While many brands offered huge discounts on product goods during the "Cyber Monday" in July holiday, several brands were riddled with challenges that prohibited deals from going live.
Amazon Auto-Bots
Sent out hundreds of emails were sent to vendors on Monday, formally known as "Prime Day Eve," notifying them that their promotions were suppressed due to profit threshold margins or lack of reviews.
Virtual Bundle Lightning Deals:
Several brands tried tiered bundle sales in order to avoid potential MAP violations on single skus. Most virtual bundles are variated with single issued products and share reviews with these products. Amazon's auto-system booted several of the lightning deals as they didn't meet the requirement for reviews as a separate ASIN - despite having multiple reviews for the individual products themselves. This caused several headaches, case-log tickets in vendor central and broken hearts of brands who were trying to hit Prime Day hard this year.
Discount Thresholds:
Other lightning deals were kicked out due to the promotional price not meeting the minimum discount threshold. This often occurs if the product drops significantly in price which would then require a larger discount end price to meet the 20% discount requirement. While Amazon's system stated that these deals could be adjusted, vendor central's manual promotion edits were unresponsive and did now allow for the promotions to be edited.
While Prime Day has been successful for several brands, others have run into several of these challenges which have inhibited their growth.