Problems with using Amazon.com to sell.

Amazon.com is a great web site to buy and sell products. You can usually get a great price for just about anything on the site. One thing I don’t like as a buyer is that a lot of the descriptions are not as helpful as I would like. I personally have purchased many items from the site from books to tankless water heaters. I have never had any problems with delivery or payment information leaks.

 

What is it like to sell products on the site? This is a great idea since the site is accessed by millions of buyers and shows up tremendously well on search engines. However, there are some drawbacks that you should know about. Amazon.com has agreements with various companies such as TASER where only TASER can sell their products on this site. If you sell TASERs, that is great, but you will not be able to sell them on Amazon.com. Amazon.com does this with many products. You have to read the fine print when you sign up to figure it out. Their system will not automatically prevent you from listing forbidden items. You will get a message from the company days or weeks later stating that you are being cancelled for policy violations after spending hours and hours to put your product on their site.

 

There is also a programming error that will put you into a higher paying program than you were asking for. There is an option where you can post a couple of items for 99 cents each. Another option would be to pay just under $40 for an unlimited store. Often those who only post a few items are automatically put into the $40 program when they specifically only signed up for the 99 cent option. They then have call or contact Amazon.com to get it changed.

 

You will also be charged a portion of your sales for each item that is sold. They charge 15% on most items. This is comparable to other sites such as Yahoo.com. Some would argue that is not bad since you only pay when you sell. Other sites make you pay whether you sell anything or not such as Ebay.com. One nice feature is that the site compares items from different sources so you can see if yours is the lowest price on the same item. This same system can also be a problem in that it can pull information from an item that is similar, but not the same as yours and the wrong picture will be posted with your information. The trick is to have codes such as UPC codes from the manufacturer to ensure your product stands out and is compared to the proper merchandise.

 

Payment is the next concern. When you first sign up for Amazon.com you enter your banking information so you can get paid. They have an initial waiting period of two weeks to verify you are who you say you are. They then pay out every two weeks from there. You can request quicker payments after you have been working with them over time. So you sell something on Amazon.com, send it out to the buyer, and then wait weeks to get paid. Does not sound so great, but it makes great financial sense to them.

 

One person I talked to who sells on Amazon.com, William Anderson, stated that he put items up for sale on Amazon.com on June 6^th, 2009. He sold two items in two days. He was later told he could not sell those items, but would be paid on June 26^th. That date passed. He called Amazon.com and was told he would be paid July 10^th, 2009 for the items he sold over a month earlier. As of the date of this article, July 15, 2009 he has not been paid.