what's up guys so i know i speak for
quite a few of us when i say that merch
by amazon feels a little janky lately it
feels like something could be broken
under the hood
and look no further than pretty much any
facebook group uh reddit wherever you go
for your information you're gonna see
people talking about various issues in
merch by amazon going on right now uh
again i don't work for merch by amazon
i'm just a youtuber that uploads to
merch by amazon but i'm gonna go over
like a summary of some of the things
that people have been talking about in
the community uh give my thoughts on it
and i'm not gonna say that i have any
fixes because i think most of these are
gonna require the engineering team to
actually go in there and fix it but um
yeah why don't we just get into it
real quick reminder i put together some
free resources for you all linked in the
description i've got my free weekly
print on demand giveaway where two
winners will be selected this sunday
i've got my free seven day merch by
amazon mini course delivered via email
and i've got a great merch by amazon
facebook group a lot of what you'll see
in this video is sourced from there
so uh saeed had made a post it's not
all-encompassing but he was saying
something weird is happening on merch by
amazon so there is a pricing problem
where even though the lowest we can
price are t-shirts and i think this is
applying to more than just t-shirts i
saw people talking about premium shirts
tank tops
but we're seeing some standard t-shirts
priced at 10.59
even though the lowest that we you know
can set the price to via the controls
that we have uh exposure to as sellers
on the back end is 13.7 cents so it's
coming in underneath there
and if we're not in control of our
pricing well who is right and when when
it sells at 1307 or under we get 0.00
royalty but it seems to be happening to
products that aren't priced at 1307.
number two there's a zip code error
number three um something about
suggestions when searching which i
haven't been able to recreate i'm not
exactly under understanding that
and number four uh something about the
unknown brand okay
so the first one i wanted to mention and
again that was not an all-encompassing
all-encompassing list because he didn't
mention the timed out status which
honestly i had never seen a timed out
status
on the manage tab i mean i don't know if
this is from submitting new designs
because i basically have just been
submitting new designs i do edit pricing
to increase prices of old shirts as they
sell
but i haven't really been in there and
double checked
cause my my manage tab is just flooded
with things so it'd be really hard for
me to like honestly find a timed out
organically but i have seen multiple
people posting a timed out status
which again i've never really heard of
or seen prior to people talking about it
in the facebook group uh and then also
if i hide myself really quickly
it looks like it's not deletable at
least in uh looks like pretty much pro
plus um so yeah so i don't know it says
not deletable that's also interesting i
did see somebody follow up and say that
they had found a way to fix the timed
out status i think it was just by
changing the price point
um but again i haven't really been able
to replicate this so i'm not 100 sure
but if you get timed out try changing
the price
next we have this brand unknown artist
unknown
um sometimes i think it just says
unknown right or maybe they switched
what it says now if you type in a brand
name that's too long and i was just kind
of thinking to myself like
programmatically how you may be able to
game
the amazon algorithm
and hear me out for like 10 seconds all
right
you know how i think you can still i
don't haven't tried recently but you
know how even if the brand like max
length was let's say 35 characters how
sometimes they would still let you type
in longer than that or maybe it's like
the older listings at least would have a
longer cap than the the the new
restriction on brand name
well you may be in the database stored
as you guys remember the born remember
when the every brand that had born in it
was ranked super high
well
what if in the database on the back end
your brand actually still says something
like born or some trigger word where you
get favorable placement in search
results
but
on the front end when amazon is
rendering our search results to the
customers which is where we all find our
products on the front end of amazon.com
not on the you know merge catalog or
anything like that
it may say okay time to render this
search result in uh you know in the time
to render this product in search results
oh this brand name is too long let's
truncate it to artist unknown kind of
like an if else statement if brand name
is equal less than or equal to x number
of characters whatever they enforce
render the actual brand else it's too
long just put it as artist unknown so
maybe artist unknown behind the scenes
contains some of these like favorable
game the search algorithm
keywords and that's why we're seeing the
placement be so high you see what i'm
saying uh this isn't me trying to like
recommend anybody go and try and game
the system or anything like that
i'm just saying that we may see it as
artist unknown but in the database field
in the back end it may be something else
and it may contain special keywords that
give it favorable placement
i don't know how to prove it without
seeing amazon's database so good luck if
anybody wants to call me some senior
engineer do that
uh the pricing error 10.58 cents
yeah this is also extremely random
although it is worth mentioning like i
have a somewhat of a theory if it's not
just like a super general bug
you know what happens when a customer
well no i was gonna say when a customer
does a return but that's only one sku
