NSFE: Misinformation in the Handmade category

NSFE Talkback
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@Handmadebyartie posted this in Handmade and gave me permission to post about it here (publicly).

Michelle_Amazon has since replied, neither acknowledging her original error, deleting/editing her erroneous post, nor thanking @Handmadebyartie for his help.

The NSFE mods literally work at Amazon, but spew inaccurate information. That post with incorrect information sat there, publicly viewable, for a month, before a veteran Seller came along to clarify. And when called out, handle mistakes poorly.

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Ummm … don’t know about anyone else but we have been paying $39.99 for the Professional plan. How do we get this $0.04 discount and can it be retroactive for the 12 years of overcharge?

{{{ asking for a friend who is kinda into the numbers thing }}}

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The referral fee for Handmade is 15%, vs. my main sales categories that are at 12%. AI Michelle apparently thinks 15% is less than 12%.

Handmade didn’t make sense for us - even though we mainly do custom products (with our hands). Why would I pay more to promote the use of my hands in manufacturing?

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The difference is the time and expense of buying barcodes to sell handmade goods on the main side of Amazon.

Marilyn

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And if you are a low volume seller, (just above 40 sales) there’s the monthly subscription fee. And apparently these things are important enough for thousands of offshore accounts selling factory manufactured goods in the Handmade category. Amazon’s Handmade verification staff is incompetent,

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We thought “handmade” was the way to sell a very niche product that would be searched for by name by the customers who wanted/needed the product, and thankfully overlooked by those who might buy the product for a “lifehack” type use that would invariably fail and result in a return from a dissatisfied customer, who really needed a college course or 3 as a prerequisite to buying.

Handmake was a fuster-cluck. Right off the bat, the credit card WAS charged the monthly fee for a professional account, as we had not (yet) been approved as a “handmade seller”. We later opened a case, and got that money credited and were no longer billed.

So we took some nice photos of our solar parabolic array and explained how the entire lab has had a zero carbon footprint since 1999, and make a video about how we run the only non-Con-Edison-owned steam-pressure boiler in New York, 'cause we run a parabolic array, not a wimpy photovoltaic array, with comical appearances by people portraying all the safety / regulatory inspectors from “Homeland Security” down to the the local fire inspector, who all said “You CAN’T have that here - it might explode”. So we have to drag them to the white board and do the same math, all over again for their education, and show them the eleventy-seven different fail-safe features that make it an automatically self-scram system, that refuses to run unless (a)(b)© through (q) are all true, and the pressure stays below xyz. “But its AUTOMATIC!” They say, “You must have an OPERATOR.” an so on. Kafkaesque.

But we were “hidden” - people going to amazon.com could not simply type in our product name, see the product, and click “buy now”. Handmade requires extra steps on the part of the customer, so one might as well be on Etsy.

So, scrap that, tear it all down from the site, and we go with a regular account in the main Amazon catalog. Here’s the product, buy one. Finis!

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Handmade mods featured croc-attachments and other clearly-factory made stuff in threads on the handmade sub forum.
And just look at all the curated pages… no one there has any clue. That, or they are just looking the other way.

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