Amazon Marketplace: not for you or me
I just spent 20 minutes prepping a no-longer-needed-textbook for sale. One of the places I thought I might sell it was Amazon Marketplace, only to be presented with this:
Obviously, Amazon Marketplace is not looking for your average Craigslister, and probably not your media eBayer as well. Rather, they’re looking for bookstore owners, high-volume eBay retailers, and so on.
It’s an interesting strategy - definitely designed to capture the fat front end of the long tail and not the thin whippy extremity. It probably results in a lot less hassle for Amazon.
But it also does leave a significant portion of the resale market for eBay and, increasingly, Craigslist. And it leave a bit of a sour taste in the mouth of loyal Amazon clients, such as me, who have bought thousands of dollars of books and other products from Amazon, but can’t use the same service to recycle redundant items.
First miss for Shelfari (and Amazon)
As you may have noticed, I’ve begun using Shelfari to catalog the books I’m reading.
However, Indigo (a Canadian bookseller owned by Chapters) does, and here it is (volume one at any rate).
I’ve wondered before if Amazon and Shelfari are linked … particularly since Shelfari buy-the-book links are to Amazon. Amazon has invested in Shelfari … which is probably why Shelfari seems to be using the Amazon book database.
. . .
. . .
Interestingly, when I fed Shelfari’s import functionality this page, it came up with a different book by the same author: Clio’s Warriors.
Oddness abounds.
Amazon marketplace: sorry, your purchase has been sold
Yesterday I bought 27 books from Amazon - mostly from the marketplace. Why not? The book are almost new, and they’re easily half off or less.Today I got a notice that a book I bought via the marketplace was previously sold.
No biggie - I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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