There has been a large-scale loss of keywords, and a large number of sellers’ orders have plummeted!

As we enter November, the exciting Black Friday sales are slowly starting. It is understood that this year's Black Friday sales on major e-commerce platforms have continued the passion of last year, extending the battle line and starting a series of warm-up activities in advance. It is reported that Temu has taken the fastest action, launching the promotion warm-up phase as early as October 20.

All major e-commerce platforms are using all kinds of promotional activities, discounts, and other means. In this atmosphere of fierce competition, many sellers have taken the lead in occupying the high ground of traffic and successfully achieved explosive sales before others.

It's the Black Friday sales season again, and major e-commerce platforms are preparing for the season. Among them, Temu continued its long-term strategy from last year and took the lead in sounding the horn of the Black Friday sprint in October.

It is learned that the 2024 Temu Black Friday promotion will start on October 20 and end on December 5, a total of 47 days. October 20 to November 1 is the promotion warm-up stage, November 2 to November 26 is the Black Friday promotion official sales stage, and the remaining time is the online promotion.

This Black Friday promotion is open to all categories of Temu products, and those who sign up for the Black Friday event can enjoy a minimum discount of 95% on the product supply price. In addition, the platform will also provide additional discounts.

Currently, Temu's accessories, clothing, home furnishings and other categories have all begun to drop in price significantly. Entering the homepage of the official website, you can see that many products have Black Friday promotion labels, and the discounts vary. With the support of this first wave of traffic, some stores have received a surge in orders, and many participating products have sold tens of thousands of units.

According to sellers’ feedback, although the promotion is still in the warm-up period, many sellers have already tasted the sweet fruits of explosive sales:

"Temu's orders have exploded, and our Amazon department is going broke. We are suffering from red eye syndrome."

“Sales volume increased by 45%, and there should be room for further improvement.”

"If it explodes, I don't know how much profit I can make in the end."

Compared with the rising orders of Temu sellers, Amazon sellers have been in a miserable state recently: on the one hand, there is the inevitable consumer cooling-off period after the autumn promotion; on the other hand, many costs such as storage fees and advertising fees have skyrocketed.

Although it is already November, the peak season atmosphere expected by Amazon sellers seems to have arrived later than in previous years:

"Last year, sales increased slightly in November, but this November, there was no movement at all. It is getting quieter and quieter."

"Sales in November fell instead of increasing, and the advertising costs kept increasing, but there was no sense of peak season at all."

"The advertising fees these two days have doubled compared to usual, but the orders have only increased a little bit."

"It seems like everyone is the same. Sales are not as good as usual. There is no conversion from advertising. The bidding is still so high that sales can't be increased."

In response to this, some sellers could not help but say: Amazon’s big promotion cycle is the shortest among all platforms. Could it be that the big promotion traffic has been snatched away by other platforms?

In fact, compared with Temu and other platforms that have promotion cycles that last almost throughout the entire peak season, Amazon's Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday promotion is relatively short and has not yet officially started.

However, in the view of many sellers, a longer promotion cycle does not mean better results. Consumers’ attention may be diverted, leading to promotion fatigue, which in turn reduces their desire to consume.

Earlier, it was reported that Amazon's 2024 Black Friday will be held from November 21 to December 2, for a period of 12 days. Although this is Amazon's longest promotion cycle to date, it is still much shorter than other platforms.

Based on past experience, Amazon's Black Friday traffic explosion points are usually concentrated during the big promotion period, and there is still some time before the event starts, so most consumers are still in a wait-and-see state.

Temu and other platforms rushed to promote their products, which inevitably caused many Amazon sellers to worry about the loss of traffic and orders. But to make matters worse, the platform has recently been in turmoil again - a large number of store keywords have mysteriously "disappeared", directly leading to the loss of product traffic.

According to feedback from many sellers, since late October, a large number of stores have experienced keyword loss, with one seller losing nearly 40 keywords in one day, causing the traffic of the top two ASINs to disappear.

▲ The picture comes from the seller’s disclosure

"Suddenly, the ranking and sales kept dropping, and the ranking and sales did not change after I made Z cost-effective."

"My search was restricted for no reason, and then they said my product was labeled as an adult product for no reason."

“I searched in every aspect and there was no problem, but I just couldn’t find the product with the keyword, and the ranking dropped from the top ten to a few hundred.”

"The keywords of the main variant can no longer be searched, and the other variant without weight is at the very back, resulting in a serious drop in orders."

"I encountered the same problem. The traffic dropped by 70%-80%. The natural ranking of keywords is still there, but many of them are behind compared with the previous two days. The orders are mainly based on advertising."

In response to this, some sellers tried multiple operations, such as refreshing the template tp, changing search keywords, asking customer service to refresh, splitting variants and then merging them, and stopping selling replacement variants, but none of them worked. When they opened a case to contact the customer service team, they always received template replies.

Currently, most of the sellers who have encountered similar situations are sellers with considerable sales, and some are even top sellers, involving all major categories. For this reason, sellers speculate that it may be a bug in the Amazon system rather than a problem with a certain category.

"I checked the links of bs100 in my category, and the infection rate is about 10%. I'm not sure about other categories, but what I know so far is that they are basically multi-variant links, and the ones that have problems are the best-selling variations." A seller analyzed.

Based on feedback from multiple parties, the more common phenomena at present are: first, core keywords cannot be displayed, resulting in a sharp drop in product rankings; second, natural positions are replaced by low-sales products, resulting in a sharp drop in traffic; third, there is a continuous fluctuation in keywords, resulting in unstable overall store traffic.

Many sellers have checked themselves many times, but none of them have violated any rules. Some sellers speculate that in addition to system bugs, it is likely that Amazon's algorithm has changed, adjusting the ASIN display and keyword ranking rules.

So far, this incident has lasted for more than ten days, but Amazon has not yet responded. However, a seller successfully contacted PSS, and the customer service manager said that they are currently following up on the matter, but the specific cause has not yet been officially investigated.

During the peak season of Black Friday, the sudden loss of keywords has undoubtedly had a great impact on the traffic and sales of sellers, and even affected the subsequent peak season operation rhythm. The most urgent task is that if you encounter similar situations, sellers need to actively open cases to communicate with customers and investigate the relevant reasons, and find solutions in time to avoid missing the opportunity of big promotions.