ASINs are temporarily excluded from a coupon if their price or discount doesn’t meet certain requirements.
Price history issue
This ASIN doesn’t meet coupon price history requirements. ASINs are required to have a sales history before they are eligible to run on a coupon.
Increase discount
This ASIN doesn’t meet price requirements. Promotion price (buyable price - discount value) must be lower than either 1) Was Price, or 2) the recent lowest price. Increase your discount value to make this ASIN eligible for coupons.
Was Price
Was Price is determined using the 90-day median price paid by customers for the product on Amazon, excluding some deal prices. For more information, go to Amazon policy on Reference Prices.
Promotion price (buyable price - discount value) must be lower than Was Price.
The recent lowest price
Promotion price (buyable price - discount value) must be lower than the recent lowest price.
Reference #2
Other reference prices
A Was Price is automatically computed and changes over time. The Was Price is determined using the 90-day median price paid by customers for the product on Amazon… We exclude prices paid by customers for the product during a limited time deal.
In our next post, we will break this down as we understand it.
This part basically excludes running coupons on new ASINs and/or ASINs who have very poor sales. Further on, you will see that there is a 90-day period being used to calculate the Was Price.
This part sets up the standard for those who run coupons on items in repetitive 90-day periods on a rolling 90-day period. The prior 90-Day rolling period determines the price that Amazon will be judging whether your coupon meets their requirements. Deal prices are not included in the calculation but competitor prices can be if your item is sold by others. If you sell your own brand solely, then the price will be determined what you have done in the prior 90-Day rolling period.
The following sets up the price you have to beat to earn a coupon …
Amazon is searching for the lowest price the ASIN was sold for in the last 90-Day period whether it was a prior coupon ASIN or simply just a reduced lowest price. So, if you or a competitor ran a coupon of 25% off on a $20 item (puts the price at $15) and either you or a competitor ran a sale price of $14.99 during the past 90-Days, then your coupon price must beat the lowest price of $14.99 to become and remain active. Amazon is effectively controlling the coupon value that you may offer.
If you own your own brand and have no competitors, then you can set up a strategy of 3 quarters running a coupon and one quarter of setting a sale price off of which the following 3 quarters of coupons would run.
Example:
List Price $20
Your Price $18 = 1st Quarter
Coupon #1 is 12% with Your Price set to $20 is $17.60 = 2nd Quarter
Coupon #2 is 18% with Your Price set to $20 is $16.40 = 3rd Quarter
Coupon #3 is 25% with Your Price set to $20 is $15.00 = 4th Quarter
Return to next 1st Quarter and repeat List Price $20 with Your Price $18
Each coupon period the coupon causes a better value until you need to reset the Was Price calculation.
This reaffirms the Was Price calculation as a rolling 90-Day medium price.
The head turning is created by pitting this
Against this …
In reality, it can be only one and we would bet Amazon will enforce the lower value every time.
In our case, we would need to lower the price by raising the coupon to 26% as our lowest price / 90-Day medium price paid by customers was established by the 25% off coupon that we ran at the end of Feb 2024. We are going to check the last 90-Days to make sure we didn’t run a Your Price lower than the coupon value. Once we establish that, we will change our test coupon % to see if it works. After that, we will test the % off without a coupon to see if any of the coupon changes above effect running a promotion this way.
My thoughts are that I completely understand the rules and why the rules are the rules but nowhere in the policy is why the system is pointing at a list price instead of the sale price.
Remember, you are lowering your price to the consumer below your sale price with any coupon and there are basic minimums in place before you can even submit the coupon.
Finally, and this is a big one and the problem we are having. Save an extra $/% when you subscribe.
No change in any price (list / your / sale) forever. In this example:
List - $10
Your / Sale - $8
Ordinary 5% Subscribe and Save setup for years - 5% - $7.60
Coupon - Save an extra 10% when you subscribe - $6.84
This is what we are dealing with. I even went so far as to match our sale price to our list and it’s still bombing out thinking the list price is still there.
Nevertheless, that should not matter. The customer is getting the best deal in the last 90 days and this is what Amazon wants with the policy.
No games are being played, the system is simply broken and I can almost guarantee that it’s a glitch with once again, a new policy / system that was never tested in the real world.
It was tested to work in its simplest form which is the policy but somebody at Amazon forgot about the variables in their own system. When I was heading up the Nature’s Bounty’s retail operation, I was in charge of their ancient AS400 POS system and worked right next to IT setting up their new Multi-Buy promo system for 2 years. My group initially tested just like I described above and we always ran into problems when we deployed new promotions.
