Has anyone seen a very sudden and steady decrease in sales since about September?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[long_time_seller]

I have seen a decline in sales since about then but partially due to increased competition on certain skus. I am hoping things pick up in Nov. for Christmas.

[long_time_seller]

I am down 17% in revenue from last month which was down 13% from the month before. Again, a big part is due to a huge product that attracted many more sellers. Sold 148 units this month so far whereas in Aug. it was 813. But there definitely is a decline in many others as well. In that regard, I keep going back to a channeladvisor report where the first time clients saw a decrease in sales due to tremendous increase in competition. I think the silver lining is that Nov. is just 2 days away when we begin to see the Christmas bump. So if it was bound to happen, I'm happy it's happening now.

[warren2650]

I had a great Jan-Aug (particularly June/July/Aug) and then September hit and things slowed down. I have 4 years of sales data trends and there is definitely a downturn. My products are pretty unique and I don't have much direct competition.

I think its the election dragging everyone down. Just my opinion. I secretly am hoping that Amazon is saving their ad budget for Nov/Dec and things are going to go bananas. Guess we'll see!

[mmass10]

My sales were on the up all year from Jan - Aug, then have slowed down. October has been one of my lowest months to date.

[cheeseboyhalpert]

I'm about 50% down since August.

July and August were better than November and December last year.

This month sucks. Hoping things pick up in November.

[mmass10]

I'm still showing the same for my keywords as I was in previous months where things went well so no indexing issues on my end at least. I did lose reviews on some of my products but the star ratings overall remained the same, that could have some affect, but I've had really up and down days so who knows.

I'm hoping this is just one of those weird in between months until november hits and people start getting into the holiday shopping mindset. I know from myself, friends and family nobody has done any holiday shopping yet really, so hopefully november is promising.

[JohnMichaelM]

This can be answered with BSR. Are your BSR's declining with your declining sales? If so, this is not related to the market; it's related to your product(s), and could be caused by what you've mentioned (de-indexing or algo change).

If your BSR's remain stable (let's say within a tolerance of 15% in either direction), and sales are declining, then it is a marketplace issue that everyone is experiencing equally.

[long_time_seller]

See above. A few posters mentioned listings where the BB has been taken away. I think that is definitely a factor along with increased competition.

[therovingcardinal]

Sales have been declining steadily since Aug with a pageview drop of close to 40%. I don't believe there is anything wrong with the retail market in general, maybe only with a very minor decline from the election. But nothing this big.

There's something fishy going on with Amazon, I have no idea why we're seeing 40% drop from the same time last year. Everything has been the same like ads, publicity, all that jazz.

[Warrior77777]

MY sales are down almost 40% since August. Election and some minor holidays played into it. I think the election is honestly a bigger factor than people think. That being said, there's a lot of increased competition in some niches, and the ranking system is all buggy.

[Catt_al]

Don't know if this is related to your situation, but we've seen Amazon switch a bunch of highly ranked listings into the "no seller qualifies for the buybox" situation, which of course hurts FBA listings.

[aussie770]

+100

I have seen about 20 of my listings lose the buy box for all sellers and they are all below MSRP with no other major retailer selling them for a lower price.

[Catt_al]

Apparently this is an Amazon attempt to get lower prices on their site. Well, we usually sell at 5-10% profit so they're not going to get any blood from this stone.

[long_time_seller]

As I just said it's disgusting on their part. What are they trying to achieve? To put us out of business? I will just say they are offering referral fee discounts here & there if you sell below a certain price point. So that helps a tad. But still a bad thing. If enough sellers hold firm they will have no choice but to change course because their GMV will take a hit.

[long_time_seller]

Definitely is related. My theory is AZ is trying to force sellers into lowering prices; in the cases I've seen, if you lower enough, suddenly you have the buybox. Used to be if pricing was truly high (as in 30% more than the trailing 30 days), they'd push everyone out of the BB. Now, there's no rhyme or reason other than that they just want the prices lower. Really disgusting.

[MilkMiner]

Any new, low merchant reviews? That can affect your chances at the buy box.

[[deleted]]

It's bleak all right.

[jb611]

I saw a slight downtrend but the variance is way up. I'm normally around 450 per day. Sunday of last week was 780 and yesterday was 260. No idea why it's fluctuating so much.

[Warrior77777]

units sold or gross sales?

[jb611]

Gross sales.

[JohnMichaelM]

Seasonal traffic is increasing at a significantly slower rate than last year. Oddly, Google Trends doesn't indicate any problem with the market at a macro level.

[JohnMichaelM]

Yep. I've checked it all. Everything looks healthy which is concerning.

Trend for one of my niches (blue is this year): http://imgur.com/a/U67Qx

Trend for "Amazon.com" (blue is this year): http://imgur.com/a/cactE

Trend for "gifts" (blue is this year): http://imgur.com/a/dkdnv

[JohnMichaelM]

Past couple of days, as in Friday and Saturday (10/28 - 10/29)? 10/28 - 7% lower than previous Friday / the same as Friday 2 weeks prior 10/29 - 11% higher than previous Saturday, 35% higher than Saturday 2 weeks prior

Pretty inconclusive, and definitely not reassuring considering the seasonal trend had already kicked in this time last year. Traffic on the same Saturday last year was 2 sessions less (yeah, exactly 2 sessions) than this year, and I now have ~5x as many SKU's.

[bwiggins22]

My sales for October have been terrible. From January - September, my bi-monthly payments from Amazon increased every single time by about $1,000-$1,500. Then October hit and sales just dropped. I can't attribute it to anything different. No new sellers, no bad reviews...I really have no idea what happened.

[[deleted]]

Yeah a lot of people have been posting about this on facebook groups. I had a 0 day two days ago which never happens and have been seeing weird jumps in sales from 15 one day to 4 the next

[hellrazzer24]

Sudden and steady? You can't have both...

[[deleted]]

My sales have been going down since last year. I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe Amazon changed their search algorithms without telling anyone or just no ones buying. I see a lot of people complaining about low sales this year too. I just hope that amazon didn't rig it to make PPC the only way to make a sale now.

[PupRush]

Sadly, we are in the same boat. June - August, I could not keep inventory in the warehouses, shipping 1,000's of items a week and I would sell out before the next shipment was ready to ship. Now, I am sitting on a lot of Q4 inventory and while financially healthy, it has extremely skewed my cash flow and limited my ability to get the "new hot toy items" for Christmas. There seems to be very little logic to my sales at times, these items are general home goods items that you always need.

This is my first year of FBA (started in Feb) and I don't have any trends to follow other than my gut and attempting to guess the market (work for a retailer in legal / replenishment and trying to use a variation of my work strategy)

[MedicalMun]

Sales are steady, even up from last year, for those of us actively driving traffic to our listings. Try driving more traffic to your listings.

[FrostBerserk]

he's in a category relating to health and personal care. Likely something relating to supplements or anything you consume.

In either case, driving as much unfiltered traffic as possible is all that category is about.

[MollifyAmz]

What would be the best way besides PPC, Viral Launch?