Coupons are one of the more popular launch strategies on Amazon but watch out, they can leave you vulnerable to scammers! Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself.
Getting a new product off the ground isn’t easy on Amazon, which is why you may want to add a little spice to your product launch by running a promotion. One of the best promotion strategies is to use coupons that allow a limited number of people to purchase your product at a considerable discount.
Coupons are a great way to boost sales velocity and generate buzz around your Amazon product but they also leave you open to unscrupulous practices.
Your coupon strategy can leave you open to coupon scammers. Here’s what you need to protect your store, your products, and your reputation.
Amazon Coupons 101
Coupons have been popular for ages, long before e-commerce was even a thing. The vast majority of customers use coupons to get money off all sorts of things. Since Amazon made coupons available to its sellers and vendors, they have become an increasingly common sales tactic.
You can create a coupon code, send it out through your marketing channels, and give customers the chance to buy your Amazon product at an incredible, reduced, price. This will generate traffic to your products on Amazon, increase sales velocity and help you build your seller ranking. But, there’s a catch.
You need to ensure that you launch your coupon strategy properly. Many sellers make similar mistakes and will launch a coupon code without placing any restrictions on its use, like limiting the coupon to one per customer, for example. Failure to take these steps leaves sellers vulnerable to coupon stackers who use software to seek out products with unrestricted coupons. These individuals will then claim multiple coupons for the same product and apply them to multiple purchases, buying up all your stock, driving the price down to zero and taking your inventory for free.
By emptying your inventory, these individuals take your product away from customers who may actually be interested in buying it. Your product can run out of stock far too quickly which can land you in trouble with Amazon. Any sellers who are out of stock or unable to full orders will receive a negative FBA rating, which will prevent your listing from ranking for your chosen keywords. All those efforts you are putting into getting your product on to page one of an Amazon product search could ultimately come to nothing.
How to Protect Your Amazon Products From Coupon Scammers
There is, of course, one relatively easy option for protecting yourself against coupon scammers –restricting the coupon to one per customer.
Amazon allows you to choose whether you’re going to limit a coupon to one per customer or if you will allow each buyer to use multiple coupons. If you place a limit of one item per customer, you put yourself in a great position to protect against any attack, but this approach isn’t necessarily fool-proof.
There are a few things can still go wrong. Perhaps you don’t apply it correctly, maybe the scammer finds a way to work around it or you lose track of which products have coupons applied. As you start to sell more volume and your promotions get more varied and complex, it’s easy to lose track of things.
Good order management is crucial. You need to be able to see all the key details about the products you sell, which is where a really good order management solution comes in.
Using FeedbackWhiz’s advanced order management search engine, you can view all your orders from one dashboard. You can search by ASIN to view all the details about each particular product. You can search by almost any metric you like and see if it has a coupon applied. If necessary, you can then go to that product and set a limit on the number of items that can go to any individual buyer. This will prevent a single buyer from emptying out all of your precious inventory.
FeedbackWhiz makes it easy to understand what is happening with all of your products. You can monitor your orders so if someone is coupon stacking, you are likely to catch it quickly, allowing you to notify Amazon or make adjustments before it is too late.
Ultimately, controlling these issues comes down to the amount of information you have about your products, orders, and sales. The more data you can collect, the more difficult it will be for scammers to target you.
In this instance, the true value of FeedbackWhiz lies in its ability to function as a complete order management platform tool. Not only does it function like other tools by helping you increase your feedback and product reviews, but it also provides the visibility you need at all levels of your business to protect you and your products from dishonest buyer practices.
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