Amazon is a nightmare

Written on February 23, 2016 by Damon Alan in Author Posts 1 Comment

My wife and I have incorporated to sell our game. We’ve bought a UPC for our company. We’ve registered with the State of Colorado and we’ve got our product in local stores. We chose Amazon as our preferred vendor.

The biggest part of our plan, in fact, was to sell on Amazon.

Which, pardon my French, is a F***ing nightmare.

We have paid for a professional seller account. We shipped our product to Amazon, another expense. We added our product, we registered our brand name, we’ve done everything by the book.

Our product is still not listed. We’ve tried for three weeks now to get Amazon to fix it. We’ve talked to dozens of seller representatives. We’ve had several hang up on us just because they didn’t know what to do to fix anything. My wife is, in fact, talking to Amazon right this minute. The last person she talked to hung up on us. The one we’re talking to now, despite a dozen or so Amazon reps telling us “There is no problem here.” said, “There’s a problem here.” She’s transferring us to technical support. I expect we’ll be hung up on.

So we’re out dozens of hours of our lives we’ll never get back. We are out potential sales of this fantastic game. We’ve lost sleep, complained to friends until they’re tired of hearing it, and are basically doing exactly what Einstein says is the definition of insanity. We just keep calling Amazon in the hopes that one of them isn’t an idiot and can fix this. So far that’s not looking hopeful.

In the end I suppose we’ll demand that Amazon return all of our money, all of our shipping expenses, and all of our fees. They can’t give us our time back, or I’d extract that from them with forceps. But we’ve just lost that forever.

So what then? We’ll go to Ebay. I know Ebay works.

At this juncture, I’d have to recommend that is what you consider as well if you’re going to be an Amazon seller.

OH, and here is what our product would look like, if you were able to buy it. Because apparently it works in their internal system. Just not for the people who might actually want to buy it.