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Faced with increasingly fierce competition, Amazon's policy changes have once again arrived as expected, causing a stir in the industry. Following the recent implementation of the warehouse configuration fee, Amazon's new coupon regulations have also been officially implemented recently. On March 12, US time, a large number of sellers reported that an error occurred on Amazon’s coupon page, showing “no reference price”. It is understood that the large-scale occurrence of this situation is related to the new coupon regulations released by Amazon earlier this month: starting from March 12, 2024, sellers on Amazon's US site must comply with new pricing requirements when submitting coupons, otherwise they will not be eligible to submit coupons. According to the new coupon regulations, ASIN must meet the following conditions before it can submit a coupon: The coupon must provide a discount percentage between the minimum discount (5%) and the maximum discount (50%) : (1) Products must have a historical selling price to be eligible for coupons. That is, new products cannot be eligible for coupons . Coupons can only be set up if there is a certain historical sales record, similar to member-exclusive discounts. (2) The coupon price should be lower than its “historical selling price” or the lowest price in the recent period (within the last 30 days), that is, the coupon price must be lower than the Was price, and the coupon strength can only be increased. It is not possible to first increase the discount to attract traffic and then gradually reduce it.Based on the above conditions, we can know that a large number of sellers’ Amazon coupon pages will show errors recently, mainly because the ASIN does not have a certain sales history or the ASIN does not meet the product price requirements .
It is worth noting that in the past, in order to stimulate consumers' desire to spend money, many sellers have adopted the method of using large coupons in conjunction with advertising for promotion, which has been quite effective in increasing product sales. However, with the implementation of Amazon's new coupon regulations, this promotion strategy seems to have lost its original effectiveness. As of press time, many sellers have been affected by this new regulation, with errors appearing on the coupon page and product orders declining: "The coupon is not showing up. No wonder I haven't placed any orders yet." "I have already started reporting errors. Sales have dropped significantly recently. I am considering whether to reduce the price." Therefore, after the new regulations came into effect yesterday, they quickly attracted widespread attention and heated discussions in the industry. Everything happens for a reason, and Amazon’s policy adjustments are no exception. It is understood that according to previous relevant announcements, Amazon said it has launched new coupon rules, aiming to constrain coupons with new pricing requirements, improve the coupon experience to build customer trust, and provide sellers with a better sales experience. In this regard, some sellers also said that Amazon sets thresholds through coupons to limit the room for price manipulation, preventing sellers from raising prices for profit after attracting traffic at low prices (especially in the new product promotion phase) . The market price tends to stabilize, which is indeed a good thing for some small and medium-sized sellers. However, more sellers believe that the new rule is actually launched by Amazon to force sellers to lower their prices, in order to compete with Temu and other low-price platforms with rapid growth momentum and test the low-price market: "The promotional methods are so white hat that they can't be any whiter. They can only rely on low prices. Are they competing with Pinduoduo? Amazon is really confused." “This wave of operations is to counter Temu’s low-priced coupons, right? New sellers entering the market can only continue to pour in with low prices, and then the entire category will reduce prices.”
In fact, this kind of speculation has been around for a long time. According to Similarweb data, as of December 2023, Temu's number of unique visitors reached 467 million, the same as AliExpress and second only to Amazon (2.659 billion).
Recently, industry sources also said that Temu plans to launch a semi-hosted model in the middle of this month. From this move, we can see that it has the ambition to become a full-category platform. Faced with such a fierce momentum of Temu, even Amazon cannot underestimate it. In addition, many sellers pointed out that the new regulations are also, to some extent, intended to promote Amazon's warehousing configuration fee, which came into effect earlier this month: to prevent sellers from raising prices due to increased warehousing configuration fee costs . Survey data shows that except for some sellers who are still trying to find ways to reduce or waive configuration fees, 68% of sellers have already included price increases in their considerations for operational adjustments. From this point of view, Amazon's new regulations have the greatest impact on sellers who promote new products. It means that during the promotion period of new products, they will lose the traffic entrance of coupons, and can only spend more energy on advertising, which means that advertising costs will be further increased. For old products, pricing strategies will also change due to this new regulation. A senior seller said that after the new coupon rules come into effect, Amazon sellers need to consider more factors when setting pricing and discounts: For example, they cannot set discounts that are too large , and avoid setting post-coupon prices on the site that lead to low profits or even no profits; product prices cannot be too low , and they must consider the maximum discount of 50%, assuming that when the maximum discount is set, whether the selling price will result in a loss. With the continuous adjustment of platform policies, the operational experience that Amazon sellers once regarded as the golden rule and its adaptability to the platform seem to be gradually weakening. It is foreseeable that the wave of industry change will rise again in the future. For sellers, the best way to deal with it is to keep adapting and build core competitiveness to ensure that they have more chips left on the table. What do you think about this? Welcome to discuss in the comment area~
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