- Joined
- Jul 1, 2023
- Messages
- 637
Rep Bank
$1,800
$1,800
User Power: 105%
Weekly Goal
Make my compliance bullet-proofDaily Goals
✅ Deactivate account (holiday mode)✅ Nuke catalog
✅ Start uploading smaller, safer catalog
Deactivating Account
I woke up this morning to yet another order on an out of stock item that I had to cancel. I now have this beautiful mark on my account health page:After that I put my entire account on 'holiday mode' which makes all of my offers inactive. Leaving my account up and hoping for orders is only making things worse.
Nuking Catalog
I've got a bunch of problems right now compounding on each other:1. I have no BuyBox winners, so I don't get sales on any 'good' products even when I'm competitive
2. My account health is suffering because I didn't have good enough filtering in place and I keep getting warnings for prohibited products
3. I have too big of a catalog, so I can't update on time and list many out of stock products, and I haven't applied my blacklists to most of my catalog yet
4. Since I have out of stock products listed where other sellers do not, this is where my sales are coming from and it's driving my cancelation rate up
5. The high cancelation rate also hurts my account health and takes me further from getting the BuyBox eligibility back
Yesterday I was considering nuking my account - deleting every single offer - and then restarting with a much safer list. I'm now sure this is the way to go, because my current catalog is a cancer that needs to be removed before I get perma-banned. I also don't have the ability to keep a catalog of that size up to date.
I will start with a smaller catalog of clean products that I can update several times per day and live with whatever sales I do or do not get. Since I still have no BuyBox eligibility, I can't expect much. In the meantime I will work on more speed optimizations and I will only expand my catalog if I can maintain my offer refresh rate.
It is also possible that my account is beyond saving at this point due to all the warnings. I don't really know. If that's the case, I still have my software and all my learnings in-hand and can potentially start a new account with another legal entity.
I understood that there are two ways to do this:
1. Delete 250 items at a time using the web interface. It takes about 30 seconds to do each page and I have about 2,400 pages
2. Upload templates - probably can delete everything using 4-5 spreadsheets
But then I found the nuke button:
So I uploaded a blank inventory template and nuked 600k offers that I have built up over the past two months or so.
Rebuilding Catalog
I decided I want to cap the number of offers that I list today at 1,000. And I will apply significantly stricter restrictions on them.Here is the new logic:
1. Don't list anything that also has an offer from Amazon US or Amazon UK
2. Only list if the product has an offer from two of the top competitors AND I can beat their prices
3. Deactivate listing if one of the top competitors also deactivates their offer (a mimic strategy)
4. Deactivate listing if top competitor ever prices below my minimum
So I know my top competitor pretty well and piggy-backing on their listings will improve my compliance. There is still some risk of selling out-of-stock products because I know they source from more than just Amazon US. This means that it is possible for them to list a product as in stock, but in Amazon US it is out of stock. Maybe they are tracking the same thing on walmart.com or another site, which I don't have the tech to do right now.
BUT if I do get a sale on something like that, I can still fulfill it (at a loss), because I could order it from my competitor and then ship it locally to my customer once I receive it. So I'm hoping this mimic strategy solves my order cancelation problem as well as my compliance problem.
The offer cap of 1k should also solve my refresh rate problem, because I will have a much smaller catalog, focused only on items that I have a good chance to win, especially if I ever get my BuyBox eligibility restored. The offers will get updated several times per hour.
All this will have been done at the cost of a huge percentage of sales. But 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing - which is where I was headed with my account at risk of perma-ban.
So I let the thing run for about an hour and I definitely met the bar of 'bullet-proof'. In fact I would probably consider it air-tight. I only had 7 offers after processing thousands of ASINs.
Loosening the Screws
I'm happy with the outcome of very few products listed, because it's better to start too strict (with no risk) than to start too loose (and risk my account getting shut down).Now I want to analyze and see what is the best way to slowly loosen the screws.
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