First off, I’d like to say that normally, I have zero problems with seller central. In the past I’ve been quite successful with it and have generated a fair amount of revenue from Amazon.com. My latest venture into seller central has been nothing more that a complete nightmare. I’ve been contracted to manage the Amazon storefront for a manufacturer who is now just getting their products out into the market.

Note: If you want to know what products I use to help my clients and myself sell and promote products on Amazon.com, click here

In general it’s the same old thing, Add a product, fill in the details, upload the pic and specify the quantity available and submit. With this latest setup its been anything but that.

I have three issues with Seller Central currently so here they are:

1) Amazon Seller Desktop

I’ve never had a problem using the seller desktop before but this time, every time I upload a product any quotes, periods, commas and other random characters are being converted into question marks. I had to go and log into sellercentral.amazon.com and use the web interface to correct the problems every time I submitted a new product.

To make matters even worse, after uploading products some of the data that is clearly visible in Seller Desktop (such as shipping weight) gets lost in the submission process and I have to use the web interface to re-enter the data.

2) Buy Now Button

When you view most products on Amazon.com, they have an option to “Buy Now” or “Add To Shopping Cart”. I’ve always won the “Buy Now” button with any product that I’ve ever sold on Amazon that was a new product or brand, as long as it was unique. This time around, all of the products are showing the “Click Here To See All Buying Options” button instead. I’ve completed the entire product information and they have been classified properly.

We have also received a ton of orders for the products which would clearly make us the top seller for these products as we are the only ones providing them on Amazon.com. That by its self should have let me win the Buy Now button.

I’m not sure whats going on here with the Buy Now Buttons but hopefully Amazons DB updates and they turn on. Not having the Buy Now button really does take away from our total possible sales.

3) Email Notifications

The manufacturer insisted that he wanted all of the Amazon.com email alerts for orders, announcements and everything to go to a specific amazon@theirdomain.com email address. So when setting up the Amazon.com account for them I created a new “amazon” email address for them.

We should be receiving a ton of order notifications but for all the orders we have received, we have only received 1 email alert. And yes the originating email address and the Amazon.com domain have been white listed.

This isn’t too big of a deal, as the manufacturer checks their orders several times a day. Actually, I should say it’s not a big deal to me, the manufacturer is pretty upset about not receiving a notification for each order.

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None of these problems are major as you can see, but they do make managing hundreds of products a major pain in the ass. I also believe that the issue with the Buy Now button not being provided might be cutting into our sales a tiny bit. Of course I’ve submitted tickets for all of these issues but so far, nothing has been resolved. I really hope Amazon fixes these issues.

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