Here is your midweek jetpack of Amazon seller news, updates, and other useful clicks for your e-commerce business…

Seller Account Health Assurance will be Available in US and Canada Soon!

Amazon Accelerate 2022 has opened the door to a world of developments and features that are coming soon. Among them is Account Health Assurance which will provide direct support to prevent account suspensions for sellers who have high account health ratings and a valid emergency contact number. If you are eligible, you will be automatically enrolled and receive an email when the program launches. Time to celebrate.

Alexa to Bring Brands and Customers Even Closer

Amazon has also announced the launching of “Ask Alexa”, a new feature that allows brands to answer customer questions.

“For example, a customer shopping for cleaning products on Amazon.com could ask, “How can I remove pet hair from my carpet?” A brand can now provide answers to such questions, along with links to its Amazon storefront.”

This feature will be available to a select group of brands included in Amazon’s registry in October 2022 (by invite only).

While this is generally a positive development, big brands may attempt to seize spotlight answers to the most popular questions in an effort for optimum product placement.

This may actually help OA/RA sellers who are slinging large brands. Wink wink.

Grow Your Amazon Business with Amazon-Approved Apps

Amazon recently approved and added 2,500 3rd Party Apps to their Selling Partner Appstore to help sellers automate, manage and grow their businesses.

Sellers now have an abundance of choices in software solutions that can optimize processes such as listings management, pricing and shipping, and automate essential selling operations.

All of these apps have been carefully vetted and will be continuously monitored by Amazon.

If you want to learn more about these Amazon-approved apps, check out this thread.

New Analytics and Supply Chain Tools

Amazon continues to empower its sellers as it recently expanded its offerings on analytical and supply chain tools.

As of September 14, the following awesome pieces of tech are now available to all sellers:

• Manage Your Experiments – sellers can now run A/B tests on their titles, images, and content to see which converts the best.

• Search Analytics Dashboard Expansion – now provides anonymized data for understanding the interests and shopping habits of your customers.

• Customer Reviews Insight – a new feature of the Product Opportunity Explorer, this enables sellers to determine which features to build on or prioritize based on customer reviews and feedback.

• Enhanced Marketplace Product Guidance – now includes selection recommendations for highly sought products in France, Italy, and Spain. If you are looking to expand to these marketplaces, this update is perfect for you.

• Veeqo (Shipping Solution) – now FREE for Amazon sellers, Veeqo enables sellers to connect all their sales channels including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify, and gain access to discounted shipping rates on UPS, USPS, DHL, and FedEx.

The Amazon Seller University YouTube channel offers instructional videos on how you can maximize these new features to grow your business.

All of these features are potential game changers for the PL, OA, RA, and brand builders.

Increased Email Marketing Reach at No Additional Costs

Amazon is currently beta-testing Amazon Customer Engagement’s Tailored Audiences, which allows sellers to reach three new audience types: repeat customers, recent customers, and high-spend customers.

The new feature, which will launch by 2023, enables sellers to send marketing emails to a selected targeted audience and drive repeat sales to establish their brands. It also comes equipped with performance and reporting metrics so sellers can measure the impact of their marketing emails.

The new email marketing feature will be available for free in Seller Central. Yeeeehaw!

Amazon Seller Support Now on Twitter

There is a (new?) dedicated Twitter account for seller support. The handle is @amzsellerhelp, and it seems they are responding promptly to questions.

Will this become a useful platform for helping sellers with their concerns? Will they fix their internal seller support platform first? SMH.

FBA Grade and Resell No Longer Free

Sad news for those enrolled in Amazon’s FBA Grade and Resell program.

Starting September 21, Amazon will charge fees ranging from $1.50 to $4.10 per item that Amazon employees grade.

The invite-only program allows sellers to list and sell returned “unfulfillable” products after Amazon inspection and grading.

Though it’s no longer free, it is still a viable option in opposition to creating a removal order and listing the product on eBay or FB Marketplace.

Detailed Rate Chart for Amazon FBA Fee Increases

Amazon fees are going up (surprise!) and for accurate number-crunching, check out these detailed and updated Amazon rate charts:

• 2022 US FBA fulfillment fee changes

• 2022 Amazon.ca FBA fulfillment fee changes

• 2022 Remote Fulfillment with FBA fee changes

• Fulfillment fees for Multi-Channel Fulfillment orders

As a consolation, Amazon acknowledges that sellers took a big hit with the fee increases and expresses “gratitude.” They are such angels.

Inventory Lab Fee Increase: Is the Juice Still Worth the Squeeze?

Short answer: YES.

Inventory Lab is increasing its subscription fee from $49 to $69 per month, but we believe it is worth every penny. Find out why here.

Other Quick Clicks

• Amazon commits $147million to create and preserve 1,260 affordable homes, primarily with minority-led developers across Washington D.C.

• Amazon raises pay and enhances benefits for delivery riders

• Amazon testing pinch-grasping robots for e-commerce fulfillment

• What Amazon’s Recommendation Algorithm could do in Healthcare

• A peek inside Amazon’s Vendor management systems, processes and practices

• Amazon continues opening cashierless grocery stores in California

• Amazon makes the cheapest Kindle even better

• Amazon’s live audio app launches creator fund

• Amazon Prime to exclusively deliver Thursday Night Football

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, comments or violent reactions, let us know below!

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About The Authors

Heath Armstrong is a creative alien and the co-founder of Rage Create. He is the author of The Sweet-Ass Journal to Develop Your Happiness Muscle in 100 Days, Sweet-Ass Affirmations, and the host of the Never Stop Peaking podcast.

