Just had 4500 books made inactive because they need approval
Hello,
We've been selling on amazon for a very long time, had over 20,000 books online. For some reason today, about 4500 books, from a huge variety of publishers, are requiring approvals to be sold used. There is no rhyme or reason to the selection of books that became inactive. The oldest books were put on amazon 3 months ago.
Any other book sellers seeing this? When requesting approval, they are asking for documentation. Obviously we don't have that since they are used books we buy from home buys and people selling to us directly at our store.
Any Moderators can help? No idea where all this came from.
thank you
41 replies
Seller_nRFmxiQg4EGrw
I've noticed over the last day or two an uptick in the number of publishers that require invoices in order to list (and not textbook publishers; just regular books you might see on the shelf of B&N).
But I've not seen active listings deactivated.
Seller_a8Dy8GChiqVXo
This is all it shows.
You need approval to sell:
Books in New, Used, Refurbished, Collectible condition(s)
Request approval
However we are not accepting applications to sell:
Other Collectible Books category in Refurbished condition(s)
No mention of publisher or anything, very random.
We've of course had specific publishers request us to get approval, takes 5 seconds and we are approved. This is something else.
Seller_rTBWL2OeoixkP
They've been doing this to a lot of us and it's getting ridiculous. It happened to me and I don't sell books.
Brands I've been selling for years, which I have active inventory of, all of a sudden, regated. I ask other sellers, SMALLER AND NEWER than myself (i've been on this godforsaken platform 10 years now) and they're wide open on these brands.
Amazon just gets worse every year. More and more problems. It never ends.
You're not alone. And obviously seller "support" has no clue as usual.
Seller_LVZcgxAgZ2xBv
Are you sure? Check the parent company of the imprints. Check also if there are trademarks listed on the cover or copyright page.
There are four or five U.S. publishers who control most of the market for professionally published books, and they may have opted for some form of gating for their imprints/brands on Amazon.
Media sales used to be the wild west on Amazon, but in the past 10 years Amazon has really clamped down on third party sales, particularly for music and movies. Part of the reason relates to demands from giant media conglomerates, but there is also a big problem with some sellers misrepresenting the condition or selling counterfeit CDs, game media, and books.
Seller_EhfgFhfsOh8gF
Not sure why we can't sell things that we own in the land of the free.
Seller_bZd1cBXZ1lXGu
US Law protects sellers of used books (From Supreme Court case: Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus,1908). By settled law, the publisher cannot require you to gain permission to resell their books. They may be filing general IP claims with Amazon, but there again, Amazon has no legal basis to prevent you from selling and if it becomes a matter of Amazon policy, it seems they would have to apply it across the board, not to just certain books. I hope you can work it out with Amazon via Support, but if not, depending on your costs, you may want to get a lawyer to help out.
Seller_ToPPYvOWlyp9j
This occurred to us prior to the holidays, though not in such volume. 4500 titles-groan!
Took us about 8 hours to get most of ours cleared-but there were only few publishers in the mix. Forced to watch the counterfeit film, not that it has anything to do w/ media. but most were approved on our record (by a ratio of about 5/1).
Though recently, ownership of small and local publishers has been folded into the Big 5 or their subsidiaries, in my opinion, being approved for the benefit of wholesalers/distributorships.
Some unfamiliar names-Zero; Not Branded(!),Non-Branded; Parallax, not to be confused with Parlux or Parragon.
Those that wouldn't approve without purchasing 10 titles and blah, blah, blah: Lippincott(purchased by a Dutch firm, nearly defunct in US except in education journals; Marvel and DC don't approve any condition but New, which we don't sell[learned this on sellersasksellers], and another is a small graphic novel publisher, begins w/ a K-ends with an A, with tiny backlist, that's using the approval process to improve their sales!
Seller_qTJiCxRI8PpIZ
This started happening to me sometime in November or December. We have stopped using Amazon as our main listing venue. It has just gotten way too complicated. We now list on 4 other venues by way of Art Of Books. If the listing happens to go up on Amazon without problem then great, if it doesn't then at least we have it up on other venues.
Seller_A7FpWsUunDC3u
You are lucky that Amazon didn't give you demerits for listing prohibited items. Some of my used books listings got delisted because they do not allow me to sell any more. It was not prohibited when I was listing it. Somehow they still ask for documentation or admission of guilt, even after I totally erased my listings. And my Performance/Account Heath suffered.
