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Comment by dpeterson | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a guide released by amazon themselves. They’ve burned so many bridges with existing sellers they may be trying to lure in all new unsuspecting would be entrepreneurs that haven’t been given multiple black eyes by them already. “Hey look, amazon was really a gentleman, maybe I should go out on a date too”

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Maybe. My money is on a post about the same time next year where he’s whining about FBA’s Long Term Storage fees catching up with him.

Its a racket for sure, once your inventory gets stuck in Amazon you either have to continually pay the LT service fee increases, or you must pay for them to "destroy" your inventory.

Hilariously, they "destroy" your inventory by selling it and keeping 100% of the money.

You can also have them return the product to you. Of course this costs money.

I don't think that storage fees specifically are a racket. What do you want Amazon to do, store a bunch of non-selling products indefinitely for free?

The lesson is that you shouldn't send a ton of products to FBA unless you have good reason to believe they'll move.

Racket may be too strong of a word, and no I don't expect Amazon to hold inventory for free. However, charging people to "dispose" of inventory (ie. sell for their own profit) is a bit shady.

You can. For the full rate a non-Prime customer would pay for shipping. If they happen to have several units in the same place, they'll send them in the same box. My mom asked for about 2 dozen items to be returned, she received about 10 boxes, at about $5 a pop (small merchandise, retailing for $10-$20 each).

> They’ve burned so many bridges with existing sellers

Details for people not familiar with the Amz horror stories, please?

They raise fees with little notice, they lose inventory and make it difficult to get reimbursed, they charge double fees on returns even if the item doesn't get returned (and on some categories triple fees, in other categories they refund the customer without requiring a return and deduct that from our payments), they suspend accounts with a Kafkaesque appeal procedure with Indians deciding whether 7 figure sellers should be allowed to sell with only a few minutes to decide each case. I'm personally familiar with several suspensions, including one where they just stole over a million dollars worth of inventory/funds and then stopped replying.

They ask for invoices from sellers to "prove authenticity", claiming that's the only purpose, then mysteriously the vendor named in the invoice gets a call from Amazon the next week trying to source the product.

They make their own private label products and put links to them on other sellers' product pages, giving themselves free advertising.

Amazon is liable to squeeze you out of a product you sell if it starts selling well. It's their platform, and they're a trillion-dollar company; there is almost no way you'll win.

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