How Do Sellers Adjust Key Strategies in Response to Amazon’s New Voucher Pricing Requirements?

Amazon’s voucher pricing requirements regulations will take effect on March 12, 2024, putting forward more stringent requirements for coupon discount ranges, participation qualifications, and discount price settings. Sellers need to adjust their marketing strategies promptly and take a multi-pronged approach in establishing sales history, optimizing promotion plans, and seizing spring promotions to adapt to the changes brought about by the new regulations.

As the leader of global e-commerce platforms, Amazon continues to optimize its market strategies to maintain its leading position. The latest move is an update to voucher pricing requirements, effective from March 12, 2024. This change means that sellers who hope to increase sales and exposure through coupons will need to adjust their marketing strategies to adapt to the new regulations.

The main contents of the new regulations

Voucher discount range limit

The discount range of the Voucher must be between 5% and 50%. This means that when sellers set vouchers, their discounts cannot be too low or too high. Discount intensity must be controlled within a reasonable range. If the discount is too low, it may not be able to effectively attract consumers’ attention and desire to buy; if the discount is too high, it may violate the relevant regulations of the platform and even face the risk of punishment. Therefore, sellers need to set a discount range that is both attractive and compliant based on their product positioning and target customer groups.

Sales History Requirements

According to the new regulations, only products with a certain sales history are eligible to participate in voucher promotions. This rule applies to all categories of goods. It has a greater impact on sellers who launch new products online. They need to accumulate sufficient historical data and sales performance through a period of natural sales before they can be qualified to use promotional tools such as vouchers. This will undoubtedly affect the promotion efficiency of new products and the speed of sales increase. Sellers need to invest more energy and resources in the early stage to increase the exposure and conversion rate of new products by optimizing product detail pages, participating in on-site and off-site promotions, and accumulating sales history as soon as possible.

Discount price restrictions

The discount price of the voucher must not be higher than the “recent lowest price” monitored by the system, otherwise, it will face the risk of automatic invalidation. This requires sellers to be extremely cautious when setting discounts. They need to pay attention to the price fluctuations of products in real-time to ensure that the discounted price is always lower than the recent lowest price. At the same time, this also reminds sellers to reasonably control the intensity of promotions to avoid falling into price wars and loss of profits due to excessive promotions.

Seller coping strategies

1. Establish sales history

For new listings or items with fewer sales, sellers need to build a sales history by increasing sales. This may mean relying more on other marketing tools, such as advertising or social media marketing, to boost sales in the early days.

2. Adjust promotion strategies

Sellers need to ensure that the promotional price is lower than the “historical selling price” of the product or the recent lowest price, which may require regular review and adjustment of their pricing strategy. Using the price history tools provided by Amazon can help sellers make more reasonable pricing decisions. At the same time, sellers need to be more flexible and precise in calculating discounts when setting up promotions to ensure that the voucher discount range meets the requirements of the new regulations.

3. Spring promotion

With the new rules in place, sellers can take advantage of the upcoming spring sales to boost sales. It is worth mentioning that at the same time as the new regulations were released, Amazon North America also welcomed the spring promotion. Officially announced that a six-day spring sale will be launched in North America from March 20th to 25th. This is the first time that Amazon North America has launched a large-scale promotion in spring, bringing a rare traffic feast to sellers. Sellers can participate in this event by applying for LD, BD, Prime exclusive discounts, vouchers and other promotional tools in advance, and strive to achieve rapid growth at this important sales node.

In the U.S. and even the global e-commerce market, Amazon has firmly established itself as the e-commerce hegemon with its 99% customer repurchase rate and 80% e-commerce platform share in the United States. For sellers, although competition on the Amazon platform is fierce, it still provides huge market potential and consumer base. Complying with the new voucher pricing requirements is one of the keys to success for sellers on this platform.

In general, Amazon’s introduction of new voucher regulations has put forward higher requirements for sellers’ operational capabilities and strategic levels. Sellers need to remain sensitive to policy changes at all times, and promptly understand and respond to the opportunities and challenges brought by new regulations. On the premise of ensuring compliance, sellers also need to formulate differentiated promotion plans based on their own product characteristics and competitive strength and continue to optimize and improve in daily operations.

This strategic update from Amazon emphasizes the importance of product pricing strategy, especially when using vouchers as a promotional tool. Sellers need to pay close attention to the pricing and sales history of their products to ensure compliance with the new voucher policy. With reasonable strategic adjustments and active marketing, sellers can still seize growth opportunities on the Amazon platform.