So yesterday 9/12/18 Amazon Merch put a new update on the Merch Dashboard. The update read...
9/12
To offer long-term product submission growth, we are migrating our product detail page URLs to a new format. T-shirts added on or after December 16, 2017 are already published in this format and, beginning today, t-shirts published before this date will be migrated to the new format on a rolling basis over the next few months. Read the FAQ.
Now I'll be honest I'm a little bit confused about what this means, if you guys have a better understanding please drop a comment below, but my take on it is that with the huge number of merch sellers and merch designs they are taking up too many links and too many ASIN's and clogging up the Amazon inventory system so they are trying to clean it up and essentially have every listing have only one link and ASIN as opposed to multiple for each color and/or size variation.
This could be one of the most mundane non-eventful updates ever, however many merch sellers are up in arms that this is going to hurt the visibility and hurt sales for their 2017 listings.
I will say that I have noticed my best selling designs were all posted in September, October and Noevember of 2017 prior to the change Amazon made on December 16, 2017 so maybe there is some truth to that.
It's also somewhat curious this change comes on the heels of the AMS advertising rollout leading many people to believe Amazon is trying to tank their sales and force everyone to pay for ads and sponsored listings to make sales.
There seems to be a bit of a war going on between new sellers and old sellers with new sellers saying yay this levels the playing field and older longer time sellers saying new merch sellers are ruining the platform.
I'm not going to pretend to fully know what this means or how it's going to play out but it will be interesting to see. I'd love to hear your take, drop a comment in the comments section below...
