Retag Butler — replace out-of-stock ASINs across your published content

What Retag Butler does

Every Amazon creator eventually has content that points to dead ASINs — products that went out of stock, got delisted, or were swapped by the brand. Each dead ASIN is a broken affiliate link that costs you commission. Retag Butler scans your storefront, finds those rows, looks up replacement ASINs in the same category, and tags them.

Critical detail: Retag Butler adds replacement tags alongside the stale ones rather than removing the stale tag. The original product history stays intact (good for analytics), but the link now points to something a viewer can actually buy.

Before you start

• Your Amazon Creator storefront URL (auto-filled from Settings → Storefront Scan).
• Signed-in Amazon Creator Hub session in Chrome.
• Storefront Butler synced recently — Retag Butler reads which rows are flagged unavailable from that sync.
• Optional: a Creators API key in API Integrations — used for higher-quality replacement suggestions.

Choosing your mode

Two run modes:

• Review (recommended for first run) — Retag Butler finds candidates and shows you each replacement. You approve or reject one by one. Slower, but you see exactly what it's about to do.
• Auto — anything above the Auto-tag threshold similarity score gets tagged automatically; anything below still goes to review. Fastest for large catalogs.

Start with Review. After 10-20 swaps you'll have a feel for what "good replacement" means at your similarity setting.

The two similarity thresholds (these confuse people)

There are two scores that look related but do different things:

• Min title similarity — controls which candidates show up in the review queue at all. Default 50. Lower it to see more candidates (some weak); raise it to see only obvious matches.
• Auto-tag threshold — controls which candidates Auto mode writes without asking you. Default 70. Anything below the auto threshold falls through to manual review even in Auto mode.

Rule of thumb: keep min similarity at 50 (you want to see weak candidates so you can reject them), and pick an auto threshold based on how trusting you are — 80 if you're cautious, 70 by default, 60 if you have a lot of catalog to clear.

Running your first pass

1. Open Retag Butler under Amazon Butler.
2. Confirm the storefront URL.
3. Pick Review mode.
4. Leave thresholds at default (50 / 70).
5. Click Run.

A Chrome window opens, walks your storefront, identifies unavailable ASINs, and queries replacements. For each candidate, you'll see the dead product, the proposed replacement, and a similarity score. Click Tag this to approve or Skip to reject.

Tuning over time

• detectParentOnly — when on, Retag Butler only flags entire parent-ASIN families as dead, not child variants. Reduces false positives at the cost of missing some real swaps.
• mobileLens — uses Amazon's visual-similarity matcher (slower but smarter for visually-distinct products like home decor). Off by default; turn on if title-similarity is giving weak matches in your category.
• skipRetaggedWithinDays — defaults to 7. Once you've retagged a row, Retag Butler won't reconsider it for that many days. Stops you from going in circles.
• Scheduler — set a daily or weekly cadence so Retag Butler runs on its own. The Auto mode + scheduler combo is set-and-forget for established storefronts.

Where the data goes

Retag history is logged per row in your preseed cache. The Retag Log panel shows every swap, with timestamps and similarity scores, filterable.

Common gotchas

• "No candidates found" — probably means Storefront Butler hasn't flagged any rows as unavailable yet. Re-sync Storefront Butler.
• Replacement looks wrong (e.g. unrelated category) — raise min similarity to 60-65 to filter out weak matches.
• "Already-tagged this within cooldown" banner — Retag Butler is honoring skipRetaggedWithinDays. Lower it or wait.
• Tagging fails silently — Creator Hub session expired. Re-sign in via the spawned Chrome window.

Related

• Storefront Butler tutorial — provides the unavailable-flag signal Retag Butler uses.
• Relink Butler tutorial — for swapping the affiliate link provider across content, not the underlying product.