The October A9 sales drop and a combination of my theories and ones I’ve read and seen.

So many people seem to be affected by the Amazon October sales drop. Main complaints are:

1. Lower organic sales
2. Higher ACOS on Amazon PPC

Now after doing some research and making some observations, here are my main theories.

1. Amazon is downgrading organic A9 results, and pushing smaller brands rank down because of things like: a) Larger brands with featured ad sections b) Amazon’s own private label products c) The push to pay to play (spend on Amazon PPC to get into the top 7 search results). d) Curated product selections With all of these in place, organic ranking how now become less valuable, and in turn made advertising one of the only ways to be in the top of search results
2. California Wildfires & Power Outages: Many people don’t know that huge portions of the state were on fire, or without power for multiple days, affecting millions (including myself). No power = no internet = no shopping
3. Google downgrading organic Amazon results. So far it’s just a theory, but Google just rolled out a new HUGE change to its algorithm called BERT. This could be affecting the overall traffic going to Amazon as a whole.
4. An interesting theory from Yev Marusenko that Amazon is prioritizing products in the search results who have stock in the closest fulfilment center. This makes a ton of sense logically, as it would save Amazon a lot of money with their one day shipping promise to its customers.
5. Amazon may be putting even more negative pressure on discounted products in terms of rank. Meaning if you gave a discount for a purchase it will count less for you to rank algorithmically.

I’m going to keep looking and testing and update all of you with anything that I have definitive proof on, or at least a preponderance of evidence to back these theories up. Let me know what you’ve seen in these past two weeks that’s affecting your business…