I’ll be honest with you: the unavailable products alert inside Oink is probably the most annoying feature I’ve ever built. You go to your earnings page, you’re trying to get your numbers, and this thing pops up telling you a handful of your tagged products are no longer available. Most people close it. A lot of people mark it “do not show again” the first time they see it. I get it. But I built it for one very specific reason, and that exact reason just happened to me again this week — so let me show you why skipping it is quietly costing you commissions.
Table of Contents
- Where This Data Actually Comes From
- The Real Problem: Brands That Relist Products
- How I Work Through the List in About 60 Seconds
- The Case That Proves It
- When to Just Leave It Alone
- Why This Matters More Than You Think
- Watch the Full Walkthrough
Where This Data Actually Comes From
First thing worth clearing up, because people ask me this constantly: Oink isn’t making this list up. That list of unavailable products is populated from Amazon itself. If you click the three lines in your creator dashboard and dig into the products section, Amazon will show you roughly a hundred products it has flagged. Oink just surfaces it where you’ll actually see it instead of burying it three menus deep.
And yes — sometimes Amazon isn’t up to date with its own data. You’ll click through to a listing that Amazon swears is dead and find it live and priced. That happens. For the most part, though, the products on that list are genuinely gone, and that’s the part that should get your attention.
The Real Problem: Brands That Relist Products
Here’s the reason I built this thing. I noticed I had certain brands I work with that had a habit of killing off a listing and then turning right around and relisting the exact same product under a brand new ASIN. Same product. Same brand. Brand new listing, zero reviews, zero ratings.
I don’t know their reasoning every time. Sometimes the reviews were low and they wanted a clean slate. Sometimes there were five different sellers sitting on one listing and the brand wanted a listing of its own. Whatever the motivation, it kept happening over and over again.
And here’s what that does to you as an Amazon influencer: your video does not carry over. The listing dies, the new listing goes up clean with no video carousel on it at all, and the content you made — the content that was actually selling — is now attached to a dead page. You don’t get a notification. You don’t get a heads up. Your commissions just quietly stop.
How I Work Through the List in About 60 Seconds
This is the whole process, and it’s faster than people assume:
- Look at the video first. Confirm the content tagged to that product is actually yours and actually correct.
- Click through to the listing. Is it genuinely unavailable? If the page loads with a price on it, Amazon is just running behind on its own data and you can move on.
- If it’s truly dead, check the replacement slot. A lot of times, if a product has been replaced and it’s been that way for a while, Amazon will show you the replacement right there on the page.
- If there’s no replacement shown, search the product title. Copy the exact title, paste it into Amazon search, hit enter. This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that pays.
- Retag your content to the new listing. In Oink, click the edit icon, pull the dead product off, and add the live one in from your browse history.
The Case That Proves It
The product that triggered this whole video was from a brand that has done this to me before. The listing was flagged unavailable, I clicked through, and sure enough — currently unavailable, nothing there. Which stung, because that product had done a perfectly respectable job of selling for me over the previous twelve months.
So I took the product title, searched it, and there it was. Literally the exact same product, from the exact same brand, on a fresh listing with no ratings and no reviews. They did exactly what I expected them to do.
Two minutes of work in Oink — edit, pull the dead ASIN, add the new one from browse history — and my video is back on a live, selling listing. The new listing had no videos on it at all, which means I wasn’t just recovering my old position, I was walking into an empty carousel. That’s not a small thing.
When to Just Leave It Alone
I want to be fair here, because most of the time this is what you’ll actually run into. The second product on my list was a vacuum cleaner I genuinely like. Flagged unavailable. I clicked through and found that one variation was unavailable but the other was completely fine, and my tag was still sitting on a healthy listing. In that case I left it alone. The dead variation is just dead, and there’s nothing to recover.
That’s what the “do not show again” option is for. Once you’ve made a decision on a product, mark it and it stops cluttering your list. The point isn’t to obsess over every flagged item — it’s to make sure the handful that are recoverable actually get recovered.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Everybody in this business is chasing new content. New products, new videos, new uploads. Meanwhile there’s a pile of content you already made, already ranked, already earning — and some percentage of it is bleeding out because a brand shuffled a listing and nobody told you.
Recovering one good product takes about two minutes. Making a brand new video that performs at that level takes considerably longer than two minutes. The math is not complicated.
That’s the entire reason this feature exists, and it’s why I’d rather annoy you with a popup than let you find out six months later that a third of your catalog is pointing at graveyards. While I’m working through the list, I’ll also push the recovered content straight over to YouTube using Oink’s YouTube functionality and run autosubmit and close on anything that’s finished — so the cleanup pass doubles as a distribution pass.
Watch the Full Walkthrough
If you’re not using Oink yet, this is one of a stack of features built specifically to stop Amazon influencers from leaving money on the table. You can grab it at oinkforinfluencers.com. And if you are using it — next time that popup shows up, give it sixty seconds before you close it.
