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Comment by fweespee_ch | Hacker News Reader

I'd strongly urge that in Amazon's case this advice is functionally irrelevant as they aren't a reliable business partner that reacts in a consistent way when it comes to MWS operations regardless of who you know that works there unless its Bezos himself.

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I agree. The advice by patio is generally sound, though in this specific scenario, I don't think Amazon would ever care. PriceZombie offers negligible profit compared to the billions Amazon makes. Even spending 0.5 seconds on their case is a waste of their time.

I would have thought that Amazon wouldn't want transparent price comparison websites. Wouldn't that tend to cut into their products?

I don't agree with that at all. We have to guess how much transaction volume PriceZombie sends to Amazon, but $50k/month isn't an unreasonable estimate (probably very low). It is totally worth a couple hours of a support person's time to deal with the source of $600k of annual revenue.

- (business lost to other sites with lowest price)

it's entirely possible Amazon did this math

Where did you get $50K from? I would guess that's a huge factor above what they exactly make. I'd estimate somewhere a few thousand (and maybe even less than $1000 some months) to $10K at most. If they're making $50K/month, they must be very very good marketers, or they're doing something very shady.

I said "transaction volume", which is the value of what people paid Amazon via PZ's affiliate links, not what PZ made in affiliate fees.

I wouldn't be so quick to disagree.

I spent 2 years generating over $1mil a year in sales through the Amazon affiliate program - to be dropped without warning or contact. No amount of follow up and attempts to contact my, previously very accessible, account rep resulted in anything. Not even an explanation on why my account was closed, outside of being told that I could take legal action (in the state of Washington) against Amazon to collect on the nearly $40k in yet-to-be-paid earnings.

I disagreed that it 'would be a waste of their time'; not saying they'd act rationally. In my limited experience it seems like they don't.

Exactly. I also deal with Amazon on a seller's platform and can confirm this. It doesn't matter who you know, the company itself is bipolar and unreliable.

As a fellow third party seller on Amazon - I am astonished by how dysfunctional and unreliable Amazon is. I cant imagine relying on FBA for my main source of income because Amazon is so fickle. For example - I have had an item in reserve [1] in their warehouse since Jan 18th!! I opened a case about it on March 4th (for those following along, that's three full weeks ago...). They just keep saying "we've contacted the warehouse and will get back to you if they can find it or not." Apparently I'm supposed to accept that items I send them are unable to be purchased for over 2 months?

It wouldn't be a big deal if this was an isolated incident but it's not.

But people continue to sell on Amazon because that is where the customers are.

[1] Reserve means an item is unable to be bought, either because it's in reserve for a customer order that hasn't shipped or its being transferred to another warehouse.

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