It’s a nightmare. I’ve been screwing around with this since the 12th. I have a test campaign going right now to see if I have resolved it. Will advise in a few hours.
The stupid thing about Amazon’s systems (1 of many), is our campaigns will launch just fine and then suppress hours later. If we go in and extend the date a day, they come back to life for a few hours and then BAM - gone. Rinse and repeat.
While trying to figure all this out, doing various things to try and get what worked forever and now doesn’t to work, I’ve been extending the campaign every 2 hours around the clock to keep it going.
We are getting errors about needing to increase discount, referencing the “List Price” - MSRP.
Coupon system is now pointing there instead of the sale price, even if pricing hasn’t been changed in years.
That’s one issue.
The reference price is another issue. The web crawler wants to see the product out in the world somewhere else. The only real way to do that is to set up a website, with the matching barcode in the backend of item setup, selling the product for that price or higher. Even if you have no intention of selling on your own website, this is necessary for lots of things Amazon…
If you have an existing site setup, make sure the backend of the item setup is fully populated with barcodes matching what Amazon has in the backend.
Needs to be a known platform - Shopify / Squarespace / Woo-Commerce - ETC…
We just set into play the same coupon we ran at the end of February to see if it would have problems currently. We don’t remember if the widget box saying it would take up to 6 hours was/is the same parameters as before. We do remember that the coupon populated with all of the items in under 2 hours before so that will be our comparison.
Will follow up later …
Edit Add
In the time it took to type is post, the manage coupon page (upon a refresh) updated to say the coupon is running.
Some of what we have seen has been with sellers who have been running the same coupon set up 24/7 for “years” (extended lengths of time). We have ran a couple of coupons at different discounts and different times for a short time frame (two weeks or less). We set one up again with the same discount with a 10 day run. It will be a test to see if Amazon is suppressing those who have been running the same coupon day in and day out verses someone who runs periodic coupons for shorter terms.
If they got rid of fake “list prices” that’d be great. It’s something a ton of companies do, both on and off Amazon. Having products that are perpetually on sale is legal, but IMO it’s deceptive marketing.
Personally I don’t like Amazon coupons either (speaking as a buyer here). The whole point of manufacturer coupons is they’re basically an advertisement, people clip them and it’s a reminder to buy it. What’s the point of a coupon that’s on the detail page itself? I guess the benefit is you can make coupons limited to 1 per customer or something.
Same happened with my coupon, even though in the past it would take several hours. A few hours later, can’t tell exactly how many hours, I noticed the orange alert:
After 1 hour and 40 minutes, all items are showing the coupon except one item … and, if we remember correctly, there is always one item that seems to lag.
I’m a bit lost to explain to myself why Amazon would make this change, especially on a practice used by successful accounts in good standing who have not abused the coupon system.
I don’t get what they are trying to achieve for their customers.
I don’t get it either. Now we are getting errors for reference prices that don’t even exist.
Sent everything with screenshots to escalations. Let’s see what story they make up now because it literally doesn’t make any sense. The investigation has been reopened… SAS manager is still nowhere to be found. Maybe he’s on vacation.
Maybe you don’t understand how retail / real CPG brands operate? There’s an MSRP price that’s established for a product. Then, it’s put on sale at different places, at different times, for less (sales / offers).
While I agree with you that purely Amazon brands are cheating and being deceptive, that does not mean that everyone is. If this change is intentional and not a glitch, this is just another example of the bad ruining it for everyone instead of the bad being purged from the marketplace.
We don’t run our coupons / deals / sales perpetually anywhere. Everything is run on a strict promotional calendar that’s created in Oct of the previous year for the entire upcoming year. Again, how real brands run their business.
What bothers me the most about this current situation is all of our competitors don’t seem to be having this problem. None of them are selling anywhere but Amazon.
I’ve been seeing suppression occur at about the 3 hour mark since last week. First you will see it on the workflow, while the offer is still valid and available, 15 mins later it will fall off.
I still think there are glitches in the system. Look at this:
To add complete details, here’s the situation with this ASIN (and all the others) - different price points of course.
This ASIN had a list of $17.99. Been there for years.
This ASIN has a sale price of $12,99. Been there for years.
This ASIN has been on Subscribe and Save for years @ 5% off. - $12.34
The Coupon is save an additional 10% - $11.10
Tell me how this shouldn’t work? BTW @GGX - 90 days is the limit for coupons so you can’t do it forever. I also don’t want to hear about our pricing and discounts being aggressive or fake. This $17.99 product would be $24 on any retailers shelf. Amazon is a different animal.
