Sales Rank Collapse After November 2 Reclassification — Anyone Else Seeing This?
Hi everyone,
I’m trying to understand what is happening after the November 1st reclassification, because in my account the situation is becoming very alarming. Since the reclassification, I’ve been closely monitoring my Sales Rank performance, and every single day it keeps dropping dramatically across almost all listings.
Here is what I’m seeing in just two weeks:
Nov 1: ~5,678
Nov 5: ~8,489
Nov 7: ~12,489
Nov 10: ~23,467
Nov 15: ~45,765
Today: almost 70,600
Nothing on my end has changed — same prices, same stock, same categories, same shipping, same traffic patterns. But as soon as Amazon moved our items onto the “general pages” after reclassification, the decline started and hasn’t stopped.
Today again… 0 sales out of almost 2,000 active items.
This never happened before the reclassification.
Is anyone else seeing the same collapse in Sales Rank and visibility since November 1st?
Is this expected after reclassification, or is something broken in the system?
Amazon, if anyone from the moderation team is reading this — we really need clarity.
When will we see the improvements that were promised with the reclassification?
Right now the opposite is happening, and many of us are watching our businesses fall apart day by day.
Would appreciate hearing from other sellers experiencing the same drop.
Sales Rank Collapse After November 2 Reclassification — Anyone Else Seeing This?
Hi everyone,
I’m trying to understand what is happening after the November 1st reclassification, because in my account the situation is becoming very alarming. Since the reclassification, I’ve been closely monitoring my Sales Rank performance, and every single day it keeps dropping dramatically across almost all listings.
Here is what I’m seeing in just two weeks:
Nov 1: ~5,678
Nov 5: ~8,489
Nov 7: ~12,489
Nov 10: ~23,467
Nov 15: ~45,765
Today: almost 70,600
Nothing on my end has changed — same prices, same stock, same categories, same shipping, same traffic patterns. But as soon as Amazon moved our items onto the “general pages” after reclassification, the decline started and hasn’t stopped.
Today again… 0 sales out of almost 2,000 active items.
This never happened before the reclassification.
Is anyone else seeing the same collapse in Sales Rank and visibility since November 1st?
Is this expected after reclassification, or is something broken in the system?
Amazon, if anyone from the moderation team is reading this — we really need clarity.
When will we see the improvements that were promised with the reclassification?
Right now the opposite is happening, and many of us are watching our businesses fall apart day by day.
Would appreciate hearing from other sellers experiencing the same drop.
16 replies
Seller_yZMn8iTRvBU4w
I have never been a huge seller on Amazon Handmade but since this change I went from having 2-3 sales a day to one in the past week. This platform has always lacked on support for sellers so I won't hold breathe for any further help with the recent changes.
Seller_HhhKgypRhh2ZZ
It's been unusually slow. Kind of a perfect storm for jewelry. Materials like gold and silver have gone way way up in the last couple years. I'm seeing pretty normal views so I'm not convinced the reclassification is impacting visibility. More likely it's higher price points and buyers becoming cautious about non essentials. This is my 10th holiday season on Amazon Handmade and it's shaping up to be very sub par.
Seller_tc9WI0dfiIulx
Same. There are many posts about it, most people are in the same boat. I don't understand why Amazon wants us to sell less :( They did something similar 2 years ago in Handmade and sales went down for most people and never really recovered to the levels before that, and now they've done it again, and sales have gone down again. This is our worst November since 2018 (and we had far fewer items back then).
That said... i found another thread (i think it was in Reddit) where regular amazon sellers (not Handmade) were all saying the same thing, that their sales were all horrible and the worst November they've had in years. So I think the reclassification for Handmade is a big factor, but it seems there are other things going on as well.
And if you sell sterling silver or real gold, then it's even worse since costs on those have almost doubled since June. If you raise your prices to keep up with the costs, sales decline.
Seller_HhhKgypRhh2ZZ
One thing the re-cat may have done is lump in a lot more competition then the old categories. The search algo is adjusting but this came in my email this morning ( unsolicited and no idea why but it was just after I playing with Rufus for the first time ). AI search is a whole new ball game. Hope the formatting stays intact.
Marketplace Madness
1/ Amazon’s Rufus gets an upgrade
Rufus just got major upgrades: activity-based search, auto-add/auto-buy, price tracking, visual search, and handwritten list ingestion. It now personalizes across a customer’s entire Amazon footprint and can even pull products from outside Amazon. Your listings no longer just compete on Amazon but with the entire internet.
Why it matters:
Rufus is becoming a discovery layer that sits above search, meaning listings that aren’t optimized for AI-driven queries will get buried. Sellers must shift from keyword stuffing to semantic, intent-aligned content (clear benefits, structured attributes, comparison-friendly bullets). Rufus will reward products with strong reviews, complete specs, and clean data and penalize those with thin or confusing listings.
Lumian can help you get up to speed on Rufus. Book a Free Consultation.
2/ Amazon Blocks More ChatGPT Web Crawlers
Amazon quietly expanded its robots.txt rules to block additional OpenAI crawlers, stopping ChatGPT from scraping product pages, prices, and powering agentic shopping actions. The move comes as Amazon pushes its own AI tools like Rufus, Auto-Buy, and Buy For Me while rejecting third-party agents that divert traffic, bypass ads, or complete purchases off-platform.
Why it matters:
Amazon is signaling that AI shopping will happen on Amazon and not through ChatGPT. This means sellers must optimize for Amazon’s own AI ecosystem (Rufus, ads, listings, price signals) rather than expecting external AI traffic. And as Amazon locks down data access, competing agents will have less visibility into pricing, giving Amazon-controlled AI even more influence over shopper behavior.
3/ Amazon prices are lower than all U.S. retailers: study
A new Profitero study analyzing 10,000+ products across 16 categories found Amazon’s prices are 14% lower on average than 23 major U.S. retailers. Amazon beats competitors across all top holiday categories and everyday essentials, often by up to 5%, solidifying its position as the country’s price leader.
Why it matters:
With Amazon benchmarking prices daily and surfacing the lowest-priced offers (whether from Amazon Retail or 3P sellers) pricing discipline becomes a core operational advantage.
Seller_zYenV1jxc6Jhb
Exact same thing happened to me. I have only a few listings that are seasonal and I went from having sales daily for the season to absolutely zero in the middle of the season with 30 days left to go. I even paid for sponsor advertisement, redid all my images, and changed the description. No luck.
Seller_gwzuNYC3ogYNo
A more appropriate forum title for HANDMADE would be:
Is anyone seeing anything OTHER than 2.5 years of falling sales?
(July/August of 2023 was the cliff for handmade, once they announced that reclassification would begin.)
Seller_mlV9hk5A1YthG
Well, duh. There were people/companies selling things in the regular Amazon categories all along. Your previous ranking was based on the small little pool of handmade; now you are in the ocean of the normal Amazon alongside them.
Be careful what one asks for. Those handmade folks who pushed for this change to be let into the "real" Amazon categories were naive to think it would be all rainbows and unicorn farts :-p
