| Amazon.com |
| Amazon.com Amazon Fulfillment by Amazon Makes DOES NOT MAKE Business Sense for the Individual Seller, Internet |
| 12th of Jul, 2011 by User801936 |
| Amazon.com may be a great place to shop for items and save money or cut cost on shipping with their many offers but, as an individual seller, BEWARE..it has been actually the reverse..A scam due to an excessive expense on shipping for an item you sell! As a regular shopper, I discovered the Sell Your Stuff service that Amazon.com offers. I decided to try to make some extra money for new and unused items but, on average after year now of selling I realized that the Amazon fees that they deduct and shipping cost for a product sold, averages out to a seller losing 1/2 of the product purchase listing price. Their pitch for 'Make Money' really means 'Make Us Money' and you pay most of the cost to do so. Their Amazon fees consist of a: commission or referral fee, fixed closing fee AND variable closing fee. The referral fee ranges between 8%-15% depending on type of item being sold. I would think that the commission includes the closing and variable closing fee? And this is 2 closing fees and not just 1? This is all subtracted from the item's listed purchase price and a variable shipping credit amount is also paid to the seller to ship. The shipping fee credit that they credit normally only covers half the amount of your actual shipping cost. In addition, the shipping fee credit does not take into consideration, the size or weight of the product or from and to destination which always varies! The page to utilize this service states: "Pricing Plans..We offer two Selling on Amazon plans. Which suits your needs?" Well unfortunately I'm finding out that this price structure only suits their needs and then I'm left with most of the expense and very little profit. For example..I sold a brand new Boom Pod item(which is a gaming chair) that retails for $50.00 and weighs 16 lbs...with a listing price of $45 and Amazon.com collected a total of $9.29 in fees..leaving me with $34 profit. They also gave me a credit of $15.49 for shipping which actually cost me $30.00 to prepare for shipping and actually ship..so I actually only profited $15.00 for an item that I originally listed for $45.00. The other catch I realized is that you must pay for all shipping cost out of pocket up front, then once you update in their system that an item has been shipped then you GET YOUR MONEY in about 5 working days. So if it takes you 2-3 days to ship your item then it's really another 8 working days from the time the item sells that you get your profit. So from my experience when it comes to selling your stuff on Amazon.com , it a scam for the seller to ship but, many savings for Amazon and the buyer! |
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In addition to charging outrageous fees, Amazon may send people counterfeit merchandise another seller sent in and claim it came from you.
in my opinion, Amazon should be sued for fraud over one their hidden policies/methods of burning sellers, who are paying outrageous fees for their clunky fulfillment system, that is staffed by people who can't read and write in English, and is just becoming more and more of a tech nightmare.
Now Amazon has even taken the phone option out so if you can't get through the e-mails sent by poor souls working in Amazon's overseas tele-sweatshop, you'e in trouble.
After years of selling a product and hitting the commingling option, as all the items I sell are the same quality and size, I just found out that Amazon's new mandatory individual labeling policy has come about because their practice is not to sell the inventory that I paid big bucks for them to fulfill, to my customers.
Instead, they just throw every sellers' inventory in one box thereby creating a situation whereby my customers might receive shoddy or counterfeit merchandise sent in by someone else.
Apparently someone was selling counterfeit goods and I'm just lucky none of my customers got the bad apple in the barrel.
Amazon would never handle its merchandise this way, but it doesn't care if the reputations of its 3rd-party sellers are ruined.
They claim that their new mandatory labeling requirement, that comes with a fee unless you feel like labeling hundreds of products yourself, will fix this problem.
However, people on the Amazon forums are claiming that even products that are labeled as being attached to a particular seller are being given to other sellers. I don't think anybody knows what's going in that Amazon Warehouse.
I guess it's reasonable to assume that someone making $8/hour in the Amazon Sweatshop/Fulfillment center doesn't care which seller a product is associated with.
I know that what I've described above is a standard business practice and Amazon plays the hidden fee game with its FBA system. Yet I honestly thought that Amazon was above crossing the line into what I consider outright fraud. A fulfillment center should be fulfilling products from my specific inventory, not the inventory of people who don't care if their merchandise is good quality or not. If it doesn't want to do that, it should say so clearly, not in the fine print.
Perhaps Jeff Bezos should quit making drones and pay employees in the warehouse a decent wage/hire customer services reps. who can communicate in English.
It would be different if Amazon's fees were low, but I'm paying 30% of the purchase cost out to Amazon, that doesn't have the courtesy to refrain from selling garbage from other sellers to my customers.
Unbelievable.
The powers-that-be can delete this post but I have a copy of it that I will be happy to hand over to whatever law firm eventually sues Amazon. |
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