Amazon will add shipping fees to Marketplace display
Amazon will begin including shipping fees in the Marketplace offer page. Amazon said it begin making the change over the next several weeks in response to "customer requests."
Products sold or fulfilled by Amazon won't have a shipping cost displayed since they may qualify for free shipping or the Prime subscription program.
Amazon is testing a series of pages for the new display. Here's one where the shipping price is listed below the item price:
Here's another test page where the shipping fee is listed in the "seller information" column:
Amazon is asking for feedback from sellers. You can send e-mail to sip-feedback@amazon.com.
This will certainly make regular Pro-Merchant sellers less competitive against Amazon and Fulfillment by Amazon merchants. What's your take on this?
Products sold or fulfilled by Amazon won't have a shipping cost displayed since they may qualify for free shipping or the Prime subscription program.
Amazon is testing a series of pages for the new display. Here's one where the shipping price is listed below the item price:
Here's another test page where the shipping fee is listed in the "seller information" column:
Amazon is asking for feedback from sellers. You can send e-mail to sip-feedback@amazon.com.
This will certainly make regular Pro-Merchant sellers less competitive against Amazon and Fulfillment by Amazon merchants. What's your take on this?
posted by Steve Weber at 11/13/2006
9 Comments:
I've always assumed that buyers are intelligent enough to realize that since Amazon offers free super-saver shipping on orders over $25.00, I need to price at least $3.50 lower than Amazon in order to beat their price. Hence it should make no difference for me. Hmmm...maybe I could have been pricing higher all along and hooked some arithmetically-challenged buyers!
I price only $2 below Amazon's price and sell fine. That makes mathematical sense if you think about it for awhile.
There are also plenty of items where there are no Amazon copies or where the going price is well below Amazon's price anyway. And there are plenty of environmentally-minded buyers who will go for the used copy everytime anyway.
So although I'm not thrilled with the news, it will not make any difference to me.
Once again, Amazon is putting the squeeze on Marketplace sellers. It seems like these changes are coming out once a week, but rarely does a change ever come out that benefits the seller. I guess it's the golden rule, "he who has the gold, makes the rules".
Amazon will eventually get what it deserves and we'll be movin on. I don't sell that much on az anyway, too many bottom feeders there
I suspect what is really happening here is Amazon feels like it created a monster with Marketplace because Marketplace sellers can provide much better service, which has been cutting into Amazon's profits. As much as they're making from Marketplace commissions, they could make a great deal more if the sales were going to them instead of Marketplace sellers. Since Marketplace's greatest weakness (by their design, of course) would seem to be high shipping costs (probably the most common complaint from new customers, at least), I think they want to display that weakness on every page so they'll get more of the business. What they don't seem to realize though, is how much loathing there is for Amazon due to years of incompetence. We have inadvertently sold many used books at a higher price than a new book from Amazon (Amazon was out of stock when the book was listed, then got it back in stock and offered it at a lower price before ours sold) because a lot of customers are fed up and are willing to pay extra to deal with a competent seller. It's not unusual for us to receive feedback that says, "Beat the hell out of Amazon," or something along those lines.
I don't have a problem with this move AS LONG AS Amazon continues to list the items fairly in order of lowest to highest price in each category. I am not in favor of taking advantage arithmetically challenged customers through the use of hidden or semi-hidden costs. Therefore, the idea of making shipping costs more transparent and, thereby, improving customer confidence in the overall buying process is, I think, fair.
From a competitive angle among sellers, however, listing items in order of least to most expensive according to the TOTAL cost of the item at any given time is still essential unless other changes are made. If Amazon, for example, attempts to compete with other Marketplace sellers and achieves Low Price status by listing any items with Free Shipping or other promotional options first, it should provide the same competitive options for listing to its Marketplace Sellers.
Bye, bye marketplace. Amazon is now on to bigger and better things. All Amazon and Amazon fulfilled orders will be showing on top even if price the same. For example a book priced at $20 by two sellers. The seller who is using Amazon fulfillment will come on top because they can offer free shipping, thought the buyer might not even qualify for it and could actually be buying the more expensive copy. Makes no sense.
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For Amazon, Marketplace is almost pure profit. They get their commission and their closing cost, they don't have to acquire or store the inventory, and they don't even have to do much customer service. It's a license to print money. Their new book sales have never been profitable.
Change or no change, though, I haven't seen much effect on my sales. I sell a lot of stuff that's no longer available new, or stuff that's priced far enough below new that people still buy it. Research shows that as long as shipping costs are reasonable, most people don't pay a lot of attention to it. So those of us who do our own fulfillment probably don't have as much to worry about as we might think.
I agree with some of the other comments here, but I'm not too worried about my sales because I'm a small time seller (less then 500 items), and I also specialize in rare and out of print books. Most of my inventory is not sold by Amazon, but I could see for someone who deals with lots of books that Amazon was still carries (remainders, perhaps?), this new change would probably take a big chunk out of their sales.
I've learned through trial and error how to get the sales away from the lowballers, big dog sellers and even Amazon itself...so whatever change this new policy brings about, it will just require a little more elbow grease to deal with. I'm up for the challenge...and it's also more incentive to keep looking for those rare and hard to find titles.
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