Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

I woke up this morning to a message that my account has been deactivated again. Before it was because I had too many orders, but this time around it is because they want more verification documents about how I'm sourcing products.

At 6am I submitted all my invoices along with an explanation and contacted my account manager to see if he can expedite it. But Amazon is a very federated company, so there are independent teams for every process and my account manager can't do anything here.

Around 4pm I got an email that my account was unblocked again and got one sale.

I wasn't able to get any coding in today, but I thought more about my goal and I have one idea to speed up the order updater considerably.

Tomorrow is the weekend and I will have a lot more time to work on this.

 

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[GoldFibre]

After no crashes for several days, my bot ran into one edge case last night, so I fixed that one when I woke up.

I implemented one more parallelization that I thought of, but there wasn't a noticeable impact on the speed.

I took some time today to think orient myself about the current state of the business and what is the most impactful thing to look at.

Some observations:

• My listings have an 'International Shipping' badge on them, which might be a deterrent. I can remove this but it will change how my shipping time is calculated
• My brand is not so well-known, while everyone knows the primary competitor's brand.
• I don't have any customer reviews, but the primary competitor has more than 1,000 in the past 12 months.
• I'm getting 1-2 orders each day that my account is active and have 14 orders so far. I know that some competitors are getting several hundred orders per day
• My best shipping time is three days slower than the main competitor. This is primarily due to my consol frequency. Right now my supplier has two consols per week, but the main competitor ships every day

Here is an offer analysis of an item that I sold yesterday:


Based on the above I suspect I won this on price alone. Even though there is one company with a lower price than me, I think they probably updated their price after I sold my unit and their price was higher than mine at the time of sale.

Even though my delivery time is longer than several other competitors, I still won the BuyBox.

Next I wondered why this product sold at all, so I looked at the product statistics:


So I wondered what this looks like for all of my orders so far, to see if there is some pattern:


I was previously considering 'Fast Movers' as anything with a display group sales rank better than 5,000, but I haven't sold anything close to that rank!

So I started looking at the listings and BuyBoxes of some of these Fast Movers and found that I'm generally losing to the primary competitor on price by a good margin. On smaller items, I would have to get the international shipping down to almost zero to match the price. This makes sense because I know this competitor has their own consols and the incremental cost of most products will be zero, since their base load is large enough.

They aren't giving the shipping away for free on larger items though. I found a rug that should have a chargeable weight of 6.6kg, which costs me about $43. Based on their pricing, I think that the competitor is estimating a cost of $22.

I think they also save some money on destination delivery. I have a really good price for a new company, but I think they are paying about 35% less. They can command this because they do over 1,000 deliveries per day.

Options:

• I can try to squeeze my international shipping vendor on the international leg. The more volume I get the more negotiating power I will have. We have a good relationship so I think I can make progress even now.
• I can look for other vendors and get quotes. I can even I just use the quotes to squeeze my existing vendor
• I am adding a chargeable weight buffer of 20% to all items, but actually I should be subtracting some because we are flattening the boxes. I was just trying to be cautious to avoid losing money but this small change would lower the intl. shipping component of my pricing by 20-40%.
• I'm paying a labeling fee on each package, but maybe I can negotiate to cap this on some basis. For instance, I could pay the fee on the first 20 packages each week, but after that it is free.
• I doubt I can lower my domestic delivery costs right now, but if I get to a decent volume I can bring that down another 10-20%.

I'm going to work on all of these, and also start tracking my actual costs to look for variations with my estimates.

 

[Subsonic]

You seem like a really smart and talented coder/tech guy.

I am curious why you choose to do this out of everything. What is your best case scenario? How much do you need to sell to profit 10k a month? With all the different steps and competing on price I can't really see a margin larger than 10%, probably closer to 5%.

 

[GoldFibre]

You seem like a really smart and talented coder/tech guy.

I am curious why you choose to do this out of everything. What is your best case scenario? How much do you need to sell to profit 10k a month? With all the different steps and competing on price I can't really see a margin larger than 10%, probably closer to 5%.

I think it is a big enough opportunity that it could qualify as 'fastlane', but I don't want to get ahead of myself with predictions.

I have an estimated profit margin of about 13% on my orders so far. This will change once I get the final costs in from each component. Since I added in some buffer in my cost calculations I expect that the actual margin will be higher.

 

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[GoldFibre]

I got an order today for an item that was FBA in the US, but the estimated delivery date was September 2. I was using FBA to decide whether or not to put a short or long handling time, but it looks like there are other cases to handle.

To fulfill the order, I bought an extremely similar product that will ship sooner, so I hope that the customer won't notice the difference.

I also emailed Amazon to ask them about adding competing offer shipping times to the SP API.

To get a more competitive price, I lowered my weight buffer, but then to compensate on low competition items, I raised my maximum margin from 15 to 25 percent.

I started building an orders module for my software, so I can track the accuracy of my costs and find out when I need to make adjustments.

This coming week I will focus on building out this module. I don't have a numeric KPI to pursue this time around. Instead I'm looking to make features to reduce my level of effort in handling fulfillment and pricing.

Also, my computer monitor broke after 8+ years of good service to me. I ordered a new one from Amazon of course.

 

[GoldFibre]

Account Restriction​

After getting two more orders this morning Amazon restricted my account again. It looks like I have a limit of 15 open orders on my account. Previously the limit was only 5.

Unfortunately I think there won’t be any sales for a few days, because I can't fulfill my next orders until later in the week. Hopefully when my account comes back online the limit will go up again.

Profitability Measurement​

I built a flow that imports my orders from Amazon, populates all my estimated costs and revenue, and leaves open some fields for filling in the actuals.

Summing up across my 20 orders I'm currently at 277 USD of profit and 15% estimated margin. Most of my costs haven't been invoiced yet, so we will see what the actual profit or loss turns out to be.

Calculating Shipping Time​

I had emailed Amazon developer support about getting the shipping/handling time of other vendors' offers and I got a pretty unsympathetic response back that also included false information. I got pretty annoyed and so decided to help myself and rechecked the SP API for shipping info hints.

Lo and behold, there is some information on the shipping in certain cases, and although it is not 100% complete, I can use it to improve my own shipping times and better avoid getting banned.

So I incorporated this logic when it is available and now in those particular cases the shipping should be more accurate.

The 'ships from state' is one piece of information that I haven't yet incorporated. Since my US facility is in the northeast US, I might want to add extra days for items shipping from the west coast or other places that might take longer.

On the Amazon web site, when I switched my postal code to Seattle against an item that shipped from Washington state, it took four days off of the shipping time.

So I added something to my bot that will record whenever it finds an ASIN from a new state and then let it run for a while. Then I manually checked each ASIN in Amazon US to see how many extra days were due to my postal code, hoping to make a configuration based on the state.

