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by partiallypro 2243 days ago
I've essentially stopped shopping at Amazon, their Audible product is really all I use.

I used to be an Amazon seller, and ran through maybe 100K in sales a year, but I stopped (wasn't profitable enough for the time spent.) I should have known, with my experience all those years ago, how easy it would be for scammers to get into the market. Hijacking a listing or mislabeling your product under a listing was really really easy. And for the volumes you can move, I can see why you'd do it.

I have some acquaintances that just buy in bulk from Alibaba and then sell them on Amazon. The seller usually doesn't know what they received is fake...nor do they care. The margin is high enough. Amazon seller fees absorb so much of your profit, you're fighting a losing battle unless you can find a cheap supplier or own the market on an in demand item. Then there are actual scammers that know what they are selling is fake and are manipulating listings...so there are multiple problems with the setup.

Of course the bad thing is Amazon doesn't seem to care, and if anything they try to screw the people doing the -right- thing with huge seller fees, and then killing them with their own line of Basic products.

I don't know how to solve it, and I don't think Amazon does either. I actually don't think Amazon cares, because their ultimate goal is to absorb fees and to take over markets with their own products. They can't do that without sales data, fulfillment fees, seller fees, etc. On top of that they make the big kids compete for coveted listing space with ads. They compete with their own logistics companies, but have them over the coals because they make up so much volume. It's a racket.

1 comments

I did the same during my college days in Canada in 2009-2012.

Regularly made few hundred bucks a months from sunglasses, then my normal job took off.