Sellers are pleading with Amazon to reconsider its decision to remove “irrelevant” variation themes between September 2 and November 30 as they brace for what they fear will be a major impact during the all-important holiday shopping season. (See update below.)
In an announcement a week ago, Amazon informed sellers:
“Between September 2, 2025, and November 30, 2025, we will remove variation themes from our product templates that aren’t relevant or frequently used, to simplify your listing experience. We’ve already marked the impacted themes as Deprecated: Do Not Use in the product template Variation Theme Name field.”
Amazon product variations are established using parent-child relationships. Variation themes are the relationship between the parent and child products (for example, a product variation listing for a lipstick may have a “color” theme).
Amazon’s announcement about removing variation themes garnered over 80 comments. One seller wrote, “Everyone being upset at this is kinda funny though, they gave us like 5 years to stop using the deprecated themes. If you’re still using them it’s kinda on you.”
But that sentiment was in the minority. Ecommerce consultants also expressed concern about the impact of the changes to variations on Amazon sellers. Chris McCabe, owner and CEO of ecommerceChris and former Amazon Investigative Specialist, posted about the changes and warned sellers in a LinkedIn post, “If you don’t fix your affected families, Amazon will split the child ASINs into stand-alone listings.” McCabe described the consequences as follows:
- Splitting your reviews
- Separating product ranks
- Lower traffic to your ASINs
- And potentially wasted ad spend
Like other consultants, he advised sellers to audit their variation families now. In another LinkedIn post about the need to act sooner rather than later, a consultant replied that when rebuilding variations, sellers should keep a record of their ASIN relationships – “Amazon’s flat files can get messy, and you don’t want to rebuild from scratch twice,” he said.
An Amazon moderator provided the following update on Thursday:
“Thank you to all of the sellers posting your feedback and questions on this thread. This update is intended to remove variation options that are redundant or appear multiple times in order to simplify your listing experience. We appreciate your feedback, and have shared it with our partner team who will look into updating the removal list based on your feedback. We won’t remove any variation themes before providing another update here.”
But a seller said that was “injecting uncertainty into an already tense situation” since they weren’t sure whether to make the changes now and risk Amazon shifting the approved variations, or wait and risk having less time to make the necessary changes.
Update 8/26/2025: Amazon announced an update about variation-theme removals today, announcing the following:
Update to irrelevant or redundant variation theme removal
On August 20, 2025, we announced that irrelevant or redundant variation themes would be removed from our listing experiences. These variation themes are marked as “Deprecated: Do Not Use” in our new product templates. We also published a list of variation themes and product types affected by this change.
This change was only intended to impact variation themes that were not needed. We’ve revised the list to only remove variation themes that had no sales in the past 12 months. Additionally, we won’t remove any versions of critical variation themes like size, color, and style for applicable “Product Types”.
Your existing variation families will continue to operate normally, with no disruption to sales. If you want to update them, you can do so at any time. Child ASINs will stay active even if you choose to update your variation themes.
To view the updated list of variation themes we’re removing, go to Variation themes planned for removal.
For more information about variation themes and how to manage variations, go to Variation relationship FAQ.
We appreciate your feedback and remain committed to providing you with a best-in-class listing experience.