple different products?

• This is a separate upload from your core product upload.
• You may be connecting products to each other in one-way, two-way or multi-way relationships: meaning a product is related to another in just one direction, not reciprocal; a product is related to another and this goes both ways; many products are set up with relationships to many others.
• To start, build the simplest relationship to test and get a sense of the process. Using the instructions in Seller Central you’ll learn to chart out a list of products by SKU, and a list of what products will be related to each. It can be somewhat circular, so start carefully!

4. For the products that are accessories, do they also stand alone as their own products and are these special listings?

• Yes, the products do stand alone as well.
• No, the products are not listed differently – they are your standard product listings. What is special is the way you will think about cross-referencing them for potential cross-selling.
• In fact, these products must be uploaded as sellable products BEFORE they are available to establish these relationships.

5. Does the accessory display show only our own cross promotion products or will other merchants show up there?

• Since you are establishing this relationship between products, it will be only your products that are linked in the display.
• Where there are multiple sellers, your relationships may not always display based on what seller’s product is being featured on the detail page.

The instructions in Seller Central provide a great overview. Open a blank inventory template and chart out your product relationships. For example, if you have a crib and there are special rails to go with it, you would probably connect those is a two-way relationship. If the buyer finds the rails, it shows the crib as a related product. If they find the crib, they see the rails as a related product. This way they get the rails that go with that crib. It could be one-way if you only want them to find the rails after they find the crib.

Another example would be something like sports fan products. If there is a team that a buyer prefers and you have a number of products for that team, you would relate those in a multi-product accessory relationship where every product is an accessory of every other product. You might have a hat and a t-shirt that are related to a coat, so that each of the other two is displayed as an accessory to the third product.

Or in health and personal care you might have shampoo, conditioner and other products in the same scent that go together. You get the point…

That’s the high level “why” about accessory relationships and a bit about how to think about starting. The best recommendation, again, is to go try it out! Next we’ll be demystifying how to approach the Amazon product classification process.

Cathi C.