The Setup
Last year I designed and built a fun little electronic trinket that I shared with friends and family. A lot of people told me that I should try selling it. I didn’t think I could make a lot of money this way, but I thought it might be fun and a good learning experience to dip my toe into entrepeneurship, so I decided, sure why not?
The first batch of trinkets I had assembled by hand, but this batch I would pay to have assembled. This means a fair bit of work, finding an assembly house, cleaning up the design, refining the bill of materials, and interacting repeatedly with the assembler to answer their questions and make requested changes to the design.
Fast forward a few months and a couple of thousand dollars, and I was the proud owner of a couple of boxes of shiny trinkets. Well … almost. I needed to do some final assembly, program the microcontrollers, and test the devices. I also needed to bag them and add labels that point to my website. Oh, did I mention? I needed to build a website, too.
In total, I probably have spent dozens of late-night hours on this, but it was kinda, sort entertaining. Finally, I was ready to send these pups over to Amazon and let the magic happen, right?
Are we having fun yet?
Well, no. My plan all along was to send a big box of these to Amazon and sell them there, with them taking their cut and doing all the shipping.
So I logged into Amazon “Seller Central” and started creating my account. They asked for so much personal information that I repeatedly had to stop myself and check the site certificate to see if I was being fished. They wanted:
- SSN
- copy of driver’s license or passport
- bank account number
- copy of bank or credit card statements
Nervously, I uploaded all that junk, and waited for the nice login prompt telling me that I could start to create my listings.
Roadblock
Instead, I got a short message saying that my documents were not in order, and my identity could not be validated. Please go back and fix it. Actually, I’ll reproduce the contents of this message here because it is totally generic:
Thinking that was odd, I logged in again, and uploaded different scans of the same documents.
Rejected. Same message.
A different bank statement?
Rejected.
Passport instead of driver’s license? Credit card statement?
Rejected.
How about photos instead of scans? Scans instead of photos? With flash, without? Color, black and white, color photos of black and white documents?
Rejected, rejected, rejected.
At this point, I have wasted three days and literally provided them with my credit card statement, bank statement, California driver’s license, and US passport. All rejected with the same terse response.
What’s funny is that there is literally nothing left for me to do. There is only one me. I have one name, one SSN, one address. I have already given them all the documents I have. I mean, I literally cannot establish my identity better than I have already done.
Amazon provides absolutely no option for redress. No email. No phone number. No help chat. Nothing.
Wait, you say: why not go on the support forums and complain? Because the support forums are only accessible by people who have passed this step.
So, I guess I won’t be selling on Amazon.
The whole episode has been infuriating, to say the least and I am just astounded by a system that provides absolutely no opportunity for escalation. (I’ve been told by that my best hope at this point is that I can get people upset on social media.)
I’ve been an Amazon customer for almost as long as they’ve been in business, and I’ve easily spent tens of thousands of dollars there over the years. It had always been a great company to work with — as a customer, but as a partner, or in this case, potential partner, I’ve never witness such abject contempt for the user.
I think it’s telling when some companies treat vendors badly. It’s sort of the corporate version of “kissing-up and punching down.” Of course, Wal-Mart is famous for it. Apple has also been rather conspicuously developer hostile (and why there are no Safari extensions from ToolsOfOurTools). I did not know about Amazon. Now I do.
And I have to say, the bad taste left in my mouth after this episode will cause me to rethink doing any business at Amazon.
Found your blog while looking for ways to receive METARS.
I hear you on the “no redress/escalation” issue with Amazon.
I’m sure you have received the messages from Amazon encouraging you to write reviews of things you buy there. I used to respond by writing reviews for my own amusement. Apparently people liked my reviews. I somehow became a “top 1000” reviewer and got a “badge” indicating that I was an expert on electronics and tools. Then suddenly last spring I got a message that I had been banned for “accepting compensation” for my reviews. They deleted all of them.
As far as I can see, there is no way to question, appeal, or receive explanation of this. They still send me emails prompting me to review my purchases however. Weird.
Good luck selling your gadget
Social media worked? How did this get unbolloxed, since you did manage to find a way and I forgot the rest of the story.
And also: anti-trust laws exist for a reason because as long as we have a functioning democracy (bites nails) gov’t bureaucracy always at least has a congressperson or other elected representative to contact but business bureaucrats run amok are another matter.
In short, I tweeted and the person who responded seemed to know the right people to reach out to. So that helped get past a few issues. Then there was a two week period when nothing happened, and then one day I was approved to sell. Then I had an issue with shipping the product because Amazon wanted to treat it as hazmat because it uses a battery. I finally got past that by deleting the listing entirely and starting over again. I think their definition of “uses” a battery means it comes with one inside it. That took another couple of weeks to resolve. And now, it’s working for the time being.