Where Are You Struggling with Peak Season Prep? Let's Talk!
Hello Sellers,
With Black Friday/Cyber Monday just 4 weeks away, I've compiled key resources to help address common challenges and maximize your sales this holiday season. But first - where are you facing difficulties? Here's a reference guide to get our discussion started:
- The FBA peak readiness playbook is an amazing resource and not just for fulfillment related information. You can also reference this guide for Deals and Promotions submission dates and minimum discount requirements.
- The Deals for events help page is great for a general overview, but for those of you who have already submitted Deals, keep the Troubleshooting suppressed and active Deals help page at the ready if needed.
- If you missed the Deals deadline or did not have any surfaced through the Deals Dashboard for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday event, you can head over to the Amazon promotions help page for a quick overview. Next, use the Create a promotion help page to guide you through set up.
- If you’ve gone through 2 and 3 above and still have some questions or need additional guidance, you’re in luck! We have an event coming up with the Deals and Promotions team, check out the🚨 Ask Amazon - GET ANSWERS on Deals and Promotions November 4th thread for more details.
- Curious about Coupons? Check out the Coupon eligibility criteria help page and get started with step by step instructions on the Create a coupon help page. Once your coupons are set up, you can manage them through the New Coupon Dashboard. If you haven’t used this dashboard and want to learn more, check out the New coupon dashboard help page.
- Not sure where to start for holiday advertising prep? Check out the Ads Strategy Guidebook for a look into holiday marketing trends, tools you can use to optimize, and strategy breakdowns by category or deal type (just to name a few).
Share Your Challenges!
Your Community Managers are here to help you succeed this peak season. Whether you're having trouble with Deals submission, need guidance on Promotions, or want to discuss what worked (or didn't) in previous years - let's talk about it.
What's your biggest peak season challenge right now? Share below and let's work through it together!
Where Are You Struggling with Peak Season Prep? Let's Talk!
Hello Sellers,
With Black Friday/Cyber Monday just 4 weeks away, I've compiled key resources to help address common challenges and maximize your sales this holiday season. But first - where are you facing difficulties? Here's a reference guide to get our discussion started:
- The FBA peak readiness playbook is an amazing resource and not just for fulfillment related information. You can also reference this guide for Deals and Promotions submission dates and minimum discount requirements.
- The Deals for events help page is great for a general overview, but for those of you who have already submitted Deals, keep the Troubleshooting suppressed and active Deals help page at the ready if needed.
- If you missed the Deals deadline or did not have any surfaced through the Deals Dashboard for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday event, you can head over to the Amazon promotions help page for a quick overview. Next, use the Create a promotion help page to guide you through set up.
- If you’ve gone through 2 and 3 above and still have some questions or need additional guidance, you’re in luck! We have an event coming up with the Deals and Promotions team, check out the🚨 Ask Amazon - GET ANSWERS on Deals and Promotions November 4th thread for more details.
- Curious about Coupons? Check out the Coupon eligibility criteria help page and get started with step by step instructions on the Create a coupon help page. Once your coupons are set up, you can manage them through the New Coupon Dashboard. If you haven’t used this dashboard and want to learn more, check out the New coupon dashboard help page.
- Not sure where to start for holiday advertising prep? Check out the Ads Strategy Guidebook for a look into holiday marketing trends, tools you can use to optimize, and strategy breakdowns by category or deal type (just to name a few).
Share Your Challenges!
Your Community Managers are here to help you succeed this peak season. Whether you're having trouble with Deals submission, need guidance on Promotions, or want to discuss what worked (or didn't) in previous years - let's talk about it.
What's your biggest peak season challenge right now? Share below and let's work through it together!
31 replies
Seller_gyJCouolDnuV6
We are struggling even to get restricted products up for sale that we have sold for years due to “supply chain authenticity risks”. That is considering we have no authenticity complaints based on your data not ours.
Seller_1oT4ZOwrSByEE
We are struggling to get our products to our customers for fair prices
FBA Cant be trusted, between the long term storage fees of unfulfillable items, things they lose or cant find, it ends up costing 10x as much
Veeqo is double billing everything a month later and not telling anyone
UPS Is upsizing all packages and charging twice what they say they will after
Fedex is even worse
Seller_zinnr9HADdMb2
Amazon will not let me ship certain items telling me they are full. But what Amazon does not know is Black Friday and Christmas are 80% of our sales for these products so for the last 10 months there is very little sales so Amazon seems to average that out and then tell us we cannot ship to FBA. We KNOW what is going to sell, Amazon AI does NOT KNOW! Ridiculous!
