A new form of competition with self
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Today I discovered a new type of ranking competition. I'm still investigating, so I don't know all the details, but I think it's like this. In addition to our online store, we also sell our products via Amazon Merchant. We are the only distributor in the US, so I was surprised to see our products offered at a modest number of other sites, often with very elevated prices (not linking to Amazon, but actually selling our product on their site). I shot the product images and the images are mine. Now Sears is selling our product on Sears.com through one of their merchant sellers. The prices are grossly inflated, and the Sears Google ranking are pushing us out of places we used to be. I'm guessing that if someone actually purchases our product via Sears.com, the order will be forwarded to our Amazon listing for fulfillment, and the reseller will pocket the price difference minus a percentage for Sears.
I will follow up with both Amazon and Sears, but regarding the competition with your own Amazon merchant product listings, is this a known problem?
Best,
Christopher -
Yes, it was OnlineSuperSeller for us too. I sent a notice to Sears at seller_support@searshc.com requesting removal of our products. They responded within an hour. OnlineSuperSeller responded soon after that.
A related problem is all the YoutTube spam. Spammers are using our product images to make the most hideous slide show videos with a link to our products on Amazon. I'm beginning to think Amazon Merchant is far more branding and SEO headache than it is worth.
Best,
Christopher -
Yes, we have experienced this with our product SteriPEN as well. For our product/brand this is more noticeable in Google Shopping Search rather than Google search. To your point it does appear that these Sears listing are being aggregated from Amazon.com retailers. On the Sears website, OnlineSuperSeller is selling our Journey product at $270 and the retail price US for this product is $99.99.
Don't know where OnlineSuperSeller is getting our product from as we don't sell product to them.
Let's see what others post.
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