From: The Massview Team

Amazon is no longer allowing discount codes greater than 50% percent off in Seller Central.

We recently started to get reports from some of our customers that they could not create coupon codes greater than fifty percent inside of Seller Central. This is a big deal because a lot of Amazon Sellers use really big discount codes when launching their products on Amazon. 

These big discounts help them get quick sales, which allows them to rank better in the search results. New products need the initial boost in sales, and offering discounts is a very popular strategy to convince shoppers to purchase new products with very little reviews. 

By limiting discount codes to 50% off or less, Amazon Sellers will have a much harder time launching their products and getting to the top of the search results. 

We are not sure if this is a permanent change to Amazon’s Seller Central or a temporary bug, but either way it’s concerning for anyone who uses promo or coupon codes to launch products. 

Luckily, we’ve been anticipating these types of changes for a long time, which is one of the reasons we built our rebate program:

How to Keep Offering Discounts Over 50% Off

Using rebates instead of coupon codes gives Amazon sellers complete control over the discount amount they give their customers. It also prevents Amazon from knowing how large a discount a seller is giving to their customers. 

In the past, Amazon would not allow shoppers to review heavily discounted products. They also would not count discounted sales as heavily in their search algorithm. That’s what makes rebates so powerful: using rebates keeps the discount completely between the shopper and the seller, so the sale counts as a full-priced sale for all practical purposes.

Of course, there are a lot of other reasons why a seller may want to offer large discounts besides launching a product. These reasons could include liquidating slow-moving inventory, offering special rewards to existing customers, or to help compensate for customer service issues. 

Unfortunately, these discounts (for any purpose) will be limited to 50% off if the new update sticks around.

While it’s unfortunate that Amazon has limited sellers to 50% off or less for coupon codes, we find rebates are actually a better alternative. That’s why we invite you to use Massview to launch rebate deals to an audience of half a million Amazon shoppers, so you can get the full-priced sales you need to improve your ranking — while still offering whatever discount you choose.

Not only will you be able to offer discounts greater than 50% off, but you can also have shoppers create lifestyle photos or videos, have them post about you on social media, or even answer survey questions about your products. This Massview tool also makes it much easier to encourage customers to write reviews for your product. (And yes, you can still offer Amazon shoppers coupon codes if you want to).

The “Social Media Promo Codes” Exception to Amazon’s 50% Discount Limit

Right now it looks like Social Media Promo Codes can still be offered up to 80% off. 

This can be limited 1 per checkout, and if you don't want to send it to influencers, you can turn off the toggle besides the "Amazon Influencers and Associates"

“Social Media Promo codes” work almost the same way as “percentage off” codes. The difference is that Social Media codes can only be set up with “group code” or Multi-use coupon codes, which are Shareable, so they have a tendency to go viral.

You can also let Amazon share this to Influencers and Associates. It’s not a guaranteed placement, but if it does get shared and you are offering large discounts, your inventory could run out very quickly if you let the sale continue unchecked. 

In other words, use these deals with caution.

Unlike normal percent-off coupons, you don’t have to set a max order quantity limit with social media codes: all you need to do is turn on “one unit per checkout” option.

The main thing you need to know about using Social media codes is that you can’t limit the quantity of redemptions. So if your code gets shared, you could empty your entire inventory at that price, which is not only expensive but could also cause delays in order fulfillment, which affects Amazon’s rating of your shipping performance (and often leads to bad reviews).

Also because these codes are shareable, you can’t control how they are used or who uses them. Typically, in order to rank well on Amazon, you will want to target a specific keyword and make steady sales over several days or weeks. This is why we prefer rebates, because you have more control over how many are redeemed — as well as who gets the rebates. 

Summary

We don’t think this change is the end of the world, but of course we would all still like to offer bigger discounts using the promo code system. 

The main thing you should keep in mind is that rebates have been the superior option to promo codes for a long time when it comes to product launches, and now that’s even more true with this update.