Why I don’t like Amazon anymore
OK, as a consumer I still like Amazon. As an affiliate I still like Amazon. But as an advertiser hoping to find a new marketing opportunity as I’m running out of search inventory, Amazon has me upset. I don’t like them anymore and I think their portrayal of the Amazon Marketplace is misleading and causes a lot of people, like me, to waste a considerable amount of time and money.
Let me give you a little background: two months ago I went to the Search Engine Strategy show in San Jose and had the opportunity to meet a lot of internet retailers. This was an awesome experience - I have met quite a few marketing people and tons of technology gurus at computer shows, but this was the first time I got to meet a number of people that do exactly what I do for a living. I had the chance to give and seek advice from other internet marketers. Most people told me that as they got low on search inventory, they looked for alternative advertising opportunities. This makes sense.
The most intriguing idea that I gleaned from these networking lunches was that we could list our products on Amazon Marketplace and essentially sell them right along side with Amazon’s own products. This makes a lot of sense to me - for a small retailer this is an opportunity to partially outsource fulfillment because Amazon does the credit card processing for the retailer. For us, however, we already have a fulfillment system in place, but it would give us a potentially huge audience that we are not currently reaching: Amazon shoppers.
So I contacted Amazon and they got me all set up and going. They convinced me that I needed Pro Seller status so I could do bulk uploads of our product feeds and I was excited to hit the ground running. Everything seemed very easy… almost too easy.
Then I went to do my first product feed. The category was Computers. It wouldn’t take the feed. Sorry, but we already have enough advertisers in this category. We are not accepting new advertisers at this time. OK, it’s not cool that this wasn’t made explicitly clear when I was signing up, but I’ll live. A lot of our products are crossover products from the computer to the living room (DVI splitters, HDMI switches, stuff like that). I’ll try Electronics. The same message appears - sorry, you should have decided to do this three years ago like your competitors.
Two things here really make me mad:
1) It should have been abundantly clear in the signup process that some categories are not accepting new sellers. It’s as simple as that. I understand why they are doing it, but they really need to make it more clear.
2) They should distinguish between an established, multi-million dollar company hoping to add mutual value to their company and some guy in his garage trying to unload a couple of USB hubs. The reason they have to limit it is because at some point the data becomes unmanagable. However, if it is a customer, like us, that is known for good tech support and is not going to cause headaches on the backend with fulfillment, customer disputes, etc., they should take that into account.
I emailed them to let them know how I feel, but they told me “I’m sorry, this is our policy.” That doesn’t answer my question - it tells me you don’t need a brain to work there. We have several hundred SKU’s that they don’t currently carry (which is surprising considering their 10 million SKU claim), but when I approached them about this I received the same response: “Sorry - our policy…”
In summary, shop at Amazon, make money as an affiliate, but don’t think you’re going to be able to use it as another marketing channel…
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[…] I have been testing out a new marketing channel recently because I have been told repeatedly that it is a great alternative to Google, Yahoo and the comparison engines (and no, it’s not Amazon). I won’t mention the channel by name because I know I will upset a lot of people who swear by it. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog » Conversion rates don’t magically improve — September 29, 2005 @ 8:25 am
[…] Amazon is a great example The largest internet retailer in the world, Amazon, illustrates this point perfectly. They have over ten million SKU’s available for purchase (source: Internet Retailer). Note that they don’t stock anywhere near this many products - read my post “Why I don’t like Amazon Anymore” for a quick explanation on how different internet retailers sell products on Amazon. Last year Amazon posted sales of $6.9 billion dollars (source: Hoover’s) on over ten million available products for purchase. For simplicity’s sake let’s assume that Amazon had exactly ten million products available. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » SKU’s - the more the merrier — October 29, 2005 @ 8:42 pm