As China and other countries continue to be affected by the COVID-19 virus, various factories around the world have gradually begun to delay production and delivery. Although the Chinese New Year may temporarily cover the production challenges caused by the COVID-19 virus, as the Amazon sellers in the United States discover and feel that the epidemic situation may lead to unexpected inventory shortages, the challenges facing sellers will become more severe.

For Amazon sellers, rankings can suffer considerable impact if inventory doesn’t keep up. Although Amazon has not officially released a formula for calculating the sales ranking of a single product, judging from experience, it largely depends on the product’s 7-day tracking sales and 30-day tracking sales. If the product is out of stock for more than 7 days, it will seriously damage the product ranking; however, when the product is out of stock for more than 30 days, the ranking will actually drop to zero, and for products that have been out of stock for more than 30 days but restocked, you need to re-stock Only by going through the test of “from scratch” sales can we quickly improve our current ranking. Therefore, although Amazon sellers may have to face out-of-stock situations, the key is to avoid out-of-stocks for more than 30 days.

Therefore, it is suggested that you can use multiple methods to deal with emergencies, of course, there are trade-offs you need to face behind each method.

1. Reduce advertising budget and traffic appropriately

If you are currently running Amazon ads or using off-site channels to channel specific products, slowing down or completely cutting off traffic will reduce the number of visits to your product detail pages, and sales will decrease accordingly. This is a path we are unwilling to take.

If your out-of-site traffic (for example, other sales channels or email marketing for non-Amazon customers) generates a higher conversion rate than traffic from in-site ads on Amazon, we recommend that you first turn off non-Amazon marketing promotions because It’s much easier to benefit from external advertising than to regain the benefits of Amazon website ads that are “down”. Regardless, you need to strengthen monitoring of paid search-driven sales and total sales during periods of delayed replenishment.

2. Increase prices

Although economic principles often say that if you raise prices, demand will fall. But inside Amazon, this becomes more subtle. First of all, if your Listing encounters competitive quotes from other sellers, then your success rate of getting a “golden cart” will be impacted. At this time, it is likely that other sellers will go short and sell your products.

Second, if you increase the price on Amazon but the product is still available on other sites (whether you sell it by you or another seller), Amazon is likely to find these lower prices and immediately “deprive” you or Other more expensive competitors qualify for a gold shopping cart.

Furthermore, if you increase the price of a product, but you have provided pricing information to the Amazon catalog, the price displayed on this information is lower than your new pricing, and Amazon will also disqualify you from competing for the gold shopping cart on the product.

3. Reduce the amount of information in Listing

This operation may seem “suffocating”, but if your product has a brand record and you can control the content in Listing, consider deleting content such as the five elements, drawings, infographics and videos to reduce Customer satisfaction and expectations on product detail pages to reduce conversions.

If you are determined to take this “unusual” approach, make sure to save your existing Listing content somewhere so that you can reuse it once you have resolved your inventory issues. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that lowering the quality of the listing may harm the traffic brought by some brand searches, but since most Amazon customers still prefer unbranded searches in natural search, there is no need to worry too much.

4.Transfer inventory from other channels

If you have product reserves or emergency inventory, or you can allocate inventory from other channels (because the losses caused by out-of-stock and short-term ranking declines on other platforms will not be as serious as Amazon’s), you can take the necessary measures to respond.

The Amazon algorithm may never “forgive” any seller because of external factors. Therefore, while you are waiting for the epidemic to be lifted and order restored, you need to plan ahead and prepare for it.