"I can just get this on Amazon" is a phrase I would hear all too often, after spending an entire week driving hundreds of miles, staying at cheap motels, and working 12-14 hours days to sell our product at an event.
Amazon has effectively cannibalized the entire retail market. People don't want to go to a store when they can just get anything delivered to them. So stores closed. A lot of them. And most of the ones that survived did so because they were selling on Amazon, or were selling something you can't get on Amazon.
So we started selling on Amazon. At first, it was great. Now, not so much. The honeymoon is over, and all that's left is a nightmare of cheap chinese crap, false reviews, and moronic, entitled customers. All facilitated by a corporate juggernaut that loves to promise wondrous opportunity so long as you play by their hilariously inhuman rules.
Virtually everything is handled by algorithms, and attempts to reach an actual human for support often results in robotic responses that makes you question if you're even talking to a human. I've seen many legitimate sellers have their accounts flagged because they happened to have the wrong keyword in the wrong place. Recently, a group of unrelated accounts were flagged because they violated "Washington State NFL" trademark. None of the sellers sell anything related to football. The connection? They all had mentioned somewhere in their description that they were based out of Washington State. Shit like this is far from an uncommon occurrence.
Amazon is taking every step to stymie a sellers ability to sell. You used to be able to leave responses to incorrect feedback, now you can't because "It was a feature that was barely used". You can't communicate with customers outside of the Amazon messenger, but get this, many customers will block their ability to receive messages from Amazon sellers. They will ask you a question, you will respond, they will never receive your response, then they get frustrated because they haven't gotten a response.
Amazon recently reduced the available space Amazon warehouses allocate to sellers by 1/3, and they didn't say a god damn word about it. Many sellers were struggling to maintain stock as is, and now they're suddenly way over their limit, and Amazon is still telling them "Hey, restock this item" only to be met with "You can't send more stock to Amazon". What the fuck.
Buyers can return pretty much anything, for whatever reason, and the seller is the one that's expected to foot the bill. Sellers have virtually no recourse, so long as the customer checks the "right" boxes in their return request. There are countless stories of fraud via Amazon purchases, and most sellers at this point have just built it into their pricing and expected losses.
