Weekly Amazon News and Updates

Uncategorized Dec 03, 2020

This Week's Amazon News & Updates:

1. Seller Central Shuts Down (Big-time):

Nov. 25th, 2020 - The technical issues stemmed from an outage at AWS (Amazon Web Services), which helps power many other websites in addition to its own.

The Amazon Seller Central board displayed the following message as of late Wednesday afternoon: “We are currently experiencing an issue that is impacting the ability to access all or parts of Seller Central. Our engineers are actively engaged in resolving this issue.” It was posted at 10:46 am Eastern.

According to Tech Crunch, companies impacted by the AWS outage include Adobe and Roku. “Amazon says the issue is largely localized to North America. The company didn’t give a reason for the outage, only that it was experiencing increased error rates and that it was working on a resolution.”

The publication linked to the Amazon AWS status board, which said the problem was due to an “issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

Cnet also reported on companies, including news sites, impacted by the outage.

It isn’t clear to us if shoppers had any difficult making purchases on Amazon on Wednesday.

What Does Amazon Have To Say?: 

Dear Seller, We are aware of technical issues related to Amazon Web Services and impacting some sellers’ ability to access some or all of Seller Central and Marketplace Web Services (MWS) APIs, and we are working to resolve them. This does not impact customers’ ability to place orders. As we work on a solution, you may start seeing new orders in Manage Your Orders or via the MWS Orders APIs. You will receive all orders once this issue is fully resolved, and we ask that you please process them as quickly as you can. We will mitigate the impact on your account health. Please note Selling Partner Support does not have additional information. We will post an update in Seller Central when this is resolved.

Amazon Then Said:

Hello Sellers,

We are experiencing delays in sales data shown in Business Reports on Seller Central. Delays are expected to last only through this week, as a result of peak traffic from Cyber Week sales. We are working on addressing this issue and expect it to be resolved shortly, and are working hard to ensure delays will not happen for future peaks. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Thanks, Amazon

 2. Storage Limits and IPI Inventory Score -

From Amazon: “Your inventory storage limit may be increased if you sell through eight percent or more of your inventory each week for nine consecutive weeks.”

  1. Professional selling accounts are subject to the new storage limits, depending on whether they meet some criteria:

To calculate Inventory Performance Index (IPI), sellers must keep popular products in stock (which drives sales), and manage their on-hand inventory efficiently (no over- or under-stocking).

Sellers who have an IPI of 500 and above on either of the two score checkpoints won’t get storage volume limits for standard-size, over-size, apparel, and footwear items.

New sellers who were active less than 26 weeks or sellers who haven’t enough sales data to generate an IPI score during both score check weeks won’t get storage limit extensions.

Professional accounts that have storage limits will still have at least 25 cubic feet for standard-size, over-size, apparel, and footwear items.

Professional account holders can track their IPI on the inventory dashboard (Inventory> Inventory planning button) and learn more about IPI from the IPI Help Page.

The dashboard works as a hub for optimizing your FBA business, including customized recommendations to increase sales and reduce costs.

-The Inventory limits for new Sellers, new ASINS, and for those Sellers with an IPI score below 500 are set to expire at the end of 2020.

***I do NOT expect Amazon will extend these inventory limits and IPI storage restrictions very long into 2021, if at all. I feel it was just due to COVID-19 - getting caught up on fulfillment, making room for new products, clearing out dead-stock, and only for Q4 (Oct.1 - Jan 1).

 3. Amazon Barcodes - Is GS1 really required? GTIN Exemption? - Second Hand UPC/ GS1 Barcodes OK?

a. “As your getting error 8572 we would need some information from you. We cannot establish that the brand and the GTIN Owner are related, we would require proof of affiliation between the brand and the GTIN Owner. The requirements for valid proof include a copy of the GS1 Certificate AND one of the items listed below…

b. GTIN exemption is FREE and still works, as long as you select your product's category, enter your Brand name you want to use, and you get approval from Amazon when clicking "check eligibility"> after 30 min you should be good to create new listings.

c. 2nd Hand Barcodes from Nationwide Barcode, Speedy Barcodes, or UPC bay, - Use at your own risk. Some Sellers are able to still get these types of 2nd hand barcodes to work, for others they are not working or can cause issues in the future.

d. It may be best to get GTIN exemption, or purchase Your barcodes directly from GS1. Make sure to enter your Brand name you are going to list products under on the GS1 database/ website so that the Brand name will match the database/ GS1 certificates.

-Look into buying your GS1 barcodes from GS1 U.K. as they are about half or less expensive as GS1 dot org.

-I'm going to try and post these Amazon weekly updates a lot more often!

Let me know your thoughts below in the comments, are you still experiencing any sales or seller central / seller app delays or issues?

 

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