Amazon UK

A ‘Merrier’ Christmas on Amazon – Fudge the Item Weights

If Amazon read this, it’ll probably piss on any chance I ever had for working with/for them. But keeping with the no-holes-barred approach I set out here, here is a tip that no-one will tell you, mainly because its dirty and underhand, but hey it works!

The Background

This only works if you know that your competitors on Amazon use weight based rules, its a basic flaw in the way that inventory is created in Amazon, by having lots of people able to edit records, then there is a margin of error, based upon this, we are able to force an error in our favour.

I say that this only works when ‘they use weight based rules’, this is because the Amazon shipping method setup for merchants is very primitive, you essentially get two options, weight based or item based and also only works for non BMVD (media like DVD’s etc) items. You can see the Amazon help pages on this here.

Its also imperative that you are not using weight based shipping yourself, if you do not alter this, then you’re screwing yourself. Again see here on how to alter them.

Spotting if we have Chance to Weight the Odds

You can normally spot what method your competitor is using on Amazon by checking a collection of items, preferably look at something that is intrinsically very heavy and something that is very light and seeing if the postage changes. If it does, Housten, we have a winner!

Altering the Weights

There are a couple of options that we can use, we can either edit records manually one by one, use a script such as an iMacro to alter them in turn, page by page, an update file or use an import/export from your software provider.

My biggest tip is not to go overboard with the weight increases and definitely not to do everything. Instead, pick on a selection of items and alter their weight so that it becomes unreasonably expensive for shipping.

If you have enough time, then picking a single item and working out their shipping with multiple weight edits could be very advantageous, you would know then sweet spots and because to create a simple calculation in excel to push each item over its barrier.

Summary

I hope you have realised how dirty this is, however realised that it could make or break someones Christmas.

The key to this is not going overboard on weight changes, setting something from 100 grams to 1 tonne isn’t going to work (well it may do, but expect it to get picked up) and for gods sake, if using the Amazon update files, ensure you write ‘update’ for the update type, its too easy to wipe data and always keep a backup and a record of the changes made, just in case you need them back later.

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