Unfortunately the result was pretty inconsistent. I found a one day difference with an ASIN from California, a four day difference with an ASIN from Alabama and a zero day difference with an ASIN from Colorado. It may be that the sellers in the US have their own shipping configurations, which I don't have a way to see.

So next I thought I can take a carrier like UPS and get transit time estimates directly on their site. I checked a couple of states, but I ran out of time today to implement this today.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Calculating Shipping Time​

Today I got the UPS Ground transit time for all 50 states, and built that into my shipping time calculator.

Then I saw that sometimes items ship from other countries, primarily China. I found that these shipping times are pretty inconsistent, and so I added a huge buffer to anything from China.

While investigating a BuyBox Winner that ships from France, I noticed that the price on the website doesn't match what came back in the API. After inspecting the response I was surprised to find that more than one offer can be a BuyBox Winner in the API and more than one offer can be from a 'Featured Merchant'.

So then I read the documentation a little more closely:


Always good to read the documentation!

Since I'm using a Prime account to purchase in the US, I took that as the priority of the two BuyBox Winner offers. That seemed like a natural configuration to make.

But then the next product I looked at had both a Prime winning offer and a non-prime winning offer. The Prime offer is cheaper, but doesn't show in the BuyBox when I go to the website. The shipping time doesn't specified either, but I can add it to cart. After adding to cart it says 'Temporarily Unavailable', but this information is not in the API.

I'm not really sure what to do in the above case. I figure for now I will cast a wider net for treating things as unavailable. So I made the conditions pretty aggressive about considering items as not sellable. Right now I value the account risk management more than the possible increase of a few percent in sales.

Fulfillment​

My account is still locked since I hit my current limit of fifteen unfulfilled orders.

Yesterday and today I had eight of those fifteen pending orders arrive in the US. They should move on today's consol and hopefully I can deliver them by Saturday, getting my account reopened. Actually I don't have to deliver them, I just have to confirm their tracking numbers. So once the goods land I should be able to do that and unlock my account.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Invoice Request​

One of my buyers sent me a message today asking for an invoice. I had nothing on-hand so had to come up with something and provide it to them. I actually wasn't 100% sure about the tax treatment but I guess we will see if they have an issue with what I've made.

Fulfillment​

Only my orders that arrived in the US on Monday made it out on the Tuesday consol. We might get them ready for pickup tomorrow, which would allow my account to get unblocked.

Transit Time​

I worked on a little tool that tries to predict the Amazon US delivery time based on what I can see in the API response. Then I ran it on a sample of products that had different shipping properties to see how accurate my configuration is:


The final column is the difference between my calculation and what shows up on the Amazon website. This is calculated under the worst possible conditions. So it is as if the US delivery takes the maximum stated on the Amazon site, and it arrives at my facility on a Tuesday, which gives me the longest lead time before shipping it international.

It looks like when all the shipping information is missing, it is Prime and coming from an Amazon facility, and my configuration is accurate with some overshooting.

But when it is FBM there is some large variance in the shipping, and it isn't clear that there is a formula to get it right. Maybe what I will do is incorporate this script into my bot, let it run for a few days to gather a bunch of data, and then run a proper statistical analysis.

The goal of this analysis is to group by cohorts separated by variance. Then I apply more aggressive shipping times on low variance cohorts and longer shipping times on high variance cohorts. The goal is to get the late delivery rate under 1%.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Controllable Unlimited Leverage​

Ok so I've sat around for a few days with no sales, telling myself there is nothing I can do, when actually I know there is something I can do and I've just been refusing to act.

So after some harsh self-talk I immediately confirmed my five orders that are arrived at destination, even though they can't be picked up until Saturday. This is fine because of the way the milestones work in Amazon fulfillment. Everything will still make it on time, but my account gets opened two days early.

As soon as I confirmed the first order the account was back online. And I could have done this the second that my account got disabled on Monday. Lesson learned.

Then I thought to myself 'What other simple thing am I completely aware of that will multiply my business but I'm refusing to do it?'

With a single line of code I can list only items that are FBA.

If I make this simple change I will only have orders on items with shorter fulfillment times,

which means my account will be restricted less often,

which means my account's open order limit will go up more quickly,

which means I make more sales and more money,

which means I can later list the full catalog without risk of restriction.

So I did it.

'What else can I do?'

I can confirm my orders earlier in the process, since it doesn't affect the final delivery date.

If I make this simple change I get to confirm my orders earlier,

which means I will have fewer pending orders at any given time,

which means my account will be restricted less often,

which means my account's open order limit will go up more quickly,

which means I make more sales and more money,

which means I can later list the full catalog without risk of restriction.

So I did it.

International Shipping Costs​

Next I listed out a bunch of things that I could be doing, mostly coding tasks, then tried to sort them all by impact and value.

Ultimately the most important thing is lowering my international shipping costs. This outweighs all of the coding tasks put together BY FAR. I've also known this for a while and even wrote it in this forum thread over two weeks ago. It is even written on a post-it an stuck against the wall in my office!

And yet I did not do anything about it for weeks.

I even had dinner with my vendor last week and did not raise the topic.

He has even repeatedly asked me what he can do to help and I did not mention it, despite it being the only thing in my head.

Enough is enough. So I immediately sent some messages to my vendor to open the negotiation. I explained the business situation, the target pricing and even offered a different structure that guarantees them more revenue in exchange for the lower marginal rate.

I'm sure I will get somewhere with just a couple of text messages and a phone call or two. And it is going to make a big difference to the business.

Prohibited Items / Restricted Brands​

Besides increasing revenue, I also need to manage my account health, because I'm shotgunning product offers out there, and some of them result in warnings. Warnings can eventually lead to account restrictions. Account restrictions mean less revenue.

I already know what item types are prohibited, and I already have some brands I know I need to blacklist.

So I started working on a filter for this.

A Bug​

I found a race condition with my API refresh token that caused sporadic crashes, so I refactored to eliminate it.

Somehow I don't have any mental block against doing a bit of coding to fix important things, in contrast to everything above in this post.

Mental Fortitude​

I'm disappointed it took me so long to wake up on some of these issues, but I'm glad that I finally woke up.

I need to be tenacious when it comes to business, because nobody is going to do it for me. And if I don't do it then what makes me think I will beat my competition?

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Throttled​

A few days ago I started getting many more throttling errors on one particular API call, which is the bottleneck of my entire flow.

I thought I was just not calculating the rate limits properly, so this morning I refactored all that code to simulate the rate limit mechanism that Amazon uses internally.

But then I kept getting throttled the same amount. I inspected the response and my rate limit is only 0.1 calls per second when the default for that particular API call is 0.5 calls per second.

So essentially my entire workflow has become five times slower.

I raised a ticket to Amazon to ask why my rate limit was so low and if they can please raise it. I also sent messaged my account manager to see if there is anything he can do to push it.

In the vein of my post yesterday, even if this hadn't been throttled, it was always my bottleneck in the workflow. So I could have asked for a rate increase a long time ago, but I didn't take action.

