So I had a KDP pre-order of a book for almost 90 days, accumulating over 500 pre-orders, German translation, on Amazon.de.
But, late in the pre-order, I raised the price from E3.99 to 4.99.
Everything looked fine until the live date, when the pre-order number suddenly dropped to 103, dropping by over 400.
264 were sold on release day, though. The 103 number hasn't changed.
My initial guess is that the Amazon system somehow queried the pre-order people and told them the price got raised (which would be a really bad thing, would feel to the customer like a bait-and-switch--I can't believe Amazon's system would intentionally do this).
I called KDP and they are puzzled. They initially claimed all these people must have decided to cancel, but that was simply not reasonable. 80% of the customers aren't going to suddenly cancel or have bad credit cards or bad accounts.
I pointed out that it's much more likely--almost certain, in fact--that this is an Amazon system issue, possibly related to raising the price. Raising the price is supposed to let the people who ordered at 3.99 get it at 3.99 and the ones who ordered at 4.99 get it at 4.99, seamlessly, but it looks very much as if the 3.99 pre-orders got mass-cancelled.
So unless my understanding is wrong, something went wrong in the system.
The KDP rep I spoke to (native English speaker, thank God) couldn't figure out what happened and is passing it to the team that handles pre-orders.
Anyone else had anything like this happen?