by Chris McCabe
BOSTON – We’re a few weeks away from Amazon’s Prime Day in June, but Amazon’s obsession with price matching may set some brands up to fail in a big way. Instead of doing prep for a peak sales holiday, lucrative brands invest time trying to claw their way back into Buy Box featured offers.
This happens mostly because Amazon’s bots “price match” their products against an incorrect product listing, like multi-packs with different quantities, for example. Between now and Prime Day, this is going to be a major battleground. Don’t let a bot destroy your margins.
The recent, considerable spike in sellers getting kicked out of the Buy Box, or having their listings deactivated pending pricing changes, originates with faulty automation. It then gets compounded with manual investigations which fail to review prices accurately, simply because someone on price matching teams didn’t evaluate the bot errors.
This “Competitive Price Threshold” is regularly causing havoc for brands. If it hits your Prime Day, how could you possibly wait 7-10 days to solve it? You can’t, and shouldn’t. We have seen some say “there’s not much you can do, Amazon makes the rules” but we think there’s a lot more nuance here to explore. If you have no strategy or waste time waiting on the wrong teams, you’ll struggle to understand or fix this.
You won’t just lose the “Featured Offer” (Buy Box). Your PPC ads stop running. For many brands, this means sales don’t just slow down, they fall off a cliff. Price control related actions represent one reason California is suing Amazon over these same pricing pressures that ultimately force sellers to inflate prices elsewhere to make Amazon happy.. Or, you’re pushed to lower prices on Amazon, sometimes despite the fact that their teams or tools matched the wrong price to the wrong item.
In some cases, it’s simply due to a fresh listing for your branded item at a steeply discounted price. The brand owner didn’t list it at that price: some other joker did, as I explain below. Amazon teams accepted that price as true, and ran with it. Then they send a message like: “Your offer is not eligible to be a featured offer. Amazon selects offers to be the Featured Offer (Buy Box offer) based on what we believe will delight customers, including great prices, availability, and delivery speed.”
As a brief side note, and as someone who used to write “blurbs” as they call them internally: whoever is composing these needs to move over or hand the keys to a different driver. So, if your Hero ASIN is threatened with a takedown using generic language stating that Amazon reserves the right to remove any listing that is not priced equally across every online offer, don’t reduce prices and hope the entire problem goes away. It won’t. If Amazon considers the “price mismatch” to be significant enough, they pull the listing, claiming a price violation and tell you to observe price match guidelines. Or else.
Wrong Quantities
As I heard the other day from another agency, a 2 lb. bulk pack was matched to a competitor’s 7 oz. “travel size” –and Amazon forced a price match to that wrong price.
Wrong Items
And I continue to see price matching of a branded product against a completely different item that just looks similar. It could be a cheap copycat with little to no value, priced way below your quality item. Why Amazon does this is anybody’s guess.
The “Temu Trap”
Amazon scrapes ultra-cheap, likely counterfeit versions of the product from marketplaces like Temu or Walmart (or whatever platform they used) and suppressed the brand’s listing when they detect a failure to match against the “fake” prices.
And if their price matches result from bots picking out a price on say, a 12-pack, because they found a “lower price” on a competitor site for a 6 pack, yes I agree. That makes no sense. And it should be an easy fix with a support case. Yet, it isn’t and brands will often struggle to locate the support they need to fix such a glitch.
What does everyone do first?
They get on a time-wasting support call that goes nowhere, or they call Account Health and a rep reads a prewritten script. A rep may offer to talk it over, yet they can’t help in any measurable way. If it turns into a therapeutic conversation where you get a shoulder to cry on without seeing any real action, it actually does more harm than good.
We hear some reps offer to escalate the case to Amazon’s murky “Price Matching” teams, without any concrete suggestions nor useful updates to follow. When these calls end, the seller also suffers the indignity of a follow up message with generic copy and paste assurances.
How do you try to fix it? Taking the “support case” route:
- Take screenshots of Google Shopping results for your UPC, circle the correct prices, and show Amazon that the “competitor” they are scraping is an incorrect match.
- Provide links to sites with listings for the counterfeit products, and highlight the product differences between their listing and yours. Images, written text descriptions, anything you can.
- Some drop their prices even if the match makes no sense, hoping just to fix it now.
If you’re told to drop your price to a level that satisfies their “algorithm of the moment” just to avoid dealing with nebulous price matching bots, consider the consequences. Sure, it eliminates the pain of having to think about it today, with Prime Day on your doorstep, but they may hold you to that price a lot longer than you’re expecting.
Sometimes Amazon reps do realize it’s a silly, easy fix, and they’ll resolve it. I agree that one attempt should be enough to indicate that they don’t have the authority to fix “Fair Pricing” violations triggered by bad data. You’re losing far too much, each day, to just sit back and wait. Please, whatever you do, take what they tell you with a grain of salt. Appeal denial messages may redirect you back to Amazon’s core position: they reserve the right to enforce their price matching policies to keep their buyers as happy as possible.
Is there Another Way?
Beyond that, the brand likely calls us or their agency to get more hands into the mix. If it’s us, we hammer it out in a day or two. A few days at most. By day four, the point is lost.
Since caving in without appealing Amazon’s bad flags will blast apart your margins, study up and begin to appreciate the strategy behind disputes. Talk to your SAS core reps, your agency head, or us. Don’t capitulate just to keep the Buy Box and keep price matching teams off your back at least through Prime Day.
If the tools are rife with errors, is that really helping the consuming public? If simple support cases aren’t enough to remedy basic errors, do all sellers have to escalate each wrong flag to a manager? What else can you do to manage this? It actually hurts buyer experience AND hurts the brands who dedicate themselves to successful Amazon-based businesses when Amazon’s AI-driven scraping bots continue to compare your premium products to the wrong items, smaller sizes, or cheap knockoffs.
It also inflates the appeals queues, beyond measure. We see successful escalation appeals that avoid runaround teams lacking strong enough SOPs, and focus on avenues where the recipient will read it and understand it, and understand the need to act, all within short timeframes. The brands who prove these mismatches can get their Buy Box eligibility restored quickly, not after wasting countless hours or days with pointless copy and paste.
If Amazon is trying to force you into a price war against a product that you didn’t even list for sale, it may be a fake copy of your brand or a “copycat” product on a platform that doesn’t stop counterfeit sales. You have to step up, voice your complaint and challenge their faulty data.
Chris McCabe is the founder of ecommerceChris.