Over 12 hours and no price drop on Amazon

[alhawke]

Should I contact customer support with Amazon? This is an older title published 2020. It could be that there hasn't been much traffic over the past year... but I have an upcoming promo on Tuesday. Typically it usually takes 1-2 hours for updates to be processed. What do you guys suggest? I have a suspicion something's off.

Maybe I made that old mistake of doing this right before the weekend...

[TimothyEllis]

No idea on that, but audio submissions are now taking days when they used to take hours.

Maybe something has changed on the back end.

Mind you, my last goof update went through reasonably normally. It was just the audio that didn't. But that didn't involve anything except updating the sample.

[alhawke]

Up at requested price in US after 24hours. Not yet on all international markets, but that's a good sign. It's never taken this long. I'll wait another 12 hours...

[alhawke]

At 48hrs in the international market without my requested price change. I sent an email to them.
Let this be a warning sign for those planning any major sales--set it early right now. Amazon's algos are buggy.
My suspicion is that Amazon hasn't honored my sale price change on KDP yet and that the US market change is from their computer matching, but... don't know.

[alhawke]

Well, this is a new one. Amazon continues to not change pricing on my book and it's earning me more money. I am getting a high royalty somehow based on the prior sales price. I'm trying to figure out the math, but Amazon in giving me a royalty of $2.12 per sale instead of $0.35. I think this is a price matching calculation and the system has completely failed in changing the price have change requested by me. I don't mind the extra royalty, but I have a feeling their going to ask for it back--even though I've been through many promos in the past where the price was changed late and I lost loads of money. Call me dumb, but I am in contact with KDP and have notified them of the errors.

Anyway, what it all means is that it's been over 72hrs and Amazon has not honored my price change request. So , for those running a sale, you might say KDP is a bit buggy at the moment. Change your price EARLY.

[alhawke]

KDP says it's an error on their end. The book continues to be frozen under updating. The good news is that the price was price matched in all major markets for my sale so, all in all, it never really did any harm.  The result of all this could have been really bad. I've got another promo I'm running next month. I plan to give myself a week of wiggle room.

Two things I can throw out there as possible reasons for the glitch ??

It's an older title. The whole reason for the promo was to boost sales which were around zero for the year. The system might have been, like, what is this book?

Second. I adjusted pricing on Friday night. I've read over and over to be wary of publishing or run price changes near a weekend.