In my opinion, 2020 was the year of a pandemic, and Amazon price alerts and deactivated listings.
I’m not talking about Amazon removing entire listings. No, this is a new kind of deactivation, one that is more temporary, but arguably more annoying. I’m talking about high pricing errors.
Price gouging aside, the most commonly observable – and solvable – reason for deactivations is due to a little known feature often referred to as the Amazon Price Guard.
In order to understand what the Amazon Price Guard is, it’s best to understand why it exists.
Many years ago, before Seller Snap was founded, there was a situation in which a third-party pricing tool mistakenly repriced a seller’s listings to one-penny. Amazon’s algorithm caught the mistake and managed to cancel a portion of the orders. But for many it was too late, the damage had been done and the seller incurred significant losses.
Amazon’s response was to create a Price Guard which acts as an upper and lower threshold to protect sellers from third-party software and user-errors.
Even though Seller Snap never reprices outside of your min/max range, in an effort to continually offer advice regarding best practices, Seller Snap encourages the use of this tool. The Amazon Price Guard is a last line of defense from user oversight, as an incorrectly calculated minimum price in a CSV import.
So, how can sellers actually ensure they are engaging in the best practices regarding the price guard?
Try AI repricing today to maximize your profit and avoid Amazon price wars.
No set-up required, simply turn repricing on and let the AI do all the work
Firstly, min & max prices in your repricing software should be closely aligned and within your min & max prices in Seller Central – this way the repricer has some room to safely do its job.
Should an item become deactivated due to this issue, it can be fixed from within the Fix Pricing Alerts section of Seller Central.
Over time, many Seller Snap customers have indicated that they have never actually utilized the price guard – so we want to simplify this process.
Today, Seller Snap is announcing a user-activated solution that will push new min & max values from within the Seller Snap dashboard directly to Seller Central with a click of a button.
Deactivations due to pricing errors are somewhat inevitable. But we can take steps to help mitigate this issue and keep on selling.
If 2020 was the year of pricing errors, make 2021 the year of active listings.
Note: This article was first published on January 18, 2021, under the author’s LinkedIn account.
