WOW! What a week! What a month!
First and foremost, our team hopes this email finds you well and healthy.
As you guys know updates seem to be coming from Amazon on a daily basis and each update seems to have a such a huge effect on your business!
Here are the updates that have come in so far
March 16th: Amazon US announces they will hire 100,000 workers to try to keep up with the excess demand they are seeing on Amazon.com
March 17th: Amazon announces globally they will only be accepting essential items into their Amazon warehouses that fit into the following categories:
- Baby Products
- Health & Household
- Beauty & Personal Care (including personal care appliances)
- Grocery
- Industrial & Scientific
- Pet Supplies
March 20th: Amazon sends sellers important reminders on Seller Fulfilled shipments. You can check out those reminders here.
March 21st: Amazon announces that select European markets, like Italy, will temporarily only accept customer orders on essential products. You can find this update here. (Must be logged into Amazon EU Italy to read the update).
March 23rd: Amazon US customers start to see that some products on Amazon have shipping windows that extend out all the way to the end of April. To combat this Amazon starts to limit the availability of lightning deals, 7 day deals, and coupon clippings to sellers.
March 24th: Amazon announces an adjustment to removal orders and long term storage fees. To make sure Amazon can restock, and ship high-priority products they have temporarily paused removal orders in some of their fulfillment centers. Sellers may continue to create removal orders, but there will be delays in completing them. Due to this change, Amazon has decided to wave the April 15 long-term storage fees for inventory stored in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
To help you navigate through these uncertain times and almost constant updates and changes to the Amazon landscape, our team has put together a free report called “How To Survive & Thrive On Amazon During The Coronavirus Pandemic”.
Here are some quick thoughts from our team:
- As Amazon limits shipments into the FBA warehouse we suggest you set up FBM listings. This way, if you run out of inventory in the FBA warehouses, you are able to continue receiving orders from customers.
- In times like these our team suggests scaling back on promotions and Amazon PPC. In our personal opinion, for the long term health of your seller account, it is best to stay in stock during these times and scaling back on these two areas can help.
- If you are already having account health issues, respond to the performance notification from Amazon letting them know that this is caused by COVID-19.
For the full free report and continued updates from our team head here.
Please reach out to our team if you have any questions and stay safe out there!