OK… Now I think I have seen it all.
I get the reason for the policy but glitchmass has come very early. Every one of our extra discount for subscribe and save & extra discount for reorder coupons blew up due to this policy. How the hell does this new policy apply to EXTRA DISCOUNTS on products that haven’t seen a price change since their creation?
This has to be a glitch. It’s with SAS now but I have a feeling they are going to make me open a case / escalate it.
My guess is this is in response to some sellers making fraudulent promotions by raising the price then doing a “promotion” to lower the price down to what it used to be.
Yea, 100%. That’s the idea but these specific coupon types:
Save an extra $ / % on the current S&S price / Save an extra $ / % for those that have ordered before should not be a part of this.
Am I crazy???
I could see it if prices were increased. Ours have not.
This has to be the product of not testing a change. Has to be
If you got yours removed and you didn’t increase prices then yeah it’s just a glitch.
The last one …
Minimum/maximum discount issue: Update your sale price discount percentage to be between the minimum (5% off) and maximum (50% off) to make this product eligible.
A coupon that reduces the price below the 50% off of the either the “was price” or the recent lowest price will make the coupon not meet the requirements.
So we read this as if you had an item that sold for $40.00 and you had it on sale for $25.00 (then took it off) and now wanted to run a 25% coupon on the $40.00 which resulted in $30.00, then this coupon won’t work because it wasn’t lower than the $25.00 sale price prior to the coupon. You would be forced to run a coupon of at least 38% so that the coupon price would be below the $25.00 sale price.
Agree
Thus the reason for our speculation above …
Ok, so let’s look at this scenario.
Pricing unchanged in 2 years:
Reg Price - $17.99 - Verified and sells at this price elsewhere / has strikethrough on the listing.
Sale Price - $15.99
Subscribe & Save Price - 5% off - $15.19 - Set up for years, unchanged
Coupon - Save an extra 10% when you subscribe - $13.67 - Coupon been running fine for weeks until the 12th.
You see something in the policy that would suppress this? I will be the first to admit that I’m not the absolute sharpest tool in the shed but I really don’t understand how this can be blocked.
This almost feels like Amazon doesn’t want sellers to discount products anymore. Goes along nicely with ineligibility for deals that we are experiencing since Jan. Listings we ran best deals on for years, we can’t anymore. Talking about stuff that sells 7K units a month and has grown since it was listed.
I don’t see why they wouldn’t want deals. You’re giving Amazon customers a discount, and in some cases paying Amazon a fee for the privilege.
This is somewhat unrelated, but lol at this coupon issue on NSFE:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/59942ee7-cc05-4a7d-a6a6-88ba92a416b3
Apparently they put up 2 coupon offers that Amazon’s system interpreted in a way to make the product free. Buy 2, get 50% off, and Buy one get one free. So the buy 2 get 50% off gives 50% off the FULL price of both products, and then the buy one get one free again gives a discount of the FULL price of the 2nd product.
Apparently their offer for free stuff went viral and they got a ton of orders right away, and they’re trying to accuse customers of defrauding them, hah! This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone who had multiple promos that weren’t set up correctly and gotten screwed big time.
More referral fees?
Having items on the marketplace that sell on their own merits instead of buyers being tricked into buying them with discounts / fake discounts - a thinning the herd tactic?
Making it harder to promote with traditional methods to force sellers into spending more on PPC? - Amazon’s CASH COW…
If what we are seeing really isn’t a glitch, I’m shocked. Might as well get rid of the S&S extra discount coupon type and others because nobody in their right mind would go that deep.
If this is the case I think they would just hike deal fees, or charge you an additional % of sales while the deal’s active.
Yea BUT, that’s in your face from Amazon. You know how sellers react when fees go up.
By Amazon manipulating things behind the scenes to achieve some set goal, how can a seller complain.
Most just shrug their shoulders and say I guess we can’t do this anymore for XYZ reason and move on.