right that's like one specific
fit color and size combination so it's
unlikely but um i was gonna say maybe if
they had a return they'd price the
return at 10 58 i don't know
uh but i think someone had said a couple
people
had mentioned they had reached out about
the pricing error
uh
oh no this is about stuck in processing
sorry stuck in processing
they didn't know what it was what did
they say i got a canned response about
how they have the right to adjust the
price so they emailed them about stuck
in processing and they said i have the
right to adjust the price on your
listings i mean amazon does these are
sold by amazon on the front end so
that's worth considering right they
don't say sold by ryan hoag they say
sold by amazon
um
this person followed up
good news on the 10.59 bug
if eventually they time out you can edit
the price and it will update correctly
just did this with one of my designs had
three sales at 10.59 so it seems like
the timed out thing is correlated with
the 10.59 bug
the interesting part is like has anybody
tried actually checking out with the
1059
product price point because that would
just mean that amazon's like losing
money wouldn't it or it would at least
imply that it's possible they're losing
money we don't actually know what their
bottom line is when it comes to
fulfilling the merch orders
another uh error so this is a familiar
one that most of us have probably seen
but somebody reported it in the group it
says a system error has occurred please
wait a moment and save your draft again
or submit your product again
so when you're uploading guys the
throttling mechanism that's built into
all of merch by amazon it's not just
unique to the upload process but that's
where you'll see it most often
it seems very sensitive you know i see
it all the time i did a video i think
last week or the week before talking
about how merch titans upload automation
had added extra
um checks basically so that it doesn't
just
stop when it runs into throttling so it
can actually fix itself most of the time
that's been really useful for me because
i get throttled all the time i had
marielle yesterday say ryan can you stop
uploading i need to do some merch
uploads i was like i'm not uploading
the throttling is just crazy sensitive
but yeah if you get this this error guys
or anything similar like you see the
price at you have a valid price like
1999 but it still says 0.00 royalty it's
probably just the throttling give it 60
seconds and then try again
um another error the zip code error i
saw two or three posts about this where
i guess people maybe living outside the
united states type in a zip code to do
their research and that was generating
errors um
i don't have a fix for this but i know
that that's something that multiple
people have reported so that kind of
sucks because i know that's you know
having the right zip code does help with
the research
hopefully they fix that
uh and then the processing error so
just listing stuck in processing um
someone else said yeah it's a glitch in
the system look at previous posts so it
seems like more people have been having
issues with long processing times don't
really have an issue a solution for that
though i mean what can we do right all
we can do is control what we can control
and uh processing times it's like once
you submit that listing to amazon or
submit that edit it's out of our hands
like in the past i've had stuff stuck in
processing for over six months
and i mean yeah that was very rare but i
know i'm not the only one that's had
that before you just see it stuck like
it just gets stuck and
nothing you can do because when it's in
processing you can't edit it
and then last but not least uh
rejections i don't know if i speak for
other people but like i've been seeing
like you know i like to do scaled-out
designs right and i have a lot of my
like csv lists for variables that i use
all the time
and i've been seeing extra rejections
for
variables that should be safe like i've
used them plenty of times in the past
recently this week for whatever reason
i'm seeing an uptick of like let's just
say a safe bet
i don't know an extra like three four
five percent rejections
if i'm i'm estimating right but
it feels about like three four five
percent extra rejections and i'm like
that's weird why is this word
getting rejected when i've used it so
many times in the past so and i i mean
it's definitely not trademarked like
that's not it's not some trademark issue
but it's is it a false positive in the
trademark algorithm yeah i would
probably classify it as that so anyways
um increased rejections if anybody's
seeing that too maybe it's just me i
don't know
and i've seen actually a couple people
losing their accounts recently uh two
recently today um so hopefully
everybody's just playing it safe and
that doesn't happen to anybody else but
anyways that's it for today's video just
a quick update i apologize i don't have
more like solutions
i don't know how to get more solutions
i'm crowdsourcing the problems and all
crowdsource solutions as well you know
that's why we have the comments section
that's why facebook still a decent place
for us to congregate because it does
it's pretty well optimized uh forum you
know even though i hate everything being
so centralized these days on the
internet it's not what the internet's
supposed to be like but
here we are
anyways guys as i sign off i do have a
full merch by amazon course walking you
through how i went from tier 10 to tier
200 000 there is a link in the
description if you'd like to learn more
thank you for watching please like
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comments section so we can all learn
from each other and help each other out
thanks for watching though i'll see you
tomorrow with a new video