Amazon's flash sale rules have changed! Coupons affect the lowest price!

Traditional 30-day lowest price Net Price = Flash Sale Price - Coupon Amount.

The flash sale price will be the lower of the 30 -day lowest price and the Net Price. In other words, the coupons issued during the flash sale will affect the price of the next flash sale.

For example:

Suppose the current price is 35.99, and there is no discount price set, but after setting a 5% coupon within the last 30 days, the price is 34.19, then the spring promotion will be discounted according to the lowest price of 34.19!

Therefore, sellers should set coupons carefully to avoid abnormal prices due to improper settings.

Recently, some sellers have encountered problems with abnormal product price changes when operating European sites.

Take the UK site as an example. The original flash sale price of a product was stable at 11.99 pounds, but it suddenly dropped to 9.99 pounds recently. After consulting Amazon officials, it was found that the price change was due to the system capturing the order price from Guernsey (the British Royal Domain) as 9.99 pounds .

Reason 1: It involves the particularity of Guernsey’s tax policy.

As a British Crown dependency, Guernsey has unique tax policies. According to relevant regulations, Guernsey buyers are exempt from 20% value-added tax (VAT) when purchasing goods on Amazon.

That is to say, the calculation formula for the Guernsey buyer's order transaction price is: Order transaction price = product price × 0.8 .

If the original price of the product is 12.49 pounds, the actual price paid by the buyer on the island of Kennan is 12.49×0.8≈9.99 pounds.

Reason 2: Amazon price crawling system loophole.

Amazon's price crawling system has certain loopholes when calculating the lowest transaction price of products in the past 30 days. The system directly includes the actual payment price in duty-free areas (such as Guernsey) into the calculation scope of the T30D lowest price, and does not effectively distinguish the pricing strategies of different regions.

This resulted in the Amazon system identifying an order in Guernsey for £9.99 as the lowest transaction price of the product in the past 30 days, which in turn affected the subsequent flash sale prices and other pricing mechanisms of the product.

Data collection and screening

1. Download order report : Download the "Amazon VAT Transactions Report" on the seller platform. The report records the order information in detail, including order address, price, tax, etc.

2. Filter Guernsey orders : In the downloaded report, filter orders with postal codes "GY1 - GY9" to accurately locate orders from Guernsey.

3. Filter the remaining orders: Filter out orders other than those from Guernsey to prove that the product price does not appear to be £9.99 in orders from normal regions.

By comparison, the peculiarities of the Guernsey Order price can be clearly demonstrated.

Legal provisions cited

According to section 30(6) of the UK Value Added Tax Act 1994:

“sales to Channel Islands should be treated as exports and excluded from domestic price tracking.”

That is, sales arriving in Guernsey (part of the Channel Islands) should be treated as exports and excluded from domestic price tracking.

When appealing, sellers should clearly cite this legal provision to show Amazon that the price of Guernsey orders should not affect the price calculation and pricing strategy of products in other regions.

At the same time, when making price declarations and appeals, sellers need to fully understand Amazon’s latest pricing mechanism.

This abnormal price incident has caused a lot of trouble for sellers, but by gaining a deep understanding of the cause of the incident, following reasonable complaint logic, and paying attention to Amazon's latest pricing mechanism, sellers can hopefully solve the problem and avoid similar situations from happening again.