Black technology avoids Amazon's scrutiny?! Price fraud is no longer a big deal

During the epidemic, sellers of masks and other epidemic prevention supplies are most afraid of not knowing when Amazon will remove their products or even freeze their stores and funds. Less than a month after the mask sellers besieged Shenzhen Amazon, Amazon has closed thousands of stores for "price fraud" with unclear red lines.

Regardless of whether you are an epidemic prevention seller or not, you are puzzled and wary of this official behavior. If your product has to adjust the price one day due to rising demand and costs, will it be the same as these sellers?

Recently, someone has tried to come up with a method that will not be censored no matter how high the price is, cleverly bypassing Amazon's "price fraud" algorithm monitoring, and it has also been exposed by foreign media.

Let's take a look at the fitness equipment product below. Before mid-March, this product was priced at $279. However, due to the impact of the epidemic, Amazon restricted warehouse entry in mid-March, and the product could not be restocked and sold out. Then, this sold-out product was entangled by more than a dozen copycats, and the price was directly multiplied by several times, ranging from $899 to $1,275.

We don’t need to analyze the reasons for the price increase, the key point is why this product has increased so much more than usual and was not caught by Amazon’s algorithm? After a careful look, the status column of these hijacked products is all filled in with “Collectibles - Like New”

This is not an isolated case. Foreign media also revealed that products in several other categories also used the method of changing products into collectibles to circumvent Amazon's price fraud review.

According to foreign media whistleblowers, this method has actually existed before the outbreak of the epidemic, but because under normal circumstances, few sellers will trigger the "price fraud" review (which requires increasing the selling price several times in a short period of time), no one knows about this circumvention method.

But all this has changed completely after the epidemic. The huge demand and the inability to restock warehouses have caused the prices of some products to soar. If sellers really raise prices according to the actual situation, they will easily be judged as "price fraud" and the products will be removed from the shelves. At this time, the method of setting products as "collectibles" to avoid review began to spread.

This is not actually a bug. Second-hand products can be sold as collectibles at several times the original price in some cases, such as products signed by celebrities and out-of-print products.

However, Amazon certainly does not have the energy to verify one by one whether the products are really collectible. It simply delegates the power to sellers and buyers. If the buyer really buys the product at several times the price, it proves that it is indeed collectible. Therefore, it is reasonable for Amazon not to set a "price red line" for collectibles.

Because of the above reason, I think this operation is safer than some black technologies that exploit bugs and loopholes. If you want to try it, I don’t recommend you to modify the existing products directly. You can follow the sale or create a new listing and select it in the product status column.

Due to the riots in the United States, the delivery time of logistics will be greatly delayed. This skill is still very useful at this time. In order to solve the problem of delivery failure and out-of-stock, you can try Amazon's official "First-in-Stock" service, which allows the inventory to be put on the shelves for sale directly after it is shipped.