Anyone have a guess at what’s going on here? On this listing, check out the sellers under “New” inventory:
If you look at each one’s seller page, they seem to be fake accounts. Also, no Used listings show up when you try to see them on this page, despite there being several. How is this possible on both fronts? I mean the amount of hoops we have to go through for account verification and you see this…
One more listing w/ the same pair: Amazon.com
Update:.. Wow, I’m seeing them on quite a few listings now. Must be some weird testing by Amazon. Once you click on the “New” offerings of any of these listings, you cannot get back to the “Used” without a full page refresh.
So this seems to be a new “feature” amazon is testing out. Showing off Amazon listings for items. I assume Amazon gets a referral $ from the link?
Both of those store names resolve to actual websites/companies located elsewhere. Hmm…
But… But it’s against Amazon’s policy to lead customers away from the Amazon site for any reason!
Back before we set up to sell on Amazon we were buying a type of ad that showed up in the search which directed to our site. It didn’t show up on a listing because it was our own product and so there wasn’t a listing to show as another seller type price. But clicks on our ad did come to our site.
Wonder if Amazon is testing as another way to get revenue?
Yeah, Started seeing this about 30 days ago and thought, wait, do I have some strange plugin doing this? No way Amazon is doing this!
It looks like this is part of this new program where they are trying to get products not sold on Amazon.
A couple of months ago, I started seeing Instagram posts from independent makers who discovered that their products were listed on Amazon without their knowledge. Amazon is using AI to scrape their websites and list the product, and when someone orders it off Amazon, Amazon then places an order with their store for it. This upset a lot of them because they had purposely not sold their products off Amazon and found that they had to go in and opt out of it to get it to stop. Last I heard, there was a lawsuit in the works.
When I saw this, I went and looked at the visitors coming to our Shopify store and found an Amazon bot scraping our store. We were already having an issue with this from bots from China, so we added the Amazon one to our block list to get it to stop.
My first thought was that this was Buy With Prime, but it seems to be something different.
This jogs my memory a bit. Wasn’t there a post about this on SAS a while ago?
Edit: I was thinking of this post from earlier this year. Not exactly the same issue, but definitely the same trend.
Never saw this before. The slide-out Other Sellers page has the brand’s website as a buying option.
This is a Shopify site, did Amazon strike a deal with them or is it happening with any brand website otherwise hosted?
This is mentioned on this thread discussing the same issue.
I didn’t catch the relation due to the title of the other post that I hadn’t read yet.
There is nothing suspicious here, I know this is a legit seller with a legit website.
What is suspicious is why is Amazon sending buyers off-site? There has to be something in it for them.
Tecovas does not sell boots on Amazon, but they have ads which will direct you to their website via Shop Direct. You do have to scroll down kind of far.
I guess Amazon wanted the ad money from brands that did not want their products for purchase on the Amazon marketplace.
My example does sell on Amazon.
But maybe your ads theory holds water - they get to harvest and charge for clicks from people who look on Amazon but won’t continue to check out on Amazon?
Suspension required with a demand for a POA …
In the meantime, we will hold their funds until POA approval date + 7.
The holding interest on Amazon’s funds for a week would let me retire.
a couple hours would do it for me!
We’d do it for the show … grab a bucket of popcorn, lay out in the recliner, and laugh as we watch Amazon squirm …
I know Schifferbooks. They are a publisher, they used to publish antique and collectible price guides, an category of book which is unlikely to sell anywhere near the number of copies than it did when the internet was young. They had other types of titles as well but the price guides were their major revenue source.
Amazon used to sell their full catalog. I suspect that this is a scheme to capture some fees on a no longer profitable group of titles for Amazon retail. If vendor express still existed, this would be a candidate.
