Amazon Sales Stopped Suddenly: How to Tell an Outage From a Listing Problem

Three threads appeared on the Seller Forums in two days this month: anyone experiencing delayed orders in Seller Central today, Amazon sales stuck for the last hour, did Amazon's servers go down again. They appear in the same form every few weeks, and the replies under them divide the same way every time. Most of the sellers are watching a delay in Amazon's order reporting and their sales are fine. A few have a listing that was suppressed that morning, a buy box that moved, or an ad campaign that ran out, and the outage thread is where they went instead of looking.

This is the check we run when a client's orders stop, in the order that finds the cause fastest. It takes about twenty minutes and it has to be done in order, because the first step is the one that tells you whether the rest matter.

Open the Seller Forums and sort by newest. When Amazon's order reporting is delayed or the site is degraded, there is a thread within the hour with dozens of replies from sellers across categories, and Amazon's community managers post in it when the incident is acknowledged. That thread is the fastest status page Amazon has. If it exists and it describes what you are seeing, the cause is Amazon, the orders are almost always there and will appear when reporting catches up, and nothing in the account should be changed until it does.

If there is no such thread, and the forum is discussing its usual subjects, the cause is in the account. A seller who changes prices or relaunches campaigns during a reporting delay makes decisions against data that is not there, and the threads carry more than one story of a price cut that turned a two hour delay into a bad week.

Open the product page as a customer, logged out, on a phone. Is it live, is there a buy button, is it your offer that has it, and is the price what you set. Then open the listing in the account and read its status. Suppressed, inactive, stranded and search suppressed are four different conditions with four different causes, and the account tells you which in the listing's own row and in the Action Center's critical cards. A listing suppressed for a missing attribute or an image rule comes back within hours of the fix; a listing removed for a policy reason does not, and the policy warnings article is the map of those.

The buy box is the second thing on that page. An offer that lost the buy box to a reseller at a lower price, or to Amazon itself, keeps its listing live and loses most of its sales in the same hour; the offer count and the buy box owner on the product page say so. The reselling article covers who can appear on a listing and what can be done about it.

Open account health and the case log. A listing deactivated for a performance notification, an account under review, a verification request that has been sitting unanswered for a week: each of these stops sales without changing the product page much, and each shows in the account health page before it shows anywhere else. The notifications inbox and the case log carry the same information a day earlier. Account health and reinstatement is what to do when it is this.

Check the orders page itself while there. An order held as pending, or one showing approval needed, is a payment or address hold rather than a sales problem, and the approval needed article explains those. A morning of pending orders that clear by evening is Amazon's payment processing, not the account.

For a product whose sales are mostly paid, sales stop when the ads do. Open the campaign manager: has the daily budget run out, is a campaign paused, was a bid rule changed overnight, has a keyword been made negative by mistake. A budget that ran out at ten in the morning looks, from the sales graph, like an outage at ten in the morning. The article on campaigns that spend without converting covers the opposite fault, where the ads run and nothing sells, and the two together account for most sudden drops on advertised products.

A competitor launched a deal. A category page changed. The product's main search term shifted in rank overnight, which the search term report shows tomorrow. Seasonality, the day of the week, a holiday in the buyer's country. None of these are faults, and all of them look like one at eleven in the morning. The tell is that the drop is partial and spread over the day rather than a wall at a time.

What to do in each case is different, and that is the point of doing the check in order. An Amazon incident: wait, and change nothing. A suppressed listing: fix the attribute today. A lost buy box: a price decision, made from the unit economics rather than the panic. An account health notification: the reinstatement work, that day. An ad budget: raise it or accept the cap. For the brands we run, this check is a standing routine in compliance and account health, and the value of it is not the fix. It is the twenty minutes that stop a seller cutting a price to solve a reporting delay.