Off-site traffic will be blocked? Amazon issued an important statement!

A piece of news suddenly appeared these two days, saying that Amazon issued an announcement reiterating its requirements on refunds, discounts, and off-site traffic.

In the forum inquiries, Amazon specifically reminded sellers that although Amazon's policy allows sellers to implement some necessary off-site incentive policies and activities to promote customer product discovery and conversion orders, such as rebates, coupons and other promotional measures.

Amazon strongly encourages these behaviors of lowering prices to increase sales, but there is a very important premise that sellers must comply with. The promotional price for off-site traffic must be consistent with the in-store promotion, rather than bypassing the store to offer a higher promotional price externally. Because it involves off-site rebates and incentives, it will have an impact on consumers and other sellers, and may be judged by the algorithm as manipulating rankings, increasing reviews, and generating artificially manipulated traffic and conversions.

The official pointed out that the off-site traffic channels that need to be paid attention to in terms of promotion intensity include "two-step links", "authoritative links", "hyperlinks", "Funnels" and "Treasurehunt", etc. At the same time, Amazon also emphasized that the use of search (keywords) to purchase + refund operations outside the site is a sensitive area, and the possibility of further crackdowns cannot be ruled out.

In general, this is not a completely new policy. Amazon just emphasized some of the current platform regulations, and also sent a signal to the outside world that the platform will definitely start with two-step links, hyperlinks, etc. to rectify illegal off-site traffic. Facebook was once full of review groups, which brought countless false reviews and orders to the Amazon platform.

Off-site traffic has always been one of the important sources of traffic for sellers. Will Amazon’s move directly push off-site traffic back to the pre-liberation era?

Amazon made it very clear in the announcement that pure off-site gameplay is officially encouraged, and what is really regulated is the use of off-site ultra-low discount codes to attract a large amount of off-site traffic and orders in a short period of time. In this case, sales will be suspended due to the surge in sales. Also, the use of off-site cashback evaluation is officially prohibited, and the announcement released this time is to remind sellers.

The traffic within Amazon is limited. If a seller’s business reaches a bottleneck, it is inevitable that they will have to touch the outside world. Amazon is well aware of this and has even been planning its own independent website business and off-site social media business.

At the antitrust hearing before leaving his job, my brother-in-law bluntly stated that Shopify is his direct competitor. This is the first time that Amazon has officially confirmed its competition with Shopify, and it also fully demonstrates the importance of off-site traffic to Amazon.

It is impossible to cut off the off-site traffic with one stroke, so how to regulate, how to review, which operations can be done and which cannot, all require a long period of off-site work to accumulate experience and explore the bottom line. At least for now, large discounts outside the site are risky, and may face penalties such as sales surges and ranking manipulation. It is recommended that you do not go against the wind in the near future, especially during the period before the big promotion. Don't put big discounts outside the site just because there is a Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday event on the site, as you may be caught by Amazon.

While Amazon reiterated its off-site policy this time, the bottom line behind it is bound to change. The off-site methods that were previously possible now need to be re-examined and tested.