While I pursue this from a customer support angle, I also have another option that will be more effort but which would be a more permanent solution: I can set up the push integration and update my pricing/availability based on push rather than pull.

I'm not 100% sure the integration covers my use cases, but whatever load I can take off of the API will result in more throughput and additional business value.

I read up on this side of the API and tried to set it up.

It looks like I can only get pricing notifications on products for which I have offers, so as I have things set up now, I would only know if my competition changed something. I wouldn't know if my costs or availability changed in the US.

One way around this is to add offers in the US and make them extremely high prices, just so that I could get the notifications and never get any sales. But I'm not sure if I would be violating some Amazon policies there.

In any case I spent most of the day building this push workflow, trying to design it to reduce the amount of API calls to my bottleneck. I was able to do so and brought my offers updated per minute from around 40 to 120. Before the rate limit change, I was at 290 offers per minute though. So the system will speed up a lot if I get the rate limit increased by support.

Exploring an Idea​

I had a chat with my neighbor, who is an entrepreneur, and I explained the business to him.

When he heard that Amazon is only slowly raising my open order limit as I fulfill my orders from overseas, he immediately had a simple idea that I hadn't thought of before.

He said if they are going to raise the limit based on the number of successfully fulfilled orders, why don't I stock something locally and list it at a cheap price to generate quickly fulfilled orders.

Using this method I could quickly get up to several hundred successfully fulfilled orders, which would be worth it to raise my open order limit even if it meant taking a loss on each sale.

But I don't even have to stock the inventory - I just need to list it. So I poked around the Amazon website to see what might work well, took pictures of some of the top products, then walked to the grocery store to see what they are selling for there.

They were more expensive at the grocery store, so I think I will just buy them from Amazon and then list them at a lower price. This way I will lose about $4 per order, including the price difference plus shipping.

Then I checked the BuyBox, and a number of competitors had the same idea and were listing at very low prices. Also Amazon won't let you list popular products unless you provide proof of wholesale purchases:


I looked at several more products as well and ran into similar restrictions. So I'm putting this on hold for tonight as I ran out of time to explore. There might be a way to do it, but it isn't as straightforward as I had anticipated.

Fulfillment​

I prepared the documents for five orders that will be picked up tomorrow.

One of the items requires entering a 'transparency code', which is a unique code on the item itself - something like a serial number. I suppose Amazon can figure out from this code that it was previously in their US warehouse.

Surveying​

At this point I had worked about 13 hours straight, with a goal of working 16 hours on the business today. My concentration on coding was faltering a bit, so I spent the last three hours browsing my own listings, looking at competitors and transit times and trying to find some new insights.

The most interesting thing I found is that there are some brands that are listing restricted and the API can't list them by itself, but if you click through a little form on the seller portal you immediately get access.

The brands I saw like this had pretty highly rated items, so I'm going to add a workflow that flags these for later. Then when I have time I can go and click through a bunch of the forms, and then tell the bot to add the listings.

Self-Talk​

Yesterday and today I applied a motivational technique I got from David Goggins. In the morning I make an audio recording calling myself out for, as David would say, 'being a little bitch', and not getting things done. I continue for about 5-10 minutes of harsh, honest self-talk.

Then throughout the day I listen to the recording on repeat. It seems like it helps break down the psychological defenses we tend to throw up against action. In part thanks to this bizarre practice I definitely got way more done in the past two days than I have in the previous week combined.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Self-Talk​

Today's self-talk was all about focusing on getting sales up. My best day so far was only 478 USD and I need to get up around 5,500 USD per day. But revenue is an output - I need to focus on the input.

Do I know how to get the revenue up?

How can I figure out how to get the revenue up?

What useless crap am I doing that isn't taking me towards this goal?

I need to figure out the answers to these questions and then immediately take action.

Today is another 16 hour day.

Throttled​

This morning Amazon developer support replied to my issue in which I was requesting a rate limit increase. They asked for a detailed explanation of what my application does, so I explained it to them. I hope they consider my use case legitimate and understand the reason for the requested rate limit.

I reviewed my workflow and found another place where I was using the bottleneck call. I didn't think it was entirely necessary to make these calls, so I removed them and got my offers processed per minute up from 120 to 180.

I also tightened up the criteria for updating prices based on the push notifications, and now my SQS queue is shrinking rather than growing continuously.

Copyright Infringement​

I got an order today for a wallet that has the Pokemon logo on it. In the product pictures it has the logo blurred to avoid getting flagged by Amazon:


The word 'Pokemon' is nowhere in the title or the description, so I don't know how I would catch this. But I know Amazon will hold me accountable if they do catch me selling this.

Bizarrely, Amazon has labeled this product as 'Amazon's Choice' in the US. So I guess they face the same problem I do in trying to determine these types of copyright infringements.


I will fulfill the order, but I took down the listing as soon as I saw the logo. I also blocked any offers on items sold by this particular seller in the US.

Brand Approval​

Yesterday I thought I would make a flow to flag where I need to go through a manual brand approval application, but today I saw that this is already in the Amazon seller portal. There were over 1,000 ASINs in the list, with some multiples from the same brand, so I went through and submitted applications for a bunch of them.

But then I checked the products themselves, and for many of them my offer is showing in the BuyBox already, before I have approval. But for others my offer is not showing due to not having approval. So I kept going through them and submitting the applications.

I was previously filtering out brands that had any restrictions, but after seeing this process I realized I should be including them. So after removing that filter there were a lot more such products showing up in the list, and even though I was submitting approval applications for two hours straight, I had more products pending when I stopped than when I started.

Early Confirmation​

The last time Amazon restricted my account for too many orders I was at 15 open orders. It's possible they have raised my limit, but I don't have a way to know. So when I got up to 14 open orders today I started confirming some early that won't arrive until next week.

And despite confirming inbound orders early throughout the day, I had several orders come in at once, taking me to 15 open orders, but my account was not restricted. I guess my limit is probably at 20 now, which I am likely to hit by tomorrow.

Shipping Settings​

Another thing I have known about for a long time but didn't take a simple action. My shipping settings say I ship internationally, but actually the shipping as far as Amazon is concerned is domestic. The international part of my supply chain falls under 'handling'.

So I changed my shipping settings with a few clicks, which removed an ugly 'International Shipping' bar from all my offers. This bar is essentially a warning to customers and is reducing conversion, so removing it should improve sales some.

Priority Queue​

I already have some priority queues, but I added a new one today for anything with display group sales rank under 5,000 (what I call a 'fast-mover') and which doesn't have Amazon as a competitor. These items have lots of reviews and I'm hoping have a better chance of sales.

I also changed my SQS logic to focus only on price changes on fast-movers and to only do price updates if it's possible for me to have the lowest price.

 

[GoldFibre]

Losing BuyBox on Fast Movers​

I saw that on many fast-mover BuyBoxes I'm not winning even though I have the lowest price. Sometimes I even have the fastest shipping as well.

