MooMooMooMoo

From myself as a buyer's pov: I can't really afford Prime; + I pay sales tax if I order from Amazon, but NOT from marketplace. I likely will purchase less, though that also is impacted by the economy.

PhantomStranger

It has devastated the price advantage most of the Marketplace sellers had over Amazon itself. From my tracking of hundreds of Amazon items through scripts, it appears that sellers are not lowering their price at all with the change in shipping charge.

I have to imagine that much of the business for cheaper items will migrate away from Amazon now.

b2net

This is such a good deal that I am surprised it wasn't in the store forum....

hilts

That was uncalled for. This is a kickass bargain.

ProfessorEcho

I don't have many DVDs or Blus left for sale on Amazon, so I'm not going to lower my prices. I refuse to sell anything that has a market value of $5 or less since it's not worth the time and effort to make so little in return. Amazon already takes too big of a cut. I don't know how or why the penny sellers make any profit, but if they do, more power to them.

As a buyer, the raised price on shipping is seriously curtailing my purchases. Yes, it only adds a dollar to the overall cost, but sometimes all it takes is a little more added to the equation to make the tipping point on whether an item is worth it to you or not. Since Amazon started charging me tax I had moved most of my business to the Marketplace, but now with the increased shipping charge I am finding less and less of an outlet for my buying. Half.com can be ok, especially for softcover books which ship 50 cents less than Amazon and now DVDs for a buck less than Amazon, but their prices tend to skew higher than the Amazon Marketplace. Oh well, in the end, I am saving by cutting back on my buying, but it's taken a lot of the fun out of it.

Proglodite

Is there any way to do a search on Amazon for 3rd Party used discs Fufilled-By-Amazon? It seems like all the search parameters I've tried will not factor shipping (or lack thereof) into the sorting - I know there are sellers with CD's and DVD's currently priced less than $3.99 - and therefore should come up before any of the penny listings...but they don't. It's frustrating. --Peter

Obi-Wanma

There's a filtering by prime eligible items, which is bascially the same thing. I don't know if that's there if you don't have prime though.

dmkb

Same here. For me, buying from Amazon marketplace was simply a matter of getting a slightly better deal on non-essential items. Now that the margin has gotten even smaller, I find I'm not that interested in buying like I was. Also, since Amazon has always charged tax in my state, Prime never held much appeal to me.

Half does have comparative pricing but not always comparable stock. There are some items that are only listed on Amazon so it is a convenience - just not one that I'm going to take advantage of much now.

Proglodite

The problem is, all the CD's and DVD's qualify for Prime because Amazon has new copies...even setting the filter to Used only didn't fix this. Was just curious if there was some trick I hadn't tried yet....

peter

MooMooMooMoo

+ half's CS SUCKS if a seller is less than honest.

bse

I order hundreds of items from Amazon Marketplace yearly and while a dollar seems like nothing, I've put off buying multiple things since. It is hard to justify those penny CDs and DVDs now as I can find it for the same at local used stores or elsewhere. It helps me a lot though as it will cut down on all those impulse buys - I used to like a preview from a DVD and just got on Amazon and buy it for $2.99 shipped.

berigan

What amazon says they take, and what they do take, are two different things. Since I don't sell enough for Amazon prime,(To make it pay for having it) this is what they took for a cd back in Feb...
Ship by: 02/06/2013
Item: Don't Be Shy Tonight [Audio CD] Santa Esmeralda
Condition: Used - Like New
SKU: 00-9JAF-FLS1
Quantity: 1
Order date: 02/04/2013
Price: $4.59
Amazon fees: -$2.48
Shipping: $2.98
Your earnings: $5.09

MooMooMooMoo

$5.09 minus at least $2.25 shipping cost at 4 ounces (more if it had a big booklet & was 5 ounces) (including mailer, label, ink & postage) minus your time packing the item & minus what you paid for the cd; was it worth it? My answer would be no.

That'sAllFolks

Did you sell FBA? Because if you didn't they overcharged you. It should have been .15 * 4.59 + .80 which is roughly 1.49.

I believe that Amazon is phasing out or trying to lower the amount of sales that come thru the MP. They have recently been gating (That;s what they call preventing most sellers from selling certain items) almost all new movies and a lot of stuff from HBO and WB. I have tried to get answers to a bunch of questions about their new policy but they have been very evasive. At times, they have pointed me to some vague policy that is pretty all-inclusive to mean whatever they want it to mean. I've lost a lot of respect for Amazon in the past few months and have been very reluctant to give them any of my business. Perhaps I have put them above other retailers -- but they have shown themselves to be just another big company that takes advantage when they can. They really are just too damn big and I hope that their market share falls. BBY thought it was impenetrable at one point and they learned a hard lesson.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Games too.

