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Elizabeth@Amazon asked

Announcement: 11/1/18 :Product Availability During November and December

Hello Everyone! We wanted to let our content creators know what they should expect for product availability during November and December, so please take a minute to read the update below:

To ensure customer orders are shipped on time during our busiest shopping season in November and December, we may extend product fulfillment times. Fulfillment times include the printing and packaging of orders and are independent of the time it takes to deliver an order once shipped. Fulfillment and shipping times determine an order’s delivery date which is viewable to customers during checkout. Please be assured that we do not plan to reduce the availability of our products, remove products from search results, lower daily publishing limits, or pause account tier upgrades. We will provide updates to the dashboard beforehand if this plan changes for any reason.

merch by amazonupdateannouncement
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newuser-60046ca2-9650-43b0-8937-8963a712c034 avatar image
newuser-60046ca2-9650-43b0-8937-8963a712c034 answered

This is great news! Early christmas present in November

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Brandon avatar image
Brandon answered

Why did my best selling shirt just lose it's really LOW BSR and get purged from all search results, and purged from my brand when you click on it?

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newuser-01215e6f-543a-47dd-8c7e-780278dbefa3 avatar image
newuser-01215e6f-543a-47dd-8c7e-780278dbefa3 answered

All my bestsellers and regular sellers stopped selling or are hidden since Cyber Monday!!! Even my bestseller with 24 great reviews. Alone this shirt brought 30 sales a day on Black Friday and saturday and the days / weeks before 20 a day. Since CM 0 sales of any of my former good or regular sellers from 2017 or 2018. Mostly in oct and nov now only newly uploaded popsockets are selling and only a few random old shirts that formerly rarely sold. My daily profit is down from >320 $ on Black Friday and saturday and > 200 $ the days before to 19 - 60 $ !!! I have > 5.600 shirts live! Last year with < 500 shirts I averaged 80 daily sales with profit > 550 $ a day until you had hidden nearly all of my listings from dec 5th on. This year much worse! It seems my account got highly sabotaged suddenly since CM from whatever you did. Some others are affected too. Others same time report record sales. It seems their accounts are somehow "protected".

Your marketplace is full of p4p copies of my bestsellers. This criminals listings now are ranked on the most prominent places of your site and get the sales for my designs and only you and the criminals earn from my designs. After they got taken down after writimg lots of time wasting infringement reports they are live again and again. Even under their same brand names. Obviously these criminals dont get banned from your marketplace.

And this during the best selling time of the year!

I am totally shocked and disappointed! What a gigantic waste of my time and money. If I would have been prepared for what happened from CM on I wouldnt had invested any time in MBA. Instead I trusted your announcement that you want to avoid to throttle accounts this year. What a sudden and careless damaging of small businesses!

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FocusedOnResults avatar image FocusedOnResults commented ·

Hello - I can fully appreciate your comments.

I don't have any insight on the BSR matter. Possibly Elizabeth will have an update if there is a glitch. I do think that the high increase of new sellers may be a factor as now the competition is so much more than last year and also of the year before. My sales have maintained a steady pulse. I do market (always have) my designs year around.

The copycat matter is way, way, way beyond just Merch. It is an epidemic and I don't know how the POD platforms are going to nail these thieves.

I happened to notice on Monday that a self proclaimed t-shirt designer had liked one of my posts on a social media platform that I use for marketing. Following the thread, I ended up at his/her one POD site (not Merch). The POD also has a Germany presence. There I found many of my designs - nicely copied - on his/her first page. It is sickening and disheartening. I could seriously hire a VA to do nothing put police POD sites and report the creeps and the VA would have a full time job and then some.

I have full faith that Merch and some of the other POD sites are trying to tromp down these criminals. It doesn't help the situation immediately for you, me and many other ethical designers but I wanted to let you know, I understand your frustration on the copycat matter.

:(

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regina stenger avatar image regina stenger FocusedOnResults commented ·

Wow...That is SAD and disheartening to read of the copycat/thievery problems which are abounding everywhere! When I found many of my designs stolen, I soon became exhausted trying to take them all down. Now I'm in a stupor wondering if I ought to just coast and keep designing, or take a break. I think you're right that Merch and other PODs are trying to crack down on these losers. In the meantime, I believe that most buyers will flock to Amazon regardless. Still it's tough, especially when you've been ethical yourself. I salute you and all the honest designers out there. Let's hope for a (somewhat) happy holiday season! :-)

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regina stenger avatar image regina stenger commented ·

So sorry, NewUser-012. My sales are sad, but... I feel badly for you. Hope it gets better.

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newuser-f27a1af0-c5de-4406-a226-5fe511640d3f avatar image
newuser-f27a1af0-c5de-4406-a226-5fe511640d3f answered

Dear Merch,

Before Cyber Monday, one of my bestsellers was consistently selling 20+ units per day, and ranked on the first page for the keyword “christmas shirt for kids”, and many, many others. Now it is nowhere to be found with these keywords, and has stopped selling.

This has happened to hundreds of my best-selling ASINs, on Cyber Monday.

It looks like this ASIN migration resulted in the product losing all the organic ranking & sales history for the keywords. As if it is a new shirt that just got uploaded.

Myself - and many other sellers - spent years working on these designs to get them selling and ranking high in the search results for many keywords.

Can you please pass me onto someone that can help me reinstate ranking of the old ASIN before the migration?

My sales have slowed down nearly 1000%.

Kindly forward me to someone who can help reinstate old ranking of these shirts.

Please do not give a generic, unrelated reply about BSR, or that you cannot comment on the placement of the visibility.

After the ASIN migration, these shirts are not visible anymore. You have initiated this. What do you propose to fix this issue?

Thank you :)

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Mike avatar image
Mike answered

New ASIN timing = cleverly disguised throttling

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Jeff E avatar image
Jeff E answered

All I know is that my sales are worse now than before holiday shopping started. I had such high hopes for a non-throttled Amazon holiday sales extravaganza and now I'm just so disappointed at what I'm seeing. =(

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Ricardo Almeida avatar image
Ricardo Almeida answered

After 2 days of good sales, yesterday I sold ZERO products.

Walks, quacks and swims like throttling!

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Jeff E avatar image
Jeff E answered

And no comment from Amazon as usual. So annoyed by what they're doing, but hey as long as Bezos makes his billions...

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