I can only think of two things that might be the reason:

• My offer on the product is newer
• My seller account is newer

There is one seller beating me on a lot of clothing products, even though my price is 30% lower. I checked their seller page and they have 21 ratings and 45% positive. And then on my account I have zero ratings so far.

Then looking a bit closer, I saw that they have a customer service phone number and I don't. So I went to my settings and added my number in case that is making any difference. I doubt it is, because several other sellers with low ratings were beating me even without a phone number.

I also changed my pricing algorithm to continue to lower the price bit by bit if I have the lowest price but do not win the BuyBox. It will do so until it hits my minimum margin of 5%, but on many of these items I had the lowest price on 20+% margin, so there is a lot of room.

The other thing to work on is my account reputation. I need to continue to fulfill orders on time, and also need some positive reviews. I will recruit some friends to buy items and then leave me a review.

Shut Down​

But then I kept looking at my catalog and I had ZERO items with a featured offer. Sometimes my offer would show up if you click on 'offers from other sellers', but if my offer was the only one on the product it would say the following:


So I'm effectively shut down, but I don't know why and there is no message on my account.

I wonder if maybe it had to do with some of the settings I changed yesterday. I did switch my address to remove the 'international shipping' banner, and maybe Amazon saw that as a problem.

I thought maybe I'll confirm an order and see if that does anything. It is also possible that the shut down was caused by early confirmation.

After searching online a bit, it looks like a lot of people have had this happen after changing their shipping templates too many times. It looks like instead of editing my template, I should have made a copy of it and incrementally switched my products over to the new one. One person said it took over a week to get their account back to normal.

So that's what I did next - I made a new template and made it my default for any new product offers or updates.

Once the customer service phone lines opened I called them to ask=beg for them to open my account again. They gave me the usual 'we will forward this request to our internal team and get back to you'.

Also as usual my account manager has no power or visibility to do anything. If there are any shortcuts to dealing with Amazon, I haven't found them yet.

I thought that maybe this restriction is on an offer level, so if I add new offers maybe I will be able to get the featured offer on those. So I switched around my queues to prioritize new listings and then checked if my offer would be featured, which usually takes around a few hours for new listings.

Unfortunately even my new listings were not showing up as featured offers.

I found an Amazon email address that some people used to appeal this situation and emailed them.

I also went on the Amazon seller's forum and posted my issue, because I saw that some people got their cases escalated by Amazon employees that work on the forums.

Pricing Error​

While investigating my account being shut down I came across a really bad error in my pricing that was putting some items up for a loss.

I've been cavalier with my coding thus far by not writing tests, but on the pricing in particular I need to be careful, so I wrote some unit tests on it to ensure the logic is sound:

Actual Costs​

After checking my spam email I realized I was getting daily delivery reports and also my first invoice from the delivery company a few days ago. I found that my cost estimate was slightly off because I forgot to include tax.

Anyway I paid the invoice and felt like I was running a real business with real vendors.

Inspiration​

I had woken up at 4am today and did all of the above in the morning, but by the afternoon I was feeling pretty drowsy and needed a break.

I read through a couple of inspirational stories on this forum I saw this quote:

One is the worst number. Never have just one. Always have two of something.

It made me think that I'm too reliant on Amazon as my one channel. Going from 100% to 0% sales in an instant due to breaking some unwritten rule is rough. Not knowing when my account will be reinstated is rougher. I could play the game of having more than one Amazon account, but apparently you have to use separate IP addresses or they will figure out you are the same and block the backup account without warning.

So I thought of two options for different channels:

• There is an Amazon competitor here that is very similar to them, but less developed
• I could run my own store on Shopify (prior to switching to Amazon I was doing something like this with automation)

I decided to try to list on the Amazon competitor, so I went through the application process and submitted all the company documents. It will take 2-3 days to review the application.

I never use this store myself, so for the first time ever I went on it and looked at the products and sellers on there. What's great is that you can see how many sales every seller has had over the last three months, and you can also see how many listings they have.

I found a lot of sellers listing in bulk like me, but with 1,000-2,000 sales, which is nothing great. But if the process is mostly automated it does give me some hedging even if it doesn't match Amazon sales.

Unfortunately they don't have an API. But maybe that is fortunate, because it is a barrier to entry. And maybe I can use browser automation to have it behave like an API.

The other big difference is that you can't piggy-back on listings like you can with Amazon. Every seller makes their own listings, which is more work. But then again there is more opportunity with differentiation via SEO and image quality.

Anyway I'm not sure the size of the opportunity here, but I'll use this downtime on Amazon to explore it.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

I woke up this morning to one sale, and I was hoping my featured offers were back, but it wasn't the case.

Considering my account is crippled, I think my goal for this week should be around risk management:

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Improve product filtering to reduce potential violations
Remove all existing offers that don't pass the filters
Speak with my local contacts at Amazon to try to get my case escalated

Filtering​

I took the advice of a friend of mine and scoured the Amazon seller forums to see what people normally get banned for. And then I looked at some of the warnings I've already received to see if there are patterns I can turn into automated filters.

I got one warning for a sex toy that in my local market had the product title 'Horse Set', but in the US it is obviously a sex toy:


This could have been avoided with a simple filter. So I added blacklisted keywords in the product title such as 'sex toy', 'bdsm', 'spanking', and more that are related to prohibited items in other categories, like weapons.

I also added brand blacklists and seller blacklists.

Besides adding the filters, I also switched the behavior from setting the offer to inactive to fully deleting the offer in the case of being on a blacklist.

There was one case I wasn't sure how to handle. They warned me for copyright infringement against the trademark 'Chevrolet', but this product is sold directly by Amazon in the US - so they must be OK with the product title and description there.

Since Amazon took down the local listing before they notified me, I don't know if the listing was very different from the US one, and so I'm not sure what an appropriate general filter would be. In any case, I added this specific brand name and all other brand names I've been warned about to the name blacklist.

Most of the violations I received were on products with under 100 reviews. But when I look at my sales to-date, about half of them are on products that also have less than 100 reviews. So if I added that filter I would lose 50% of sales while lessening my risk of being banned by some unknown percent. It's hard to take this call.

Pokemon Wallet​

Two days ago I got a sale for a wallet that had the Pokemon logo on it. Amazon has since removed the listing from the US store.

Even though Amazon doesn't like it when you cancel, I suspect they will like it less if I sell a trademark-infringing item, so I canceled both the customer order and my purchase order on this product.

Amazon Contacts​

I spoke with my account manager and he showed me some other places I can clean up my account. He seemed confident that if I delete problematic listings I should get my BuyBoxes back.

Without me asking he also basically confirmed the plan I had for today anyway - to filter out all those things and apply it to all my existing orders as well.