Glad they are finally admitting some of this. I think it’s been two years since I’ve been educating people that you have to have an item sold at the normal price for a coupon to work and told by so many that I’m wrong even seller support had no idea why coupons wouldn’t work.
Yea, I’m glad too but they either really messed this up or they took it too far.
Amazon has a coupon type for Subscribe and Save. It doesn’t work anymore.
So either fix this ■■■■ or get rid of the coupon type.
It doesn’t work anymore. - I lied - It still works great for Amazon 1P listings and their private label.
I’m guessing the latter, as yours is not the first mention of similar problems I’ve seen over in the NSFE ever since the 4Mar24 News Headline “New coupon pricing requirements” (link) brooked dawn.
See… Here’s the problem… This 
is a 3rd party seller of a brand. Not 1P. Doing exactly what we were doing. They have a list price, they have a sale price, they have the strikethrough, they have S&S on, and they have added a 10% on top coup. AND IT’S RUNNING!
So why isn’t ours?
Here’s a condensed list of our problems so everyone can sob with me…
As you know, I keep a close eye on our competitors and they never seem to have these issues. We are now having issues on Walmart too. Being told our best seller isn’t eligible to display for a certain advertised KW - it’s not relevant. LOL, I won’t get into specifics but let’s say it’s a Vitamin C 500mg product. In this scenario the keyword that’s wished to be promoted (sponsored) would be Vitamin C 500mg. 
Is that why I get almost no bites for my coupons? The only reason I create coupons is to move items with no sales. If it’s selling, I don’t need to discount the price.
I’ve found the solution to this steaming pile of ■■■■ new coupon policy. Whether it’s a glitch or intentional (I believe it’s intentional) - you can no longer have a list / sale price / strategy, even if it’s verified with the strikethrough and run coupons with less than a stupidly high discount.
The only way to fix this is to make your list / MSRP your sale price. Then it will work.
The new program is referencing list not sale price and presumes you recently jacked your price up and then put it on sale and suppresses the offer.
Here’s something funny though… When you first set the coupon up, it will go live for a few hours regardless and then die. You can then go back in, bump the end date up a day or back a day, hit save, and it will go live again in 30 mins for ~2 hours.
This is just how bad Amazon’s programming is. It’s really astonishing.
If this is how Amazon wants this to work intentionally, then why the hell didn’t they tell us? No more list / MSRP / Sale pricing allowed if you want to run a coupon, period!
14 words is all it would take to explain all the nightmares that are going on right now in the selling community over this vs. the book they wrote on the policy.
Yeah, same… Oh well, now I’ll just pull stuff and rework it sooner vs trying this. It was a good way to get new stuff moving too. I’d rather offer a discount on the first sale to get things started…
Here’s an update on this…
Very useful info from SAS escalations… I won’t bore you with all the standard templated responses I could have gotten for free from Seller Support. This is the part that I pay for:
“Unfortunately, I will not be able to share more details about how coupon prices are validated by the Amazon system, please understand these algorithms are considered to be confidential information.”
Really? You can’t tell me that my list prices being in existence are what’s causing this problem? Can you tell me why I am able to trick your broken system by changing the end date every 3 hours? LOL
Anyway - I am in the process of testing my theory (self service SAS, couple grand a month fix)…
I took our “Your Prices” out and replaced them with the sale price on all but our best seller to see if just that item would get suppressed from the offer. Didn’t work. Stupid me… Forgot about the actual target of this test - “List Price” which is a mile down the workflow. That’s now equal to the sale price.
I’ll know tomorrow if all of this works and if it does, I’ll fix the last ASIN.
Will report back 
I used to create coupons for ASIN’s sitting in Amazon warehouses close to 6 months. Today I did the same for 5 ASINs that sold before (e.g. having a sales history) but not recently. First I thought that with the new policy if an item is not sold within the last 90 days, this suppression error appears (No Reference Price Available):
This might still be true, but sellers on NSFE say that regularly selling items (for years!) are getting suppressed too.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/2c2007f4-a982-4d95-8c53-05db1f63fc05
