I have been getting a bunch of reports from you guys about the upper carousels. They are changing. Some of you are saying they have gone buck wild, which per my sources is a very specific type of wild. And after digging into it, I actually do think something is going on here.
I have watched people post about this in the Facebook groups and get met with “yes, this is normal, carousels move.” Which is true. Carousels do move. But I think what we are seeing right now is different, and I want to give you a few nuggets to chew on so you can decide for yourself.
What We Are Covering
- What People Are Actually Reporting
- Theory One: A Short-Term Stress Test
- The Backlog Problem This Would Solve
- Theory Two: Equal Visibility for Everyone
- Where This Could Be Heading: A Scoring System
- What It Means for Your Clicks
- What I Am Doing About It
What People Are Actually Reporting
About four to five days ago, people started posting in the Facebook groups saying the carousels were behaving strangely. Every time they refreshed a product page, they saw a completely different set of videos.
Normally that is not how it works. You look at a product page, hit refresh, and you generally see the same videos again. Maybe one slides in or out. Mostly it holds steady. And yes, we have always known that different people see different results from each other. That part is well documented and not new.
But one person, on one product, refreshing repeatedly and getting a fresh lineup every single time? I have not seen that before. At least not at this rate. That is what makes me think this is not just normal carousel drift.
Try it yourself before you read further. Go to any product, hit refresh a handful of times, and watch what happens.
Theory One: A Short-Term Stress Test
Here is the thing about Amazon. They do not do something just for the sake of doing something. There is always a purpose behind it. Sometimes it turns out to be the wrong call, but they always go in with an outcome in mind.
So if this is real, and every Amazon shopper is seeing the same effect, the question is why. Amazon is always trying to position themselves to make more money. What does randomizing the carousel get them?
My most plausible theory: this is a short-term stress test designed to generate data fast.
The Backlog Problem This Would Solve
You guys know a lot of these products are absolutely backlogged with videos. There are so many of them, and carousels typically do not move fast. Maybe one slides out, maybe two slide in, but generally they hold. It varies person to person, but there is at least a semi-consistency to it.
The problem with that is if you have a massive backlog, a bunch of genuinely good videos never see the light of day. And new videos keep coming in at a rapid pace, so the backlog grows faster than the rotation can clear it. At the rate Amazon has been going, they have no realistic way to surface the good stuff that is buried.
Now imagine you shuffle the carousel aggressively for several days across a decent chunk of the shopping population. Suddenly every video in that backlog is getting shown to real customers. Amazon is a data company at its core, and this would hand them an enormous amount of data very quickly.
That data does two things for them. One, it lets them grade the existing backlog so they know what to prioritize. Two, it tells them what actually moves the needle for customers. If they see a repeating pattern of videos that convert well, they can look at what those videos have in common and build a better system around it.
Theory Two: Equal Visibility for Everyone
The other possibility is that Amazon simply decided everything should get equal visibility. Wild west, everybody rotates in and out evenly.
I think that is very unlikely. Amazon is trying to make money, and they know some videos are bad. They do not want to intentionally platform a bad video in front of a customer who is about to buy. Giving everything equal airtime regardless of quality runs directly against their interest. It is on the table, but I would put it near the bottom.
Where This Could Be Heading: A Scoring System
Here is where it gets interesting to me. If Amazon collects enough data to define what a quality video looks like, the natural next step is grading creators, not just videos.
TikTok has a creator health score. Amazon has clearly been paying attention to TikTok. I think part of the push behind Creator Connections, shifting commission costs onto brands, comes from that same playbook. A creator scoring system would fit right in line with that direction.
And the only way to build one is to give videos a shot in the first place. If they are stuck in a backlog nobody sees, you have no data to score them with. So a mass shuffle is exactly what you would do first. Honestly, I am leaning toward a mix: a short-term stress test that produces the data needed to grade the backlog and build a scoring system on top of it.
Amazon has not meaningfully updated this program in years, at least not in ways we can see. This would be a significant one.
What It Means for Your Clicks
The impact is genuinely unclear, and I want to be upfront that it could go either way.
- If you struggle to break into carousels: there is probably upside here. If this goes on for a while, I would expect your clicks to tick up as your videos finally get shown.
- If you have benefited from premium carousel slots: this could bring those clicks down, because that slot is no longer reliably yours.
- For most people: you may lose on your winners and gain on products where you had no visibility at all. It feels like a wash to me right now.
This is one of those moments where having your own data matters more than the group consensus. If you are tracking which products you are in and what they are producing, you will see the shift in your own numbers well before anybody agrees on what happened. That kind of visibility is exactly what I built Oink for.
What I Am Doing About It
Absolutely nothing different. And I think even once they implement whatever this turns into, I will still be doing nothing different.
If this does turn out to be a grading system, I think I would actually like that. There is this weird gray area right now where we never really know if we are doing the right things or where we stand in Amazon’s eyes. I would take some transparency there. I would be in favor of it.
So go check a product page, hit refresh a few times, and tell me what you see. Does this feel like a stress test to you, or does it feel like Amazon doing Amazon things?
To be clear, these are theories, not inside information. But something is going on, and it is worth watching closely. If you want to keep a real eye on how your products are performing while this shakes out, that is what Oink for Influencers is built to do.
