Effective March 31, Amazon updates pricing, mediation, and refurbished product policies

Amazon is updating its European selling policies that affect pricing, mediation, and refurbished products. The new policies will take effect on March 31, 2022.

In its Selling Policies and Seller Code of Conduct, Amazon explicitly prohibits price manipulation and search ranking manipulation . (Note that Amazon’s price parity policy was rescinded in the US in 2019 and in the UK and EU a few years ago ) .

This policy will apply to the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland.

Regarding this policy, some sellers said that they may not have enough decision-making power in product pricing. Previously, many sellers’ product prices were defined as “inflated”, and most of them were ASINs with good sales.

Another change is regarding Amazon's mediation policy , which shows that sellers can choose to appoint a mediator from a list of two mediators provided by the Center for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) .

At the same time, Amazon is also updating the metrics it measures for sellers participating in its refurbished products program, called Amazon Renewed, to include the following:

1. Introduced negative review rate (% of total orders) and product quality return rate (% of total orders) as the main quality performance indicators, and cancelled negative review rate (% of all reviews) and updated quality score ( RQS) .

2. For Chrome devices , it is mandatory to have automatic update support for at least one year.

3. Require mobile devices to maintain full functionality in the country in which they are sold, including wall plugs, charger voltage and frequency, cellular connectivity on all frequency bands (including 4G, LTE, and 5G), and the ability to set the product to the language of that country.

Also effective from March 31, 2022, Amazon will also launch a new Lab Central program policy applicable to the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain sites . It is understood that this is a voluntary service through which sellers can conduct compliance testing in a more convenient way .

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