There were also a lot of 'search suppressed' listings that contained banned phrases such as 'free gift' or 'new design'. Most of these were sales-y phrases like that, but there was one I couldn't understand why it was banned: 'mens predator'

I ended up deleting about 4,000 offers, and added a bunch of new banned words and phrases to my list.

More Amazon Info​

So with my API call rate limit lowered from 0.5 to 0.1, my application was slowed down by 5x. I had asked Amazon why they did it to my account and I actually got clear information back from them.

The decrease was actually across all sellers and apps, not just against mine:

Starting May 1, 2023, the rate for the getItemOffersBatch operation within the Product Pricing API will be lowered (amazon.com)

No reason was given, but maybe they are trying to encourage the use of the push API.

They said I can appeal the decision, but I have to show them that I have a business case that warrants it and that I've exhausted all other possibilities. They also said pretty much nobody gets a rate increase.

I'll put together a case and try my luck.

Other Marketplace Approved​

Yesterday I applied to list on a local Amazon competitor and they approved my application by 9:30 this morning.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Apply filters on both source and destination marketplace values
Look for a comprehensive Amazon filter online that I can leverage
Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders

Account Update​

I got two more sales while I was asleep, but the account still has no BuyBox winners. Also got one sale during the day.

Filters​

I found this page, which has a longer list of words than mine, so I combined them together:
Amazon's Restricted Keyword List for 2023 - Product & A+ Content (bebolddigital.com)

And I changed the code to check both the source marketplace product name and the destination marketplace product name when flagging ASINs.

I deleted any new problematic listings in my account and added any new keywords I found to the blacklist.

Amazon Competitor​

I wanted to upload 1,000 products to the Amazon competitor, but first I needed to figure out what the process is. There was a webinar in the morning explaining how to getting started, but I'm so impatient that I got bored almost immediately and left.

So this evening I manually edited a CSV with a single product on it and tried to upload it until I got it right. But it still required some manual tweaks in the GUI to get it through to the QC stage. This all took a bit longer than I had hoped.

There are a couple of obstacles to fully automating the creation of the CSV, and the main one is that I need to download the product pictures from Amazon, which runs the risk of getting blocked for scraping. This is only needed for initial creation of the products. After that I can trivially create price and availability updates without any risk.

Since the goal of this week is to avoid getting blocked, I'm going to think of a safe way to do this first. Scraping directly from the same computer that makes my API calls is not a safe way to do this.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders
Follow up with Amazon account manager and my senior Amazon contact on getting back my BuyBox eligibility
Submit business case to Amazon for raising my API rate limit

Account Status​

I got another sale last night and another during the day, but still no BuyBoxes in my account.

Filtering​

Again I went through my listings and there were some new things getting flagged, so I updated my filters and deleted the problematic items. I suppose this will be a daily routine for a long time. It doesn't take me very long, and eventually this can be done by someone else once I'm making enough money to have someone take on part of the work.

Here are the manual tasks in the business:

• Cleaning up risky listings, updating filters (can be partially automated)
• Procurement (must be manual, but can be assisted by a tool)
• Updating fulfillment Google Sheet (can partially automated, partially assisted)
• Replying to customer emails (must be manual)
• Answering the phone (must be manual)

All of this for now is totally doable by myself at the current volume. Once it starts becoming a lot, I will initially add automation and tool assistance, and once I exhaust that and it is still a burden, I will consider hiring someone to do the tasks. Then I will just do spot checks and help with managing exceptions, like if a product isn't available to procure or if there is a unique request from a customer.

Amazon Contacts​

On Monday I spoke with my account manager and got some advice, but I didn't reach out to the senior person I know.

This morning I realized I'm not taking every action I can to fix the most critical issue in my business, so I messaged all of my contacts in Amazon to explain the account status and ask if they have a way to escalate a review of the account. I know this is possible because I've seen Amazon employees do this on the seller forums (still nobody has replied to my post there).

After escalating I think the senior guy spoke to my account manager, because he then gave me some more information to help remove warnings from my account. He also said there is a way to appeal the lack of offer eligibility, so hopefully he can help get my account back to normal.

Rate Limit​

I wrote up my business case for why I need a rate limit increase on the SP API.

If they don't approve it I'm going to experiment with putting dummy offers on the Amazon US marketplace. If this lets me get push notifications from US offer changes, then I can speed up my workflow several times over.

Order Management​

Back when I got my first order I spent 10 minutes making a Google Sheet to track all the orders. I collaborate on it every day with multiple people who work at my vendor, and so far it is doing well (max 6 orders per day).

Through using it I think I've got most of the requirements of a full OMS in mind, especially the particular issues that come up with my business.

I don't think the Google Sheet is going to suffice if we get to 100 orders per day, and this is the volume that my account manager said will tests most sellers' fulfillment systems.

So I took some time today to sketch the functional requirements, third party integrations and the data model, keeping in mind that it should be handling 100's of orders per day, which means 300-400 orders per international consol. The goal is to minimize errors and minimize the effort required to process orders at each stop of the journey.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders, update filters
Complete first draft of OMS data model
Get API docs from delivery partner and review them

Filtering​

This morning I saw that my account health went from 'At Risk' to 'Healthy' thanks to some of the changes I made yesterday:


I did my now daily routine of cleaning up problematic offers and adding to my filters. This only takes about 10 minutes and I do it once in the morning and once in the evening.

OMS Design​

I sketched out the important tables that I need, and I wrote out a bunch of use cases I could think of. Then I checked if the table structure is supporting those use cases or not and made adjustments. I also started writing SQL queries for each use case.

So my first draft of the OMS data model is done. But I want to revise it multiple times before implementing, because the tolerance for failure on this project is very low. If it breaks I risk getting my account banned for failure to fulfill. This is in contrast to the robot I made earlier, which is like an escalator, because if it breaks it just becomes stairs:
An Escalator Can Never Break - YouTube

Delivery Partner API​

I asked the delivery partner for their API documentation and reviewed it a bit. There is a challenge with address mapping so I'll have a semi-automated solution instead of fully automated.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders
Research featured offer eligibility
Self-talk to expand my mindset

Fulfillment​

The largest consol to-date arrived, so I prepared the documentation for 12 orders. This took about an hour, mainly because I kept getting interrupted. But I can see how this will be a big burden if I got up to 100+ orders in a consol.

Self-Talk​

Oh boo-hoo! Or maybe I should say, 'what a relief!' Amazon removed your BuyBox about a week ago. You can now give yourself credit for the imaginary money you would have made if Amazon wasn't such a meanie. I guess you can sit around and wait for them to do something. There couldn't possibly be anything you can do to get sales, to hedge more, to take control.

No, the best thing for you to do is to rest easy, knowing that Amazon controls your fate. Do anything except take action. Hand your power over to some omnipotent entity as a defense against taking action.

'But I asked my contacts in Amazon to help.' Oh so you have found another omnipotent entity you can hand your power over to. The same guys who help you with nothing and who give you piece-meal and shaky information. Great, you can use them as a defense against action as well. Anything but taking action yourself.

