Amazon Personally Identifiable Information Data Protection Update—What Feedback Genius Users Need to Know

Learn about Amazon’s recent MWS API update for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and what it means for Feedback Genius users.

Amazon recently updated its MWS API Data Protection policies. These updates are security requirements that limit access to personally identifiable information (PII) for Amazon buyers. These updates affect all service providers that use the MWS API.

This update does not affect the core functionality of Feedback Genius that you depend on for your business. Seller Labs will continue to provide you with the service you expect while maintaining our compliance with Amazon’s data protection policies.

What Amazon Is Changing:

Amazon’s new security requirements now limit access to buyers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Access to information such as buyer name, recipient name, and shipping address are now only granted on a must-have basis, primarily for tax and merchant-fulfilled shipping purposes. All software providers are required to comply with this new standard. We expect to see changes in Seller Central as well to reflect this policy.

What Seller Labs is changing:

In order to remain compliant with Amazon’s new policies, the following changes will be effective Wednesday, August 21, 2019:

• Buyer PII will no longer be available for use within Feedback Genius.
• PII data elements such as buyer name, recipient name, and shipping address will not be searchable or available for use within email messages and templates.
• Feedback Genius messages will continue to send as scheduled.
• PII-related variables will be replaced with the default placeholder text as described below:
  • The following message variables will now populate with placeholder text “Customer”:
    [[buyer-name]], [[first-name]]
  • The following variables will not populate any content and show as blank text:
    [[recipient]], [[ship-address1]], [[ship-address2]], [[ship-city]], [[ship-state]], [[ship-zip]], [[ship-country]]
• Seller Labs will not be proactively replacing customer messages beyond removing the variables stated above.
• Our email templates have been updated to ensure they are compliant with Amazon.

What you need to do:

Login to Feedback Genius and review your email templates to make sure they read well with the variables removed. You may need to modify your existing messages; we recommend using greetings such as “Hello there” or “Hey there” in place of the missing variables. This is also a good time to review your email templates to make sure they work with your current branding and style.

As with any Amazon update, we’re here to help you. Please contact us with your questions and concerns or email us at success@sellerlabs.com.