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There are only 5 days left until the official opening of Amazon North America's March Sale in 2024. In order to seize the traffic of the first large-scale promotional event in North America this year and achieve a breakthrough in sales, many sellers are currently preparing intensively. But at the same time, Amazon's rule of "doubling its efforts during peak seasons" has once again emerged, causing a stir in the industry. According to Amazon's official definition, a variant refers to a group of ASINs that are related to each other. For Amazon sellers, reasonable merging and splitting of variants not only helps increase reviews, but also optimizes listing rankings, thereby increasing product sales. However, in recent years, under Amazon's increasingly stringent policy review, this operation has also been strictly controlled by the platform. It is learned that recently, some sellers received account deactivation emails from Amazon due to variant violations. Amazon mentioned in the email that because it detected that the ASIN variations created by the seller violated the ASIN creation policy, Amazon has deactivated the relevant seller’s account and removed the relevant listing. The seller said that the variants of his deactivated account all belonged to the same category, and he had often split and merged them in the past. However, a variant error occurred in recent operations. After receiving two warning letters, the appeal was still passed normally. The seller did not pay much attention to it and repeatedly created variant mergers. Then he directly received an email from Amazon to block his account. As of press time, the seller’s account has not been restored, and Amazon has prompted “insufficient information” when filing a complaint. After consulting customer service, the only response he got was: the only solution is to prove that there is no variant error. It is worth mentioning that there are quite a few sellers who have had account problems due to variant operations recently: "I received two warnings through variant merging, and I also lost performance after changing the titles of two products that are no longer for sale." "The real variant was also innocently swept several times. I dare not merge it again. It's difficult to deal with." “It is recommended that recently dismantled variants should not be re-merged with the original link, as this may cause performance loss again.” Based on this, many sellers believe that Amazon is currently strictly investigating variant violations and dealing with a large number of variant abuses, and even innocent sellers have been implicated. However, some sellers have proposed relevant solutions: 1. Check the listing to find out which ASINs are in violation; 2. Adjust the relevant ASINs and take measures to resolve the violations; 3. Submit POA: Submit the ASIN, adjustment content (detailed explanation and evidence) and relevant policies (stating that you have taken measures to comply with the rules and will make plans to avoid similar problems from happening again) to Amazon to apply for account recovery.Amazon has not responded to this yet, but judging from the fact that Amazon’s big sellers have been fined huge amounts of money for abusing variants , this is indeed not the first time that Amazon has taken “heavy blows” against illegal variant operations. With the end of the era of wild growth, sellers who have now realized the importance of compliant operations are now very nervous about Amazon's rule changes. Compared with operations that are explicitly prohibited, such as "brushing orders" and "fake reviews", Amazon has certain conditions for determining abuse of variants , mainly including the following: Changing a product detail page (parent or child) that is materially different from the originally listed product; Changing the detail page of a parent product so that it does not match the child product; Adding erroneous child product variations that are not true variations of the parent product; Adding multi-pack variations to an existing parent product that are not produced by the manufacturer; - Merge zombie listings to get reviews.
Based on the feedback from sellers, generally speaking, accounts that abuse variant operations as mentioned above will first receive performance emails from Amazon. If warnings are ineffective or adjustments are ineffective, the accounts will be blocked. It is learned that in April last year, Amazon's big seller Bountiful was sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for an abusive variant of "merging listings to obtain reviews" and was fined $600,000 . The FTC accused Bountiful of abusing the ability to create variants on Amazon, engaging in “review hijacking” by merging new products into existing products to take advantage of existing product ratings and reviews on Amazon, deceiving many consumers. Not long ago, the FTC also announced that it would refund more than $527,000 to consumers who purchased Bountiful-related products. Industry insiders believe that the Bountiful case not only marks the first time that the FTC has taken enforcement action against the "hijacking of reviews" operation, but also means that behaviors that affect consumer rights, such as the abuse of variants of "merging listings to obtain reviews" on the platform, will be subject to stricter supervision. In addition, regarding Amazon's motivation for tightening the review of variant violations, many sellers speculate that Amazon will conduct a major cleanup of accounts on the eve of a big sale, and this account scanning storm may have been caused by the upcoming March big sale. According to Amazon's announcement, promotional activities will be launched in Amazon's North American, European and Japanese sites in late March this year: If Amazon sellers want to seize this wave of traffic, they must conduct a comprehensive check on the compliance of their accounts in the near future to avoid being implicated by Amazon's tightening scrutiny. Finally, I would like to remind you again: in the current environment, the unconventional harvesting model is no longer applicable. If you want to survive tenaciously during this industry reshuffle, or even seize development opportunities, you cannot do without the long-term spirit of compliance first. What do you think about this? Welcome to discuss in the comment area~
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