It's not like if you thought for thirty seconds you could come up with alternative solutions. Everything is an insurmountable problem outside your control and you should wait for someone else to solve it. Don't think about solutions. Don't take action.

/sarcasm

Ok, think for thirty seconds. How can you take back control? How can you reframe the problem into something inside your control instead of 'Amazon soft-blocked my account', which is framed as outside your control?

1. You already have two accounts because of a mix-up when you first registered. You might be able to list on the original account, which has no offers, no warnings or anything. The primary risk is that it uses the same business entity as your current account and Amazon might flag it.
2. You could register another company, or two, or three and have those companies create seller accounts. You might have to have different signatories and owners on the companies to avoid getting flagged, but you have friends that would do this for you. You would also have to access the accounts from independent IP addresses, so maybe you need to create some VMs for managing each one.
3. You could ask people you know who already have companies to use their entities to sell. Maybe this would have tax implications or something. But you haven't asked anyone.
4. You have a company registered in the US. You can check if you can use a US entity to list on your local market and sell there. The signatory is different as well, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Actually, having more entities helps in more ways than just hedging the risk of getting blocked. Since they can share the same database, but have independent API rate limits, you can use them as a fleet of robots to scan Amazon US and update pricing across all your accounts.

Another idea that is more outside-the-box:
5. Turn your software into a SaaS solution that you license to other Amazon sellers. However, all the pricing data goes into a central DB that you leverage to update your own pricing. Then you have a second revenue stream, plus you enhance your existing seller account. You have seen quality level of the software that other sellers use and you know the current price point. This idea hedges the risk of Amazon associating the account with each other, but has a lot of development requirements to get a proper application set up.

The other thing you can do is research more about featured offer eligibility and take notes and make sure your account is as clean as possible. For sure you don't know everything yet and even if Amazon is opaque about things, there is still plenty of information out there on the internet.

Featured Offer Eligibility Research​

I read some more on the seller forums and even found some Amazon articles about this issue. There is no published formula:

To ensure that customers have a great shopping experience and to guard against abuse, we remove eligibility based on account performance and other risk factors.

I also saw that someone from Amazon replied to my post. They wanted to help but couldn't find my support ticket because I'm in another marketplace. So I gave them the requested information - hopefully they can escalate, my account for review, as I've seen them do this for other accounts. After review some of them gain eligibility back and others don't - Amazon won't give any explanation either way.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders
Automate more to avoid account health warnings
Improve efficiency by remembering blacklisted items and removing them from rotation

Account Status​

I have someone on the seller forums trying to help me. They couldn't see my previous case because it wasn't opened in the US, so I opened a new one. I didn't realize until now that the support teams were divided up by marketplace.

So in addition to that support ticket, I opened another one in Amazon AE, and finally they dropped me a bone:

In addition to that, we would like to inform you that you’re currently not eligible to be featured in the Buy Box due to decreasing account health.

I knew this might be part of the reason, but also my eligibility was removed when I edited a merchant shipping template. Maybe both factors are combined.

In any case there are some improvements I can make to the automation to avoid account health warnings.

Amazon 'Fair' Pricing Policy​

I get a lot of warning for violating Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy. This is because my competitors list many products at much higher rates, more than 300% higher than what I would list it at to get 25% margin. Then when I list mine, Amazon's algorithm decides I'm not playing fair, and flags and deactivates my offer, even though my offer is the one that is fair and better for the customer!

Anyway there is no point in fighting it - I adjusted my pricing algorithm to price 10% below the lowest competitor, rather than to my highest margin in this scenario.

In some cases I also violate the Amazon Fair Pricing Policy because my price is too high. Usually it is on items that have very high dimensions, like patio furniture, and so my shipping price gets inflated. To avoid this, I put a cap on how high I will offer on any item. So anything over $1,000 won't get an offer at all.

And then in other cases, there is a reference price that assumed the product is sourced locally, and my price considering the shipping costs makes it too high. So there was printing paper with a reference price of $5, but shipping alone on any of my items is higher than that.

And in other cases, they don't like that my price is too high above the competition.

So I added logic wherever I could to alleviate these cases, because some of these pricing issues show up on my account health dashboard.

Banned Words​

I noticed that I'm still putting up offers on products that have banned words in them, even though I've already blacklisted those words. So I did some debugging to figure out why.

It turns out I have a lot of older products created before I was storing the names in some newer columns, so there was nothing to check. I changed the code to retrieve the name from the API if it is missing and then check it for the blacklisted words.

It checks both the source marketplace name and the destination marketplace name for any banned words.

'Other Issues'​

A few products get inactivated for 'other issues', but the seller portal interface can't tell you what to fix:

Your listing requires additional troubleshooting. Click troubleshoot to proceed.

After clicking 'Troubleshoot' absolutely nothing appears.

I don't have any way to predict which products will get this flag, so I'm just adding any ASIN like this to the blacklist.

Product Photo Issues​

I couldn't think of an easy way to filter the product photo issues, and luckily these aren't generating account-level warnings:

• Product photo background is not white
• Product photo cuts off part of the product
• Product photo has prurience
• Product photo has a logo, graphic, or watermark

I just delete them from the seller portal when I get them. Maybe there is some improvement to the bot that can sync the images between listings, but even if this works I can only update some of them. In other cases there is another seller that controls the brand and I would be dependent on them to fix the listing.

Fulfillment Latency​

Some offers have a status of 'Availability Update Rejected' with the following message:

The fulfillment_latency value entered (53) exceeds the maximum allowed: 30

There is no fulfillment_latency parameter in the API, but it turns out it is the same value as
lead_time_to_ship_max_days. So I changed the logic to not create the offer if my calculated transit days are greater than 30.

Return Orders​

One of the most expensive items I sold was a watch, and the buyer requested a return today after it was delivered. I have to eat the cost of the return shipment locally. I'm wondering though if I can re-list my returned product on FBA, or if they will be considered 'used'. If I can't do FBA, then I can put up on FBM offer at a lower price with quantity 1 and see if it sells.

If I eat the entire cost then it erases a lot of the profit of the sales so far.

I also had a second return later in the day, but on a much less expensive item - a swimsuit.

I noticed that the biggest competitor doesn't seem to have offers on clothing. Maybe they avoid the category because of a high return rate? After all, you don't know how it fits until you try it on.

If this continues to be an issue with this category or any other category, I might also disable my offers.

Local Fulfillment​

I got one order today that was actually out of stock in Amazon US. But I searched for it here locally so will fulfill it way ahead of time. And will still make some margin on it.

But then this buyer ALSO canceled today!

 

[msufan]

This thread is incredibly interesting -- thanks for sharing!

