All the front-end products have disappeared! Amazon is actually doing a big purge

At around 3 pm this afternoon, which was almost early morning local time in the United States, a shocking bug broke out on Amazon's front desk that affected all categories, and only two or three products were left on all search pages.

No matter what category you are in or what words you use to search, the results are always like this: only two or three products are shown, and the rest disappear. There is no page-turning button and no number of search results.

Our seller discussion group was quickly ignited by this topic, and group members who usually lurk came out to complain.

Some group members even encountered errors in the translation of the backend order and inventory pages. They could not enter the page by refreshing or changing the browser, and the error displayed was "no access permission".

However, at the moment I write this article, Amazon has fixed the big bug that caused products to disappear from the search page. Currently, the organic ranking products and search numbers can be displayed normally. Some sellers' backend pages are still inaccessible, but it is only a matter of time before they return to normal.

When Amazon freaks out, it usually means they have updated their algorithms or changed their policies. This is the pattern of Amazon freakouts that we sellers have summarized over the years. So where did Amazon go wrong to cause this BUG?

I reviewed the page over and over again, but didn't notice any changes in the display of the search page. I had to find a reason, and it would be that there were a lot more self-operated products.

It wasn’t until I saw the place below that I started to sweat. Amazon’s move this time was really big!

Changes behind the bug

In the past, when we were selecting products and determining keywords, we often checked the number of search results for the keywords. To a certain extent, the number of search results represents the market capacity and intensity of competition for the category.

When I accidentally looked at the number of search results after the bug, I found that the number of results had dropped significantly! Even big keywords like "Shoes" and "earphone" only had about 8,000 or 10,000 searches.

You should know that such words usually have at least 50,000 results, which is a real red ocean category. If the same word is searched on the Japanese site, there will be about 30,000 to 50,000 results.

The US site, which has a larger and more mature market, cannot have only this few searches. When I confirmed this with the operations team, they also said that the search volume was indeed much lower. I just saw 10,000 searches for a certain keyword in the morning, but after the bug was fixed, the search volume for the same keyword was only 4,000, which was more than half less.

If the decrease in search volume is not due to a bug, then there is only one possibility: Amazon is cleaning up the listings!

However, the seller’s products have not been substantially deleted, so where did the missing search results go? Obviously, the products with lower rankings are not displayed in the search results.

This is also the reason why many sellers in our communication group today said that the traffic and orders have plummeted. Amazon may have secretly made changes before the bug occurred, limiting the display of low-ranking products in search results.

Based on my current investigation, this change applies to all categories. No matter what category or what major word, the search volume has shrunk significantly. The laser hair removal device category below even has only 1,000 searches.

If the products in the front row didn’t have hundreds of reviews, people would mistakenly think they were unpopular products that no one was making.

There is nothing wrong with the recommendation mechanism of an e-commerce platform to display more high-performing products in the front. However, depriving the back-row products of their display results and making new products have no chance to be seen by consumers is a clear violation of Amazon's Day One principle.

Amazon has not yet released any further updates, and sellers may have to wait for some time before they find out that their products have been removed from Amazon’s search pages after seeing a sharp drop in traffic rankings. However, the power of a small number of sellers is far from enough to get Amazon to correct this problem.

Please help spread this message so that more sellers can see it. Only when more and more sellers realize Amazon’s cheating operation and make a big enough condemnation, will it be possible for Amazon to face this problem again and give a reasonable explanation to the products and sellers with low rankings!