SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow
Amazon blames 'error' for blocking Nintendo resellers from listing products
Amazon Marketplace sellers who deal in new, used, and refurbished Nintendo products woke up to a peculiar notice yesterday: without warning, Amazon was telling third-party sellers that they could no longer list Nintendo products of any kind without seeking approval. The policy change appeared to affect both Nintendo games and Nintendo hardware like 3DS handhelds. At first blush, it looked like two companies had stuck a so-called brand gating deal, common in e-commerce and designed to restrict third-party sellers who may traffic in counterfeits.
After a day of silence, Amazon says the email notifying Nintendo resellers of the apparent policy change was a mistake. "Yesterday's email was sent in error and all impacted listings were reinstated within hours," a company spokesperson now tells The Verge. Despite Amazon's claim that all listings were reinstated, a forum thread filled with affected Amazon Marketplace sellers has been active for the last 24 hours. It's unclear how many sellers were affected, and whether Amazon has communicated the error to them.
Initially, the policy change looked quite similar to the type of brand gating deals Amazon has struck with Apple and other companies in the past. Those deals have had the effect of kicking off all but the largest third-party sellers from an e-commerce platform, ostensibly as a tool for counting down on counterfeit products. (Nike is another big-name Amazon partner in this regard.) But dozens of legitimate third-party Nintendo sellers were saying they were being cut off from the most lucrative US marketplace for selling online goods without any explanation and without any guidelines for how to proceed.
Amazon now says it has reinstated all Nintendo resellers' listings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @12:57PM
Amazon has been doing similar things for many years. It's not an error, it's corporate bad behavior and almost no one has stood up against it.
Here's my personal story--when they were getting started and mostly selling books, Amazon demanded large discounts, free return shipping for unsold books, and other special treatment from publishers. If a publisher (in particular smaller specialty publishers) refused, Amazon would list their books as "Out of print or 10 weeks." This happened more than once to my engineering reference book--which has been in print continuously since 1995.
How did I find out? Several emails came to me (the author), "Help, I see your book is out of print--but I really want a copy, do you have any left and can you sell me one?" This is the power of false advertising, these customers believed the hype that Amazon was the last word in buying books, if it wasn't at Amazon, it must be unavailable. In fact, it was often cheaper directly from my publisher's online book shop (sometimes Amazon would sell below list price, but not for long).
My publisher currently refuses to sell their more popular titles to Amazon, it's not worth the hassle and the money isn't there. The books do appear on the Amazon site from 3rd party sellers, but the prices are usually outrageously high. I guess some book sellers are still counting on the Amazon brand and on customers to not do any price shopping?