Amazon Seller Central Pananoia

Has Amazon kicked off competitors?

[donok]

I have a client that has been selling sleep products (memory foam and latex toppers, pillows, mattresses) through Amazon Seller Central for several years, all was good. My client is a good, serious business but had a few customer complaints that happened over the holiday season. Amazon dumped them like a criminal - technically, my client was performing poorly and exceeded the 2% failure/complaint level (2.5%). Now, I can't get Amazon to respond to any request for review.

Here's the weird thing that has my client wondering. All the products they were selling are now offered directly from Amazon. My client thinks that something is fishy - has Amazon knocked out the competition? There are still a few third-party sources, but it seems a lot less than before.

I just thought I would start a thread to see if anyone else is experiencing anything similar...

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Don

[ecommerceprofit]

Amazon is stressing me out - what a way to make money. Their feedback system is bonk. A customer complained to us about receiving a damaged product which we knew was totally false but we automatically offered this customer the option of receiving a re-ship or a refund in a very nice way - quite cheerful (standard operating procedure). Anyway, the customer posts a negative feedback - most likely because we did not respond for 3 hours (away from computer). Amazon does not even give merchants the opportunity to respond before bad feedback is left. Ebay is changing their rules on this tomorrow - good for them. Amazon is messed up for these reasons:

1. They do not have a firewall between depts (the people merchandising Amazon's own products and the people running seller central) - they steal data (what I believe - I could be wrong).

2. Buyers can leave feedback without the seller having a chance to fix

3. They have mostly an automated algorithm to decide if you stay or are kicked off the Amazon store (from what I read - could be wrong)

4. They do not have a dispute dept to settle disputes between buyers and sellers. They take the buyers side right away.

5. They do not make the buyer sign a statement that the buyer leaving feedback is not a competitor or a friend of the competitor

6. More to be added as I think of them...this is a good start

I'll stick with them but will stop competing on price (keep prices high) and will spend more time on ebay and even more time building my own site.