Amazon informed sellers they can try reactivating items they believe were incorrectly blocked in the marketplace’s efforts to fight price gouging.
It’s a difficult situation for sellers as marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and others try to crack down on price gouging amid the coronavirus crisis. As our recent survey revealed, the costs of procuring inventory to resell have risen – and as a seller wrote in reaction to Amazon’s Friday announcement, “Your price gouging/pricing health bots do not consider our product cost. One seller offers at a loss to clear out inventory and the rest of us are expected to follow suit.”
Amazon posted the following announcement on Friday:
As you know, Amazon’s Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy protects our customers from unfair, excessive, and misleading prices. Our price gouging prevention systems attempt to account for variations in local laws while also providing customers a consistent experience across our stores. We also take increases in the cost of goods, freight, and labor into consideration, and that’s particularly true in light of COVID-19. We have and will continue to adjust our price gouging thresholds to reflect these dynamics.
If you believe you are offering a fair price for a product that has been suppressed by our price gouging prevention systems, please go to Manage Inventory and re-activate your listings by clicking on Edit and then click the button Save and Finish.
If your listing remains inactive after following the steps above, you may need to update your price by going to the Fix Price Alert page, or you can appeal our decision through the Account Health Dashboard.
You can find the announcement on Amazon.com Seller Central.
