Question
My Amazon sales have slowed to a crawel. I had not been able to figure out why. Today I found that most of my items have moved into Cell Phone even though they are not cell phones. To make it harder to figure out what is going on, Cell Phones is a restricted catagory and I could not list there if I tried.
I called seller support and they said a large seller must be selling the same item and they moved theirs into the wrong catagory and that caused mine to move. What kind of nonsense is this? I can also not re-list my expired items becuase they are now in cellphones and I do not have permission to list in a restricted catagory.
Seller support said they have to send the problem to catalogue and it could take a few days to fix.
How should I handle this? Should I ask for a refund on my subscription fee? I am loosing all my weekend sales which normally are more then I make during the week.
Answer
It has been 5 days now since this problem happened. I have called Amazon twice and both times they tell me Catalogue has to fix the catagory problem. In the mean time I an not re-list my items as they expire or list competing items.
This is really bad that big sellers can list items in restricted catagories that are the wrong catagories for the item (clocks in the cell phone catagory instead of electronics.)
The CSR agreed that this is a problem but Amazon seems to not be very concerned about fixing it.
Should I just make up UPC code numbers and re-list my items? I don't like to lie but it seems Amazon wants me to in order to sell my items and allows the big sellers to lie and cheat to keep me out?
Answer
Sorry this is happening to you. I don't sell at Amazon so I have no bright ideas to offer, other than to say if I were in your spot I'd do whatever I had to do. If that involved fudging on some UPC codes, so be it.
They obviously don't give a fig about their sellers, so I say f them. Good luck.