Promotions stuck? It’s not your offer, it’s what Amazon thinks your product is.

Pretty annoying when you plan a whole promotion strategy, but the system gives you errors.

That’s what happened to a seller who came to us, stuck with error 5885.

Here’s what that means: Amazon flagged their branded ASIN as generic, which means they "could not change a product detail page, or add offers on another seller’s generic product, or copy the product detail page to another store".

Which made no sense because it wasn’t just branded. The actual brand owner was the one making the changes.

And the brand name was clearly displayed on the detail page, and the backend data supported it.

But still, no listing updates. No ability to create promotions.
Just that dreaded error message.

First, we diagnosed the issue, and what we found was something really interesting.

What Amazon calls “branded” isn’t just about having your logo on the product or your name in the backend. There are three deeper internal attributes (that I will dedicate a post to) that need to align perfectly for the system to recognize your ASIN as branded.

In this case, the Amazon Retail team had contributed to one of the attributes, the brand name (which made it look legit), but some of the other internal attributes were off.

To the system, that meant the product was generic, end of the conversation.

So we built a workaround.

We downloaded a new category listing report.
Filled in only the most critical fields.
Then we submitted a full update using the product’s UPC instead of the ASIN,

All this to recreate the listing from scratch, essentially.

That reset the branding attributes.
And it worked.

Listing: unlocked.
Promotions: enabled.
Error 5885: gone.

It sounds simple in hindsight, but I'm not going to lie—it took us some solid tries to make it happen.

That's why understanding how Amazon reads your backend is so important to problem-solving on Amazon

After this case, I think we are sure of some things.

• Just because your listing looks branded doesn’t mean Amazon agrees
• Misaligned attributes can quietly block your growth
• Flat files (done right) can be your best friend
• Solving the issue isn’t about fighting Amazon, it’s about speaking its language

If your listings are misclassified or your promotions are stuck, there’s probably more happening under the hood than you realize.

But what's crazier is that this is just part one of the issue, because even though the error was gone, Amazon still held one attribute.

Want me to break down how brand attribution really works and get more control over this in a future post? Let me know.