The End Of Rebates, Two-Steps URLs, & Other Search Rank Manipulation

Amazon has just made an unconventional announcement via one of its Forum Moderators (which we’ll circle back to in just a minute) to clarify the rules of its Seller Code of Conduct, which aims to combat the reportedly increasing amount of sales rank manipulation. Recently, Amazon noted that it had received many inquiries about its incentive policies, especially those related to driving buyer discovery and conversion through off-Amazon coupons and rebates made to drive purchases on its platform.

Amazon continues to allow sales promotions that are offered directly upon the Amazon platform, such as deals, discounts, and coupons. However, the use of rankings boosting practices such as super URLs, two-step URLs, funnels, search-find-buy, rebates, or similar off-Amazon marketing incentives is in violation of the Seller Code of Conduct. As you probably know, the issue Amazon has with these types of promotions is that they falsely inflate rankings in Amazon search. Amazon’s claim as a reason for the enforcement is that it can be an abusive practice toward customers and other sellers, assumingly by creating a false sense of the popularity of the product and providing an unfair advantage over sellers not using these practices.

Yet, what’s most interesting about this announcement from Amazon is how they decided to broadcast the message, which, as we mentioned above, was through a Moderator named ‘SEAmod’ on the official Amazon Forum, rather than its typical channel for seller announcements, which is called Amazon News. This has led to speculation from Amazon sellers that the company is gearing up for a major update to its Seller Code of Conduct policies, with rumors coming from those in Amazon’s inner circles that the company might announce the changes as early as next month to curb these types of infringements.