Amazon selling product you initiated
Apologies if this has been raised before, but does anyone else find it pretty galling that Amazon themselves start quite brazenly selling your products when they see the product sells well? They want it all. Or do you believe it’s sound business practice on their part? It’s virtually impossible to compete with them and just seems a lousy deal to me, sound business practice or not. It hardly endears you to them. Am I missing something?
Amazon selling product you initiated
Apologies if this has been raised before, but does anyone else find it pretty galling that Amazon themselves start quite brazenly selling your products when they see the product sells well? They want it all. Or do you believe it’s sound business practice on their part? It’s virtually impossible to compete with them and just seems a lousy deal to me, sound business practice or not. It hardly endears you to them. Am I missing something?
50 replies
Seller_cJms0GbotqqtV
Amazon are in business to earn a return for their shareholders, not for marketplace sellers.
It is possible that the European Commission’s investigation into Amazon practices may make it more difficult for Amazon to exploit the market information they can gather from marketplace sales. Although that may be irrelevant for UK sellers by the time it is completed. But at the end of the day, it will always be impossible to compete directly with Amazon, who can use their position to extract larger discounts from suppliers than any marketplace seller is able to.
Paul
Seller_72Sy9T6sEfmjl
It’s a highly dangerous game to put anything new on Amazon.
As revealed by kika Amazon staff in the US are encouraged to become sellers and they have access to sales data from other sellers.
I’ve experienced this a couple of times. If you make a few sales a day on a regular basis your listing suddenly disappears in search to be replaced with cut price global sellers in the US or Chinese sellers.
I don’t put up anything new on amazon any more.
Seller_zWhFURNhcbesd
Then again, it might also help! They see what we sellers are dealing with, the problems we encounter with customers, Amazon Seller Support and the web site.
Trying to think positive thoughts! 
But when I see Amazon selling the same ASIN as I do, I cannot see anything positive in that. Not for me, at least …
Seller_u6h2JH0QwfEd0
What makes it worse is that they can request your invoices to see the supplier for [insert reason here]… thankfully the SS team have had the initiative bred out of them so this info probably isn’t finding its way to SARL… or is it…
Seller_5sfrqeyXkv13z
A thought cropped up after some recent experience. Potentially another source of revenue for Amazon is storage fee, I wondered whether for some of my products it was more profitable to charge me storage fees than the commissions from sale of those products. For some reason they just keep regularly disappearing from FBA listing but storage fee then crops up.
Seller_Zl4t3wrkSGi8T
Almost every one of my suppliers have been approached by Amazon to allow them to source the products I’m selling. Thankfully, most have had the foresight to deny them a supply, however one particular supplier agreed to it and is now wishing he didn’t. He gets charged all sorts of fees by Amazon and operates on a much much lower margin due to these fees, hes currently seeking a way out of the contact
Seller_nZyQSlz4yhzDl
Yep! One of our biggest suppliers did just that and didn’t even have the courtesy to let us know, despite our custom with them over many years and in several outlets. We’ve had to adapt and diversify to counteract this. We also know some of our other suppliers have been approached and declined thankfully, but for how long we don’t know. Let them find out for themselves how difficult Amazon are I say…
Seller_8PqdYLL8nb4uF
Going back to the OP’s introductory question, if it is ‘your’ product, surely Amazon would need to buy it from you before they can sell it at all. If it is not ‘your’ product but one you source from a manufacturer or distributor, then they are merely competing, albeit at a great advantage.
Seller_zWhFURNhcbesd
There is a page where you can calculate your FBA cost and gains. Great, I thought as we were thinking about putting some stuff on FBA. Now I can calculate the FBA cost without looking at lists up and down, I thought it would be like enter the measurements and weight etc! But all they wanted was the purchase price info of the product, the FBA costs I needed to enter myself!
WHAT?!
As I have to enter an ASIN there is surely a big PLING! in the Amazon system if the profit is a above a certain percentage. I am not using that function, a simple Excel works as well. Or better.