Seller_Ys8Kz8TPanVFB
@Dougal_Amazon
Where are we struggling???
Very simple, Amazon's unrealistic ship times that they are Deliberately manipulating and showing buyers that it takes EIGHT DAYS to ship to our same zip code! 14 Days to ship coast to coast. We have opened cases about this and oddly (you aren't going to believe this) we get no response. Our shipping metrics are near perfect, We are delivering on average three days before the promised delivery date and yet Amazon still adds days and sometimes a week onto our delivery dates.
This is not a a bug, it's a feature (to Amazon anyway) as they continue to try and push FBM sellers into a broken FBA system.
There, that's my biggest struggle. What do you have on that?
Seller_isfUwyrhbyGPr
Total lack of consistency in how FBA featured offers are selected is increasingly making FBA unviable, period.
The (unwritten) rules change without warning, and Amazon provides no clarity or guidance as to what it's doing, or why, when making radical alterations to the Featured Offer mechanics. Instead, we are gaslit and told nothing has changed.
If preference were no longer given to FBA offers over merchant-fulfilled offers, on a permanent basis, and we had some clarity from Amazon about the nature of that, then we would pivot, adapt and go back to 100% merchant-fulfilled. I know many sellers would prefer it that way, and I don't blame them.
But in the current state of play, we have no clarity or insight into what's really happening, why it's happening, or when it will happen (or for how long), so we are instead ambushed by these sudden changes. Amazon has flipped a switch without warning, at least three times this year, that randomly changes the Featured Offer mechanics dramatically and erases the net benefit of doing FBA at all.
Seller_NzEmZKTEdcpPZ
We are struggling with what Amazon bots do. Specifically:
1. Inability of Amazon to understand the current economics, leading to prices being blocked from being shown to the customers with a "Price is currently too high" message.
We are in electronics/computer market. Prices of the components keep going up due to Tariff wars, rising manufacturer and shipping costs, and factories allocating its resources to more profitable AI hardware components (which means client electronics components are produced at a smaller volume, leading to high prices because of the simple supply and demand economics laws). Prices for the products go up, causing us to raise them for the consumers. Amazon refuses to show higher priced offers on the product page. The only way customers can see the offers if they click on Other Buying Options link, but most of them don't. Besides, a message "Price is currently too high" discourages customers.
In short: cost of goods at the factory is going up, but Amazon doesn't let sellers to raise it. Other platforms don't do that. As soon as Amazon does something like that with an ASIN, we see sales drop at Amazon and go up at other platforms. Customers still buy the products, but Amazon misses out.
Same situation happens when someone at eBay sells it for less than it should be selling, "Competitive Price" kicks in and blocks all offers at Amazon, indicating that our price is above Competitive Price. That's just not smart.
Anyway, prices will be going up, it's inevitable. And Amazon will keep on thinking it should be only going down, effectively killing the sales for the affected products.
2. Amazon's bots kill ASINs at will and it's impossible to appeal.
If Amazon bot thinks the product was created by an un-authorized seller, it will kill it. I've seen that happening a lot lately. The product description can be perfectly correct: correct product, title, description, manufacturer part number, UPC code, etc. But simply because it was created by someone who does not have authorization from the brand, Amazon will kill it with no possibility to reinstate. For example, if Sony (which I am not affiliated with) comes up with a new product that destined to be popular, I can create a listing with all the correct data. After a while Amazon will kill it (because I am not authorized; even though all product details are correct), and nobody else will be able to reinstate it. Sellers will have to come up with an alternative listing with a different UPC, etc.
This happens in large numbers lately (check forums), hundreds at a time sometime. We, for example, don't have time to deal with the appeals for each of them. I'd rather spend more time and effort marketing these products elsewhere, knowing the same fate won't happen there. Again, Amazon loses sales and revenue.
Please don't ask me to submit SS Cases so you could try to have a "concerned team" to look into that. It's a waste of my time. Nobody is concerned about that at Amazon. You should have other means to raise the issues internally, MODs.
Seller_KoqAFvxBwjdZB
Honesty and integrity from the mods and Amazon support. That is our struggle - just finding basic human decency and respect from Amazon mods and Amazon seller support.
