There’s a lot of discussion on Seller Forums that Amazon is not allowing any new product listings for Supplements (and Health & Beauty overall), even for people who have previously selling in the category. Is anyone else encountering this problem?
Our last conversation about this. I haven’t seen much change except a few examples of mods escalating and getting a few listings through.
@VitRhea thanks. That thread is super helpful
We might add … Welcome to SAS!
I’ll ask my SAS (strategic account services) manager (who works with other supplement / H&B sellers) about this and report back.
I sent the email already and then I went on over to the NSFE.
Could be that Amazon is finally getting around to expanding their resting requirements beyond Sports / weight / sexual health niches to everything. At least based on what I am seeing.
That was supposed to happen like 4 years ago and continued to get put off.
That would be great to weed out the BS (as much as possible since fake COA’s can be bought from shady labs that are certified).
Maybe we can bust a few Alibaba supplement sellers. Yea, Alibaba got into supplements in the last couple years and it’s crap as expected…
They JUST added joint health (anything containing chondroitin, glucosamine, MSM) back to the testing page the other day (within the last week or so; they’ve stopped dating changes to the page). It would be wild if they went from that to total certification.
There was a big recall on a joint supplement awhile back where a few sellers lost a ton of $ relating to the auto-refunds of every purchase, regardless of lot.
Maybe it took Amazon that long to react…
I’d rather see this go all the way, all at once, instead of drips and drabs.
Now that Alibaba is into the supplement game across categories, now is the time to enforce the corruption that is happening on the marketplace.
I watched that one explode.
Honestly? I’m all for it, the industry is full of sketchy folks who will slap your name on a product and set you loose to sell it. But it’s also a pain to have to test for whatever drugs they’re putting in garbage knockoff supplements, and hope they don’t change their list at the drop of a hat & make it retroactive with 0 warning. (I guess we now have to test joint health products (defined by Amazon for NSAIDs and corticosteroids based on NSF/ANSI 173-2024 section 5.3.5.3.)
Pet peeve
The entire time Amazon had the individual drugs these products would need to be tested for they spelled vardenafil wrong, like they copied and pasted a list and left off the terminal “l”.
frankly, no supplement should be posted without testing results from an approved source. I do not want to be taking snake oil supplements.
Then don’t buy from a brand you never heard of on Amazon (including ours, although it is getting out there in B&M).
If you’re buying supplements on Amazon, only buy them 1P (sold by / shipped by Amazon). At least you know Amazon is buying direct and reselling. You avoid all the stolen goods that are being peddled on those listings and potential counterfeits, although I imagine that is very rare.
Even NOW Foods found counterfeit products on their listings. Honestly I try not to buy supplements outside my company anymore. If I do, I try to buy from reputable, big brands.
They may say that but I find that difficult to believe. Who in their right mind would counterfeit such a cheap product? It would cost more. LOL
@Dogtamer - I see you about my response there. Now Foods has been a good steward for the industry - no doubt about it.
With that said, they did a ton of work against Amazon sellers / brands to better their own sales.
They said they found counterfeits? Who’s going to prove it?
I’m not buying it (the counterfeit part).
I’ve been at this since 1998 and worked for the biggest supplement company in the world for 20 years.
Sure there are things out there that aren’t what they say they are but counterfeiting $10 Now Food Supplement products doesn’t seem like a likely scenario.
Not necessarily so, for entities which don’t mind skirting the prevailing laws of this nation - a real-world example of that being this:
There’s a reason why the advent of high-quality printing methodologies becoming easily-accessible wound up forcing the U.S. Department of the Treasury to implement changes in the way that high-value currency notes were produced.
It’s often overlooked that there still exist deep-pocketed foreign entities whose sole goal is to disrupt global commerce for their own ideological ends (yes, Beijing, I’m looking squarely at you), and that they possess the financial means to do so - even @ the risk of short-term loss, because they’re playing a long-term game.
Some of the items were listed on Amazon as tablets or softgels, but consumers received small white #1 capsules, and the bottles are labeled as capsules even in cases where NOW® does not make or sell that product in that form.
Some of these would be fairly easy to fake with capsules of generic white powder (rice powder, etc.) fills, and that’s probably what happened. You could have more in label and bottle costs than filling capsules with rice powder. Customers who aren’t familiar with NOW’s distinctive blurple lids may not even realize that they’re missing. Do that for enough $20-30 products at minimal raw material cost and…
I do not pay a lot of attention to this category of products. Maybe because I associate them with a career path I left behind many years ago.
I see claims of counterfeit in many other categories for products which make no sense counterfeiting.
I see people concerned about counterfeits of 100 year old product which is not likely to sell very many, and not at enough if a price to justify the effort.
I suspect that social media has a lot to do with this, as well as ignorance of product and process.
There are YouTube videos warning people about counterfeit product, with explanations of how they were produced and how to recognize them which are total fiction. But they have enough people looking at them to qualify for a piece of advertising revenue.
There are influencers spreading self-serving lies which are helping them line their pocketbooks.
In some ways it it a rivalry between warring tribes or gangs, each with nothing to guide them but greed.
I had forgotten about the details of this.
This must have been someone filling capsules in their garage by hand (portable, personal encapsulation machine), printing labels themselves and hand labeling them.
Either that or they had a connection at a contract manufacturer that ran a few hundred thousands capsules for them with rice flower in them.
Trace pharma ingredients I find hard to believe but who knows…
Asking purely as a consumer who knows little about the supplements world, are you guys saying that NOW makes cheap stuff, as in low quality?
I take certain supplements at the direction of a doctor, so beyond my preference for not eating poison, I actually need them to work.
Nope. They are a huge, long standing, and reputable brand. Yes, their stuff is cheap but all supplements are cheap to make and with the volume they have, they have taken the stance to make less profit and make up for it with volume.
They are also one of the biggest defenders of the industry against Amazon BS and a main player with the CRN.
Good company that you can trust.