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Minimize the chance of getting shut down again

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings and delete any offenders
Fix lingering logic issues that are causing more flags
Improve efficiency by remembering blacklisted ASINs and removing them from rotation

Offer Cleanup​

Did the daily routine of cleaning up problematic offers. There was much less to do today than in previous days.

Logic Issues​

The number of flagged offers decreased a lot after yesterday's changes, but I am still getting a few flags today. So I went and investigated each offending ASIN to see how it happened and fixed the logic.

Remembering Blacklisted ASINs​

Before I was deleting offers from ASINs that violated a blacklist, but I didn't actually remove them from my queues. Now I'm persisting this information and removing them from the queues, which should make some small efficiency improvement over time.

Corrective Plan of Action​

There is one major flag against my account that is going to stick there for 180 days. It is for listing that one sex toy product. The case is already closed, but I thought that it is worth a shot to message Amazon with a professional response.

I sent them a detailed message acknowledging the issue and explaining how my software works and why that particular product received an offer. Then I explained my plan of action and that I've already implemented the changes so it should never happen again. Finally I apologized for the incident and reiterated that I have no intention of selling prohibited products on the platform.

I suppose if I'm extremely lucky they will have mercy on me and either remove the warning or restore my featured offer eligibility.

Live Crickets​

Someone ordered live crickets from me as pet food for their reptile. Even if I could ship them internationally, I don't think many would survive. I had to cancel this order and take another penalty on my account. Plus I found some other category of things to blacklist.

Sandblasting Gun​

I got a notification about having an offer on a sandblasting gun and that it might be prohibited. Amazon will do a review that takes 2-4 days, and if they agree it is prohibited it is a pretty bad mark against my account. I guess I should have just filtered out the word 'gun' entirely. I've done that now.

I also stopped adding new ASINs altogether. Right now my updates are so slow because of the rate throttling that I don't think I need to be expanding my catalog. At the same time, adding more ASINs increases the risk of IP infringement or adding a prohibited product. So it's safer now just to pause.

Week Summary​

I had essentially zero filter on my bot at the beginning of the week and now I have a lot.

The number of flagged ASINs for serious issues has been zero for a few days straight, where as before I was getting some continuous issues.

I still get a couple of pricing policy flags, but these are minor and I can just delete them.

I also learned a lot more about compliance on the Amazon marketplace in general and have applied a great deal of that information.

So with my somewhat vaguely-defined goal of Minimize the chance of getting shut down again, I made a lot of progress. Since it is vaguely-defined, I can't really say if I achieved it or not.

In any case, I'm moving on. Here are the ideas I have for next week's goal:

Build out first version of OMS - I started on the architecture for this, but I have the sense that is going to be a lot of work and I won't get much benefit until 1) it is at a relatively mature state and 2) I have a lot more orders coming in

Automate part of the fulfillment (without a full OMS) - I could break things down into smaller, value-adding improvements, like automatically adding a line to my spreadsheet when I get a new order or automatically creating the AWB with my delivery partner.

Speed up offer update automation - I have a couple of ideas on how I can speed up the automation, but I'm not sure if they will really work. If they do, then it will probably 5-10x the speed of the bot on updates.

Do more risk-management - I could continue the theme from this week and keep thinking of more ways to keep my account healthy, but I don't have a lot of ideas left right now.

Explore secondary revenue stream - I could use the infrastructure and data from Amazon to try to enable a second revenue stream, like the local Amazon competitor or a Shopify store, but this will actually increase the risk of my account getting shut down since I will have to do some scraping.

The ONE THING that makes all the difference right now is getting my featured offer eligibility back, but this is Amazon's decision. I can keep looking for ways to ask for an expedited account review, but I don't think that will take up the entire week's worth of effort. So probably this is going to be a secondary task, whichever goal I choose.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goal​

Make my compliance bullet-proof

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings, delete any offenders and update blacklists
Brainstorm more ideas on how to improve compliance
Implement at least one new compliance improvement

Largest Order Ever​

I got my largest order ever - 12 rain ponchos. However, there were two problems: 1) they were military camo which might not pass customs and 2) the product has already been removed from Amazon US so I can't procure it anyway.

So I have to cancel it. I'm now at 30% cancelation rate when Amazon's target is 2.5%. This is so high BECAUSE I don't have featured offers, so the only products people buy from me are the ones that nobody else is bidding on.

This was a pretty big punch to the gut, and it took me a while to click that cancel button.

Check In On Old Side Hustle​

I have a small sweat equity stake in a retail/ecommerce business I helped start two years ago. They have a weekly meeting on Mondays that I almost never join since it conflicts with my full time job. But this week I moved some things around so that I could join.

Last week they had a record 100k USD in revenue. I spoke to the majority owner after the call and told him about my Amazon business. He's also looking to expand his business to Amazon, so I gave him some advice based on what I've learned so far. He told me he would be willing to invest and help secure exclusive distribution rights if I ever wanted to hold inventory here.

After I had a down mood over the weekend this interaction left me feeling pretty energized He sees opportunity everywhere and is always working on new solutions and new ideas.

Brainstorming​

I have been telling myself that I've done 'everything' to make my account compliant, but that is an excuse, another defense against action. So I thought I would go for a walk and get an ice cream.

The rule was that for me to walk and get the ice cream, I needed to have my phone out with the notepad app open. I was only allowed to think of compliance improvement ideas and I needed to write down as many as I can think of, with a goal of five.

Here is what I ended up writing in the app on that short trip:

Five ideas to improve compliance:
1. Only list where the main competitor is listing
2. Find a list of words online and filter
3. Delete entire catalog and start over (now that I have blacklists)
4. Only list products that have a certain number of competing offers
5. Only list products that have a certain number of ratings
6. Exclude all outdoor products (could be military)
7. Switch from blacklist to whitelist
8. Check age of listing in US before posting (is the age available?)
9. Check seller rating in US
10. Only sell if multiple sellers in US
11. Measure everything in this list against products on which I’ve gotten warnings to see which have the strongest correlations
12. See if other identifiers on the ASINs can be found in some other product database
13. See if there is some API that will predict if customs will have a problem, based on product name
14. See if there is a way to safely attempt to create a draft product, and see if Amazon has a problem before creating the real one
15. Keep blacklists but only list on whitelisted categories or product types
16. Also search product descriptions and bullet points for blacklisted words
17. Subscribe to listing upload notification and immediately blacklist and delete when we get a warning
18. Check US seller account age
19. Don't list if US seller is not featured offer
20. Check US seller catalog size

That ice cream was worth it!

I'll use this for the next couple days or until I need a fresh batch of ideas.

Implementing One Improvement​

After checking the code it looks like I'm already doing this one:

19. Don't list if US seller is not featured offer

So I did this one first:

16. Also search product descriptions and bullet points for blacklisted words

I am thinking hard about the combination of these two, which are a bit like going nuclear:

1. Only list where the main competitor is listing
3. Delete entire catalog and start over (now that I have blacklists)

I know that my current catalog of over 600k listings has problems in it that are going to keep on biting me. So maybe wiping it clean would be a good thing, even though I have to build back up again.

