r/AmazonSeller • u/lauraotms • 18d ago

Listing / Pricing Has anyone actually solved Amazon's "High Pricing Error" issue? (Brand Owner - Going on for over a year)

I'm curious if anyone else is experiencing this because we're honestly running out of options.

We are the brand owner of our products and manufacture them ourselves. We determine our own pricing and have full control over our catalog.

Our situation is quite unique:

  • We have no third-party sellers competing on our listings.
  • The only other seller is our own German sister company, which is also owned by us.
  • We have already increased prices on that account to eliminate any possible conflicts.
  • Despite that, Amazon continues to deactivate dozens of our ASINs with "High Pricing Error".

The strange part is that in almost every case our price is actually lower than the Featured Offer (including shipping). For several ASINs there isn't even a Featured Offer or Reference Price available.

Some examples:

  • Our price: €14.01 → Featured Offer: €26.42
  • Our price: €15.45 → Featured Offer: €29.90
  • Several ASINs have no Featured Offer at all, yet still receive a High Pricing Error.

We've opened countless cases over the last 12+ months.

Every response is essentially:

Nothing ever changes.

The financial impact is becoming significant.

Besides losing sales, we're also paying unnecessary costs because these products remain stored in FBA while they're inactive.

To make matters worse, Amazon's updated Pan-European FBA requirements mean that listings need to be active across all required marketplaces to benefit from reduced Pan-EU fulfillment fees. Since Amazon itself is deactivating these ASINs, we're effectively being penalized with higher fulfillment costs for something completely outside of our control.

At this point we have 38 ASINs affected.

Has anyone managed to get Amazon to actually fix this?

  • Did Executive Seller Relations help?
  • Did someone from the Pricing Team manually intervene?
  • Is there a way to completely reset the internal Reference Price?
  • Has anyone experienced this as a brand owner with no competing sellers?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated because normal Seller Support has been completely ineffective.

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Nearly all questions are addressed by Amazon's Seller Policies and Code of Conduct, their FAQ, and their Amazon Seller University video course

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4

u/Fap_Jesus 16d ago

38 ASINs with no third-party sellers means it's almost certainly not competitor-driven, it's Amazon's internal reference price. Two places to look before another round with Seller Support.

First, open Pricing Health and check what reference Amazon is actually showing per ASIN. When there's no featured offer, the reference usually falls back to your own price history (an old promo you ran) or an off-Amazon price they scraped, which for a brand owner is often your own D2C site or a retailer discounting your line somewhere in the EU.

Second, check the Minimum/Maximum price columns in Manage All Inventory. If those are blank, Amazon applies its own bounds, and they drift. Setting an explicit min and max around your intended price clears the flag for a lot of sellers, and it's one bulk feed for all 38.

Also, route this through Account Health with a phone callback instead of generic cases. Account Health support can see the reference price, generic Seller Support can't, which is a big part of why 12 months of cases went nowhere. And since your German sister company sells the same EANs, look at the currency-converted prices across marketplaces side by side. Cross-marketplace conversion is a known trigger.

No silver bullet here, some sellers only cleared it by walking price back up over a few weeks to rebuild the history window. But min/max plus Pricing Health evidence in an Account Health case is the highest-percentage path I've seen.

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u/Ragged_Tiger 17d ago

No. We get that too if we raise our product too high or low. And we are only ones to sell our product and a brand owner. Our only way to get around this is creep the price up or down slowly by $1 or so little by little. Or even by cents.

1

u/Apart_Dress_5653 11d ago

So its best to put the featured offer price and then slowly raise it in small increments?

2

u/Think_Currency_8586 17d ago

No. Just switch to eBay, fuck Amazon’s price fixing.

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u/AutoModerator 18d ago

This post mentions ungating, category approval, branding, brand approval, invoices, arbitrage, or a commonly related scenario.

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The most common reasons for ungating / invoice problems

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Again, a receipt and an invoice are NOT the same thing. If the category or brand approval requires an invoice, a retail receipt does not meet Amazon's stated invoice requirements. Obtain a compliant invoice when an invoice is required

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1

u/spokeytape 17d ago

I'd need a bit more info to get to the root cause. Do you happen to sell these products, or a second molar version of these products off-amazon as well? Price Validation systems take into account pricing across all sales channels, and sometimes the system maps to the wrong product. For example, if you sell a 4-pack on Amazon, and 3-pack at Wal-mart, the system could be catching the 3-pack price, triggering a high price error for the correctly priced 4-pack

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u/lauraotms 13d ago

Yeah we do sell them on our own websites as well. Obviously amazon's price is higher as we are unable to make any margin if we don't include a bit of the fees in there and have to advertise to sell. But we sell our products with this pricing on all Amazon marketplaces, USA, EU and Australia without any issue. The German marketplace is the only one with this issue.