I think it's just going to push sellers back to ebay.

greylocke5

In my opinion, Amazon and ebay are really only interested in marketplace sellers who list a large number of items for sale. If you list a dozen or two DVDs, CDs, etc., they really don't want your business, so they have increasingly found ways to discourage the small volume sellers.

As for Amazon's higher shipping cost - for me, as a buyer, I only look at the bottom line. I comparison shop using a couple of the on-line price comparison sites. I check Alibris, Barnes and Noble, fye, etc. - to see what they have listed. I've noticed that some of the Marketplace sellers I used to buy from have already raised their prices, especially on CDs, so I have already cut back on purchases.

I think this means that small sellers will search out other, smaller venues to list their merchandise. If Amazon, ebay, and others manage to prune out the small vendor it creates an empty niche in the overall marketplace and eventually others will fill in that niche.

MooMooMooMoo

Agree, but at least in ebay's case I'd change your numbers to around 10,000 as the minimum where they care (unless you're selling very high priced items). I'm currently around 2200 listings & get treated by Pakistan CS like I don't exist, which was also the case when I had over 4k listings (removed 1/2 of my listings last September as response a to the 13% fee on shipping, I had to save the $100 or so in fee increases somewhere so I saved it in listing fees).

I haven't sold on Amazon in at least 10 years. When they first implemented "one click" as a requirement for marketplace sellers (than called "Z-shops"), it was very buggy & ripped me off about $165 over a month or so. They finally gave me the $165, but I had a ridiculous amount of time into it with there accountants before they would pay me, so when they made "one click" the only form of payment I could accept I left.

I do suspect the bugs are long fixed today, but the entire experience left a very bad taste.

That'sAllFolks

Actually I now see that raised the per item fee from .80 to 1.35. That's probably why they raised the postage -- so they could get .55 more.

So it is .15 * 4.59 + 1.35, which is 2.04. It seems they still overcharged you.

I'm not sure I really agree with that. Otherwise eBay would not offer 50 free listings per month to everyone. Big time sellers could really care less about that. As for Amazon, I don't think they care one way or another. They are trying to maximize sales, even at the expense of their sellers and they really don't care whether they leave or not. They are just too damn big.

I also look at the bottom line. However, I do check eBay for single item purchases that I find cheap on Amazon for 2 reasons - lower price and the chance to combine postage. 3.99 postage is going to make many buyers start looking at eBay as well and MP sellers are going to suffer.

ChipHP

goHastings.com should benefit with their $.99 shipping per CD, DVD and/or book. When I see a CD or DVD listed by goHastings on Amazon MP, I go to goHastings.com and buy it direct to save on the shipping (and that was when Amazon shipping was $2.99) ... I suspect I am not the only one who has figured this out.

Used CD and DVD prices have continued to drop (even some local Half Price Books stores are selling desireable DVDs for $1 to $3), the $3.99 shipping will make Amazon MP Sellers not competitive for common CDs and DVDs.

dmkb

Totally this.

rw2516

Also the additional item shipping has gone from $1.00 to 1.49 when purchasing directly from Amazon. An aside, what happened to all the pictures on Amazon? No more customer images and no more clicking on image for larger view. Images with zoom still zoom when rolled over though.

MooMooMooMoo

I neglected to state this in my prior post; but imo ebay wants hobbyists AND Giant corps. It's folks like me (been on ebay with 20-10k items at a time since 1998) that are being eliminated. There was a time I had direct access to an ebay category manager to reslove problms. Now like everyone else not named "Super D" or one of there subsidiaries, I get to call CS in Pakistan if there's a problem.

joltman

I've seen multiple times where gohastings will have an item on amazon for less than they have it at their site, even including amazon shipping. I don't understand why they do that.

MooMooMooMoo

God knows I hope so. Only Amazon can prevent ebay seller bankruptcies (like mine)

PhantomStranger

The price increase has already cost Amazon Marketplace on a couple of transactions this week. I came across a few cheap CDs that I had to buy off Half.com due to Amazon's new pricing structure. GoHastings is a decent alternative for cheap CDs, if you don't care about condition.