*@#&! Amazon went and "improved" the Seller App

Selling on Amazon APIs and apps
1

Don’t know how many of you’ve noticed, but sometime yesterday (at least for me), the seller app now displays the NEW price on the results page immediately after scanning an item (barcode or image search), rather than the lowest USED price.

For booksellers like me, this means multiple additional clicks to get down to the used pricing information and muchhhhhh much more time to go through a lot of books for keepers. This already cost me $ yesterday when I picked up a bunch of books at a sale, only to realize the change when I got home to list them. Beware!

I don’t post on NSFE, so leave it to others to complain there.

Initial results from scanning a product:

Screenshot 2023-09-14 at 10.07.14 AM
Screenshot 2023-09-14 at 10.07.14 AM750×1334 87.1 KB

Actual lowest prices 2 clicks into those results:

Screenshot 2023-09-14 at 10.11.01 AM
Screenshot 2023-09-14 at 10.11.01 AM750×1334 138 KB

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2

You should still be able to the change the product search setting to show only used not new.

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3

@Tandi you mean after clicking into the results and selecting the Used or Any tabs, right? The default is the New tab. Again, multiple additional clicks vs just seeing the important info on the initial results page. Otherwise, please let me know where to change this setting.

For booksellers this really sucks. Most books have a New price well over a seller’s minimum threshold for selling an item, so to see where the floor is for the Used prices you’re competing against it’s multiple clicks.

No reason for this change, imo. I can’t imagine many people using the app to scan products are doing so to resell New product. Maybe I’m wrong on that.

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4

On the main page I can click the 3 bars on the top left and hit the gear button then go to Product Search and select used / unselect new. Give that a try.

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@Tandi Thank you for that info. I never knew that was there. Alas, even when I remove “New” from the conditions shown, it still returns the New price on the initial results page. All your suggestion gets me is removing the New tab if I ever want to compare New/Used. Bummer… thanks though.

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6

That feeling from when you thought you were on a roll finding all these great deals to realizing that it felt too good to be true because it wasn’t.

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Sadly, plenty want to list as New, so…

This is probably why.A little bit of “hostile (software) architecture”.

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8

If they did it on purpose to trick sellers into buying things to sell to Amazon buyers at a loss, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

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It’s just like seller central when they made all the changes.
Everything is now 1,2, or 3 clicks away.

The problem is the people programming these pages & apps don’t actually use them on a daily basis.

They don’t feel all the time wasted, like we do, with all the additional clicks/steps.

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10

They’re doing it on purpose so you hire a SAS Core rep to help you with all that stuff.

11

Defective and dysfunctional and discouraging by design

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12

D & D & D by D … Nice!

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13

Abbreviated as 4D or D4.

Marilyn

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14

We call this “Broken As Designed”, or by the acronym, that very few people know is an acronym - “B.A.D.”

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15

Well I submitted a case to Support on the changed behavior. Actually had to resubmit as they requested an ASIN, of course :roll_eyes:

16

Hilarious and exactly what I expected, sadly. I sent a 2 step email on how to reproduce the issue on the App. Here’s their reply:

Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,

Thank you for contacting us. I am Avinash and I will be glad to assist you with your issue.

We understand your concerned regarding Search and scan issue. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your continued support and patience. We empathize with your frustration in this regard.

Searchability is generally a yes or no issue; either an item is searchable on our website or it is not. How easily found an item is within the search results is a separate question and there is a set number of things that a seller can do to improve how their item is filtered in searches.

The Keyword help to search product:

Customers must be able to find products before they can buy them. One way to find products is to search by keywords, which are matched to product information such as title and description and generic keywords that sellers provide for a product. Relevant and complete information for a product can increase a product’s visibility and sales.

Actually how amazon work is:

  1. Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, buyers who shop on Amazon use words or browse refinements to find what they’re looking for.

  2. Amazon takes steps to try to present customers with the closest match to what they’re looking for based on those terms that they’re using and where in our virtual store they’ve gone to look for products as well as some of our own internal logic based on buyer behavior.

  3. Sellers can help by ensuring that their products are classified accurately and that their product information like title, brand, product description, and other attributes are all accurate and compliant with detail page rules.

  4. Any products we find that do not comply with our listing or search rules may be suppressed from search until the quality issues are resolved.

For more information please find the help page link given below:

Optimize your product discoverability:

Accurately classifying your products:

You have been truly patient with this regard and we are grateful for you.

We once again thank you for your cooperation and have a great day!

To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.

Were you satisfied with the support provided?

Yes No

Thank you for selling with Amazon,

SADARAM S.
Amazon.com Seller Support

17

LOL you can’t empathize with that which you can’t even understand.

@UserID did you open that case with SS or the app team?

18

You’re better off trying to find a 3rd party app to use for this purpose rather than waste time continuing down this route.

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19

This app worked perfectly for me for nearly 10 years running. I go head to head with book scanners with their barcode hardware and 3rd party software and constantly out source them using just the Amazon app (hint it shows results for items w/o a barcode, which is substantial usually). I also do NOT FBA after a trial years ago and for many other reasons. As far as I’m concerned this tool, as it functioned 5 days ago, was perfect and needed no tinkering from Amazon. Naturally, it’s a PITA now… really surprised it lasted as long as it did I guess.

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20

Latest reply from support. Ftards…

Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,

My name is Donna, I’m a Selling Partner Support Representative, and I’m more than glad to assist you with your case today.

We understand that you are contacting us regarding an issue with Amazon Seller Application. We see the urgency of this for your business and our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this could have caused. We are here to assist you.

For us to further investigate, we will request a basic troubleshooting first:

  • Uninstall then reinstall the application
  • Ensure that the application is in the latest version

Once reinstalled, please let us know if same issue persists. If so, kindly provide:

  • Device and model you’re using
  • Screenshot of error with timestamp
  • URL of page (if applicable)

Thank you for your kind cooperation.

Thank you for selling with Amazon,

Donna C.

1 Like