Seller Prime is a couple years old now and it seemed to backfire on them and it seems they are trying to push sellers off of it by enforcing near impossible to meet standards that even Amazon themselves don't meet.
It's true that you're forced to buy with Amazon's account, but this is shipping spending that would've been paid for by Amazon anyway. The merchants are not losing out on any volume discounts, since this was never "their" volume anyways.
IMO, this is the way to think about this: if the Amazon-negotiated rate for warehouse -> customer shipping is lower than what the FBA fee would've been (which it often is), the merchant is coming out ahead.
> Seller Prime is a couple years old now and it seemed to backfire on them and it seems they are trying to push sellers off of it by enforcing near impossible to meet standards that even Amazon themselves don't meet.
Yes it's about 2 years old, but it wasn't something that was widely popping up on Seller Central dashboards until earlier this year. I don't know whether you're referring to the ship-out time requirements, but so far my company hasn't had any issues with SFP. Better yet, the merchant controls which items are fulfilled under SFP, and which are FBA.