The fact that I am able to manipulate Amazon’s system every 3 hours to keep our promotions running is laughable.
I’m sure you have seen this new BS atop the coupon workflow. This is an excuse for a malfunctioning system and an embarrassment! It’s clearly not how they wanted it to be but they probably rushed the programming and ended up with this duct tape and coat hanger patch. I’ve been there and done that. It’s sad actually. This is the AWS company and they offer a patch-work quilt of a broken system at a trillion dollar company to the biggest network of sellers on the planet.
I just noticed how poorly written this disclaimer is. They even rushed that. It should end “ON THE AMAZON WEBSITE” Not - On Amazon Website… Wow and LOL
We agree … what you have should work; however, the “broken” part of the code (unless it was done on purpose) is that it is not allowing a match of the lowest past sale price (Was Price). It has created a coupon race to the bottom.
What it appears to us is that the Was Price is set to trigger as needing < (less than) the Was Price. It should (at the minimum) be set at =< (less than or equal to) the Was Price.
If we are correct, then we should be able to run our coupon at 26% (will test later). If that doesn’t work for us, then the system is completely FUBAR. This means Amazon will start loosing at income created by the 60 cent per redeemed coupon fee. When they realize this, it should get their attention.
Here’s an update. Appears that there’s just a timing delay of 48 hours when you match your list to your sale price. All good here now. I still don’t agree on how this is working being logical but whatever.
so … set it up … wait until it goes through the running … then needs attention (3 hours mark) … coupon disappears … and then 48 hours later it runs fine?
48 hour test
Marking start time 3:53pm Central Time 3/21/2024
Check time 4:00pm Central Time 3/23/2024
We initially set this up with 7 products in it. Save an extra 10%.
Only our best seller had the strikethrough which I didn’t want to lose so I separated the campaigns to have 5 items in 1 campaign and the best seller and its variation in the other.
I did that so I could keep the best seller going with my every 3 hour change and let the other suppress so escalations could look at it while it was down. Now, that 5 ASIN campaign is verified and running and I haven’t touched it in 36 hours. It was down just a few hours ago.
I went back and looked at my text messages with my partner for when I told him I was making the change and it was pretty much exactly 48 hours ago.
Coincidence? IDK. Did Amazon change something? IDK. Did escalations fix something on our specific campaign? IDK.
I just pulled the list price out of our hero item. Guess we will know for sure on Saturday.
Actually, might know sooner bc the variation had it’s list pulled at the same time bc it didn’t have the strikethrough. So 3 hours I will know if it’s what I think or someone stepped in on that campaign that was being investigated.
The system will suppress a single or more ASIN’s within a campaign and allow the others to run if they are in compliance.
Now we know. It wasn’t any change by Amazon or help from SAS, it was me.
The campaign suppressed but only our best seller because that’s the one I didn’t pull the list out of until today. The variation that’s in this same campaign is running and verified.
Did you click in to check and see if the entire offer (all ASIN’s) were suppressed?
We did have 1 listing that was suppressed due to a legitimate policy concern (price was lower for about 45 days).
It’s nice not having to go back in every 3 hours to extend dates to keep our offer running. Thankful that Amazon’s systems are so bad that it gave us an opportunity to do this for the last 10 days.
Selling history on Amazon (90 day avg stable and at or above current list price) - I would think you had that so this really sucks.
Current 90 day avg being verified somewhere else on the internet - Do you have this? I don’t know if you are a PL seller or a reseller but if you are PL, do you have your own website? If you do, is it running on a known platform? If it is, did you fill out all product attributes for that platform which includes the same barcode being entered on that platforms back end that matches back to Amazon. Web crawler at Amazon will verify / establish a reference here.
Also, your barcode could come into play as well from things that I have read in the past. GS1 strikes again.
No GS1 reference on website … manufacturer numbers would match … have seen Amazon crawler on site … and we have never had any price issues of being too high or not low enough …
However, it claims there is no “Reference Price” which would get back to Amazon code not seeing any of our items past pricing / coupon pricing / etc. on Amazon. There is one ASIN that we thought might fall in the …
… but all of the ASINs seem to be falling under this which includes our number one …
Waiting until 4pm and then might try to increase to 26% but we doubt that is going to work with it being “No Reference Price available” and no way to determine why that is happening.
No change for us after 48 hours.
All ASINs still reporting “No Reference Price available”.
Until Amazon documents what “No Reference Price available” is or changes whatever is blocking our price history, it’s not worth our time to play with.
We had never done coupons until February of this year and did it as a test of the waters. So not having coupons for us is not a win or loose situation.
