Lost all your shopping carts overnight? Be careful of Amazon sellers raising prices!

Recently, an Amazon seller had an unexpected situation. All the products in the store's shopping cart were lost overnight! I quickly checked my mailbox and found an email from Amazon notifying me of the violation!

Amazon explained in the email that the seller abused the shipping fee on the product details page, causing the shipping fee to fluctuate . Some consumers have complained to the seller because of the shipping fee fluctuation, so Amazon has removed all the products from the shopping cart . Not only that, if Amazon receives similar complaints again, it may directly remove the seller's products or even remove the sales rights !

It is normal for self-delivery sellers to modify the delivery freight template, especially now that global shipping capacity is tight, and the freight itself fluctuates greatly. The average price this week may be in the 30s, and next week it may be in the 20s. If you want to control the overall profit margin, the freight will change frequently. Can Amazon remove your products from the shopping cart or even take them off the shelves just by changing the freight?

From the email alone, we cannot tell how often the seller changes the shipping price, and Amazon’s backend policy does not mention that there will be penalties for changing the shipping price. However, the secret of this penalty is that it is not because of changing the shipping price, but because of the “fair pricing principle”.

This is actually a very early additional rule. It was not fair pricing at the beginning. Around 2017 and 2018, a group of sellers took advantage of super-high shipping fees to reap the profits of some buyers who did not see the fees clearly. At that time, the matter became so serious that Amazon refunded more than 100,000 US dollars in shipping fees, and then immediately introduced regulations to set a cap on shipping fees using the "fair pricing principle."

According to the announcement at the time, Amazon requires all sellers to adhere to the principle of fairness when setting the shipping prices of self-delivered products. The shipping prices set by sellers need to be in line with the actual situation and be close to the shipping prices of other major retailers (same size, weight, same destination and mode of transportation). Once the shipping price of a product exceeds 20% of the standard freight rate, it is considered an unfair charge.

If sellers charge too high shipping fees, it will undermine buyers' trust in Amazon. Amazon will disqualify the product from obtaining the "Buy box" and reduce the number of times the listing is displayed. If sellers repeatedly have this problem, they may be frozen or have their sales rights permanently revoked.

So it is not that the seller changes the shipping fee too frequently, but that the amount of the single shipping fee change is too high. How does Amazon judge whether it is too high? It will not only refer to the shipping fees of other logistics partners under the same delivery conditions, but also fully consider the opinions of buyers. So in this example, maybe the seller’s actual shipping fee is indeed very high, but because the buyer did not understand and complained, Amazon still punished the seller for violating the "fair pricing principle", and the seller could only suffer in silence.

Freight rates fluctuate greatly now, and freight rates have skyrocketed due to tight shipping capacity. It is really difficult for sellers to raise prices. If they raise freight rates across the board, they may be punished by being removed from the shopping cart. On the one hand, we should be cautious about raising freight rates and not raise them too often or too much at once. On the other hand, we should leave enough profit margin on the product price, so that when the logistics increase is too outrageous, we don’t have to adjust the freight rate too high in the background, so that the profit can cover it appropriately and avoid being punished by this "fair pricing principle".