This has been driving me insane for the last year… First 15 days of the month are stellar, last 15 days fall off a cliff… I’m talking a 40% drop with no change in strategy.
Is anyone else seeing this kind of decline mid-end of month consistently?
It could be the customer and where and when their money comes from (Govt assistance). That’s the only thing I can think of. It’s so strange and so different from Amazon.
Sadly, this is by invite only on Walmart. I’ve tried to get invited through my guy on the inside but no luck yet.
Our S&S sales on Amazon are ~14% of our business so that accounts for some of the difference. The reality is our reorder people more than likely would have bought again anyway.
Subscribe and save is a buyer scam IMO. 1,821 cancelled Subscribe and Save orders in the last 365 days. With that said, 3820 shipped S&S orders.
It’s certainly worth it but buyers should not be able to take the discount and walk away from the program… Not cool.
Slightly OT, but I have been put off by Subscribe and Save. The intervals are almost never right for our needs, and the most recent ripoff had the S&S item auto-delivering for $36.28, which I thought was high. I checked the price a few minutes after that email from Amazon, bought the same item for 22 bucks and change, and canceled the S&S.
So what you’re saying is as a buyer… Very interesting / strange in that when we run sales, our S&S buyers always get that lower price. I wish that wasn’t the case. If someone agreed to subscribe for $15, they should expect to pay $15, nothing more, nothing less…
I get why Amazon offers the lowest price (that’s the way it’s supposed to be), but what I don’t get is what you’re reporting here unless it’s related to buy box / who you bought it from in a multi-seller scenario…
So anecdotal, and at the same time embarrassing. Not for us. We have had a 300% increase in sales since the 16th.
Now that said, in two years, we have had less than 25 orders. We got a $300 order a few days ago. On a product that has a one star rating, as a seller that has a one star rating.
Back story, someone (competitor with similar product?) tanked us with this only rating we had 30 days after launch.
Yes similarly if the given price on the buybox (BB)is high for that given day - the S&S customer will pay said buybox price. Exact opposite of a discount day on the BB. Like all our customers got the BF and CM deals that were S&S.
The whole blackhole that is S&S is offputting tho. It should just be as easy as petitioning for S&S - a short review for the category and item and price and that’s it. But they have a stupid algorithm that determines that and you can’t petition for eligibility. One of our products would be perfect for it and if we got to 20% S&S we could potentially even drop the price by $1 (think percentages).
I posted something on a business group today and got generic responses about amazon fees and Chinese competitors - which obviously, if your operations are circa 2017-18 would make sense, but just not how one operates today - however, I could see the deterrence some had for even being on amazon (albeit mostly ignorance, but still).
I totally agree. For social I point to our brand websites all eCommerce. I am not giving that social capital up to anyone. Amazon, Walmart, etc…
The odd thing about this one product, it has nearly 400 stars at 4.8 on Amazon. Why the seller selected to give us one star on the product. Why they hit us as a seller with one star when it arrived early and packaged well. We have a 100% seller rating on Amazon after 12 or more years.
No clue why. However, there it sits. For all to see from sea to shining sea.
Nope, the way S&S works is you get the prevailing price at the time of the reorder.
A scheming seller could get a bunch of subscriptions, then hike prices by a lot and it’ll sell units to all those buyers at the gouge price.
I’m not a fan of subscription programs. It’d be better if they just offered a customer loyalty program where reordering that product gets some % discount (and from the seller point of view makes sense too, reorders have significantly lower risk of returns/refunds so it actually costs them less for those orders as well).