Amazon.com Holiday Selling Guidelines?

[spmahn]

I'm a small time seller on Amazon, having converted over this past year due to my dissatisfaction with eBay's ever increasing pro-buyer policies. I'm not a high volume seller, and restrict my listings to mostly flipping video games I find at thrift stores and liquidating my action figure collection.

Today I get an e-mail essentially telling me that if I don't sell at least 25 items between 9/1 and 11/1, I won't meet their holiday selling guidelines, and I presume the majority of my listings will go inactive during the period lasting from 11/1 through I assume 12/25.

Is this new? I know this is probably more about Amazon trying to protect their own bottom line during the Holiday season and try to block the least profitable sellers from undercutting them during this time, but really, who is this really benefiting? I only sell maybe a handful of items each month, but my side business is fairly lucrative, I usually make at least a couple hundred bucks in extra income each month from selling toys and games. Two months ultimately isn't THAT big of a deal, but it still pisses me off.

I guess I have some DVDs I can try and unload at the bare minimum break even point to reach those 25 items, but why should I even have to be bothered? Amazon's fees aren't any better than eBay and Paypal's, so it's not like they're really doing me any favors either.

 

[62t]

They have this last year as well.

 

[tangytangerine]

Yeah, Amazon did this last year. Which was annoying for me, who tried ordering from small sellers I ordered from in the past. But found out their account went inactive due to this policy.

I guess it's to keep buyers from ordering from sellers that have small inventories and don't ship out quickly during the holidays. To me all it did was drive the prices up, since it eliminates the sellers selling stuff cheaper.

As for when they go back active. It seemed like the accounts didn't get activated again until a few days after christmas. If you're selling only a few things, it's best to just let it go inactive during that time. There will always be the people who order after christmas due to getting gift cards, which is when your account will be reactivated.

 

[IAmTheCheapestGamer]

This is annoying to me as well, since I only have a few items to sell and I don't sell items that often on Amazon. Right now my current inventory includes some micro sd flash memory cards with adapters to make em normal size flash memory cards, a single deck of Harry Potter playing cards and a couple of other things.

But I have some Christmas CD's that I planned on offloading on Amazon around Christmastime to maximize the amount I could make for them.

I guess this means I'll have to sell them sooner than late October-early to mid November like I was planning on.

 

[Virtua]

Don't worry, they'll eventually ban you for no good reason without any explanation or means to dispute it. It happens to everybody on amazon marketplace.