In the loop

Amazon says your price is too high. Too high compared to what?

Stay updated.

Picture an inspector walking into your shop a few weeks before the holidays. He tapes "price error" across half your shelf and turns to leave. You ask him what the right price is. "Lower it to the reference." You ask what the reference is. He's already out the door.

That's roughly what sellers have been describing on Amazon's own forums this week. One seller says nearly all of his Pokemon listings were deactivated for a "potential high pricing error." Others report dozens of listings gone within days, some priced only modestly above cost. They say Pricing Health showed no reference price at all, and that a specialist review came back with the same sentence: lower to the reference.

Then the part that really hurts. Sellers say the stock is already in FBA. A deactivated listing doesn't sell, and getting the units back costs removal fees. Right before the weeks you planned the whole year around.

What's actually going on

From what sellers describe, nobody at Amazon looked at these listings and decided they were overpriced. Sellers believe this is the automated Fair Pricing check: a price is held up against a reference, and if the gap looks too big, the listing goes inactive first and the questions come later.

The interesting part is what that system can't see. It doesn't know what you paid. It doesn't know that a sealed box from a couple of years ago is harder to find today than the day it came out. It doesn't know that "discontinued" usually means scarce, and scarce usually means the price goes up. In my view, that's the whole story: to a pricing check, an item that gained value looks exactly like an item someone is overcharging for.

That's why collectibles, discontinued products and anything that appreciates are the most exposed right now.

Sellers in those threads also pointed at something you have to smile at: on some of the same items, they report Amazon's own offer priced well above theirs. I'm not raising it to pick a fight. I'm raising it because it proves the point. This isn't a person judging who is greedy. It looks like an automated check.

And if you're a brand owner thinking "good thing I don't sell trading cards," not so fast. Sellers say the same kind of check can hit brands whose price off Amazon sits lower. Next to your own lower price somewhere else, your Amazon price can look "too high" too.

Our take

The system isn't calling you a cheat. It's saying "this number looks strange to me." Frustrating, yes, but a strange number is something you can go and look at, and the sellers who look this week get to deal with it in November. The ones who wait find out with stock stuck in a warehouse during the weeks they can least afford it. Be in the first group.

Here is one first step for today, and only one:

• Pause your repricer rules on the affected SKUs. A repricer moving prices on its own right now only adds noise.

That's the first step, not the whole fix. What tripped the check on a specific SKU, and what Amazon needs to see to switch it back on, is case work. That's what a Case Autopsy is for: we take the case apart before we write a single word, then go for the Root Fix, the actual cause, not new wording. I've been working on Amazon appeals for more than 10 years, and when an automated rule hits a good listing, calm and precise beats fast and loud.

Stay updated.