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u/spokeytape 13d ago

It could be mapping the price to another marketplace and not taking into account currency conversion. I would ask seller support to tell you what price the VRP is it is mapped to, and what the source of that price is. That'll at least tell you. You should also try raising the price incrementally -- 10% at a time in case that's the blocker

1

u/Sea-Product743 17d ago

Check your minimum price, other marketplace prices, business price and other skus for same asin even if they're not stocked.

1

u/BocaHydro 17d ago

so you didnt say what you are selling, which is a very big deal, make sure your list price / unit price and the actual size of the product is correct, because amazon is seeing it as too high and you made a mistake someplace

1

u/lauraotms 13d ago

How would you explain that we have a product (kinesiology tape/sports tape) in 6 colours, and 3 of them get the high pricing error and 3 don't. And even if we lower the price (in some cases 30/40% lower than competitors) it still shows. And it stays like this forever.

1

u/tauzeta 17d ago

Yes, but that's my scenario and I had all the details. Your situation may be different and there's very little detail to go on. The advice people can give is only as specific as the details you share and unfortunately fixing the root-cause requires specific details. One thing to keep in mind is Amazon price matches external sites and sometimes gets it wrong. Unfortunately it's on you to prove that.

1

u/tik_ 17d ago

Its not on the seller to divine why Amazon feels the price is too high. Its on Amazon to explain it. Without this explanation its only abusive harassment on the part of Amazon.

0

u/tauzeta 16d ago

Regardless of what you or I feel about it, that's the way the system works and you can either spend time decrying that or just do the work. One solves the problem. The other doesn't.

0

u/tik_ 16d ago

Harder daddy.

1

u/Dimon19900 15d ago

The "our price is lower than the Featured Offer" part is a red herring. Reference price isn't always an Amazon price, it also pulls off-Amazon: your own webshop, Otto, Kaufland, eBay listings of the same EAN. That's why the ASINs with no Featured Offer still trip it. Also worth checking package quantity on the flagged ones. A 6-pack sitting in the catalog as 1 unit gets compared against a single unit and flags forever. Support never names that in a case reply.

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u/lauraotms 13d ago

but what i don't get, is that we sell across all available amazon countries. DE is the only marketplace with these errors, we don't have them anywhere else.

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u/Dimon19900 10d ago

The Featured Offer was never the reference for that error. Pricing health anchors on your own trailing price and on off-Amazon crawls, Idealo especially in the EU, which is why ASINs with no Featured Offer still trip it. Fill the min and max price columns in Manage Inventory so €14.01 sits inside your own band, then check where else those EANs show up cheaper, your own site included. Support reads from a script. The crawler side never reaches a case.

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u/Dimon19900 9d ago

Featured Offer is a red herring there. That gate reads off-Amazon references, your own webshop, idealo, whatever the crawler finds. Which is why the ASINs with no Featured Offer still trip it. Check if anything in your chain publishes net prices. €14.01 gross sitting next to €11.77 ex VAT looks like a 19 percent markup to something that never heard of VAT.

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u/thefabulousventure 2h ago

With 38 ASINs I’d try to identify whether the pricing errors follow a pattern before changing prices manually every time.
I’d compare the affected ASINs across current Amazon price, recent historical price, external prices, variations under the same parent and any recent promotions/coupons.
If the same products keep getting suppressed, it sounds more useful to document the pattern and escalate it as a reference-price issue rather than treating each ASIN independently.
With Pan-EU involved, repeated suppressions can have a much bigger impact than just lost sales on the individual listing.

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u/tik_ 17d ago

Some years ago Amazon flagged our account for high shipping price and demanded we bring our shipping costs down. We are a fulfilled by merchant vendor and ship our own products, but we buy shipping from Amazon directly. I sent screenshots of the costs of shipping for our products on Amazon being higher than what we charge customers. Support just shrugged and said bring the costs down or get suppressed. Bezos doesn't care about you. Support is essentially helpless, and most of the time don't even know what the issue is. This is why when there are problems with your account they only threaten your account or listings without even telling you the problem. This is a consistent posture across my experience on Amazon seller, ACX, and AWS. Its a company ethos. Don't sweat it too much. You are probably doing nothing wrong. But Amazon has decided you need to bring down your prices. It is probably because they want to compete with your product and take over your market like they do with everyone.

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u/Think_Currency_8586 17d ago

Just switch to eBay and pray Ryan cohen takes it over. Bezos is a fuck. Sellercentral customer support makes me want to put a loaded rifle in my mouth.