90 ASINs and falling: why more SKUs is killing your Amazon growth
More SKUs on Amazon feels like risk management. If one product softens, others carry the channel. If a competitor launches against your top seller, you have depth. The logic sounds right until you look at what happens to your AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) budget, your team's attention, and your channel data once the catalog crosses a certain threshold. Past that point, SKU breadth is not a hedge. It is a drag.
Evan Lipsky, Director of Finance and Operations at a suncare brand approaching $15M in annual sales, named the problem directly: "I think we have too many ASINs. I think we have something like 90 ASINs, and I think just, you know, getting some better focus would be really helpful." This is not a brand that is failing on Amazon. By Evan's own account, Amazon is the best-performing channel in the mix. The problem is that a good channel has plateaued, and the catalog is the structural reason why.
What 90 ASINs does to your ad budget
AMS spend is not infinitely divisible without consequence. Every ASIN you support with paid advertising carries its own ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) math: minimum bid floors, competitive CPCs in the category, and a break-even threshold that depends on that product's margin or conversion rate. When you have a handful of core SKUs, you can concentrate budget where the economics work and let the numbers tell you when to pull back. When you have 90, the decision of where to concentrate is the hard work, and most teams either avoid making it or outsource it.
Past a certain ASIN breadth, the outsourcing move tends to be automation. Brands adopt AI-driven AMS allocation tools not because automation is optimal but because the catalog is too large for a small team to manage with manual judgment. The tool spreads budget according to rules it was trained on, but it cannot make the call that a human strategist should make: this ASIN deserves support; that one does not.
Evan flagged this pattern explicitly: "I think we're just relying, almost relying a little bit too much on AI in terms of, like, the AMS allocation tool that's being used. And I just. I think there's a smarter way to do this." The automation is a symptom of the underlying problem, not the cause. The cause is a portfolio that has grown past the point where any team, with any tool, can allocate rationally across all of it.
The harder truth: a black-box allocator running across 90 ASINs is not solving the prioritization problem. It is papering over it. The spend still has to go somewhere, but the choices are no longer deliberate.
When the portfolio gets too wide to read
The second casualty of a bloated ASIN catalog is signal clarity. On a well-rationalized portfolio, you can see which products are growing, which are declining, and why. You can isolate the variables: a price change, a listing update, a competitor launch. With 90 ASINs, the account becomes opaque. The signal that should tell you where to invest is buried in noise from dozens of products you are not actively managing.
The operational result is that SKUs fall without a clear cause, and the team has no capacity to investigate. In Evan's words: "We really should be peaking right now, and I think we're just struggling to find the right ASINs to support. You have some ASINs here. Over here. They're down, like, double digits and they really should not be, given that we're smaller brands."
Double-digit declines during peak season, for a brand with a 10-person team and a single temporary Amazon manager who doesn't have enough time to dedicate to the channel, is what signal loss looks like in practice. The team is not ignoring the problem. They literally cannot see it clearly enough to act on it. There are too many competing priorities across too wide a catalog.
"We really should be peaking right now, and I think we're just struggling to find the right ASINs to support." -- Evan Lipsky, Director of Finance and Operations, a ~$15M suncare brand
This is the structural bind: a wider catalog does not give you more data. It gives you more data that is harder to interpret and harder to act on with a fixed team and a fixed budget.
The rationalization play: how to decide what to cut
ASIN rationalization is not about retreating on Amazon. It is a precondition for growing on Amazon once the portfolio has crossed a breadth threshold where focused resource allocation becomes impossible.
The pattern Evan describes is common at this ceiling: the obvious moves are already in place. Bundles are a priority. AMS and DSP are reasonably handled. The low-hanging fruit is gone. As Evan put it: "I feel like we've probably picked a lot of the low hanging fruit that's been there already, you know, made bundles a priority. We think we have a decent handle on AMS and DSP right now. I think just my biggest concerns, I feel like we're plateauing a little bit and we really need to continue to grow."
When a brand is post-bundle, post-basic-optimization, and still plateauing, the next lever is almost always portfolio focus, not more spend or more tooling.
The rationalization question is: which ASINs are worth defending with real AMS budget, and which ones are occupying space, spend, and attention without producing proportional return? The answer requires looking at a few specific signals for each SKU:
Contribution margin after AMS. Not gross margin. Margin after you account for what it costs to acquire a sale on Amazon for that specific ASIN. If the ACoS required to maintain a defensible BSR (Best Seller Rank) for a product exceeds what the margin can absorb, that SKU is a cost center, not a revenue driver.
Organic rank trajectory. ASINs that hold or improve rank without sustained paid support are worth defending. ASINs that require constant paid intervention just to stay visible are candidates for consolidation or delisting.
Review velocity and rating trend. A declining rating on an ASIN that is also requiring heavy AMS spend is a compounding problem: you are paying to send traffic to a product that is losing conversion quality. That SKU depresses the rest of the account.
Seasonal relevance and shelf life. For category-seasonal products like suncare, an ASIN that does not perform during peak is unlikely to recover. The question is whether it deserves continued AMS support or should be allowed to run down.
The right number of ASINs to actively support is not a fixed formula. It depends on team capacity, budget, and category. But the right test is simpler: for each ASIN currently in your account, could you articulate why it deserves a budget line in the next 90 days? If the honest answer is no, or if the answer depends on the AI allocator making the call for you, that ASIN is a candidate for rationalization.
Before you run the next AMS cycle
For an Amazon channel lead who suspects the portfolio has gotten too wide, the diagnostic starts here:
Pull contribution margin by ASIN, after AMS spend, for the last full season. Rank the list. Note how many ASINs in the bottom quartile are also receiving active paid support.
Identify every ASIN currently in decline that has no clear owner and no documented intervention plan. That list is your immediate rationalization candidates.
Map your total AMS budget against the number of ASINs receiving any spend. If the per-ASIN budget is thin enough that no individual product can build meaningful organic rank, the spread is the problem.
Ask whether the current allocation tool or process could explain, ASIN by ASIN, why each product received the budget it did last month. If it cannot, the process is not making decisions; it is making distributions.
Set a threshold for the number of ASINs your team can actively manage with human judgment. Everything above that threshold is a candidate for consolidation, and the products you choose to keep should be the ones where the math is clear.