I have been an amazon seller for more than five years and have had a store on Amazon most of that time paying $39.95 per month for the access. Having the store permitted me to sell with slightly lower fees paid to Amazon for their services. Nothing beats the exposure to large populations of buyers as Amazon but the trade-off is everything else. I worked ok but then Amazon started to get more AI involved in determining what and how I could sell and at what price I could sell it for. Some time ago I had a bath salt kit listed for sale and it was removed because their pre-AI bots decided it was something to do with illegal drugs and that was just one of many subsequent items to be removed from my inventory. I am a reseller like many amazon sellers and sometimes my article for sale is new in the original sealed package. If I list it as new now the AI sales sensors/censors remove the item giving me a message I have stolen intellectual property and constantly pester me with emails about fixing something that makes no sense. Amazon long has removed toys from your inventory and other items unless you are approved to complete with them or some other seller, particularly at Christmas. This you cant sell that you can't sell or maybe you can and can't.
So my listings for some 4000 items came to be encumbered with infinite complexity for resale items....the whole thing entered a world of artificial reality like the news in Russia under Putin. Then the system sees i have no inventory of an item that was one resale item and gives me an order to fill where i have no inventory and i have to search through the inventory to find out that i have none which is a waste of time. Kafka would love that so would Putin.
What made it impossible for me to keep my store was this getting paid nothing or less than nothing for selling an item so Jeff Bezos could have a party yacht 4 times as big as Putin's and his oligarchs. Why should i sell an item and make less money than the item is worth? Why should i sell an item and lose money? So after getting rid of the Amazon store because earning a dollar on a $6 item is a bit absurd when it costs the buyer $9, I let my listings stay up to sell them without paying the $39.95 a month and a $4 item i sold cost the buyer $7.99 including postage. Amazon's fees on that that i paid as the seller were $3.99 without the store and $3.72 for postage. You see amazon can give you $3.99 for postage and tell you you need to send the item next day air for $39 so it costs you more than the item is worth and gives you a giant loss. Where does Putin come in? Well try adjusting your prices now with their AI censorship system. to correct this problem i try to raise my prices so i net at least a dollar from the sale of a $3 book hoping for volume sales but Amazon then freezes the listing and sends an email that My price is not fair I either take the 28 cents profit for selling the three-dollar book or i can't show my price listing to the public. It's all about the oligarch size party yacht i guess?
Silicon Valley has the wrong idea about the internet. The big tech companies see themselves as aristocrat socialists with all their high-minded self-serving principles and want everyone else to be part of a world of serfdom. Oh yes, I am shopping for a class action lawsuit now. Originally Amazon let you price your product any way you wanted not locking you into some defined price level but not any longer. It even used to be easy to put my own products up on amazon but now thats an other layer of bs to deal with. With inflation going up so fast i want to make my prices go up and Amazon expressly won't allow me to make a $3 or $4 book that i would end up selling at a loss with the postage and fees they charge locking me into their feudal system that benefits the Yacht owner.
What is interesting is I also sell on ebay . I put products of my own up there and i put up my own price and with inflation people automatically bid the prices higher as a result.....I was surprised by that. ebay has more of a free market than amazon. Amazon is ripping off customers overcharging their sellers so the hell with them. the Hell with putin.
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