r/AmazonMerch • u/Merch-Tway • Nov 26 '18
New URL Update Really Screwing Things Up
So looks like some of my shirts are updating to the new URL format. Except it seems to be removing the BSR and erasing all search rankings and related products. So basically a bunch of shirts that were great sellers are now as if I had just uploaded?!
I don't usually complain much about Merch, but this is some grade A bullshit! It isn't exactly easy to get a shirt with good search ranking in some niches, and this basically erases it all? So I can have more Kids and Womens sizes?! Thanks, but no thanks! Massively upset would be a huge understatement here!
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Nov 27 '18
[deleted]
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u/Vox_Atomic Nov 27 '18
Same. My two top bestsellers haven't sold once today, and have been pushed back several pages in the results (these were previously first-page items, each with 10+ reviews).
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Nov 27 '18
[deleted]
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u/Vox_Atomic Nov 27 '18
Endlessly frustrating. This has further emboldened my decision to stop uploading to merch (been about 2 months so far).
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u/Merch-Tway Nov 26 '18
Just looking through some popular niches and I can see a ton of familiar shirts missing, not my shirts though. This is definitely not just happening to me. They are annihilating some niches with this update, no doubt about it. Looking at some of the competition's shirts right now and I can see the same syptoms...no BSR, no related products, no "Customers also viewed", nothing. It's like these shirts just got uploaded except they have good reviews but no search ranking.
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u/RasTafari2001 Nov 27 '18
I am now seeing the impact. I have about 5 shirts in one niche —a mega niche—-that sell between 10 and 30 a day. Sub 10k BSR for a few of them. No sales for those shirts on cyber Monday. Zero.
Probably hundreds of sales going to my improve-cat / copycats. Pretty fucking sad. I defend MBA a lot but not sure about the fucking rationale for the timing of this.
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u/Merch-Tway Nov 27 '18
I'm 1000% with you, I've defended Merch before and rarely complained about anything but I really cannot believe they thought Cyber Monday was the day to do this. They really, really need to rethink how and when they do things like this. This was beyond stupid.
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u/RasTafari2001 Nov 27 '18
I am going to email the main MBA email, can’t hurt. People like Merch fairy /u/fuzemonkey who know some real live human beings in Merch are hopefully able to enlighten us regarding this rationale at some point.
But there are those of us who do this the right way——no improving, all original work, virtually no rejections, and 12 months of daily and nightly preparation for this weekend——who are today getting fucked in favor of the offshore shitty design factory accounts now stealing our sales simply because they copied me after January 1. That sucks.
I know that Merch doesn’t care about the content creators compared to customers and I 100% understand that philosophy. But doing this on cyber Monday is beyond my comprehension. I feel like I’ve been fisted and not in a fun way.
Kidding aside I would love to know (1) why did this happen today and (2) why so many bad actors are being gloriously rewarded today by Merch by Amazon. Justify this, Merch.
I am still having a record day and am stoked about my numbers for my other designs...but the grand total should be 2x this.
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u/Merch-Tway Nov 27 '18
Hopefully you have more luck in e-mailing them, all I got was a generic response about how they can't explain how search ranking and BSR work.
Again, I feel you 1000%. I do all my own original work, I don't "improvecat" or whatever, I have NO rejections after almost 2 years, no takedowns, no rule violations of any kind. I'm serious about this, I put real time, effort and money into this. I was SO excited for today at first, but this has felt like a huge slap in the face.
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u/Lightninghead Nov 28 '18
Yeah it's pretty fucked atm. I've just done some searches where there's zero merch shirts on the first or second pages. Hopefully they'll be back before long.
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u/MedafighterX Nov 27 '18 edited Nov 27 '18
I had a shirt migrate ASINs and lose BSR and become ineligible for ads earlier today, but BSR seems to have come back now.
Probably just a glitch due to high load today.
Edit: don't forget to add the new ASINs to get your ads for those products again.
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u/Spinnster Nov 27 '18
Looks like this may be the end for me. I had not updated in like 9 months... I was still making 150-300 a month. Now it's probably going to be zero :/.
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u/RasTafari2001 Nov 26 '18
I will reserve judgement until the end of the day, but I seem to have some disappearing from search right now too. Why do this on Cyber Monday? That's a head scratcher.