There is one feature inside Oink that I know drives some of you crazy. You open your earnings page, you are ready to get to work, and up pops the unavailable product list. Most of you look at it, sigh, and hit skip. I get it. But I built that popup for one very specific reason, and that reason just happened to me again this week — so let me show you exactly why skipping it is costing you commissions.
In This Article
- Where That Unavailable List Actually Comes From
- The Relisting Game Brands Play
- How to Verify a Listing Is Actually Dead
- Finding the Replacement Listing in 60 Seconds
- Why Your Video Does Not Follow the Product
- How I Fix It Inside Oink
- When You Should Just Leave It Alone
- Using Do Not Show Again Correctly
- The Real Reason I Built This
Where That Unavailable List Actually Comes From
First, an important detail a lot of people miss: Oink is not guessing. That list is populated straight from Amazon. Amazon itself is telling you those products are currently unavailable. You can get to the same data yourself — click the three lines in your creator dashboard, head into the products area, and Amazon will hand you roughly a hundred products it has flagged.
Is Amazon always right? No. Sometimes Amazon is behind on its own data and the product is perfectly fine. That is part of why the list feels annoying — a chunk of it is noise. But the signal buried in that noise is worth real money, and Oink’s Unavailable Video Matching exists to surface it instead of making you dig through a hundred ASINs by hand every month.
The Relisting Game Brands Play
Here is the behavior that made me build this in the first place. I noticed certain brands I work with had a habit of killing off a listing and then immediately relisting the exact same product on a brand new ASIN. Same product. Same brand. Fresh listing. No ratings, no reviews, no history.
Why do they do it? Sometimes the reviews went sideways. Sometimes there were five different sellers piled onto one listing and the brand wanted a clean listing they controlled. I genuinely do not always know the reason, and honestly it does not matter. What matters is that it kept happening over and over again, and every single time it happened, my video went dark on a product that was still very much for sale.
How to Verify a Listing Is Actually Dead
Do not take the flag at face value. My workflow takes about fifteen seconds per product:
- Glance at the video thumbnail in Oink to confirm which product you are looking at.
- Click through to the live Amazon listing.
- If you see a price and a buy box, Amazon is just slow — leave it alone.
- If the page says Currently unavailable with no buy box, it is legitimately gone.
That one check separates the noise from the money. The example that prompted this article was a product that had sold respectably for the previous twelve months. Losing it would have been a real hit, and the only reason I caught it is that the popup put it in front of me.
Finding the Replacement Listing in 60 Seconds
Once I confirm a listing is dead, I look in two places. First, Amazon will often show the replacement listing right in the suggestion slot at the top of the dead page — especially if the product has been relisted for a while. That is the easy win.
If that does not surface it, I copy the exact product title, paste it into Amazon search, and hit enter. In the case I just worked through, the very first result was the identical product from the identical brand on a brand new listing with zero reviews. They did exactly what I expected them to do. Sixty seconds of work to recover a product that was already proven to convert.
Why Your Video Does Not Follow the Product
This is the part that costs people money and they never see it happen. Your video does not migrate to the new ASIN. It stays attached to a dead listing that nobody will ever visit again. Meanwhile the new listing — the one actually selling — has no videos on it at all.
Think about what that means. A brand new listing with no reviews, no social proof, and an empty video carousel is one of the softest targets on Amazon. You already have the content. You already know the product converts. The only thing standing between you and that carousel slot is a retag. If you skip the popup, you never find out the slot was open.
How I Fix It Inside Oink
From the unavailable list I click the edit icon on the flagged item, pull the dead ASIN off the video, and tag the new listing in its place. Then I push the video through to my other channels — I use Oink’s YouTube functionality to send it straight over without leaving the page — and hit autosubmit and close so the whole item is done in one pass.
That is the whole loop: verify, find the replacement, retag, submit, close. Four or five products a month handled that way adds up to a meaningful amount of recovered commission over a year, and none of it requires new content.
When You Should Just Leave It Alone
Not every flagged product needs action, and I want to be honest about that because it is most of them. The second product on my list this week was a vacuum cleaner I actually liked. One variation was unavailable, the other was completely fine, and my video still had a proper tag on a live listing. Nothing to fix. I left it.
That is going to be your experience the majority of the time. The list is not asking you to do work on every item — it is asking you to spend fifteen seconds ruling each one out so the one that matters does not slip past you.
Using Do Not Show Again Correctly
Once I have made a decision on a product — retagged it or confirmed it is genuinely dead with nothing to recover — I mark it as do not show again. That is what keeps the popup from feeling like the same nagging list every month. The feature only stays annoying if you skip it instead of clearing it.
Work the list once, mark your decisions, and from then on the popup is only showing you genuinely new problems. That is the difference between a tool that nags you and a tool that watches your storefront for you.
The Real Reason I Built This
I did not build Unavailable Video Matching because I wanted another popup in my own product. I built it because brands move their listings around constantly, my videos kept getting stranded on dead ASINs, and I had no systematic way to catch it. It is the same reason Storefront Cross Check and the Comparison Video Schedule exist — the Amazon Influencer Program quietly erodes your back catalog, and nobody sends you a notification when it happens.
Your existing videos are an asset. Treat them like one. Fifteen seconds per flagged product is the cheapest commission you will ever recover.
If you are not using Oink yet and you have more than a handful of videos on your storefront, this is exactly the kind of leak it was built to plug. Grab it at oinkforinfluencers.com, run the unavailable list once, and see how many of your videos are sitting on listings that no longer exist.
