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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, @07:45PM
My guess is they accidentally hit a "select all," or equivalent, in trying to flag a particular counterfeit seller and everything else was just an automatic reaction to that. I don't think it would be a brand-gate because I would think Nintendo and Amazon would have some PR thing ready to go for when it hit the news, rather than sheepishly just undo it. It isn't like this even garnered that much media attention to require an about-face turn like this.