In the last few weeks, I’m seeing a growing number of ASINs in which Amazon grabs the buy box despite not having any inventory - and probably no prospect of ever having inventory.
If you try to order one of these non-existent copies, you encounter “TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK. Order now and we’ll deliver when available.”
Often these are small press runs, sometimes university presses, and any experienced bookseller understands that they are out of print permanently. In one instance, I know the publishing company owner, having been on a first-name basis for over a decade, and I asked him if the book was going back in print, or if Amazon had contacted him about it. He assured me that the book was out of print forever, and that nobody - Amazon included - was getting any more new copies.
This idiocy is a problem for me because Amazon sends me price-may-be-too low warnings, and won’t let me sell at market price. So I waste the time of deleting from Amazon and re-listing on eBay.
I typical example is this where Amazon lists at $120, but has none in stock, and won’t let anyone else list new copies below $120.
I have a stack of them, bought directly from the publisher, still in the publisher’s original shrink wrap. I sell them at $50. Now I only sell them on eBay, and nobody sells them on Amazon. Many list, but nobody sells.
Everyone loses here: Amazon gets no sales; Amazon sellers get no sales, customers can only buy on Amazon if they pay way over market price. ( And most of the sellers who do list on Amazon have sub-90 feedback with lots of complaints about failure to deliver )
Is it just me, or are other booksellers seeing this also?
To any reasonable person, it does look like price fixing. I await someone with more spare time and more spare cash to get Amazon to address this in a courtroom.
I can’t say that I’m seeing a “growing number” of these, just the usual enough-to-be-annoying amount.
And I can tell you that some of those pages are like that for YEARS. (This is one of those random things I keep track of on listings that affect me.) And, as @Pepper_Thine_Angus says, I don’t really believe it’s intentional, but just more evidence of a poorly-run machine.
I’ve had that work only a handful of times (out of hundreds). Even then, it surprised me. If you’re working with a “usually” here, good for you!
Thanks, but I have never had that work. If it did work - and worked consistently - I would just file this under 'avoidable Amazon irritations", and invoke it as needed.
I suspect that Amazon recently applied this to university presses. I’ve got tens of thousands invested in OOP university press stock, so it looks like a recent rush to me.
I’ve run across this numerous times over the years. I think it’s just another example of how poorly Amazon manages its catalog. Looks like the work of a bot. What gets me is how extremely customer-unfriendly this is. It’s like punking the buyer into thinking they’re going to get something they never will.
I’ve run across this on a fair number of books. I got lucky enough to do a cleanout a few years ago from the woman who had run a publisher after her father passed away. I got all the books that had been in the archives and the board-room displays. She had put the books in storage after closing the office, and they sat there for a while (sadly, some got damaged in the meantime). Publisher closed in 1999. One of the books I have was a limited edition, published in 1980, and never reprinted. Amazon still offers it; although they still let me price it at the reasonable price of $495 (maybe on the cheap side, but I have two copies).
Perhaps 50 or so titles from this publisher Amazon says the “Out of Stock” message and has the BB, but so far, I’ve been able to list at the price I want, which is often higher than Amazon’s price (and sold a lot of them).
So yes, widespread and annoying problem. Never been able to get any resolution or comments from the mods. But if I can list at my price, not the end of the world.
As for the min/max prices, I’ve never had that help with a High Price error; the only Low Price alerts I’ve gotten were when I had a min price set and went below it (which is appropriate to get a warning).
Like most of the small (and sizeable) victories against Amazon over the past decade about the only hope is if the EU and their regulators decide they have seen enough.
They are the reason why the clause about MUST HAVE the lowest available sale price on Amazon disappeared (with NO announcement that I ever saw).
I’m really not big on mindless, brain dead regulations but Amazon just keeps begging to get hit with a 2X4 across the head in so many ways.
I don’t see it often, but that’s just due to the nature of what I list. But, yes I have certainly seen the bs message about “temporarily out of stock” for books I know will never be back in stock for Amazon
I ran into this, but not in the context of books. Amazon tried and failed to source from us, but got a reseller to sell them some items. Normally the margins don’t make sense to sell this way, but since each color is a unique item, and you need to send a couple of samples (for fre) of each ASIN to be a supplier, this made sense for the first few items. But when we caught the reseller in question and the supply dried up, Amazon still thought (digitally) that they had a pipeline to these items, so they took the buy box (at the same price and shipping speed) with a “preorder and we’ll let you know” message, making it look like the item was out of stock.
This is both incompetent and evil. I don’t think one excuses the other.
At the risk of appearing to be defending Amazon I wonder if this can be explained by a strategic change,
Jassy is completely committed to feeding and grooming the cash cow for an enhanced stream of milk (profit).
Word has leaked about his initiatives in the Amazon devices area, culling the staff and tightening profit requirements.
I have seen reductions in some items I buy with Amazon no longer stocking them and prices rising to twice Walmart when sold by third parties. And when one seller sells out, another gets the buy box.
What if Amazon is no longer treating small presses as vendors but buying their products from one or more distributors, on demand.
Out of print products could still be in a distributor’s inventory, Amazon could be maintaining high prices because they would have lower margins than buying direct and they could assume the prices are inelastic.
Amazon has used distributors before, and may always have used some.
Has anyone actually ordered one of these active but out of stock books? Maybe they can fill an order. But if they can’t, maybe they could have when they listed the book.
What kind of rank do these books have? “Headhunting” is close to 7 million. Amazon would not stock that book but might rely on a distributor to keep library business on the site.
This is by no means anything more than a plausible theory of what bean counters might decide.
Most of the ones that I run into have been OOP since 1999 or before; at least one is a limited edition that sold out in 1979. I doubt that any distributor has them in inventory.