Amazon has become a daily part of our lives. The user-friendly interface and the easily accessible products have made Amazon the first pick for effortless shopping. As buyers and as sellers, people tend to turn to Amazon due to its easy selling facilities.
Anyone intending to sell their products and make money will have Amazon in the back of their heads due to the platform’s significant exposure to buyers. However, if you think it’s that easy to make money selling your products on Amazon, you might want to think again.
Thanks to Amazon’s sublime marketing, sellers (also customers of Amazon believe it or not) have the crazy thought that the customers are Amazon’s priority and focus, but that’s where everyone goes wrong.
Let’s take a minute here and think...
How does a bookselling company become a world-dominating beast? How can they offer everything? From A-Z - video streaming, retail, food delivery, smart home tech - anything, you name it. How does a bookselling company owner becomes the world’s richest man?
The answers may be already lingering in your mind. But if you are thinking it's because Amazon looks after its lifeblood (its sellers), you may be in for a surprise.
Amazon Seller Experience
While you might be experiencing the best service as a buyer, it’s the opposite for a seller. Not entirely believable, is it?
I see where you’re coming from.
The bait is in the gazillions of ads showing you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave your job and make millions becoming a seller on Amazon. Only if it were that easy!
We have researched the experiences of the current and former Amazon sellers. Here are some of the terrible things the sellers face on a daily basis.
1. The absurd rules and policies for sellers.
Amazon’s rules and regulations are mainly in the buyer’s favor. The buyer gets away with anything while the seller ends up suffering a significant loss. Even petty and fake negative feedback from armies of Chinese Sellers can cause the seller’s account to be suspended. Besides this nerve-wracking situation, there’s also a fear of rules changing any moment with zero warning. This is one of the most common and frustrating parts of selling on Amazon
2. The fake negative reviews and business losses.
Things get worse when a seller ends up losing their whole business overnight based from an attack or fake bad reviews from Chinese wholesalers. Rarely are these reviews appropriately evaluated for authenticity. In one story (Google it now!) a seller went from selling over 169,000 units of DVDs with a 97% positive rating to closing his business.
All from ONE FAKE review claiming he sold a counterfeit product. This seller was banned from Amazon permanently, his case thrown in the trash of automated emails. He was charged for Amazon’s removal fees, and went bankrupt.
3. The insane pricing system.
Even when you join Amazon as a fortune 500 brand, you’ll notice that their terms of services state that you cannot ask for prices higher than any other platform. You’ll be forced to sell your products at lower that your brands MAP (Minimum advertised pricing) even though you are a world or nationally reknowed brand. Amazon even has an army of computer bots to track prices and product information on other websites and compare them to Amazon sellers.
These bots are deployed regularly to ensure the lowest price on Amazon. If the same product is available somewhere else at lower prices, the seller will get a penalty. For example, the brand will be removed from the buy box rotation, causing heavy losses. This eventually forces the brand to use Amazon’s warehouse to store the seller’s products at insane rates after 90 days and make the brand purchase on-site ads to stay visible to the buyers.
4. Sellers are pretty much forced to sell the products on Vendor Central.
Sellers can choose to sell the products either as a third-party vendor or as a first-party vendor. The difference is that as a third-party vendor, you’ll have complete control over your products, listing, and inventory, but as a first-party vendor, you have to sell the products directly to Amazon, that too at the insane price Amazon demands.
So basically, as a first-party seller, you have zero over your business.
That’s why third-party selling is much more preferable. And Amazon knowing where their profits lie, and forces the fortune 500 sellers to become first-party sellers rather than fullfill on their own. This way, Amazon makes a lot more money leaving the sellers’ listings equity and sales impotent.
5. Amazon is the copycat.
This is no new news. Amazon has been copying and ripping off third-party sellers' popular products and launching it as their own product. Amazon steals product information from third-party sellers to come up with the same product once it has gained enough popularity and then monopolises page one with their own cheap and inferior products.
This ultimately drives the original sellers out of business. A former third-party seller said that for about 17 years as an Amazon seller, he had gone through situations where Amazon kept undercutting him on price and eventually chased him away from business on the platform.
6. Amazon loves and actively supports Chinese sellers.
Communism anyone. Globalism anyone? As we have already mentioned before, Amazon prefers to provide products at the lowest price possible, and China is the world's factory. Chinese sellers can copy any famous product and produce it at the cheapest price possible. For Amazon, Chinese sellers are the most profitable option as they don't even care about losing money at the start because they will force small businesses off of page 1 and then reap the rewards by putting up the price when their honest competition is destroyed.
Chinese sellers destroy third-party sellers’ businesses at the same time. They buy seller’s products in bulk and then refund them with a unverifiable rating, which leads the sellers IPI score destroyed, products blocked in the seller performance section, listing annihilated after pouring thousands and thousands into ads to rank their product.
These are the reasons Slate gave Amazon the nefarious label of being world’s most evil tech company.
Why Is Amazon So Careless Toward the Sellers?
Although Amazon may appear to be caring, at first sight, all they want is the transactions, prime delivery and up to 30% fees for the 'privilage' of selling on their platform. They continuously rip the sellers off, protect the buyers at any cost, and keep making money from their mistreated selllers' hard work.
The sellers are pretty helpless when it comes to such incidents. They get their accounts suspended without any warning or any valid accusation and are asked to follow an appeal process to get their account back.
But here’s the twist, your appeal or message will never reach any solution. You’ll either get an automated reply, or they might not even get back to you. Your journey ends when they’re done squeezing you out.
That explains how Jeff Bezos’ became the richest man in the world.
Now he's palmed it off to shoot rockets into the sky. Typical of psychopaths. They prefer to get off the planet than fix the one they are on. And let's not even start on whether Amazon pays taxes like small business do.
Conclusion
So, does this mean there’s no way to do business on Amazon?
There sure is. People are just not aware of the tactics yet, as most of them give up after a massive loss or going bankrupt because some guru told them it was easy. You cant just have Amazon PPC ads as your only route to market. You must have influencers, facebook and google ads, messenger bots, facebook pages and of course, your own ecommerce website to drive your ACOS (Actual costs of sales) down.
That's why we created Philanthroshop.
We only sell products from USA based small to mediaum sized businesses. Yes, on Amazon. Yes a lot is sourced from China. But quality, non-obsalecent, educational, home and outdoor products from our trusted suppliers. We refuse to buy off any company who sells wholesale on Amazon as a prerequisite. We are here to build a community and combat the influence of Chinese Sellers killing of mum and dad and small businesses.
When you shop on Philanthroshop. You are supporting the little guys and beating back the communist agenda. The American market should be for American businesses. After all, this is OUR city on the hill and OUR freedom we are fighting for.
Shop now and support small USA brands. We can make a difference, together.