And if I only list what my main competitor or top 5 competitors are also listing, I can kind of piggy-back on whatever compliance they have done. At the same time I can keep all my existing blacklists in place.

 

[msufan]

View attachment 50505​

Weekly Goal​

Make my compliance bullet-proof

Daily Goals​

Again go through existing listings, delete any offenders and update blacklists
Brainstorm more ideas on how to improve compliance
Implement at least one new compliance improvement

Largest Order Ever​

I got my largest order ever - 12 rain ponchos. However, there were two problems: 1) they were military camo which might not pass customs and 2) the product has already been removed from Amazon US so I can't procure it anyway.

So I have to cancel it. I'm now at 30% cancelation rate when Amazon's target is 2.5%. This is so high BECAUSE I don't have featured offers, so the only products people buy from me are the ones that nobody else is bidding on.

This was a pretty big punch to the gut, and it took me a while to click that cancel button.

Check In On Old Side Hustle​

I have a small sweat equity stake in a retail/ecommerce business I helped start two years ago. They have a weekly meeting on Mondays that I almost never join since it conflicts with my full time job. But this week I moved some things around so that I could join.

Last week they had a record 100k USD in revenue. I spoke to the majority owner after the call and told him about my Amazon business. He's also looking to expand his business to Amazon, so I gave him some advice based on what I've learned so far. He told me he would be willing to invest and help secure exclusive distribution rights if I ever wanted to hold inventory here.

After I had a down mood over the weekend this interaction left me feeling pretty energized He sees opportunity everywhere and is always working on new solutions and new ideas.

Brainstorming​

I have been telling myself that I've done 'everything' to make my account compliant, but that is an excuse, another defense against action. So I thought I would go for a walk and get an ice cream.

The rule was that for me to walk and get the ice cream, I needed to have my phone out with the notepad app open. I was only allowed to think of compliance improvement ideas and I needed to write down as many as I can think of, with a goal of five.

Here is what I ended up writing in the app on that short trip:



That ice cream was worth it!

I'll use this for the next couple days or until I need a fresh batch of ideas.

Implementing One Improvement​

After checking the code it looks like I'm already doing this one:


So I did this one first:


I am thinking hard about the combination of these two, which are a bit like going nuclear:


I know that my current catalog of over 600k listings has problems in it that are going to keep on biting me. So maybe wiping it clean would be a good thing, even though I have to build back up again.

And if I only list what my main competitor or top 5 competitors are also listing, I can kind of piggy-back on whatever compliance they have done. At the same time I can keep all my existing blacklists in place.

To reduce the percentage of cancelled orders, could you have one product that you sell consistently? An ebook that goes for $0.99? A physical item that goes for the very minimum?

Also, if you nuke everything and start over, could it be on a fresh account, or is that impossible?

 

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[GoldFibre]

To reduce the percentage of cancelled orders, could you have one product that you sell consistently? An ebook that goes for $0.99? A physical item that goes for the very minimum?

Also, if you nuke everything and start over, could it be on a fresh account, or is that impossible?

Yeah I could try to juice my orders with a loss-leader, but the problem right now is that I'm not allowed to win any BuyBoxes. So even if I put a low price, it gets buried by Amazon and the vast majority of people that come to the product page won't see my price.

In order to use a new account I should have another legal entity. This would cost me $1,500 and take about a month. There is also a risk that if I use the same IP address to connect to both accounts Amazon will cross-apply the restrictions from the first one to the second one.

 

[biophase]

Yeah I could try to juice my orders with a loss-leader, but the problem right now is that I'm not allowed to win any BuyBoxes. So even if I put a low price, it gets buried by Amazon and the vast majority of people that come to the product page won't see my price.

In order to use a new account I should have another legal entity. This would cost me $1,500 and take about a month. There is also a risk that if I use the same IP address to connect to both accounts Amazon will cross-apply the restrictions from the first one to the second one.

I find it interesting that the majority of your orders have issues. Is this because your competitors are filtering out these “problem” listings and not selling on them, so you’re the only option for the buyer?

If so, you aren’t competitive on any “legit” listings so far and are only getting orders because you’re the only option.

 

[GoldFibre]

I find it interesting that the majority of your orders have issues. Is this because your competitors are filtering out these “problem” listings and not selling on them, so you’re the only option for the buyer?

If so, you aren’t competitive on any “legit” listings so far and are only getting orders because you’re the only option.

Yes something like that.

I have two different types of cancelations:
1. Products I shouldn't have been listing in the first place, like 'live crickets'
2. Products that are fine, but maybe one variation goes out of stock - Amazon US instantly removes their offer when this happens, but because my catalog is so huge and relies on polling, it takes me several days to discover it is out of stock. So then if a buyer wants that particular variation (like a particular size and color of a dress), there is no offer in the BuyBox, but they click 'see all buying options' and my offer is there

 

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[GoldFibre]

But the reason this has suddenly become the majority is that when my account could win BuyBoxes I would have far more sales on items that were in stock, and these would out-weigh the cancelations on things that were out of stock.

 

[BizyDad]

The amount of stick-to-it-ness being displayed here is fantastic. Solving problem after problem. Figuring things out as you go. Love it.

 

[biophase]

Yes something like that.

I have two different types of cancelations:
1. Products I shouldn't have been listing in the first place, like 'live crickets'

Yes, but this is the problem. Only your problem listings are getting sales.

2. Products that are fine, but maybe one variation goes out of stock - Amazon US instantly removes their offer when this happens, but because my catalog is so huge and relies on polling, it takes me several days to discover it is out of stock. So then if a buyer wants that particular variation (like a particular size and color of a dress), there is no offer in the BuyBox, but they click 'see all buying options' and my offer is there

Again, it’s only when nobody else has it in stock that you’re getting the sale.

This would tell me that I’m not competitive in normal items.

Back when I was selling on my websites, some didn’t get any traffic and would only get a random sale if an item was mispriced. This meant that my website wasn’t any good. People wouldn’t pay a normal price for something. But if something was discounted too much, they would take a chance on my website.

 

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[MitchC]

Really interesting thread

Your margins are much better than I expected

This is just so opposite of how I would and most people would approach ecommerce but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong

Interesting

 

[MitchC]

I have a couple of questions and thoughts that come from a lack of understanding of what you are doing

The obvious thing to do would be do what everyone else does, pick a product that’s not available or maybe isn’t good in your market and build a brand

I assume you have decided not to do this for a reason, not sure what that reason is but whatever

You mention the possibility of excluding brands and trademarks

If you aren’t sourcing branded products

Why source them from Amazon?

Why not source them from aliexpress for example

Also I wonder if you could take all these listings and have your bot automatically create Shopify products and have them rank organically on google shopping

Could you share an example of one of these products you’ve sold? Or even just something similar