For transparency, after hearing gibberish back from SAS escalations, and reading stuff on the NSFE - I came to the realization that the system now points to list, rather than Sale for the reference price. I pulled every single list price out yesterday. It’s gone, yet the system is still doing this today, even on new offers created today. It very well could be a timing issue at this point but this never should have happened in the first place after reviewing the above.
Happy to debate this with anyone here. I’ve been wrong before.
He’s found! What a tool response to me calling him out on his ineptitude and 3 day response times.
Just got this:
Hi Steve,
Thank you for your anecdote. Rest assured that I am working in the background to research your issues and provide my input. I have to mention though that I need to be fair with my all accounts (I manage several accounts) and they all have issues, emails, meetings, shipment issues, etc.
So the way I do it is I work my email inbox in the order it was received. Knock them out one issue at a time. I will not be able to give more advantage to certain accounts over others when they all are dealing with urgent cases and issues.
Thank you for consolidating the issues in one email. By tomorrow, I will work on these issues and send you a new email about each item.
Yes, but there are also plenty of brands that are always “on sale” and rarely at MSRP. At that point, the real price is whatever it usually sells for, and if you pay MSRP that’s the sucker price. Unless a substantial amount of sales happen at the list price, then that number is just a marketing game used to make stupid people feel like they’re getting a deal. Of course, these games and all other marketing games work which is why they’re played
And of course, this is the issue. It’d be nice if they were actually getting rid of some
marketing games, but this is unlikely the case and there will always be some people who are favored over others.
It seems to be a glitch where it’s counting 10% off the list price, which is 16.19. If you didn’t increase your offer price to 17.99 then clearly that circled line is a mistake. Also, not giving you sht for doing what everyone else does as well – it’s a necessary and effective marketing tactic, I’m just saying I don’t like it in general.
That’s right and that was Amazon’s way of dealing with the fraud in the past. We had the strike through on every listing because we play by the rules. Now I dropped the lists, have no strikethrough, and can’t run coupons that worked just fine until 3-12 with a list price.
It’s called pay to play. Our main competitor, the one that spends $17K a day on PPC has multiple brands competing with us that are identical products in different labels. They can do what they want, whenever they want.
I’ve even got SAS telling me that we need to increase our PPC spend to open up more opportunities that others enjoy. That doesn’t even sound legal to me because it’s not.
Bingo … at 3 hours the orange Needs attention showed up …
When we go through the set up, there are no indications of anything to correct.
And the coupon is slowly dropping off of the ASINs … currently about half have dropped in last 20 to 30 minutes.
Points of comparison …
Our list price has been same for 18 to 24 months
Our price has been same as list price during this time except for
2 weeks where we lowered our price to be 15% off list price
2 weeks where we did a 15% off (no coupon)
1 week where we did a 15% off coupon
1 week where we did a 25% off coupon
The promotions above were done between Dec 2023 to end of Feb 2024.
Before that, we had never tried or needed to do promotions.
As simply as ours is and without any guidance of what needs attention, it’s not worth our time to figure out how it is broken.
What triggered us to try the % off and the coupon, was seeing the price on some products that had the strike through on the list price and the sale price showing with a % off. What we found was a pop up that said it was a reduced price from the list price and that that item had sold for more than the list price at one point. That blew our mind as the MSRP has always been the price in the sky price and many consider any price over that to be approaching gouging territory.
At one point, Amazon kept sending emails telling us that our list price needed to be changed. So we decided to go the other route and change our price up to match the list price. The Amazon emails stopped. Go figure … that really promotes low pricing.
And by the time we got done typing, there are only 3 ASINs left with the coupon.
We are going to hold and do nothing to see what happens with the next 72 hours.
Yea, we get these too. Never did anything because what we had was correct and VALID…
I still wonder if there’s a mistake in the program. Doesn’t make any sense. It’s been a week though and nothing has changed. Then again, someone’s account here has been down for 2 months because of a mistake in the program.
ETA - I’m sorry yours are bombing out too but glad it’s not just us.
Haha… Just caught the campaigns right when they threw the errors (and while the offers were still running) and bumped the exp date up a day… That puts me in the clear for 3 hours - Prime time for our volume time of the day…
I have to say, this is kind of fun forcing our offers to work, exploiting another glitch which is on top of another glitch.
I’m getting better at this. Been doing this all day and night since last Thurs when we realized there was an issue.
