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Comment by joks | Hacker News Reader

What is the cited policy?

What is the mechanism under which products like this are listed? https://www.amazon.com/Darden-Restaurants-1_DARDEN_standard-...

What exactly makes this illegal?

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" Please be informed that you cannot list the e-gift card listing as it falls under prohibited listing as per the Amazon policy as mentioned in the following help page. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G2001644... "

The URL is not accessible to anyone without a seller account

Prohibited items: 'Cash or cash equivalent instruments, including money orders, checks that can be customized (including blank checks), traveler's checks, stored value products like retail or open loop gift cards or electronic stored-value redemption codes (except for retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers) Gift cards, including: Gift cards, except retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers'

But restaurants, delivery apps, Abnb, Hotels.com and even Chewy have ecards:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Hotels-com-Red-Gift-Cards-mail/dp/B01... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Bath-Body-Works-Snowflake-Email/dp/B0... 3. https://www.amazon.com/Dominos-Pizza-Gift-Cards-mail/dp/B00M...

4. https://www.amazon.com/DoorDash-Gift-Cards-Email-Delivery/dp...

5. https://www.amazon.com/Instacart-Gift-Card-Email-Delivery/dp...

6. https://www.amazon.com/Chewy-eGift-Card-Delivery-Standard/dp...

> electronic stored-value redemption codes (except for retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers)

You're not an approved seller. Seems pretty clear here.

Retail gift cards are supposedly physical cards, not eGift cards?

And the fact big name retailers notionally competing with Amazon can secure approval to issue gift cards on Amazon.com is a pretty clear indication that it's not an anti-competitive policy, it's a why would we invest compliance resources in proving that startups selling gift cards for digital goods aren't money laundering operations when it'd be more cost effective to just ban them from the platform policy.

Yeah sure, "invest compliance resources" when they don't even let you know what the application procedure is? Sure. The anti-competitive behaviour is shown as it's not possible to for small companies to even apply! If large companies can deploy resources towards compliance small can too, but without knowing the rules it's impossible.

I hate to break it to you, but you're not Amazon's competition, and it's not "anticompetitive behaviour" that they don't want to spend thousands of man hours reviewing hundreds of applications from small businesses or fake business making gift cards, only a tiny fraction of which will generate more profit than chargebacks and legal trouble.

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