Let's Talk Shoes: Amazon's New Shoe Size Requirements

Amazon’s taking another step towards improving its customer experience.

Starting August 30, Amazon will be enforcing new requirements in the footwear category. Sellers will have to submit a slew of new attributes for every shoe listing added to its US marketplace or risk having their ASINs removed.

The end goal? To clean up the dropdown sizing menu on shoe listings so that customers aren’t confused by U.S. versus U.K. sizes, “W” versus “B” width. (And, of course, to get more people buying shoes on Amazon.)

Why is this a big deal for Amazon shoe sellers?

Here’s the good news: Sellers and customers both benefit from the change in the long run. Aside from receiving more traffic to your shoe listings, if you’re a reseller, you’ll have more high-quality competitive ASINs to choose from.

Now for the bad news: listing shoes to Amazon is about to get a lot harder. Between sending a dozen more item specifics for every shoe that you sell and following Amazon’s formatting rules, setting up a single ASIN may take exponentially longer.

Before these changes, you could get away with formatting shoe sizes however way you wanted. For example, you could input “7.5 (M) US” as a size.

Now, you must split up width and size unit must into two different attributes. Amazon will only accept the U.S. size for any shoe on its U.S. marketplace. And though “7” or “7.5” may work, Amazon will not accept “seven” or “7 ½” as valid sizes.

Amazon has already emailed a spreadsheet of acceptable shoe sizes to U.S. marketplace sellers—and the list goes on forever.

These new standards apply to all existing and new ASINs. That means by August 30, you must:

1. Create a plan to update your shoe listings. After August 30, Amazon will likely remove ASINs that aren’t compliant with their new standards.
2. Build a move-forward plan for standardizing shoe sizes across all of your future ASINs. Failure to send complete or correct information will cause your upload will fail and/or prompt Amazon to remove your shoe size or ASIN from display.
3. If you’re a reseller, you should identify ASINs that have cluttered dropdowns and may therefore be removed or need updating in the upcoming months. Consider how that’ll affect your sourcing strategy moving forward.  

Note: Amazon maintains the final word over how sizes appear on your ASINs. So, if you and another seller both list men’s shoes with the same size, Amazon’s shoe size standardization logic may convert the two sizes into one universal value to prevent confusion.

What, exactly, are Amazon’s new shoe size requirements?

Amazon is requiring the following details for every shoe listing on its US marketplace.

• Target gender: male, female, unisex
• Age range description: specific size ranges for the intended age group of your shoe  
• Footwear size system: only U.S. shoe sizes will be shown in the U.S. marketplace; any non-US sizes must be sent together with the U.S. conversion (Amazon will not convert sizes for you)
• Footwear age group: infant, toddler, little kid, big kid, adult, all
• Footwear size class: numeric, alpha or age values or range
• Footwear width: medium, wide, narrow
• Footwear size: values depending on footwear size class

Certain circumstances will also require additional information.

• Footwear gender: Required when footwear age group is set to Adult (women, men, both). This value may be the same as target gender.
• Footwear to size: Required when foot size class is set to Numeric Range, Alpha Range or Age Range. This makes it possible to display a size range like 7-8.
• Unisex values: Required when target gender is set to Unisex and footwear age group is set to adult. You will have to provide the size for each gender, like 8 US Women / 6 US Men.
• Brand-specific exceptions: Certain brands, like Converse, you must provide the non-US size and the US conversion to successfully list your product. Specific Converse-brand shoes require you to use “men” as the gender and update bullet points with “Represented in Men's" sizing. For Women's, order 2 sizes up. For example, ‘4 M US Men’ is equivalent to ‘6 M US Women.’”

Feeling overwhelmed and need help?

We’re here to help. Our team saw this change coming and got a head start in preparing for the update.

When you create a shoe ASIN from Zentail, you’ll only need to provide five standard fields in addition to a SMART Type. Zentail’s AI-technology will infer the rest of the attributes for you, keeping you compliant to Amazon's strict rules while cutting down time-to-list to a matter of minutes.  

Best of all, once you’ve loaded this information into Zentail, you’ll be able to list your SKU to other marketplaces like Google and Walmart Marketplace in a few simple clicks—no extra work required.

For existing ASINs, use QuickEdit to edit listings in bulk. Simply export a spreadsheet of all your footwear SKUs with the new required fields, then import your data back into Zentail.

Don’t let Amazon’s footwear requirements set you back

Subtle as they may seem, Amazon’s footwear updates are impossible to ignore. Zentail will help you stay compliant by taking care of the backend work for you, including formatting data feeds and keeping listing errors at bay. Contact us about staying compliant and leveraging Zentail’s automation to get ahead.