Is it just me or are Amazon taking things to extremes with its charges and how it controls our selling prices? A small selection of recent issues we've encountered below but it feels like we're fighting fires on Amazon every week. They just find new things to waste our time on.

Issue 1 - The dimensional weight charging is an absolute farce. It's simply a way to overcharge sellers. I have an item Amazon is currently charging us £10.91 FBA fee on (not including commission or VAT). The same item costs me around £2.50 to send via Royal Mail (excluding VAT). How do they justify this? They clearly have far greater scale than us. I'm not expecting them to sell the service at the same price we acquire it but selling at more than 4 times what a small business pays surely emphasises the extent of a monopoly they have and the extent they are taking advantage of small businesses. Ultimately we have to pass the costs onto customers so everyone is having to pay this in one way or the other.

I have a second item which is being charged £7.85 FBA fee. This week, Amazon sent us a notice titled "Take action: One or more of your offers are not eligible to be a Featured Offer (Buy Box)". In short, they're removing the buy box as they claim our price is too high and they want to reduce it from £19.99 to £16.99. We were basically operating at cost price at £19.99 as the product is out of season. The total Amazon charges on this listing are £10.10 (excluding VAT) when sold at £16.99. VAT is £2.84 so in that scenario, we would be paying £12.94 (76.16%) of a £16.99 transaction to Amazon fees and VAT. That doesn't include the cost of sending the goods to Amazon or the product cost itself.

Since when does Amazon get to dictate our prices? Even if we want to sell this product at £2,000 and make zero sales, surely that's our right? Threatening us with the removal of the buy box to comply with the prices they want to sell at is becoming an increasingly used tactic. The problem is, they find a single source to compare it with and there's absolutely no consideration of any of the differences between the products being compared to.

Issue 2 - We received a second email this week titled 'Action Needed: Update your shipping prices'. So basically, we charge £0.99 postage for all large letter sales. Amazon considers this unreasonable and too expensive. But why? Perhaps it's because we charge it per unit so when a customer purchases 2 units, they pay it twice. Often, purchasing 2 units increases a package size from being a large letter to being a parcel which costs us more than 2 large letter rates so it evens itself out for the situations where we pay more or make a greater profit. This is somehow considered foul play by Amazon. In their email they state the following:

You appear to be charging excessive shipping prices for one or more of your seller-fulfilled products that are classified as prohibited seller activity and actions in violation of Amazon’s Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy. The policies can be found at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/help/5TUVJKZHUVMN77V and https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html/?itemID=G200386250. In the case where all ship options violate the policy, your offer has been removed. Further violation of this policy may lead to account deactivation.

Now to put this into perspective, Amazon can charge us £10.91 for the item stated above (per unit) for shipping an item that costs us around £2.50 but if we charge £0.99 per unit to ship a large letter item (which is actually an undercharge after VAT and commission) then we're breaching Amazon's policies and threatened with account deactivation? If ever there was a definition of hypocritical then surely this is it?

Issue 3 - The upcoming increases to Amazon Small and Light rates. I found this amusing where they advertised it as "Low-price FBA rates". What it really means is they're raising the Small and Light rates significantly. It further emphasises the hypocrisy above when Amazon is raising all its rates but threatening sellers with all sorts of penalties if we don't reduce our rates.

Issue 4 - I have raised the issues above with Seller Support but as usual, they're not interested and send you on a wild goose chase. The template emails they send don't address or resolve the issue being raised and you end up more frustrated than when you first started. Seller Support is not fit for purpose and I think most sellers would agree that sellers don't get much 'Seller Support' when contacting Amazon.

Issue 5 - A-Z Claims have become a joke as well. I seen someone previously refer to this as the equivalent of online shoplifting which I think is a great way to explain it. We had a customer who had a product for around 2 months and they damaged it in use (we determined this from the email discussions and images provided). As is often the case, they were unreasonable and wanted a full refund even though it was clear they damaged the item. The customer technically isn't able to open a claim after 30 days however Amazon customer service not only helped the customer do this, Amazon customer support deliberately used a false reason to open the claim in order to circumvent eligibility. We had various emails back and forth from the customer discussing the product and then the claim came through as 'Package did not arrive'. As the order did not have a signature, we then lost the claim even though this was a complete abuse of the claims process. I don't even blame the customer in this scenario, this was Amazon staff who deliberately did this.

Issue 6 - The amount of Amazon listings that get changed and it either removes important information or shows incorrect information. If it's not removing search terms they're saying a product is made from a different material or that it's electric when it's not. I presume this is an Artificial Intelligence action but surely we should have the option of authorising changes rather than them occurring without our consent. I don't know how many times we've had a listing change information and occasionally generate a customer complaint as it shows something Amazon has changed. We've had to resort to paying for software that sends us alerts to all our listing changes so we can catch them. Today we had a plastic product show a material change to metal. I'd much rather have the ability to approve/decline these changes than for them to take place without our consent in the hope we'll find it in future.

Issue 7 - Customers abusing reviews. We all know how important reviews are but customers know this also. Amazon is completely useless in managing this and being fair to sellers. How many times have we all had a customer threaten us indirectly with a review? This is in a very simple way such as "my item broke so I'll just have to leave a review". In other words, 'I know I'm not eligible for a refund or replacement but if you don't give me one, I'll damage your product listing reputation out of spite'. Amazon allows customers to get away with just about anything and rarely supports sellers. We ask for a review to be removed and we get hit with a standard template response even when it's a legit reason for review removal. In a review we had recently said the item was "Too Small". The size information is on the listing but Amazon won't remove it as they consider this an acceptable review.

Issue 8 - Not only does Amazon absolutely scam sellers with FBA rates, customers can also return anything they want and in any condition. Amazon simply do not care and as long as something comes back, they'll ship it back to sellers and charge us for the pleasure of it. The condition we receive some items back is absolutely horrendous. There needs to be far greater management of this as we have no comeback in these scenarios and we're having our bottom line hammered by Amazon.

Issue 9 - As the cherry on top, Amazon are relentless in encouraging us all to invest in Amazon advertising (PPC). It's no surprise that the only winner here is Amazon. There are more sponsored positions within search results than ever and we're all forcing each other to pay more money in advertising. Not only are our advertising costs greater than ever, Amazon is charging us more than ever fulfilment fees and they're forcing us to sell goods for less with threats and penalties if we don't. It's a race to the bottom and that never works out well in the long run!

A huge rant, I know! But these issues are constantly occurring and we're all powerless to do anything about it. It feels like we're at a stage where Amazon is evolving but not for the better. This platform has quickly become a vulture in which sellers are the prey.

I wonder what actions other sellers are taking these days as I can only assume many are looking at focusing on other platforms. I'm not naïve enough to say we're going to stop selling on Amazon as it generates revenue but there's a significant reduction in profits and Amazon doesn't appear to be slowing down their systematic targeting of its sellers. Amazon is increasing its pricing on sellers but also forcing its sellers to reduce their prices via a variety of different tactics. There is only so long this type of compression can occur.