21 Reasons Why Your Amazon Sales Are Falling

For Amazon sellers, it is not an easy task to promote a product. The daily sales of Amazon sellers are not exactly the same, and they will fluctuate within a certain range. However, once a product has a good performance on Amazon, the orders will sometimes suddenly drop and never recover. There must be a reason for this. Sellers need to think about the problem from two perspectives, external reasons and internal reasons. Today, I will analyze it for you, and you can also find your own reasons.

1. External factors

1. Amazon merged your listing with other sellers’ listings

This situation occurred more frequently in 2016, mainly because some illegal "black technology" would directly bind their products as variants to your products. However, after Amazon cracked down on such violations and introduced new regulations in November prohibiting the copying of brand-protected products, the situation has improved significantly. Now the biggest culprit for merging variants without your permission is Amazon itself.

2. Your Listing is included in Add-on Item

This mark is the most controversial mark on Amazon, because it is not like Best Seller or Amazon's Choice, which can bring you direct conversion and traffic, and it may even affect your listing sales. However, Amazon will not tell you when your product will be marked with this mark or when it will be cancelled.

3. Losing the Buy Box

Since nearly 90% of sales come from the Buy Box, third-party sellers must strive for the Buy Box if they want to succeed on Amazon. Amazon will assign the Buy Box to sellers with high performance scores.

If you are the only seller of a product, then the Buy Box is definitely yours (for now). But if there are many sellers of the same product, you have to compete with other sellers for the Buy Box. If sales suddenly drop, it is possible that you have lost the Buy Box.

4. The product is suddenly audited

This problem is a "high-risk version" of the above problems. Amazon will review your listing when it believes that the problems are concentrated and have a serious impact. It is recommended that you prepare sufficient documents before listing your products. After all, no one wants to be blocked or permanently banned from selling.

5. Seasonal trends

Depending on the type of product, sellers may experience low and high seasons for sales.

For example, if you sell sunglasses, your sales might be higher in the summer. If you sell prom dresses, your sales might be higher in October because people are getting ready for Halloween.

If you want to determine whether product sales are affected by seasonality, sellers can track monthly and annual sales data.

All sellers will see an increase in sales in the fourth quarter (Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday) as people start buying gifts during the year-end shopping season. Sellers need to ensure that they have sufficient inventory for their popular products.

6. New negative reviews appear on the page

Everyone understands this problem. Negative reviews are the biggest "killer" of conversion rate. If a page suddenly receives some vicious negative reviews, even if you see that your CTR (click-through rate) is high, the Conversion rate will be very low.

There is also feedback, which allows buyers to evaluate your overall service rather than product reviews. Many buyers make a mistake and leave feedback on the product in the feedback. If the content is negative, it will mislead new buyers and thus lose orders invisibly. In this case, sellers can contact Amazon officials to ask them to delete the feedback.

7. Competitors maliciously push negative reviews to the top of the page

This is an "extreme question". There was even a bad review that received more than 200 likes, so everyone must pay attention to the evaluation in the lower left corner of the page.

8. The product is maliciously copied by others

Everyone hates these "flies" who follow the sales. Now everyone will find that their listings are often followed in the middle of the night, and these "flies" can quickly snatch their shopping carts. They are puzzled!

Therefore, it is very important to register your brand and file it. Upload your own brand logo packaging and brand logo details on the product to prove that your brand has been put into use. Although it cannot completely prevent follow-up sales, it is better than doing nothing and letting others take advantage of you.

9. Ignoring the role of FBA

FBA out of stock This is also a common sense issue. Many Amazon sellers forget to replenish stocks in time. As a result, a listing is out of stock for many days before the second batch of FBA goods are put on the shelves, and then the sales are not as good as before. It can be seen that FBA out of stock has a great impact on the sales of listings, and we should do our best to avoid such things from happening.

Many sellers think that FBA fees are high, so they insist on shipping the goods themselves. However, they do not know that FBA can increase the ranking weight of product listings (beneficial to traffic + sales), and the user experience is relatively better (beneficial to reviews), and the probability of grabbing the golden shopping cart is also higher (a huge source of traffic).

2. Internal Factors

10. You changed your product category

Each category on Amazon gathers a large number of precise keywords. When your product performs well in the current category, if you suddenly change the listing to another product category, the entire keywords, target customers, and traffic will all change. Therefore, it is best not to suddenly change your product release category when the product sales are stable and do not rely on CPC advertising (the traffic for advertising mainly comes from paid keywords, so the impact is not significant).

11. Low product exposure

If sales suddenly drop, sellers can try to search for related products from the customer's perspective.

If your product is not on the first page of search results, this may be the reason for the loss of sales. Check your product display on mobile devices.

Make sure the product is listed correctly, choose the right keywords, and have clear pictures. Otherwise, it is best to relist it.

Another approach is to check if there are any big changes in product page views.

12. Someone complained about product quality/safety issues

This is also a fatal problem. "Safety issues" are listed as the most dangerous of all audit issues. Often, even if a listing performs well, it is likely to be eliminated due to 1-2 safety complaints. Therefore, it is recommended that you must complete various certifications before putting your product on the shelves. Even if someone wants to "hack you", you can provide evidence to Amazon and the listing will resume sales soon.

13. End of promotion

Many Amazon sellers run promotions to boost sales and provide product exposure. If a promotion has recently ended, it may be the reason for the seller's sudden drop in sales.

Sellers should record the time of advertising campaigns launched on Facebook or other channels.

14. Failure to respond promptly during holidays

Opening a store on Amazon is not like working. Working has weekly holidays, and you can let yourself go. But on Amazon, buyers may contact you at any time. If the seller is on vacation and does not reply in time (automatic replies do not count), Amazon will record it, and the Contact Response Time score will be reduced, further leading to the loss of the competition for the gold shopping cart.

15. End of advertisement

Many Amazon sellers use PPC (pay per click) and Google Adwords to increase the number of visitors to their listings. Amazon PPC or Sponsored ads directly affect sales, and if these advertising campaigns end, sales may suddenly drop. Similarly, if Google Adwords ads are removed, sales will also drop.

16. ODR is not detected in time

ODR is an important indicator for Amazon to evaluate the performance of seller accounts, so it must be lower than 1%. If the seller does not pay attention, once it exceeds 1%, the seller is very likely to be suspended or terminated by Amazon. Therefore, sellers must take this matter seriously and pay attention to every claim or review they receive. Repeated problems must be corrected.

17. A sudden increase in return rates

This is the calculation of Amazon’s backend performance. For now, don’t consider how many returns Amazon calculates to reduce your weight (it’s meaningless even if you tell everyone). You only need to consider that you are Amazon. If you find that the return rate of a listing has suddenly increased, do you dare to continue to bring customers to this listing? Of course not! Amazon may even suddenly punish your listing by suspending sales.

18. No cumulative reviews

Data shows that 80% of buyers will refer to reviews before deciding whether to place an order, so reviews are very important to conversion rates, and they also play a big role in ranking weight. However, it is difficult to obtain reviews through normal channels, with only a 2% probability. Sellers can contact Amazon reviewers immediately when a new post is launched, and obtain reviews through discounts or free trials. Excellent reviews can increase conversion rates.

19. Incomplete product parameters

When optimizing listings, sellers often overlook filling in product parameters, but Amazon's backend relies on the A9 algorithm. It can make recommendations based on product parameters, and some products with similar parameters can often be recommended by Amazon. If sellers do not fill in the blanks of product parameters, it means wasting the opportunity for Amazon's system to make recommendations.

20. Not paying attention to some updates and adjustments of the Amazon system

21. Keywords are not perfectly optimized