@heathfistpumps | heatharmstrong.com | sweetassjournal.com

Jason Berwick is a serial adventurepreneur, e-commerce automation junkie, and the co-founder of Rage Create. He spends most of his time building systems to scale digital businesses while traveling the world.

@jasonsepicquest | JasonBerwick.com

The post 9.21.22 Midweek Clicks: Seller Account Assurance, Alexa and Brands, Amazon-approved Apps, New Amazon Seller Tools, and More! appeared first on Seller Spaceship.

Word Count: 1,155Estimated Reading Time: 3.3 minutes

If you are a seller on Amazon, one of the most bothersome messages that you can receive is:

“Listings deactivated for potential pricing error.”

Personally, we find this very annoying, especially if the price of the item in question is in line with our competitors. However, over the years of selling on Amazon, we’ve figured out a variety of methods in dealing with high price errors. In this blog post, we will share these methods with you, as well as information on Amazon’s policy on product prices, and tools and software that may help improve your Amazon FBA business.

The Amazon Fair Pricing Policy

Sellers often wonder why Amazon has this price mistake alert set up in the first place. They think that since it’s a free marketplace, it’s their prerogative to dictate the price for the inventory they have for sale.

It doesn’t quite work that way, though.

Amazon, in line with their mission to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company”, regularly monitors the prices of the products in the marketplace in order to spot pricing practices that may harm a customer’s trust. Therefore, a product priced too high (when compared to the same or similar products) from their vantage point may get dinged. Amazon may remove the offer, suspend the ship option, or if the seller is a repeat offender, terminate the said seller’s selling privileges.

Compliance to this policy is very important, unless you want a deactivated Amazon seller account.

To understand the Amazon Fair Pricing Policy better, log in to Seller Central and click here.

Fixing Amazon High Price Errors

Fixing a pricing error isn’t that difficult. Here are ways to address Amazon price mistakes:

• Check Your Listing for Price Mistakes – while this may seem obvious, at times we are dealing with so much inventory that sometimes, really simple errors such as a misplaced decimal point can create a pricing error that may cause one of your listings to be deactivated. Just fix the error, and your listing will be active again.

• Set Minimum and Maximum Prices – we’ve experienced receiving alerts for high price errors even if the price we’ve set is what we feel is right for the marketplace. One thing that has worked for us is setting minimum and maximum prices for our product. You can do that by navigating to your “Price Alerts” page or “Manage Pricing” page. Set your min and max prices (your sales price should be in the middle of these two) and check again if the pricing error disappears. At times this will make the error disappear completely, other times it comes back after a couple of hours.

• Check Out Your Competition and Readjust Your Price – for us, this usually occurs when we restock products. Sometimes, the price of that particular product has already gone down, and our previous price is significantly higher than those of our competitors. If this happens, simply readjust your price to align with your competitors and the pricing error will be resolved. Don’t forget to adjust your minimum and maximum prices too.

• Fix the Issue with Your MSKU – there are times when the MSKU of your product causes a glitch in Amazon’s system, and this glitch may trigger the high price alert. To address this, create a removal order for your product. Once you have the product, delete the old listing, and resend this to Amazon using a new MSKU. It’s a bit of a hassle to be honest, but this method was able to fix some pricing errors we had in the past.

• Get Help from Seller Central Support – like most of its algorithms, Amazon’s high price alert algorithm is a mystery to sellers, and sometimes no matter what we do, the pricing error doesn’t get resolved. In this case, it is best to contact Seller Central support to ask for assistance. Present all the information pertinent to your case (like a screenshot of your competitor’s prices to show that your price aligns with theirs, reasons for pricing higher than your competitors, etc…) so that your case gets resolved quickly. We know that in some instances it’s difficult to get the proper assistance from Seller Support, but be patient and always be respectful. They will usually reply with links from their knowledge base, and before getting upset over the canned response, make sure you follow the links, read up, and try their suggestions. If these do not work, you can always make a request for your case to be escalated to their supervisor.

• Just Bite the Bullet – sometimes, it’s exasperating to deal with high price errors, so what we and other sellers who do online and retail arbitrage do is just lower the price of our item until the alert disappears, more so if we just have a few units of the product left.  We know that this is not the ideal solution, but sometimes the cost of dealing with a pricing error for a single item is higher than the actual profit you make off of it, so we just do this and move on to the next product. There are a lot more productive ways to use your time rather than deal with a high price alert for a single item.

 The Power of Automation:Amazon Repricing Tools and Software

We love automation, and it has been one of the keys to the success we’ve experienced in the Amazon FBA game. We’ve incorporated it into just about every aspect (including price management) of our FBA businesses, and the investments we’ve made in these tools and software have helped us expand our businesses and increase our profits.

Repricing manually is fine if you’re dealing with low inventory levels, but once your inventory starts to become larger, it’s wise to invest in an Amazon repricing tool or software. The automation these repricers provide help you keep up with constant price fluctuations on Amazon, allowing you to stay competitive and preventing Amazon price mistakes that temporarily disable your listings.

If you want to learn more about Amazon repricing tools and software and how it can bring your business to the next level, check out our previous blog post.

From our experience, Informed.co (formerly Appeagle) has been instrumental in keeping our FBA businesses very competitive in the wide-open Amazon marketplace. It has helped us increase our profits and prevent pricing errors that can hamper our sales. If you’re interested in using Informed.co, check out our previous blog post that details our repricing strategies that allow us to win buy boxes more often to increase our sales and profits.

We hope this blog post was able to help you understand how to fix high price errors in Amazon. If you have more questions, or would like to share your knowledge on this topic, light up the comment section below!

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